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Less a showdown, more a decision – Phillip Bloom outlines his reasoning for choosing PPro 6.
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[Walter Soyka] “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?”
I think it’s because they are willing to lose some of their previous loyal customers to ultimately make a better product, even if it means releasing a product that isn’t ready for everyone quite yet.
[Walter Soyka] “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 think that Autodesk had to do that to compete. It’s a smart business decision. Autodesk also has an ecosystem, it looks different from Apple’s but it’s there.
Adobe did scrap a few things in the past, but why do you think Adobe is getting a lot of attention lately? Adobe has done a good job of getting things ready from primetime (Pr CS5.5 to CS6 brought some great changes) but I think a lot of that is people looking for an Apple Hardware/FCS alternative or both.
[Walter Soyka] “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.”
Parts of it are young, parts of it are really old, as Oliver suggested. Even if the code is new, the way it operates is still kind of feels “unmodern”. I am talking directly about media management. They are making great strides, though. No question about that.
[Walter Soyka] “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…”
And here in lies the problem. At some point, you are going to have to start over, or release a new application. Or, if you are going to gradually transform Ae in to a true 3D application, you’d have to do it very very slowly to give people a chance to learn, and not alienate your loyal users, and keep the legacy features and support that everyone loves Ae for.
If you go the new route, you now have to support the Legacy, and find resources for the new app and you are now building two apps, not just one.
If you do a gradual transformation, you keep your legacy happy, but you risk not moving fast enough to attract the new 3D compositing crowd. They will look elsewhere. Those are not easy business decisions.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “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.”Since I’m always up for car analogies (sorry Franz), for me X is like being told that in order to use this great new aerodynamic body I’m going to have to learn to steer with my feet and break with my hands. It’s not that there’s any connection between the new body styling and the new steering mechanism, it’s just that since they were rebuilding the car from scratch they figured there had to be a better way to handle the driving interface, which hadn’t really changed in over a hundred years. Now I’m not saying it’s impossible to drive “pedestrally”, but I will have to be convinced that the aerodynamics that I do want is worth the new steering that I have little use for. In the meantime I will be looking out for a car with great aerodynamics and a steering wheel that I can get my hands on.
[Jeremy Garchow] “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.”
Yes, it looks very capable and when/if they make editing with multicam as powerful as they have made the multicam setup, I will have to try steering with my feet.
[Jeremy Garchow] “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.”
I think it’s part missing features but it’s also partly X’s rejection of tracks, and it doesn’t matter how many features they add I believe there will be many editors who will refuse to edit in a non tracked environment.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “I think it’s part missing features but it’s also partly X’s rejection of tracks, and it doesn’t matter how many features they add I believe there will be many editors who will refuse to edit in a non tracked environment.”
Again, I disagree. I think that the metaphor is incomplete in FCPX, that is to say, that there isn’t quite a full track replacement mechanism in place, even though I believe one has certainly been started. What is needed is a few of the advantages tracks offer (free standing clips, visual organization, etc). In my opinion, this could be done without tracks and still keep a modern approach to an editing interface. So while might say the professional rejection has occurred because of the loss of tracks, I would say it has occurred because the track replacement isn’t fully developed.
As far as the car analogies, I see what you’re saying, I just don’t find it that radially different in the sense that, I don’t feel like I have to relearn editing, I’m still editing in FCPX just as I am still driving in a car.
I also didn’t know we the collective editing community has been using computers for 100 years. That’s a new one on me!
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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. PPro showed how this could be done”
I’m not sure I agree that PPro is a good example of this. The CS6 UI is certainly more streamlined, but there are similar operational issues with CS6 as there have been in most of the recent, previous versions. Little was changed operationally – aside from a performance boost evident with each new version. Most of the change was cosmetic and in generic, a mimic of Avid Media Composer.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “but the organization and tracking of footage is particularly rugged, at least in my opinion. “
that’s a kind way of putting it.
If they can’t get out of the box of single project, second project import (and footage duplication) ala AE, thy’ll run into real adoption problems. That said, if adobe anywhere is any indication, adobe appear to be preparing for some pretty surprising strides.
https://blogs.adobe.com/VideoRoad/2012/10/adobe-anywhere-for-video.html
They’ve done quite serious stuff at the backend to read it, including muxing all the operations down to a single stream to allow for multicam over a realistic dsl pipe.
If they implement adobe anywhere anything like as well as they generally implement on the whole – you could imagine it percolating pretty damn widely.
