Mark Sanger (Oscar Winner for Editing – Gravity) Avid vs FCPX

[Michael Gissing]

Having spent most of my career at the bleeding edge, I find it interesting to see such a conservative mindset. Whenever I hear someone say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” I cringe. Software doesn’t have to be broken to improve it. It is also always broken so apart from needing bug fixes it can improve.

That said we should be acutely aware that stability and working (but older) paradigms are perfectly valid if the software is dong the primary job. I had a long chat many years ago with Gerry Hambling who was proudly the last editor to cut big features on a Moviola. He made it work and he got the result.

So although Mark may be out of touch with how X has gone in the past three years, I fully understand this methodology. That is why I hate software that deliberately breaks forward or backwards compatibility as it means people like me who try to be current have post workflow issues because some companies cut such long form projects adrift. The reason AVID is still the preferred system for features is that it doesn’t ask for leaps of faith and complete mindset changes. With big budgets comes a desire for stability. It is exactly the area of the industry where paradigm shifts and rapid version turnover is actively shunned.

[Craig Seeman]

It also shows the major business problem developers have in supporting that mindset.

You’re selling a product to a market that isn’t inclined to pay for upgrades very often and when it does, it’s inclined to be averse to major feature changes that might require any significant rethinking.

With a subscription model, the developer gets steady income whether or not the Post Production team takes advantage of new features.

It would seem a tough market to cater to and make profit should of selling big iron that require expensive support contracts and upgrades as project demands increase commensurate with production demands.

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Gissing] “Whenever I hear someone say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” I cringe. Software doesn’t have to be broken to improve it. It is also always broken so apart from needing bug fixes it can improve.”

In fairness, when Mark Sanger said that, he was talking about their decision to stay locked on the same version of the Media Composer throughout the course of post on Gravity (three years) — in other words, not upgrading in the middle of the project.

Also given that time context (>3 years ago), perhaps his remarks on FCP X are less controversial.

The “strange new territory” remark about MC could easily be taken out of context. That was about all the changes that happened between when they started Gravity (circa MC v4 or v5) and when Gravity wrapped. That possibly covers the smart tool and both the birth and death of PhraseFind, and definitely covers the 64-bit transition, Open I/O, a tabbed interface (!), major changes in AMA, steroscopic support, source-side LUTs, background encoding, new flavors of DNxHD, FrameFlex, and the latest licensing changes. I don’t think a negative connotation was implied; rather, he was commenting on the increased rate of change versus previous releases.

When he wrapped Gravity and looked at what had happened with Avid while he had been working, he echoed some of the sentiments often expressed in this forum: “I was history” and “If you don’t keep up, technology will overtake you.”

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]

[Tim Wilson]

Talking about conservatism in contexts like this is the ultimate straw man argument. There’s not one person in this forum who was looking for a new NLE in April 2011. Not one. Or if there is, you haven’t spoken up until now. If you COULD have stayed with a less disruptively upgraded FCP, you would have.

Change gets treated like an ethical imperative around here sometimes when 3 years ago, most of you hadn’t changed for years, and weren’t looking to.

I’m going to risk dipping into a metaphor because the “old dogs” thread brought it up. In this context, working dogs aren’t asked to learn new tricks. They’re drilled on the old tricks over and over, until they can perform those tasks surrounded by flames, underwater, while someone is coming at them with a knife.

Which is why it’s ridiculous to refer to experienced Avid editors as inflexible. There is no group of editors on earth more flexible at solving problems, because no group of editors faces more problems. LOL

Some of those are endemic to life with Avid, but some of them are endemic to large-scale operations that are under constant pressure. They’re underwater, surrounded by flames, and people are coming at them with knives. Learning an NLE which even its fans concede requires a bit of rewiring isn’t in the cards, nor should it be.

