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Less a showdown, more a decision – Phillip Bloom outlines his reasoning for choosing PPro 6.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “good god oliver you are infuriatingly rational and measured. its not on.”
LOL. It’s only because I type sober! 😉
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
hey hey – that was sober ranting peters – drunk is a lot more incoherent.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “devil’s advocate Oliver: if you had to pick an editing platform over a three year horizon, given the two companies behaviour – would you pick PPro, or FCPX?”
This is a really tough question, Aindreas.
Oliver brought up the long game. I could make an argument for or against the long game for every one of the A’s:
Avid plays stability over the long game, with bin compatibility going all the way back. Avid has a very dedicated user base, and there are some kinds of work where Avid is the best choice by a mile. They have a mixed hardware/software approach to the business and are the go-to provider for collaborative editing.
However, Avid’s target audience is limited and shrinking as a proportion of the total production pie, Media Composer is arguably limited by its legacy, and Avid itself is in a perilous financial position. They don’t seem to be growing their user base much, if at all, and they have let some advanced systems like DS languish for years.
Autodesk seems very serious about Smoke 2013 — so serious, that they’ve done something that they practically never do: pre-announced features. They do this for internal bookkeeping reasons; when they pre-announce anything, they must defer all revenue on the product until they deliver everything they announced. They don’t do this for Max, Maya, or XSI; they don’t do this for AutoCAD.
They are also clearly putting serious engineering resources behind Smoke 2013, both in porting to the Mac in the first place and now in re-inventing the product’s workflow.
However, they face an uphill battle in adoption. Though Smoke has a well-deserved reputation for speed, flexibility, and quality, Autodesk is classically a niche player in the NLE space. They are offering a premium product that will retail at 11.67x the cost of FCPX; they need to convince some portion of mass-market editors that the cost and learning curve will be worth it.
Apple has tarnished their reputation among pros over the last few years, but might be starting to turn it back around with FCPX. The pace of development has been pretty rapid, and a lot of the early objections to FCPX are no longer valid. On a long enough horizon, they may have a good shot at recapturing editorial market share by getting young editors today who will be senior editors several years from now. FCPX offers some unique and powerful features not found elsewhere, especially in the area of organization.
However, FCPX is still an incomplete product, and Magic 8-Ball says the future here is hazy. Will Apple’s long game for FCPX look more like FCP Legend, with a long development and adoption curve, or more like Aperture with front-loaded development and adoption? Could Apple’s penchant for thinking different and keeping it simple stupid, in combination with the fragmenting post production market, largely consign FCPX to smaller shops with little interchange or less attractive, lower-margin work?
Adobe is doing a wonderful job of listening and responding to customer feedback, and Premiere Pro looks like a wonderful choice for track-loving FCP refugees. Premiere Pro offers familiarity, and with good hardware, Premiere is a nice, high-performance option. Native workflows are a breath of fresh air for some who would have been tasked with hours or days of transcoding on a Legend workflow. There’s a lot of adjacent power with software like Audition, Photoshop and After Effects in the Creative Suite, and many editors already own licenses for Premiere by virtue of their Creative Suite bundles. Adobe Anywhere is an amazingly promising technology that may well make Adobe the player to beat in collaborative facilities of all sizes.
However, suite-wide integration isn’t complete. While there’s a lot of potential with SpeedGrade, there’s currently no project interchange. Dynamic Link with After Effects is very cool, but does not perform like FCPX/M5. Premiere’s media management is a delicate flower and they offer no standard intermediate codec of their own. Adobe has pulled Premiere from the Mac platform in the past, and they currently benefit most from NVIDIA technologies that are ill-supported on the Mac platform.
We’ve jiggled many electrons on this forum discussing how it’s wonderful to be an editor with all these choices on the market today. There’s a flipside to this: there’s no one, clear, compelling general-purpose choice. The notion of picking a single platform and committing to it for three years is tough, because no matter which one you pick, you’ll be leaving something on the table with respect to the other options.
Ironically, I currently see stodgy old Avid and creative disruptor Apple to be very similar in terms of their rigidity: they are each offering products with a specific philosophy and more or less sticking to it. I currently see Autodesk and Adobe as the more pliant pair, bending their products to suit a changing market. As always, the question of vendor comes back to how well they meet your specific needs.
If I had to pick one and only one, I’d be Team Adobe as I couldn’t do my work without Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.
I don’t think I have the luxury of picking one and only one, though. Premiere Pro is the best overall fit for me and my work now, and it’s far from perfect and I have a feature request list a mile long. All the As still show enormous potential, but I can’t afford to think that far out; I have to go with the best solution today, and I have to be willing to change my mind about what that may be tomorrow (just as I did when dropping FCP Legend and adding PCs).
