If you’re thinking about premiere pro CC – it might be a really good idea to wait.

[David Lawrence]

[Chris Harlan] “I agree with that. Eventually, I probably won’t be using Creative Cloud if I’m using it for too long in a vacuum. I like the Premiere changes quite a bit, but Symphony is also swell for me. I’m in for a year, and I hope this all gets worked out in the meantime. If it turns into an island, then I will only rent it when I need it, which probably won’t be often because CS 6 fills most of my non-NLE needs. So, fingers crossed that it all works out.”

Chris, how much better is the new Premiere in your opinion? As good as it looks from the demos?

BTW, I hear great things about Symphony 7…

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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl

[Chris Harlan]

[David Lawrence] “Chris, how much better is the new Premiere in your opinion? As good as it looks from the demos?

BTW, I hear great things about Symphony 7…
“

I wish I could tell you. I’m buried in a project right now, and can’t get into it. I’m currently working in–drum roll–FCP 7. I have seen it in the field, prior to the release, and it is really a matter of lots of little niceties. I AM looking forward to it, but it may be weeks before I can give it a real spin.

Yeah, MC7 (with the Symphony Upgrade) does look nice. I actually bought the 6 to 6.5 upgrade today to make sure I could take advantage of the free boost to 7. I’m looking forward to that too. And, weirdly, I’m enjoying being back on Legacy, as well. I will probably time freeze a Legacy computer at one of the Lions just for the heck of it.

[Jim Wiseman]

I like David’s three year plan, at most. It is what I would have spent anyway. I think the other 6 million they seem to be willing to slough off would as well. The current model doesn’t work for anyone with half a brain. I would rather just stay with CS6 and be done with it. Prepare my files from different codecs and export them as a universal one such as ProRes of DNxHD and finish in something else. I’ve already done one long form project that way, and I got the best of both worlds. Adobe isn’t indispensable when looked at that way. I won’t sign for more than three years, and not without a working copy at that time. Features not backward compatible are of no use. CS6 in three years? No, thanks, I already have it and it won’t support three years of my work.

Better off sending them no money and forcing a real change in this model. In other words, dump Narayen. He’s tied to this like a burglar caught in your house. Adobe can innovate without this model. All I really need is better media management for docs, anyway. I do about zero mograph, and Motion suits me better for the little I need anyway. AE code is so ancient, why should I pay for a re-write of that when I hardly ever use it? Especially if the whole deal causes me to lose access to my work. I’m not brain dead. The suite was really the best model. Why do you think all the yelling and screaming is happening? People liked it and want it back. Failing that, 3 years and a current out for Adobe to save face. But that doesn’t even solve the problem of future OS updates, especially on the Mac, where they happen every year now.

Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1,Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.3, Premiere Pro 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Avid MC, Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz 24Gb RAM GTX-285 120GB SSD, Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 8Gb SSD, G5 Quadcore PCIe

[Mike Dar]

This reminds me of what Politics are at large. Forced participation.
Essentially, one will not own ones work eventually, without participation. I know it sounds like an extreme comparison, but the idea that tomorrow, to utilize what I created yesterday, I need to spend, sure reminds me of socialized systems we see coming into effect.
To say; what we created, we ‘did not make’, because it does not exist without paying daily for it TO EXIST.
So I see this as something beyond a modeling of profits for Adobe, I see the cloud paradigm as Adobe participating in MY… ownership of created efforts.
Don’t take this as a Political statement, but as seeing a real comparable in Adobes future business modeling going away from independent ownership. Do I like collaborating on the net, sure, do I believe this is taking advantage of consumers to where Adobe participates at each level of the products commercial use, you bet.
It really seems like a tax, kinda like arguing Obamacare status, is it a tax? And what is ‘is’, and how did Adobe come to believe if the government can do it, we can too?
Adobe could have done its cloud participation differently and made out like bandits in many ways, without creating a ‘tax’ structure as I see it becoming.

[Walter Soyka]

Sorry for the lengthy delay, Aindreas. I took the weekend off.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m being serious: How are you doing that Walter? How are you viewing the works you produce with rental software differently? You are creating owned works, dependent on tool subscription.”

I understand the issue of project file ownership/control. While I may join you, David and Jim in a theoretical opposition to rented software, this problem is entirely ideological for me. It is not a practical problem at all for my business.

As I’ve said before, I essentially have to automatically upgrade every release anyway to stay compatible. I was already on de-facto subscription. This isn’t that different.

Am I dependent on tool subscription? No more so than a regular “activated” installation. Of course I need the tool to access a project file while I’m using it, but I very, very rarely need a project file after I deliver a finished project. My repeat business isn’t about making changes to existing projects: it’s about making new content to address new communication needs. Assets are re-used; projects are not.

If Adobe changes CC and makes it unaffordable or unpalatable in some other way, I’ll leave. I’m well-versed in other software and I use other applications frequently where appropriate. I could start my next project on Smoke, NUKE, or Motion this afternoon instead of Ae/Pr.

Old project files give Adobe no power over me. If I had left CC and I did need access to an old project, I’d just rent it for the month. Every job I do has some kind of variable cost: licensing for photography/music/fonts, computer time for rendering, freelance labor, etc. I have overhead beyond that: office rental, electricity, phones, Internet access, software maintenance, insurance, etc. The cost of the production tools is actually the smallest of these.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Walter: there is no benefit scenario that trumps the basic issue whereby we habitually face losing fundamental control over the tools we are using to create personal works. I’m nearly strangling the expletives coming out my throat at this point. this is not a subscription to watch cable, or to listen to music – this is renting your fundamental ability to do do your job. every month.”