Here’s the thing. Many of you have trained students in NLEs. I’ve trained dogs. To extend our metaphor, the point isn’t the age of the dog. Its the suitability of the current tricks to the current tasks. Listen, sit, stay, fetch, come, find. That’s pretty close to the entire range for the dog’s entire working life.

To put it another way, the goal is to teach NEW dogs OLD tricks. There have been some nuances in HOW to train over the centuries, but the tasks haven’t changed much.

Not to overstate the nobility of editors or editing. There’s not a noble bone in the lot of us combined. LOL We’re howler monkeys hurling our own feces through the bars of the cage. Working dogs may incline to nobility, but they still lick their balls and pretend they didn’t fart.

My point is that the KINDS of editing that Avid editors do hasn’t really changed. Not since the days of film. Timelines are simple, so don’t fgjking mess with my timeline. Don’t make it do different stuff because you think it will be neato. I don’t have time to follow your neato suggestions, because I have a profoundly NOT neato client and an even less neato deadline.

I’m reminded of what Jeremy Garchow said re: Windows machines being faster back when we were wondering if Apple would release a new Mac Pro. He conceded that Windows machines probably ARE faster, if for no other reason than you can load up more RAM and GPUs — but how MUCH faster would it have to be to make up for the time he lost learning Windows? His answer is the correct one: it’s almost inconceivable.

And coming back to the beginning, not one of you was looking for a new NLE in April 2011. Some of you still aren’t.

To the extent that you have, many of you have stretched the process out for a couple of years. You’ve had the mental, occupational, and temporal bandwidth that a feature editor, or a TV editor working in a feature-style workflow, simply doesn’t.

Not because Hollywood-style workflows or work are “better” than your work. It’s almost surely not. Most movies and TV shows bite. LOL Those editors aren’t necessarily more professional or superior in any way. But they have a set of luxuries that most of us haven’t: a purpose-built set of tools, provided by a company with only one basic constituency for those tools, and workflow parameters that have stayed largely the same for over a very long time.

Nor do they have what many of us had to face over the years: a company that couldn’t figure its market out and collapsed (Media 100), or blew up established workflows for a neato future, and in some cases, still not provided a suitable replacement. I’m still positive that if Apple hadn’t changed course, virtually none of you here would have either.

FCPX guys are self-selecting as WILLING to change, because they’ve HAD to do it to get here in the first place, whether they’ve liked it or not, or I think maybe even more often, guys who LIKE change, who WANT new things, and have the time to make those changes.

In the same way, I think Avid editors are people who tend to prefer depth of experience, and a narrower range of improvisation, rather than expanding breadth of experience.

Is enjoying change for its own sake a negative? No. Neither is recognizing that change is being forced on you and adapting. But neither is being a cattle herding dog or a bomb-sniffing dog, who’ll go their entire career with the FEWEST SKILLS POSSIBLE. Mastery matters more than novelty.

Hey, if your work changes, change tools. Or if you like change, change. But I don’t think there’s anything “better” about tending to prefer change, any more than I think it’s “better” to prefer sticking with something that’s working.

But you know what, someone sticking with what’s working WORKS, whether or not it’s something that works for YOU.

[Shane Ross]

Sorry…he’s spot on. On big budget shows, you need a proven tool that works. Most people don’t want something that’s very new to the field, that doesn’t have a solid workflow in place yet. There are a few that are pioneers, and they didn’t go into things without issues. When Walter Murch used FCP 3 to cut COLD MOUNTAIN, even Apple said “don’t do this.” But he did, because he loved the control he had with audio. So they had a team of people on site making sure things worked, fixing things that didn’t. And it wasn’t until a few versions later, say FCP 5 or 6…that FCP started seeing use in the feature film market. FCP 5 and 6 is when it started creeping into TV as well. When things were more solid, and stable. Workflows ironed out and working.

FCX is being used on a feature…as is Premiere Pro. And yes, there were issues with both systems. Both needed a lot of hand holding and experts on hand to make sure things worked. They aren’t proven. Until they are proven, many…nay, most…editors, and mainly producers and studios who need to ensure that things work right, and there are no hiccups…will trust those NLEs and use them.