I’m keeping my eye on FCPX, because I’ll need to know it if my clients start adopting it. I started learning Smoke on the 2012 version and immediately shifted gears to Smoke 2013 after NAB because I am enamored with the fast-turnaround, single-app workflow, and I love the idea of having a real 3D compositor in my NLE. Premiere Pro is the best pick for me now, and with reams of great user feedback and some strong original thinking of their own, Adobe has the ability to make that product even better. Lance has piqued my interest with Vegas, so now that I’m running Macs and PCs, I can actually consider a PC-only editor.
TL;DR — “May you live in interesting times” sounds like a blessing, but it’s really a curse.
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “If I had to pick one and only one, I’d be Team Adobe as I couldn’t do my work without Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects.”
I think this decision comes down to the type of editor you are – as in – editor/mogrx or mogrx/editor. If your primary focus is animation/design/compositing/graphics, then the CS6 package is the best of the lot. If your main focus is wading through lots of story, then it’s up for grabs. FCP X is a very incomplete package unless you just really “get” Motion (and assuming some new, future integration with Logic). I’ve done a lot of jobs with X and for what I do, I still rely on FCP7/FCS (plus various utilities) to fill in workflow gaps.
Tony talked about the “pile on” effect, but in a way that’s actually better in the Adobe world. For instance, if you use both FCP X and After Effects, you are generally stuck buying two sets of plug-ins. If you stay with Premiere/After Effects, then many of the AE plug-ins also work in Premiere. The bottom line is that in this scenario, your total cost is lower. Naturally, if you pull AE/Pshop out of the equation, that’s not true, but a lot of us simply can’t work that way.
There are two things to watch for:
1) I think the next X update will be a watershed. A lot of decisions are riding on that. If it gives back some of the “lost” legacy features, more editors and shops will shift that way.
2) Each company needs a new “Cold Mountain” moment. We think Apple doesn’t care about the effect of this any longer, but that’s not true. Likewise, Adobe tries to make hay with feature film use of AE and blur the line through omission that these same films were NOT cut with Premiere. But that will change, once some high-visibility film gets cut with either X or PPro.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I think this decision comes down to the type of editor you are – as in – editor/mogrx or mogrx/editor.”
Agree 100%.
If you’re doing straight editorial, I think FCPX is a strong contender. FCPX would have been a great fit for the creative editorial I was doing 8 or 10 years ago. If I were doing that sort of work today, I’d be all over it.
I do take some pains to point out that I’m not doing creative editorial daily like most here, and that last post of mine would have been a great place for my graphics-first disclaimer. I don’t see FCPX helping me much in the more design-driven work I tend to do today.
[Oliver Peters] “FCP X is a very incomplete package unless you just really “get” Motion (and assuming some new, future integration with Logic).”
Motion has some fun and cool features, and I want the FCPX/M5 integration for Pr/Ae.
Having used Motion for years, my position on it may become my position on FCPX, too: high floor, low ceiling. It’s easy to get to 80%, but it’s hard to take the 80% to 100%. Contrast with Ae, which has a low floor and a high ceiling. It’s harder to get to 80%, but easier to take the 80% to 100%.
(Cue the Nuke and Flame folks to point out that by 100%, I mean 95%…)
[Oliver Peters] “I think the next X update will be a watershed. A lot of decisions are riding on that. If it gives back some of the “lost” legacy features, more editors and shops will shift that way.”
I feel the same about Adobe Anywhere. If they can really make collaboration work, I think they stand to take huge share in big boutiques and small facilities — especially since these already rely on Adobe products for graphics and other non-video content.
[Oliver Peters] “Each company needs a new “Cold Mountain” moment. We think Apple doesn’t care about the effect of this any longer, but that’s not true. Likewise, Adobe tries to make hay with feature film use of AE and blur the line through omission that these same films were NOT cut with Premiere. But that will change, once some high-visibility film gets cut with either X or PPro.”
Adobe also likes to talk about films that use Premiere for tasks other than editorial (pre-vis and VFX). The thing I take away from that is that Adobe has already gotten their editor onto a job that would have otherwise been MC. If Adobe nails collaboration and media management, as well as correcting some of the niggling UI shortcomings that have been universally feature-requested, I think they can really compete with Avid for feature films.
The question for me here is to what degree Apple is thinking about collaboration. If they are sticking to their traditional approach of individual empowerment, larger-scale integrations will continue to be a challenge. If they have a competitor for Adobe Anywhere hidden up their sleeves, the collaborative space will really heat up.
