Mid-market NAB happenings

[Walter Soyka]

[Shawn Miller] “Just took a look at the demo… wow! I would NEVER have imagined that a tool like this could be offered for ~$10k. I’m curious to know what the folks at Autodesk think about this.”

HIERO has reportedly been buggy so far — but The Foundry moves fast, and I expect that since they’ve pretty well saturated single-shot comp, the fact that this opens a new market to them would get it plenty of development attention.

Autodesk is now trying to put some separation between Smoke and Flame. Smoke Advanced (the Linux version) is no more; it’s now Flame Assist. Smoke is now a Mac-only product. Going forward after this release, future versions of Smoke will be subscription-only, will not support sparks, and will no longer be Flame-compatible.

Meanwhile, Autodesk has done a lot of work on Flame in the past few releases, making really fundamental changes (and major improvements) to the architecture and workflow. With Autodesk’s NAB marketing moves, it seems as though they are looking to keep Flame and Flame Premium as very premium products.

The lack of any offering between Smoke and Flame might be opening a big door for NUKE STUDIO.

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

[Gustavo Bermudas]

I have been wondering a lot, why Autodesk did what they did with Smoke this year, and if I connect all the dots the only thing that starts making sense, is that Smoke may suffer the same luck as Softimage in the near future.

Here’s why, I have been visiting the Flame forums in the Autodesk area for a while, mostly because I wanted to get some insight on what was going on there, and the thing I noticed is that there was some anger or frustration by experienced Flame users with Smoke for Mac, specially the new changes happening in Flame that took the timeline approach from Smoke 2013, lots of people complaining that Flame is going to be Smoke and its users are going to be now Flame artist too, over saturate the market, and all that.

So with the new direction of separating Flame from Smoke, you can see that seems to be a response to that, and if Autodesk Flame has its user base, on maintenance subscription, that keeps R&D running and profitable, they create a symbiosis, they protect each other, there’s no need to expand the market, just protect it and keep it healthy.

Now if you remember that Smoke for Mac was introduced as an online editor with compositing capabilities targeting FCP7 users, and also later last year there was a subtle nod at an alternative to paying subscription to Adobe, why suddenly adopt subscription at 3X the price of Adobe’s annual subscription? It seems counter-intuitive, and I don’t think the Autodesk guys are that out of touch with what’s going on in today’s post production market, this move doesn’t seem interested in making Smoke succeed, it seems like a planned end of shelf life, or at least creating a cause.

There was a big silence from Smoke for a year and half, and the people that paid their subscription fee didn’t get the update for last year, that’s obviously the reason they’re providing 2015 as a perpetual license to all of those who own a subscription, they’re fulfilling their contract obligation.

I hope I’m wrong with this, and I hope that Autodesk offer permanent licensing options along with subscription ones, and they can continue to develop Smoke further for many years, but what I saw at NAB 2014 with Autodesk Smoke , and Autodesk history of discontinuing software, like recently they did with Softimage, raised more questions than answers.

[Shawn Miller]

[Michael Gissing] “Shawn, I am too small to set up a room for VFX. I sub contract to other freelancers who have their own setup. I don’t have enough demand to justify this. I am excited about Resolve as a finishing tool but I am not needing advanced compositing.”

Ah, I see. For some reason, I thought you ran a smallish (~10 person) post house.

I’m also excited about Resolve 11, I’ve been learning and using 9 and 10 for about a year now, and I really like it. NukeX Studio looks like an amazing opportunity for small houses. It will be interesting to see if its price point encourages the growth of more boutique VFX/finishing shops.

Shawn

[Chris Harlan]

I sat through the demo and was very impressed.

[Chris Kenny]

[Gustavo Bermudas] “I’m sure Blackmagic not only hurts developers, but it also hurt a lot of post houses that use Resolve as well (and paid for it), prices has gone down incredibly low for post services, and I remember a few years ago we were eager to buy new stuff that came out, now we’re like “do I really need this?”
I really love Resolve to death, but I despise Blackmagic for what they’re doing, and right now we’re tied to it because there are no other options, why should I invest in a 6 figure system when clients want to pay a figure less?”

Would you rather have post production facilities competing on the basis of how much capital they have access to, or competing on the basis of efficiency and talent? Expensive tools give you the former. Cheap give you the latter. It seems like when evaluating the effects of Resolve’s pricing you’re counting the harm done to long-established high-cost facilities, but not counting the benefits reaped by new facilities (e.g. my company), by clients, or by consumers who ultimately get access to more and better content.

Anyway, there are still fairly expensive things clients will pay more for. Grading off of a cinema projector in a DI theater instead of crowding around a 24″ monitor in some guy’s basement, for instance. Setting up a serious room can still run to six figures even with Resolve at $995.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[David Mathis]

Nice to see another low cost color grading and finishing option available with Nucoda. Do you know off hand what editing capabilities it has? How well does it interact with Final Cut Pro X and what about plug-in support?

[Gustavo Bermudas]

Ideally they should compete about talent, however, Bkackmagic allowed color grading to become commoditized, so now lots of post houses, big and medium sized, are competing with price, and talent only considered as a secondary factor. This is how I noticed clients are approaching it lately.
Also, big companies are coming down in pricing competing with new boutiques, as a result the mid post market is going, if it’s not already getting squezed with the lower end. So it seems, like in this society, the “middle” is going away.

[Gustavo Bermudas]

Check liftgammagain.com, it has been talked extensive over there