I was a pioneer and champion for FCP. And yes, I used it on many projects, and encountered many bugs and figured out many workflows. And I became a champion for that NLE and had to prove it worked, and worked well, on many many projects. I was lucky to have someone trust me to use it on a project where Avid was a big issue. If Avid wasn’t an issue with the footage we were shooting, I’m sure I’d be on an avid. But FCP was the solution to the issue.

Until FCX is a solution to something…people won’t change. Especially on features, where all you do is straight cutting. Right now it, and Premeiere Pro…are the solution to dealing with 4K footage, because currently, Avid doesn’t do it. Soon it will. But that’s why they are being used…because they solve an issue in post. not because “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to edit with FCX?”

FCX isn’t the solution everywhere…which is why you might not see it everywhere. It doesn’t do stuff I need done, so I don’t use it. I used FCP 4.5 up to FCP 7 over Avid because it solved all sorts of issues that I had with Avid. FCX solved tons of issues in other areas of post…that’s why it’s popular and took off. And it’s solving some issues in features, thus why it is being tried out.

But I will agree that one of Avid’s biggest issues is people unwilling to change…unbending. Try to change one thing and people FLIP OUT! I know editors and post companies still using Avid MC 4…because they hate the smart tool. Forget the fact that you can disable it and work normally…they don’t like the fact that it even exists, and takes up screen real estate. So they stick with their precious MC 4. THOSE people are a problem…and they do make it tough for Avid to innovate, because they cannot get all their clients to pay for the upgrades…many stick with what they have because, “hey, it still works.”

FCX did innovate. It innovated in ways that many people needed. I didn’t need it, therefore I poo-poo’d it. Said “it isn’t for me!” And it still isn’t. But I do see how it’s perfect for TONS of workflows, tons of areas of post. When more and more people need it’s solutions in TV and film…then you’ll see it spread.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Andrew Kimery]

[Craig Seeman] “It also shows the major business problem developers have in supporting that mindset.

You’re selling a product to a market that isn’t inclined to pay for upgrades very often and when it does, it’s inclined to be averse to major feature changes that might require any significant rethinking.

With a subscription model, the developer gets steady income whether or not the Post Production team takes advantage of new features.

It would seem a tough market to cater to and make profit should of selling big iron that require expensive support contracts and upgrades as project demands increase commensurate with production demands.”

Avid certainly has a problem in that in controls a high end niche, with limited growth potential, and every effort it’s made to compete down market (in the past with FCP Legend and now with X and PPro) has failed (the Xpress series, buying Pinnacle, etc.). Having to unbundle their I/O hardware from their software has certainly hurt as well. I won’t say Avid has given up, but I think they know their strength lies more in the enterprise sector and that’s where they rolling up new products like Avid Everywhere.

I agree with Sanger in that Apple targeted a much wider users base with X. I wouldn’t have used the term consumer but Apple certainly made sure people that don’t edit all day, every day (or even edit most days) could very easily and comfortable slip into X. Given the massive amount of video that is created each day it makes sense to have products targeting different demos just like Word, Pages and Final Draft all basically do the same thing but they each cater to different demographics.

Both Shane and Tim talked about how valuable proven workflows are and I think it’s an important enough aspect to Sanger’s segment of the market to underscore that point yet again. Knowing what pot holes in the road exist and how to avoid them can’t be overstated in these scenarios. It’s much easier to budget money and time around proven workflows than it is to lose money and time chasing down a problem you didn’t know existed. Especially when there are a dozen (or dozens) of people working on the project together (literally day and night) and you don’t know if the root of the problem lies with what Bob did five minutes ago when he tried to rebuild a database or with what Sue did 5 months when the media was originally ingested.

