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Interview with Thomas Grove Carter
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[Bill Davis] “But it’s also true that “finishing” is changing. And worse, becoming less and less relevant in the modern era.”
Have to disagree. Finishing is changing, but it’s certainly not becoming less relevant, and won’t long as people continue to pay to see movies in a theater. Try grading a stereoscopic DCP for stereo projection on your laptop and you’ll quickly see what I mean. ???? That’s just one example.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~researchlinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/Cfz92F
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web: propaganda.com
facebook: /dlawrence
twitter: @dhl -
[David Lawrence] ” Finishing is changing, but it’s certainly not becoming less relevant, and won’t long as people continue to pay to see movies in a theater. Try grading a stereoscopic DCP for stereo projection on your laptop and you’ll quickly see what I mean. ???? That’s just one example.”
Finishing is becoming more relevant to every level of production, including corporate, local, whatever. For that matter, Apple are the ones who blew this wide open with Color in the first place. It was perhaps largely the realm of specialists before then, but absolutely not since.
Resolve is certainly doing its part to finish knocking down the walls (SEE WHAT I DID THERE) with apex-class tools available for anywhere from free to $299, and significantly extending the utility of control surfaces for as little as a few hundred bucks, up to a genuinely game changing box at all of $1000. Look at all the YouTubers shooting with Phantoms, REDs, and Blackmagic’s cinema cameras and tell me that $1000 is an elite price. It just isn’t — as indeed, FREE is not either. ????
I’ve also been enjoying watching Baselight and Mistika helping extend the market at the high end, too. They’re helping put an end to the fiction that heavy iron is passé — not in a world where you need heavy lifting it ain’t. Autodesk and SAM (formerly Quantel) are continuing to thrive as never before.
That’s not counting ever-more-powerful tools built into NLEs (eg Lumetri) and powerful FX plug offerings for X, including Color Finale ($99), Colorista ($199), and cineLook (formerly $99, now free if you join CGM).
I’d argue that top to bottom, there’s no ecosystem anywhere in our creative space that’s richer, more robust, more diverse or growing more quickly than finishing. Not even editing. Not even close.
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[Bill Davis] “This is the era where one person CAN touch everything from creation to delivery – at an impressively high level of success – and deliver content that doesn’t compare all that badly to what the “pro team” can produce.”
Not sure I agree here. I started professional video editing in the 70s and we were editing “online” the whole time. No offline/finishing there at all. If you go back to film, it was quite common for people/companies to be one-man bands, because the tools were relatively cheap for the time. You could own the camera, sound gear and a film editing bench and be largely self-contained. The extra was just the lab and optical effects – the “online” of its day.
The reason for separation of responsibilities is because of the expertise and mindset that many people bring to the table. There are plenty of great editors who are good creatively, but terrible when it comes to quality control. I can design, but a true graphic designer does better work. I can mix, but a skilled ProTools mixer does a much better job.
So while one person can own and do everything, it doesn’t often give you the best results and that’s just as true today and in years past.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Tim Wilson] “Resolve is certainly doing its part to finish knocking down the walls (SEE WHAT I DID THERE) with apex-class tools available for anywhere from free to $299, and significantly extending the utility of control surfaces for as little as a few hundred bucks, up to a genuinely game changing box at all of $1000.”
The interesting thing with Resolve is this. Yes, one person can do it all with a single tool. However, a small shop can also set up 3 “hero” rooms optimized for different tasks – editing, grading with control surfaces, and mixing with a mixing surface. And the beauty is that it’s all using the same app – no need for project translation.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “The interesting thing with Resolve is this. Yes, one person can do it all with a single tool. However, a small shop can also set up 3 “hero” rooms optimized for different tasks – editing, grading with control surfaces, and mixing with a mixing surface. And the beauty is that it’s all using the same app – no need for project translation.
“This story is absolutely astounding to me. That Grant Petty managed to update and mainstream a true alternative to Pro Tools and release it for $299….or zero, if you think of it as being thrown in for free with Resolve….I’m speechless. In any other year, the industry would be howling about a truly viable, robust standalone $299 alternative to Pro Tools, with what looks to be a considerably more affordable approach to control surfaces…but he just threw it into Resolve! And expanded the scope of what it can do for free!!!
I mean, I do love that his specific goal was to make high-end audio tools accessible to video editors rather than saddle up on Pro Tools per se, but still. What an amazing story.
I was the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Avid Xpress Studio back in 2004, and I saw firsthand how difficult it is to have THIS level of audio and video production share the same software real estate so to speak. Pro Tools has been part of Avid for over 20 years and it STILL hasn’t happened.
Your guess is as good as mine if this is even vaguely on the agenda at Apple, who bought emagic back in 2002. Not that Logic is attempting to do what PT and Fairlight are, but its significantly lesser relative ambition should have made it easier to integrate, but 15 years later, not so much.
That Grant could update, mainstream, AND INTEGRATE Fairlight and Resolve in a matter of months is entirely unprecedented — and he managed to blow performance through the roof AND the price through the floor!
When people say that not much of consequence happened at NAB, I’m floored. Well, I guess only if you don’t do anything with NLEs, color grading, or audio. ????
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[Bill Davis] “But it’s also true that “finishing” is changing. And worse, becoming less and less relevant in the modern era.