As it stands, collaboration may be the line that fragments editorial. If Apple stays focused on individuals and one-man bands, and Adobe becomes more focused on collaboration and teams, we may end up with a natural detente.
As interchange options continue to improve with Apple, I think FCPX may well make an outstanding offline NLE. As interchange options continue to improve with Adobe, I think Creative Suite may well make an outstanding finishing system. Work cut on FCPX and finished on Adobe or Autodesk seems like a good flow to me.
To that end, perhaps the choice of NLE doesn’t matter that much at all…
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “To that end, perhaps the choice of NLE doesn’t matter that much at all..”
That’s where I’m at right now. The trouble is that it makes predictable workflows hard to create and implement across a team of different editors (people).
One thing I do applaud Apple for is starting with a clean slate. We may not all agree, but if you read any of the issues posted on the various Avid forums (CCow, Avid-L2, Community, etc.) you see a lot of problems caused by cobbling one feature onto another. Even though they recoded it as 64-bit, there’s still a lot of legacy junk there. Things like behaviors working unpredictably when Smart Tools is engage or not.
Apple avoided that with X, but is obviously suffering the negatives from that approach, too.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “One thing I do applaud Apple for is starting with a clean slate. We may not all agree, but if you read any of the issues posted on the various Avid forums (CCow, Avid-L2, Community, etc.) you see a lot of problems caused by cobbling one feature onto another. Even though they recoded it as 64-bit, there’s still a lot of legacy junk there. Things like behaviors working unpredictably when Smart Tools is engage or not.”
I think your combining 2 different things here. You can start with a fresh slate when re-coding for 64 bit but that does not require a total re-conceptualization of the basic software. PPro showed how this could be done – new code, additional features to take advantage of 64 bit and a GUI that builds on but does not throw out the original. Avid has obviously not gone far enough, and for many Apple has gone way too far.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Oliver Peters] “One thing I do applaud Apple for is starting with a clean slate. “
Hear, hear.
At the same time, I think Apple is the only one who could have taken this risk and get away with it.
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[Herb Sevush] “You can start with a fresh slate when re-coding for 64 bit but that does not require a total re-conceptualization of the basic software.”
Here’s more failed car analogies:
You can put a bigger, faster, more powerful engine in any car, but it doesn’t make that car more aerodynamic. It will be faster through brute force, but not by better design.
[Herb Sevush] “and for many Apple has gone way too far.”
I disagree here. One of the problems with X is that it is “incomplete”. I think X hasn’t gone far enough.
Some of the things are simply fantastic. The Multicam setup window is by far one of my favorite features. Easy, powerful, helpful. Mutlicam editing (or really, multitrack audio editing) isn’t up to snuff, but all the multicam preparation is pretty f*cking good. Just like FCPX itself, the extremely powerful organizational and database capabilities are really really good, but some of the finer editing tools aren’t quite there yet. I think Adobe has the opposite problem, with CS6 the editing is much better, but the organization and tracking of footage is particularly rugged, at least in my opinion. Which one is harder to fix and update? The back end or the front end?
If a person hangs around in FCPX enough, you can see where it’s going, but there’s a lot of functionality that could be much better that simply isn’t available today. It is this types of shortcomings that have cause a lot of pros to simply reject the software and call it an absolute failure of design.
The other people who like what they see and can see the longer throw will say that it is a work in progress and it’s just not quite there yet. I, for one, want to see Apple go much further and they haven’t gone too far at all.
Jeremy
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[Oliver Peters] “One thing I do applaud Apple for is starting with a clean slate.”
Shumpeter’s creative destruction in action. Sometimes it’s necessary to start over to move forward. As you point out, this must be balanced against the cost of losing architectural stability and the effects that has on your users and their workflows.
[Jeremy Garchow] “At the same time, I think Apple is the only one who could have taken this risk and get away with it.”
Because Apple users might be more loyal and more forgiving, or because Apple was willing and able to lose every single one of their previous FCP customers in order to go after new ones?
Autodesk has taken a big risk with their existing customers in rethinking the Smoke workflow and in repricing Smoke, and Adobe scrapped Premiere entirely a few years back to launch Premiere Pro.
I’d also argue that Premiere Pro is pretty young. Adobe is pretty free to chuck its legacy bits — and looking over the last three releases, they have been doing exactly that.
Adobe’s entrenched apps (Ps, Il, Ae) are a different story. Would I love to have a true 3D compositing environment in Ae without ray-tracing? Yes! Can Adobe pull it off without breaking everything they’ve built in Ae over the last two decades and alienating their user base? Different question…
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
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