Fusion 9 leak, VR and price drop

[Tim Wilson]

Yeah yeah, I’m late, but just to be official, here’s my posting:

Blackmagic Design Announces Fusion 9 with VR

Some thoughts from downthread just because:

1) No way BMD does a graphics program. None. Grant Petty has striking with the clarity of his vision: solving BIG problems. Problems that affect the industry in the most sweeping manner possible, and that affect people’s lives, both for technology and even more important, access to technology.

There are a gajillion crazy-ass cheap, crazy-ass powerful graphics solutions out there, and they all work just fine with Blackmagic products. Heck, even Photoshop is an insane amount of bang for the buck, but there is literally not one single problem to be solved with world-changing graphics power, and the access thereto. We’re already there.

It might be different if the guys at Affinity were like the guys at DaVinci, out of money and out of time, but that’s not the case. They’re doing great. The companies who have run out of steam along the way (eg, Painter, and I say Corel, although you may not) really kinda needed to. You don’t get to survive just because you want to. But the great stuff is great, it’s doing fine, it’s alllllll accessible….and as Michael Gissing points out, most people’s print needs are getting met by exporting frames and converting to CMYK in Pshop or similar.

Look, the key to BMD’s utopian vision — and make no mistake, this is a utopian strategy, not a capitalist one (although who knows, maybe I’m the one that’s mistaken) — is that Grant gets to charge next to nuthin’ for his core products because he’s not wasting money chasing niches. In that sense, his strategy is in a way the mirror image of conservative. Almost an ideology, I think. Is it big? Then let’s do it. Is it small? Let somebody else do it.

Take this to the bank.

Or, laugh at me later when I’m wrong again. But I don’t think I am.

But then I never do, until I am. ????

2) I wouldn’t call this an ideology, but Simon makes an observation that’s likely pretty dang close to a mission statement:

We were all quite rightly absolutely awestruck by Resolve 14 and the Fairlight integration, but I think it’s fair to say that this Fusion release is potentially significantly more awesome.

Jobs used the phrase “insanely great.” He wanted jaws to drop. And as Simon also rightly observes just a couple of sentences later:

Nobody, but nobody, is changing the game at anything even remotely approaching that pace that BMD have now achieved.

And that includes Apple at its Jobsiest. The fact is that Steve was easily distracted, and went chasing niches to plug — people talk about Apple chasing Avid, but it never happened. It was always Adobe. Steve wanted to license Premiere, but when he couldn’t, he went after the guy who invented it. Adobe has compositing, Apple buys Motion and Shake. Adobe adds DVD, Apple buys Spruce. etc etc etc.

(btw, I was at Avid while this was happening, and I was the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Avid’s attempt to ALSO address Adobe, known as Avid Xpress Studio — and I’m tellin’ ya, there was virtually no thought of chasing Apple, because nobody chases the company who’s not in front. It was ALWAYS Adobe, imo. And yes, that’s my opinion, but that’s also how I personally played it.

— Digression within a digression: how’s THIS for clarity of vision? Look at how many people were adamant that Adobe was doomed by a subscription-only model who are now completely out of this industry. Gone. Whereas if they’d simply invested their life savings in Adobe stock on the day of the announcement they could have retired gazillionaires a few years later. Although who knows? Maybe that’s where they all went. —

Returning to my digression already in progress….

I’ll also note that Avid started being a little more explicit about chasing Adobe a year ahead of Apple. It was only after I taunted Apple on the road for a year with the phrase “Avid Xpress Studio is the most complete Suite” — often to their face as we went from user group to user group around the world, sometimes in the same meetings, presenting back to back — to describe the combination of Avid, Pro Tools, Softimage, and dedicated video and audio hardware that Apple dropped the name Final Cut Suite, and and came right back at us with the name Final Cut Studio to counter the year-old Avid Xpress Studio.

Apple literally unveiled the sign right as NAB opened that year, directly across the aisle from Avid’s booth and facing straight into it. In fact, Avid’s booth was quite literally the only place on the floor from which you could read that banner. Well played, my friends. ????

And I do mean friends. Indeed, I spent NAB 2003 working full time in Apple’s booth at NAB. It’s a small industry, and sometimes friends trade a little paint on the turns And hey, I’m friends with everyone now. What a great time to be in this business!)

But I digress. ????

My point is that there’s literally nothing that could happen with Affinity or Corel, or even somehow swiping Photoshop, or whatever other scenario you care to name, that would be BIG for what Blackmagic is doing with video, film, and audio. There are no big things to do with still images. Anything further along those lines than is already there is a distraction, moving in exactly the opposite direction that the rest of Blackmagic is going, and the one thing we’ve yet to see is Blackmagic distracted or moving in the opposite direction of itself.

Not that this was necessarily clear in 2009, mind you. We ran a lengthy interview with Grant on the DaVinci acquisition that was 40 minutes of “wtf….no seriously, wtf” until it became clear to all of us….until we asked it again with the camera and Teranex in 2012….and Grant wrapped it up nicely. The two things you need for better video output are better acquisition and better processing. Fairlight completes it today with a sound toolset designed for motion picture and video, rather than music. He’s touching on distribution with broadcast and the web now, but that’s it in a nutshell. Pictures in motion.

My goodness, this is fun.

Oh wait, I just looked up the title of the actual interview that Ronald Lindeboom and I did with Grant Petty about DaVinci, cameras, Teranex, et al in 2012, which was a pull quote: “We Want To Blow People’s Minds”

[Michael Gissing]

Spot on Tim. It’s amazing how a company grants (see what I did there) a wish to so many of us with an amazing upgrade to Resolve and Fusion and the first thing people jump to is why don’t BM make a still/graphic program.

I’ve just finished an article for Audio Technology mag on the Fairlight integration after interviewing the Fairlight/Blackmagic team. They are a focused tight group. I didn’t get a tip off about Fusion even though it was nearly ready to drop. But I did get the absolute message that they are about changing the face of collaboration workflows as well as democratising production and post. Eyes are firmly on the ball at BM.

That said they will probably do something amazing by recognising another big hole in established workflows.

[Steve Connor]

[Michael Gissing] “first thing people jump to is why don’t BM make a still/graphic program.
“

Well one person did 🙂