I think this is much more an emotional issue than a practical one. Plenty of businesses run without “fundamental control.” Look at Dropbox. They are 100% dependent on Amazon S3 for their file storage. 100%.

Owning tools doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy glow of security. What’s there to own? The “pliers” tool analogy doesn’t work with computers. My old CS3 installation discs won’t help me sleep at night in 2013.

Broadening the scope of the discussion a bit, we lost fundamental control over the tools we use thirty years ago when someone got the bright idea that software should be licensed, not purchased.

If you need to ping someone else’s activation server to install your tool, do you control it? If you can only get it to run on a specific set of hardware running specific versions of OSes, do you control it? If a product you’ve invested time and money in can be EOLed without notice at any moment, do you control it?

Crying for perpetual licensing or loyalty buyouts or whatever isn’t the answer to this problem. You’d still be tied to Adobe, and fully dependent on them to provide activations or whatever other updates or functionality was required.

Open data is the soft answer, and open source is the hard answer. If you could reasonably open your work in another application, or if you could actually adapt the application itself however you saw fit, then you’d be Free.

Many objections I see to Creative Cloud boil down to “what if” scenarios, like “what if Adobe raises the price of CC?” When/if they do, I’ll re-evaluate. FCP7/FCPX and this whole Mac/PC thing taught me that I can switch. I’ll use what’s best for me for now and switch when it changes.

I know I’ve talked a lot about where I think Creative Cloud will go and how it will solve problems I have today, but that’s still in the future and we can’t count on it yet. Let’s consider the CC versions of the apps we do have today.

Look at Ae: CINEWARE is awesome. Refine Edge is awesome. Snapping to layer features is awesome. Bicubic sampling is long overdue, but it’s here now and it’s awesome. Improved DNxHD, DPX, and OpenEXR support is awesome. Look at Pr: there are dozens of little editorial improvements that are awesome. The audio clip mixer is welcome and awesome. Lumetri looks are awesome. Mezzanine codec support is awesome.

There’s enough awesome there that I don’t want to use CS6 anymore. My clients don’t know it specifically, but they don’t want me to use CS6 anymore, either — not when a feature like CINEWARE lets me iterate quickly back and forth between Ae and C4D, for example, letting me get better work done in the same amount of time.

I’m not trying to tell you that CC is right for you. Obviously, you feel very strongly that it is not, because you are not comfortable with the requirement that you’d pay in the future for the continued ability to open your projects. You want creative software to work the way it has worked since its inception, and that’s a reasonable position to take.

I do sincerely hope that Adobe comes up with something you, David and Jim can be happy with. I’m really happy with the CC applications and I think you would like them, too.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jason Van patten]

[Walter Soyka] “Owning tools doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy glow of security. What’s there to own? The “pliers” tool analogy doesn’t work with computers. My old CS3 installation discs won’t help me sleep at night in 2013.”

Here’s a fun “what if” that is actually real: imagine that Adobe introduces a disastrous bug into your NLE, making it literally impossible to do your work? What then? Download the update and hope you don’t trip over the bug? Download the update and hope they patch it quickly? Stay at your current version of the NLE but continue paying them a monthly rental?

(For the uninitiated: I’m referring to the spanned AVCHD clip bug that still hasn’t been fixed in Pr CS6)

Let’s look at those choices. The first two are just trouble waiting to happen. Specially if you make money with your NLE. Hopefully no professional would choose either of those. That leaves the third: stay at the present release. Well, great. You’re paying them money for something that you’ll never update until they fix the bug. Their excuse for going to the rental software is that they’re free to release new features on a regular basis. How’s that benefiting you during this “bug” problem? It’s not. And it’s costing you money.

What if they release new features that you really want, but still haven’t fixed the bug? What if it took them more than a year to fix the bug? What if they were never able to fix it (as is probably the case with the aforementioned CS6 bug)?

Paying for perpetual licenses gives you, the end user, far more freedom to pick and choose IF you want to pay for the upgrades.

[Walter Soyka]

Jason, my position is that bad bugs are bad, period.

I don’t get how this as an issue of perpetual license versus subscription. Why is it better to pay a lot of money upfront for product with a bad bug?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jason Van patten]

[Walter Soyka] ” I don’t get how this as an issue of perpetual license versus subscription. Why is it better to pay a lot of money upfront for product with a bad bug?”

I guess I wasn’t clear enough and I apologize for that. FWIW, I agree that a bad bug is bad, period. But…

Had I a better grasp of the CS6 issue, I wouldn’t have paid the money for it. I’d have continued happily along with CS5.5 and saved myself the upgrade cost. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover this bug until I was past my 30-day refund period, so I’m stuck with a piece of software I paid for and can’t use. I had the choice and I made the wrong one.

If you start paying rental for CC and some nasty bug is introduced by an update in the future (expect updates to happen: this fall and this winter for things like AE and Premiere…) you also have the choice to update or not. But what you don’t have is the choice to continue paying. Again: you’re signing up for a monthly rental ostensibly to give you near-instant access to upgrades and new features. But you don’t get to pick and choose those features and updates. You either take them in serial or you take none of them. Regardless, you’ll continue paying for them.

Does that make sense? To me there’s a distinct difference.

[Todd Kopriva]

> I’m referring to the spanned AVCHD clip bug that still hasn’t been fixed in Pr CS6)

This bug has been fixed in the Premiere Pro CS6 (6.0.4) update: https://bit.ly/DVA_updates

(BTW, a new After Effects CS6 update is coming soon.)

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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