It reads as insanely useful for mid range boutiques, and, maybe even more so, within multifloor new media agencies where multiple parties chew on the same material for shifting collaborative reasons. Ending the duplication of those assets within premiere and prelude feels immense to me.
Its almost like 50’s style IBM servers virtualised in the spine of the building delivering ubiquitous media for near trivial backend hardware investment and existing software. that’s a sell.
adobe still have something like an apple level ability to call the game. After effects shifts tend to determine the kind of stuff we see, PS owns image editing – adobe might actually end up stepping in and determining the practice of distributed media as a backend to media work.
If – if – that pans out, the Adobe Suite cloud would present a pretty sizeable challenge to Motion 5 and FCPX 10 as they sit on the mac appstore.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Oliver Peters] “Most of the change was cosmetic and in generic, a mimic of Avid Media Composer.”
So I’ll disagree with this anyway.
as far as I understand it, and in my playing, I now have realtime jkl trimming on a near par with media composer – that is a core attribute of avid long touted, entirely absent in FCPX and FCP7 before it.
In FCPX I have a laboured precision tool, mouse driven, where if I space bar slap to pause beyond the edit point for a dialogue point say, the skimmer will override the stop point once I move the mouse and I lose it. this is correct right?
Also in 6 I have both clip level and track level audio effects – not that I have ever gone mad for track level adjustment, but this combo is both useful and new?
bottom line oliver; you do phrase things nicely, but if it broadly, and successfully mimicked Avid’s core editing functionality, which people seem to say it has – considering where 5.5 was, cosmetic seems a very odd word to choose.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “If they implement adobe anywhere anything like as well as they generally implement on the whole – you could imagine it percolating pretty damn widely.
“Agreed, but this would require a pretty beefy system to handle this in the form of ultra fast storage/SAN/and the computer(s) to run it. It will be great for the big guys, no question. The blog says that it can serve 30 seats without a massive fibre channel installation, I would think that a medium sized one would be necessary. Perhaps not to each seat, but the backend of that machine streaming 30 r/w operations, even if the streams are small will require some horsepower (compression takes up a lot of processing cycles, therefore 30 real time compression streams will take up… lots more). There’s still some physics here, it’s not a sprinkle of magic dust quite yet.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “If – if – that pans out, the Adobe Suite cloud would present a pretty sizeable challenge to Motion 5 and FCPX 10 as they sit on the mac appstore.”
Absolutely. We will see what happens in 2013.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Agreed, but this would require a pretty beefy system to handle this in the form of ultra fast storage/SAN/and the computer(s) to run it. It will be great for the big guys, no question. The blog says that it can serve 30 seats without a massive fibre channel installation, I would think that a medium sized one would be necessary. Perhaps not to each seat, but the backend of that machine streaming 30 r/w operations, even if the streams are small will require some horsepower (compression takes up a lot of processing cycles, therefore 30 real time compression streams will take up… lots more). There’s still some physics here, it’s not a sprinkle of magic dust quite yet.”
Absolutely. 30 seats will need some serious server-side heavy metal, though the clients could be very, very light.
I’d guess the VARs will be all over this.
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 -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “bottom line oliver; you do phrase things nicely, but if it broadly, and successfully mimicked Avid’s core editing functionality, which people seem to say it has – considering where 5.5 was, cosmetic seems a very odd word to choose.
“Well, cosmetic, because most of the improvements are reskinning the UI. But yes, that’s an oversimplification, for sure. There’s also a hardware abstraction to AJA and BMD card. In my testing, it isn’t as good with these cards as X. The trimming is more like MC, but timeline-based trimming was in CS5.5 and before. Audio track behavior is better, but not as good as 7 or MC. Import/export behavior, multiple projects (not) and similar operational issues are unchanged.
FWIW – I never use the Precision Editor in X. Hate it and find no reason to use it. Other trimming methods are much better.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Absolutely. 30 seats will need some serious server-side heavy metal, though the clients could be very, very light.”
Adobe Anywhere is viable for facilities that would otherwise invest in Avid Unity/ISIS/Interplay or Apple Xsan/Active Storage. I don’t see small shops or even big agencies with media departments pursuing this. And when you get right down to it, how many projects really function long-distance? Most of the time a decent in-house network is what’s really needed. This is an architecture targeted at broadcast plants, pure and simple. It’s being driven by the push they are getting from enterprise users like broadcast groups and networks. Remember that’s where Adobe makes a lot of its money, not single seats of Photoshop or Premiere Pro or After Effects.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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