Death of Aperture-FCPX Next?

[Bill Davis]

[Mitch Ives] “o, whether Apple works with Adobe or not, we’ll all be forced into an Adobe subscription until Apple fills in the missing features.”

Uh, no Mitch.

You can still purchase and own Lightroom as a standalone.

It’s all of $79.

So the only Apple risk is that people leave Aperture for Lightroom – AND then that subsequently they don’t find enough value in whatever Apple creates to come home afterwards. And as we’ve seen with Legacy, people are happy to keep working on something that works and wait to see how things shake out.

Personally, I’ve been using Lightroom for about 3 years now and like it a lot. But It’s not the holy grail. Over the past few years, I’ve often had to launch Photoshop from within Lighroom to get something done that’s beyond Lightroom’s capabilities. Consistent with my lack of support for the rental model – I let Photoshop lapse so I’m not paying for a product I rarely use – and while I briefly considered firing up my licensed copy of Aperture – honestly, Pixelmator is doing all that I need.

Everyone here knows I feel they hit a huge home run with FCP X. And if they innovate with whatever Apple’s new Photo system turns out to be – I might be able to let the last of my Adobe software go.

I don’t hate the cloud in general, I embrace it. It’s made my client liaison work hugely easier.

But I’m pretty firm about supporting companies who’s vision aligns with my own. And tool ownership is a small thing that I truly believe in – tho I certainly understand others who are happy to trade lower present day costs for much higher lifetime tariffs.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Bill Davis]

I prefer to think of it as iMovie is the idea scratchpad that Randy U uses to allow the team to test concepts before they refine the ideas that end up in FCP X.

But that’s just me.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Oliver Peters]

Actually Stu Maschwitz has an interesting take.

https://prolost.com/blog/2014/6/27/the-battle-for-all-the-photos.html

Seems like this is partially a play against Google.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “tho I certainly understand others who are happy to trade lower present day costs for much higher lifetime tariffs.”

The lower cost of entry today is a fact while the much higher cost over time is only a possibility. For example, someone could buy a month (or a year) subscription to CC, do what they need to do, then never need to subscribe to it again.

[Bill Davis]

Andrew,

I’m not sure I buy into the reasoning.

In the case of a long time Adobe software user, perhaps someone could buy a month or two of CC and become productive enough with the new iterations to make it worthwhile. But if you don’t already have operating expertise, I find that highly unlikely. For a new user confronting the Creative Cloud possibilities, I’d argue it’s more like a YEAR or two to get even basically competent with the slew of apps it represents.

Essentially, CC is NOT a service for part time or sample users. It’s a service that presumes that you’ll INVEST in learning the apps in depth – and that means months and months and months of subscription.

Then if you opt out for a while, and the most vaunted attribute of the service proves correct – that they can rev apps more agilely and more rapidly – then you came back needing to re-learn at least some stuff.

Face it, dive in/dive out use is NOT the goal of CC. Perpetual rental income is.

And for that reason I think it’s fair to compare the cost of CC on a realistic at least year long “buy AND learn” basis to the ownership cost of X.

I think it’s fair to note that a year of CC suite subscription to fully learn just PPro would be significantly more costly than simply buying X. And to explore the slew of other niche apps in the suite would likely take very significantly longer.

Simple at that.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Mitch Ives]

[Bill Davis] “You can still purchase and own Lightroom as a standalone.

It’s all of $79.”

This is good news Bill. I’m in. I’ll buy LR today.

Adobe called yesterday and gave me the full court press on CC. I literally couldn’t get off the phone. He mentioned the $10/month for PS and Lightroom. Funny he never mentioned buying it for $79.

I think you’re right, once people get used to LR, why would they switch to Photos, unless it’s spectacular? I hope it is, but I won’d hold my breath.

As for the cloud, I want to be in charge of when I use it. I don’t want Apple to force me to use it. This is still America right? I get to choose?

I’m using Pixelmator too. I think I got that idea from you.

I’m with you on the ownership versus renting. Renting is like being on crack. How do you ever get off?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “or shuffling clips around in old style destructive timelines. “

Now when did this phrase come into use ? I’ve noticed it on this forum for the past few months and I’m wondering what exactly it’s supposed to mean. I’ve been working on timelines for almost twenty years and I don’t recall them destroying anything, at least not intentionally.

Now destructive editing in audio means that you can’t reverse the process, your actually changing the media your working on, the phrase “destructive” is actually describing a process. Similarly destructive editing in photoshop is when you flatten layers and, again, intentionally change the nature of the media in a way that can’t be reversed. But “destructive” timelines — other than the careless actions of an incompetent editor who doesn’t know what he’s doing I don’t see how any timeline can be accurately called destructive, and even in that case it’s the editor who’s destructive and not the timeline.

Really Bill, I thought we had gotten past the name calling thingy.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Bret Williams]

How’s this? Keynote can no longer output alpha channel animation or proRes 4444 codec videos. I used Keynote to make animated 3D charts for video all the time. I have to keep keynote 09 around for that. 09! That’s as old as Final Cut 7!

[Rick Lang]

[Mitch Ives] “As for the cloud, I want to be in charge of when I use it. I don’t want Apple to force me to use it. This is still America right?”

I agree and I’m in Canada. Surely I don’t want all my photos in the cloud, only those I select that I want to share. All the photos in the cloud forces one to buy a lot more cloud storage. What’s to like about that?

If Photos forces everything in the cloud, that’s a showstopper from a financial standpoint as well as distaste for all things that belong to me being kept ‘safe’ by someone else. The only thing that I subscribe to keeping safe is money in the bank and as we know, that’s hardly safe at all. If Lightroom has an option not to use their cloud and Photos forces everything to the cloud, I’m switching.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Bill Davis]

Well, there’s a LOT to like about Lightroom. But there are dificiencies as well. It excels at the basic initial tasks of importing, sorting and rating photos to pick selects from large groupings. Then it has a basic suite of touch up tools to let you quickly enhance and repair your selected raw files.

But it’s internal semi round trip link to Photoshop (the return file shows up as a separate tiff alongside the unretouched original) is a good indication that Adobe did not try to make it anywhere near a full fledged photo editor.

It also sports a good bit of what I think of as feature creep, with stuff like a slide show generator and “order me a photo album” crap that I just ignore.

That said, it’s fast, great at what it does and not overly complex once you get beyond figuring out whether and when to split off sub catalogs.

What could send me to Photos is if Apple figures out a clever way to let me not just retouch and organize my stills, but makes them accessible directly via the FCP X media browser across all my apple devices.

Right now, Lightroom work is a separate operation and when it’s done I’m plopping photos to the desktop and importing them to X as a totally separate operation. If I miss one, it’s launch Lightroom again and go through the whole dance over.

I suspect Apple has a big opportunity to improve that workflow.

We’ll see.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.