You also have to keep in mind that they might be running some custom software that can’t be upgraded as easily as buying a new copy of an NLE. A buddy of mine did some work at a large facility and he mentioned that that facility was years behind switching from FCP 6 to FCP 7 because they had custom software that allowed their DAM to interface with FCP 6 but under the hood changes in 7 weren’t compatible with the custom software. Once they deemed the cost of rewriting the software to be worth it they did so and then upgraded to 7. Needless to say they are still on 7 and are researching which NLE to switch too.

Oh, and speaking of antiquated tech, George R. R. Martin probably gets that crown as he still uses DOS word processing software to write his books.

[Bill Davis]

I’m still not buying this threads central premise. Not even a little.

Tim is right to this extent. I wasn’t looking to change from FCP 7 after 12+ years of editing. But it was largely because I was a vastly more ignorant fool then – than I am today. I thought that the traditions of the A/B roll editing I’d been involved with for 20 years plus were still the best way to approach editing – except in a few specific areas where the pain was significant. For example, I absolutely was looking around and noticing that not everyone was still paying the “render tax” that I was day in and day out. And that was bothering me in 2010 big time.

Still, I was generally content because I only knew ONE aspect of the software where I could reasonably expect timesaving improvement. If you’d told me I could have FCP 7 with NO rendering and some incremental improvements – I’d have been giddy with delight and signed up for another 10 years, like everyone else.

But then Apple came along and showed me that I didn’t even have a CLUE how much better editing could be. I didn’t know I’d want an internal asset management database, I didn’t know I’d enjoy a magnetic storyline.I didn’t know I’d want one-click sharing to Vimeo. Or Roles, or Instant switch proxy/original workflow, or a dozen other things in X that I think Apple improved on and that save me actual time and therefore money today day in and day out.

So sorry, but arguing that just because nobody had a clue that there might be useful alternate ways to think about editing – also implies that there was no reason to explore those different ways to think about editing IS conservatism. By definition. And the type of destructive conservatism that misses potentially beneficial change.

It’s the conservatism that says that what we have RIGHT NOW is plenty good enough. So there’s no compelling need to change. Conservatism says SLOW DOWN and change less. Change carefully. Change after a big poll and the guys who do it best right now ALL get to weigh in on how the change is supposed to be done. And for gods sake don’t break anything we have right now. All the paychecks depend on it!

Conservatism is “this is how it’s done professionally, so don’t screw that up.”

And my counter argument has always been that that’s a fine strategy when things are going along just fine. When you’re meeting all your deadlines and the money is rolling in and your next three jobs are set – THEN it’s perfectly smart to be as conservative as you can be. Because what you’re conserving is outstanding.

The problem is that this describes a ridiculously tiny fraction of the creative shops out there that I know of over the period of the past 5-10 years.. For most real folks in the real world, that old professional model had largely been DESTROYED. Utterly. Budgets for everything perhaps except the top of the top end are still in the toilet. Where once there were 50 projects to sustain small operators – suddenly there were THREE. And two of those were probably cancelled before they were funded.

And so it’s great that yet another Oscar Winner is defending the AVID ecosystem. And I’d recommend that if you’re an Oscar Winning editor, you too should darn well be fluent as to editing on AVID as well.

But in the rest of the NON Oscar-winning world. Some of us desperately needed innovation even if we didn’t actually realize it at the time.. We needed to pay less. (A LOT less, considering how most of our billing were under so much pressure.) We needed to get more capabilities – and not just more of them but different capabilities. We needed to edit in weird mixed codecs and on laptops and in the CAR. Basically, we needed a tool for this generation. And Apple was far sighted enough to work hard to give us exactly that.

I don’t shoot with the same type of cameras I did in 2008. I don’t watch the same TV Shows. I don’t read paper magazines off a newsstand any more. I don’t edit on the same types of computers. And I just don’t think trying to hold on to THE software of the last decade makes a whole lot of sense either. For me. I have no clue what you need.