“Less relevant for who? Broadcasters? Movie Producers? I’m not sure it’s true in those sectors at all
[Bill Davis] “This tells me that anyone who clings too strongly to the classic production modes of yesterday is making a dangerous decision (in my opinion.) The traditional production process still works just fine today. It creates excellence. It leverages expertise built over long hard work. But if you don’t understand that there are NON traditional production processes nipping at the traditional ones heels – you’re delusional. “
I’ll mention that the next time I’m chatting with the owner of Molinaire in London, a very well known finishing house, I think he might disagree with you
[Bill Davis] “Basically, only a tiny sliver of the MOST highly conditioned professionals can discern the visual and audio differences between that young YouTubers work – and a high dollar professional production companies work.”
I’m pleased to be in that tiny sliver who can spot the difference between good and great
[Bill Davis] “So do NOT get complacent about this stuff.
Do NOT think that what you (or I) know now, is what’s going to be what you need to know tomorrow.
“Absolutely right, but that’s been true over the last few decades too.
I understand what you are trying to say Bill, Web TV is changing all the models at an astonishing pace but there at the moment it’s all still in ADDITION to traditional Broadcast and Film and it shows no sign of making any significant inroads in this area.
For me the biggest disruptors in the industry are Netflix and Amazon and they have VERY high production quality in their output, which I’m assuming, is still made with “traditional” finishing.
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[Steve Connor] “Web TV is….still in ADDITION to traditional Broadcast and Film and it shows no sign of making any significant inroads in this area…For me the biggest disruptors in the industry are Netflix and Amazon and they have VERY high production quality in their output, which I’m assuming, is still made with “traditional” finishing.”
I don’t quite understand this. Netflix and Amazon ARE web-based TV, IOW, “new media”. Netflix is spending $6 billion per year just on new content, and in 2016 got 54 Emmy nominations. Amazon’s biggest series is Grand Tour (a new media production), reportedly budgeted at $5.8 million per episode. To me, that is “Web TV” making significant inroads.
The Star Trek fan film Prelude to Axanar has extremely high production values, yet is a pure new media product. It was probably finished traditionally but is definitely not a traditional commercial production: https://www.axanarproductions.com/
By “Web TV” if you mean only non-traditionally finished products, normally that’s not done for higher-budget productions. However the movie “Saved By Grace” was finished entirely in FCPX: https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1830-hollywood-veteran-lance-bachelder-explains-why-he-has-chosen-to-use-final-cut-pro-x-on-his-latest-feature-film-saved-by-grace
I’m not sure it’s possible to isolate revenue from all streaming web content that is not traditionally finished, so I don’t know if there are numbers to definitively assess that as not making any significant inroads. However Youtube alone is estimated to have $27 billion in revenue by 2020, and the demographic chart on this page is interesting: https://www.tubefilter.com/2016/04/15/youtube-estimated-revenues-27-billion-2020/
By contrast Hollywood’s *global* box office revenue in 2016 was about $38 billion.
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[Steve Connor] “For me the biggest disruptors in the industry are Netflix and Amazon and they have VERY high production quality in their output”
Can there be such a thing as too MUCH content? The amount of content is now overwhelming to the point where (in my opinion) a lot of it is not very good and we are missing good stuff because it’s “lost in the sauce” of web content. I rarely have the patience to find and then sit and watch a series online or over the air. What’s more interesting is that when we do watch “regular” TV, the commercial breaks are so much more annoying than they ever were.
After cutting the cord years ago, I have now started reducing my online content footprint as well. Sling was the first to go with Netflix being examined next. Amazon stays because of my Prime account. Hulu is gone and HBO never was. At our household (kids are grown and gone) the actual TV rarely gets turned on anymore (until football season) I have an antennae on the roof for “local” stations (local for us is 40 miles straight line to the transmit point) and that is just for more localized weather information.
Just a muse on a rainy cold morning in Virginia. Thoughts?
Scott Witthaus
Owner, 1708 Inc./Editorial
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Joe Marler] “I don’t quite understand this. Netflix and Amazon ARE web-based TV, IOW, “new media”. Netflix is spending $6 billion per year just on new content, and in 2016 got 54 Emmy nominations. Amazon’s biggest series is Grand Tour (a new media production), reportedly budgeted at $5.8 million per episode. To me, that is “Web TV” making significant inroads.
“I should have said YouTube TV 🙂
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[Steve Connor] “Less relevant for who? Broadcasters? Movie Producers? I’m not sure it’s true in those sectors at all”
This is always going to come down to anecdotes, but in my world the standard of finishing expected by our clients keeps going up year on year.
As the tools continue to improve and allow for better and better results, so the expectations become more and more demanding. Our clients are continually discovering that they can ask for more and more “perfection” and thanks to some incredible advances in software we can keep delivering it.
I think it’s great that our clients continue to build on their expectations and demand results that they would never have considered possible only a couple of years ago, let alone ten or twenty years ago.
However although it is possible to keep up with the pace at a cost that keeps getting cheaper, it’s still not possible to deliver what our clients expect without using the tools (both software and hardware) that are specifically designed for the job with the highest specification in mind.
On a more general note, although there are still millions who cannot tell good or bad from a hole in the ground, there are ever-growing legions of extremely knowledgeable and exacting younger audiences with a very keen eye for even the smallest deviation from what we currently think of as “perfection”.
And today’s “perfection” will always be tomorrow’s “I can’t believe they used to live with that!”
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki
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