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OT: Adobe raising our costs by 600%
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ah god love you steven.
no pain mate.
say this piece right: PWC for the NHS. Click the “all years” link whatnot for the 10 min. piece with oodles of archive.
https://www.pwc.co.uk/government-public-sector/healthcare/nhs75/index.jhtml?linktransform=no
All the green screen noise control is AE custom, final grade MB.
type animation routines – AE with custom java script, main editor FCP7. seven days to completion with ITNSource buyout.as an editor – some of the responses wooden – hopefully hidden with the various type and image animations.
My point being that there is no conception that I or anyone who comes after me, in the minimal AE FCP skills blend currently underway
(that will become AE/PPro), would touch FCPX with a ten foot barge pole simply because it lacks any benefit Steve.there is no logistical reason to go there. Its a nutty editing system with absolutely no friends.
next time I pull this kind of thing in that timeframe – I rather hope I get to have PPro.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Andrew Kimery] “Yes, if only the dirty heathens would hurry up and realize how wrong they are for not recognizing the pending perfection that is FCPX.
Lord.. and I thought nothing could approach the asinine level of late 90’s PC/Mac flame wars.”
Oh dude, trust me, there are subterranean caverns of assininity that we’ve not even started to plumb yet.
(Just look at the current TV season ratings for evidence!)
And for the record. Nobody that I know has ever argued that X is “perfect.” What it is is fast and fabulous and fun IF it fits your needs. If it doesn’t – well then all the magnetism or clip connections in the world won’t make a gnat’s breaths worth of difference to you.
But really, lighten up. That it makes some people happy, doesn’t mean it has to make YOU angry. That’s just silly. It’s software, as folks often note here, not religion. Course now that I think of it, I wonder if in 18 months people will still be talking about the Pope’s resignation – in a fashion similar to how so many here are still obsessed with debating FCP-X.
Weird thought.
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.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “[Chris Jacek] “Actually, we still get the upgrades for FCPX, and my students quite vehemently hate it.”
sorry I’ve got to do this: Craig Seeman below in other thread:
“That’s why I think it will be young people. Future video post entrepreneurs. It’ll happen by attrition.”
well yes quite indeed.”
But he did say it was a “small department.”
And this is a teacher who apparently isn’t willing to teach it.
Who also finds Adobe expensive.
Wait ’till the see Avid pricing once they go from education to “adult” prices. Priced “right” for eduction. The company that loves expensive upgrades.
I hope they like Lightworks. -
FWIW My buddy teaches editing and FCP X at our state university. His fist time editing students take to FCP X “like a fish to water.” i.e. they understand it and are up and editing quickly.
As someone who has taught FCP X to several students and employees who have had no editing background, I find that they are able to understand FCP X very quickly and get to storytelling process faster. In the past, I never had much success teaching FCP 7 to my employees or interns or even fellow creatives. They would quickly become discouraged as they tried to memorize the steps and the locations for how to do what I would consider basic tasks. If you think about it simply rearranging clips in FCP 7 or other “second generation” NLEs is very complicated and practically impossible to discover on your own. On the other hand I’ve never had a student or employee EVEN ASK me how to rearrange clips in FCP X. They just pick them up and move them!
At my office, several years ago we actually started doing offline editing in the iMovie (the one that works like FCP X, not the track based one) and finishing in FCP 7 because it enabled us to not focus on the details of editing and instead concentrate on making the story the best it could be. We found that our end results were not only better, but took substantially less time. We started having conversations about making adjustments to make the story better, not just concentrating on getting the project out on time. For our corporate documentary work FCP X is the best tool for the job by a long shot and in my opinion the best visual storytelling tool available.
On the other hand I can completely understand students and editors who are used to approaching editing as a precise “production task”. Those who are so used to a track based NLEs are of course going to be frustrated by the magnetic timeline where elements seem to have a will of their own.
BTW. I too am bothered by Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I feel like I am paying for things I don’t need and I don’t feel right about the fact that if I stop paying my tools will suddenly stop working.
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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque -
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Message received
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[Bill Davis] ” It’s software, as folks often note here, not religion. “
Ys, Bill. But usually they are noting it when talking to you. 😉
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[Chris Jacek] “I don’t argue the “eureka moment” premise, for someone who is fully engrained in post and likes to play with toys. But even as one of those people, I’m unlikely to pay the Mac tax just on the chance of that eureka moment happening for me. I got my first Windows machine in 20 years last summer, and can honestly say that the transition hasn’t been bad at all. As a loyal Mac apologist for those 20 years, I always felt that the extra money you paid for a Mac was worth it. I cannot say that I believe that any more. “
For what it’s worth, I’ve had exactly the opposite experience. We built a Windows machine primarily as a Resolve grading system given last year’s lack of a (real) Mac Pro update. I figured hey, I’m a Mac guy, but this system is going to pretty much run one app. How much difference can the OS make?
A lot, as it turns out. A few annoyances, some of which we anticipated, some of which we didn’t:
– Explorer just isn’t as ‘rich’ as the Finder is — you can’t have it calculate folder sizes in list view (just when hovering over a folder), there’s no column view, there’s no QuickLook, its search features aren’t as nice.
– Working with QuickTime media is frustrating — codec support is incomplete (no ProRes encoding, no XDCAM decoding, etc.), performance isn’t great. I guess this is in some sense Apple’s fault rather than Microsoft’s, but either way it does make Windows worse for our use cases.
– The whole way Windows deals with drive letters and file paths ends up requiring us to either manually assign mount points for every drive we use with the system (like a six step process that’s not easy to explain to interns), or constantly relink things when drive letters for external drives decide to change of their own volition.
