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One year later…
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Nope, still have no idea what you are trying to communicate. Guess i’ll have to sit this one out.
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haha, it’s an internet meme – and I did a poor job at conveying it. Rest assured it’s meant to be a subtle cheer-on.
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[Andrew Kimery] “Some have mentioned maybe Blackmagic would buy Avid, but I don’t see that as much of an improvement. If BM bought Avid would Avid then only work w/BM cards? Isn’t that basically the same path that many say is dooming Avid now?”
But BM apparently has a functioning business model. Is DaVinci sales hurting or helping BM’s hardware sales? I think BMs hardware pricing and direction lend themselves to wide use. That’s not the case with Avid. When Avid limited hardware use with MC/Symphony the choices were expensive. Some thought overpriced for the features. I don’t think DaVinci users feel that way about BM’s Video I/O. I don’t think ATEM users feel that way about their hardware switchers. On the other hand many ProTools users were livid at the cost of the hardware upgrade.
Actually I think BM and Avid is a very good comparison between a viable hardware business model and one that isn’t in the long run. Avid also is very upmarket in its hardware whereas BM tries to be broadmarket (affordable).
BM is willing to be daring by entering new markets very aggressively. They did it with DaVinci. They’re doing it with their Digital Cinema Camera. Avid? Well they did come out with a neat iPad Video Editor. I’m not sure how the revenue for that works for a hardware company or the upsale from that to Symphony with Isis. Meanwhile BM has a free lite (and really not all that lite) version of DaVinci Resolve and they give away the full version with the camera. BM’s moves probably do a better job of the upsale both in software and hardware. Even their camera is geared to sell their color grading workflow given the choice of codec they used.
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then many thanks, but I really didn’t get it (still don’t sorry). though the day I get everything…. well, that’s never going to happen now is it 🙂 But I did get Black Sabbath’s Paranoid LP on vinyl through the post today so I’m happy in my little fifedom.
Thanks for trying to elaborate though.
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The meme is based on an old advertising campaign, where the man pictured usually gives quirky but correct advice, in some kind of comical way. The advise is usually geared towards younger generations, basically trying to show a wiser, more successful man teaching his underlings.
Anyway, you can probably see why I thought of this scenario when you likened the editor-FCPX relationship to a game. Kind of true.
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[Daniel Frome] “Ugh, thanks. So if Avid actually folding? Why are you insinuating this?”
I don’t know what’s happening with Avid beyond that their financials continue on a downward spiral even after the brief uptick. They’re about debt free which means they’re probably much more likely to be sold than fold. A debt free company can be a very good value.
The issue is that whether it’s internal reorganization or sale, someone(s) are going to be making decisions about their product lines and business model and someone users might get hurt. Some products consolidated, some dropped. I’m not sure which and what but that means there’s some risk for people buying Avid products.
The one sure thing (IMHO) is that things will not keep going as they are. Given the lack of debt they can go on for a while but to stay debt free may mean more staff downsizing and that creates another set of problems depending on which departments.
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ah, well that’s kind of flattering, though this may have been a more pertinent image to use for me:
https://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44413000/jpg/_44413846_garnett1_203bbc.jpg
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[Andrew Kimery] “I agree that if FCPX would’ve launched with high-end features enabled that would have given a different perception to the launch. And what you are saying furthers my hypothesis. At some point during the development of FCPX the choice for launch features was set (iMovie thumbs up, XML thumbs down). If it was a time crunch issue why didn’t they get started on development earlier? I’m sure w/all of Apple’s in-house development experience they could do a good job of planning out realistic development schedule.”
Despite the bad PR, it seems to have been the correct choice for Apple to ship as soon as it had a release suitable for mainstream editors, rather than waiting on high-end features — they seem to have sold a lot of copies over that first 12 months, after all. Consequently, had they started earlier, I imagine they’d still have done a minimalistic initial release.
[Andrew Kimery] “Honestly, I think the resources got pulled to work on iOS projects, which also explains the final, lackluster update to the FC Suite, and so there was a rush job to get FCPX out because they natives were really getting restless.”
I suspect the final lackluster update to FCS was due to resources being pulled to FCP X, and was also an illustration of why FCP needed to be rewritten from the ground up — a lot of the features people would have wanted in that update were probably impossible to implement within the old codebase. Native support for non-QuickTime media, better use of GPUs and multicore processors, 64-bit, etc. This stuff just wasn’t reasonably possible in a creaky old Carbon app.
[Andrew Kimery] “Sure, Avid and Adobe might not be reinventing the wheel (though they are both doing a better job of supporting old media and new media workflows than Apple currently is) but I don’t worry about the next version of MC or PPro getting delayed, or under-delivered, because they diverted massive internal resources to work on an iDevice app. I can’t say the same for FCPX.”
As I noted previously, Premiere is probably not one of Adobe’s more important products (and because of the way almost everyone buys CS apps in bundle form, it’s not even clear how many actual additional sales improving Premiere with produce for Adobe), and Media Composer faces some risk posed by Avid’s problems at the corporate level. It’s not immediately obvious to me that FCP X is the most risky long-term choice here. It’s true that it’s not Apple’s primary focus, but Apple has 250x Avid’s revenue and actually sells a smaller number of products than Avid does, so it doesn’t logically follow that FCP X will receive less investment than Media Composer.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Dennis Radeke] “I think many people miss what I consider to be the main point – namely the workflow of Production Premium in its entirety. In this case, Premiere Pro is the ‘hub’ application – where things like After Effects, Photoshop and others feed into the main organizational, story-telling tool.”
I get the argument for integrated tools, and I’m sure for some types of projects (VFX-heavy music videos or commercials that have the edit, composting, graphics, etc. all done under one roof, for instance) it’s extremely useful. But my reaction is the same as it is to Smoke’s integrated toolset. This sort of thing seems like it’s hugely important to a couple of market segments, and not really all that useful to others. For instance the kind of integration you’re describing wouldn’t do us much good with our indie feature projects — editors in our world choose software they enjoy using (because they’re going to be cutting with it for months) with effectively no regard for workflow considerations, VFX and graphics are usually done by outside facilities, and everything is going to end up getting fed into some color grading system that isn’t part of Adobe’s ecosystem in the end anyway.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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