For Mark Sanger – it absolutely does. And that’s great. But it’s NOT evidence of the value of conservatism in editing. It’s evidence of the value of conservatism in editing for editors who don’t have any compelling need to change all that much. If you’re one of those. Bless you. Great. Congrats. But I”m not that. And sorry, but spending orders of magnitude more money and assembling a Oscar Level multi-user edit system is a stupid goal for most content creators in this market in this day and age, in my opinion.

Heck, look around. We’re down to SIX media conglomerates who create the vast majority of ALL the content we all consume. SIX!!!!! Thats not SHRINKING opportunity – it’s SHRUNKEN. Done deal. Six portals that control whether you can get to a national audience unless you do it via the web. Six gatekeepers for your Movie or your TV show in the US.

And down here in the weeds I’ve come to realize that imagining that I can storm one of those six stone castles, might not be all that smart. Particularly since every single other content creator or editor will ALSO be trying to storm the same six castles. So maybe a tool like FCP X can help me polish my craft, continuously improve, and leverage nearly the same quality of results – and do it all for a couple of hundred bucks. And maybe I can find a path that doesn’t require me to get in the same line as everyone else trying to get a seat in the same six castles.

It’s GREAT that we get to read about the guys cutting at Mark Sangers level. And if we pay attention, we can learn a lot. But I”m not sure how practical the lesson will be in an era where there will be 200 or 500 – or even 1000 seats cutting Gravity style features are out there. Viewed agains the hundreds of thousands of seats I’m pretty sure will develop cutting stuff out in the rest of the real world where tools like FCP X can kick butt.

Who knows. Maybe we’ll all be feature editor film editors some day. But I’m kinda not holding my breath.

FWIW.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Bernard Newnham]

Tim, you are a wise man.

Bernie

[Scott Witthaus]

Bill, great post. Have been doing a little work on Premiere recently, and you realize what you miss from X and didn’t know you needed before X was released!

Having done beta-test cycles for Media Composer (and DS), yeah, the MC crowd is conservative because that workflow is solid and proven for them. And that’s a good reason not to upset the “apple” cart. Being on the beta run when the Smart Tool was released certainly re-enforced this notion (granted, it was a pretty ‘dumb tool’ when it was first released). This conservatism also has Avid using R&D dollars on doing version patches for software that may be one or two full versions old. And that slows things down too. Again, for their core market, this is a good reason not to go too fast or get too radical. It simply has to work for them.

But that’s a small niche. What system Gravity was cut on really means nothing to me and my market (there are no Avid suites left, so MC is not even in the conversation). Coming from an Avid shop and then losing places to use that skill, I had to find a replacement, which was FCP-Legacy, and then three years ago there was another fork in the road. You pick the path of what gives your client the best product and let’s you make a profit. Might be X or not. I am keeping my Premiere chops up because there may be another fork. Same with Resolve. So yes, I am actively looking at other alternatives simply to be as marketable as I can going forward. But it has nothing to do with “Gravity” or any other blockbuster for me.

Just my humble opine on a cold frosty morning! 😉

Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter

[Michael Phillips]

Just some historical context on SmartTool… When it was first released, you could not turn the functionally off altogether and it took several point releases to get it to the state it exists now. Before those issues were addressed, you have to remember that navigation was anywhere in the timeline – muscle memory sets in. With SmartTool in its first few releases, one had to remember to only navigate via timecode strips out outside tracks. For existing users, that was a lot of muscle memory to undo.If they did not pay attention, something was potentially changing in the timeline.

It was brought up several times before beta even released that SmartTool should be an option that is defaulted on, but the user could turn off completely. This way the more progressive user base would have it available from the get-go and long time users can introduce it when they needed or wanted to. This would have eliminated the first impression syndrome that existed with the first (bad) first release and point releases that still linger today.

I will also say that this user base is not so much resistant to change if done well. But it has to be better and not done for the sake of change. There were a lot of “new” things in v6 that were done for the sake of change, but did not add functionality and in some cases made it worse for many users.

My two cents.

Michael