– Virtually every client drive that passes through our hands is Mac formatted. We use MacDrive to work with these drives in Windows, and it’s pretty good, but just not quite as solid as we’d like, honestly.
– Ejecting drives is also weird. Windows is back where OS X was with this prior to 10.6, where often drives would claim to be in use, and the system wouldn’t tell you what process was using the drive or let you force eject it. Additionally, depending on what controller they’re attached to (and there are a couple on the motherboard, plus we’ve got an SAS controller installed), Windows may decide a drive is internal (even if it’s not) and not offer to let you eject it at all. I’m told there’s some registry hack to fix this; I haven’t tried that yet.
– Boot times are considerably worse than for any modern Mac, despite an SSD boot drive. Pretty painful if the system acts up and you have to reboot in a client-supervised session. Or (see previous point) if you have to reboot just to safely remove a drive.
– Windows just seems to be a little quirky with hardware support. The system sometimes, entirely at random, takes 15 extra seconds to notice the keyboard and mouse when it’s booted. Sometimes USB 2.0 devices don’t quite want to work when plugged into USB 3.0 ports, despite the fact that those should be 100% compatible. It took probably 30 hours of my time to really get the system up and running the way it should (all the right drivers installed, the right PCIe slot arrangements, everything properly updated), significantly longer than equivalent tasks have ever taken me on a Mac.
So… the system is fast, it was damned inexpensive by a Mac user’s standards, and it does fundamentally perform the tasks it was ‘hired’ for. But we will immediately buy any new Mac Pro, or any plausible replacement Apple comes up with for it. It will easily be worth the extra expense to make these issues go away.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I am genuinely curious why they vehemently hate fcpx.
I prefer certain tools to others, and I can understand needing to teach a broad spectrum of tools and workflows, and I also get why one might not find fcpx suitable, but vehemently hate?
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[Craig Seeman] “But he did say it was a “small department.”
And this is a teacher who apparently isn’t willing to teach it.
Who also finds Adobe expensive.
Wait ’till the see Avid pricing once they go from education to “adult” prices. Priced “right” for eduction. The company that loves expensive upgrades.
I hope they like Lightworks.”I’m going to have to call “passive aggressive” on you Craig, perhaps with a bit of arrogant myopia on the side. The implication of your post is that I am so sort of small town simpleton locked away in my little ivory tower with no idea how the real world works.
Let’s look at why I am “not willing to teach it.” And let’s remove the fact that I, like many on this board, have been working in post since the days of CMX and the Ampex Ace, and I personally think that FCPX is still a highly flawed editing tool. But let’s look at some of my “real world” problems.
I’m trying to run a program that gives me a whopping $3000 annual budget for equipment, and I had to fight for 2 years to get that raised from its original $1000. Also, like most people who work for an organization that does things other than video production, I have to deal with blank stares from accounting, and flat-out aggression from IT, at the mere mention of a Mac-based computer purchase program. I’m sure many of you in the “real world” have been there too.
My task is to provide an education, and to somehow get the necessary tools within our always constrained budget. After doing all the heavy lifting to sell my bean counters on the idea of forcing our students to buy a laptop and software, and front them the financing to do so, Adobe suddenly hits us with a 600% increase on our existing costs for their software. These are costs that we budgeted three years into the future, based on Adobe’s own philosophy that our maintenance contract would “provide us with predictable budgeting.” Somebody tell me what’s predictable about canceling said program, and offering no other solution than the before-mentioned 600% price increase for their Creative Cloud. That may not seem expensive by 1990s-era giant post-house standards, but any time a vendor sextuples their price without warning, I think it’s fair to call that expensive.
So before you cast me as naive, try once to look at this from a perspective other than myopic post-production-professional. Your comment: “Wait ’till the see Avid pricing once they go from education to “adult” prices” makes a pretty baffling assumption. In what scenario do you think that the cost of commercial licenses will be relevant to fresh-out-of-college graduates? Do you think their entry-level jobs will smack them in the face with the “harsh reality” of “real world” pricing? They are most likely going to get paid to edit on whatever system their employer thinks is best, and more than likely be asked to wear a bunch of other hats. Purchasing decisions and budgeting are likely years away. So please save your snarky “I hope they like Lightworks” comments. They offend the sensibilities of us bumpkins who don’t live in the “real world.”
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Chris Jacek] “I’m going to have to call “passive aggressive” on you Craig,”
Yep, I was very deliberate too. Actually aggressive aggressive IMHO.
[Chris Jacek] “I personally think that FCPX is still a highly flawed editing tool.”
I rest my case on that one. Not that a personal opinion is wrong but that’s not the person to teach the tool or even be open minded on student preference.
[Chris Jacek] “I have to deal with blank stares from accounting, and flat-out aggression from IT, at the mere mention of a Mac-based computer purchase program.”
I even had to deal with it as an engineer at a post facility that did mostly TV broadcast work mostly for a major network. …. They bought Macs to edit and the even apologized when the editors, who had worked on Macs at other facilities. practically rebelled when the first PC rolled. in. Of course a broadcast environment isn’t a school and they obviously had other “bottom line” considerations such as making sure good editors wanted to work there so they had good product.
[Chris Jacek] “Adobe suddenly hits us with a 600% increase on our existing costs for their software. “
I can’t speak for your specific budget but Adobe doesn’t want to be Avid. They’ve changed there business model. Instead of outright big ticket purchases, which can cost heavy up front, followed by people skipping upgrades, which probably had a pattern of: high price discourage sales, lack of paid upgrades undercut development costs, they came up with a monthly rent model. It may cost many people more money in the long run but a very easy point of entry. Of course those who deal with annual budgets and multiyear plans see the costs because they’re looking at cost over three years rather than one month revenue vs one month expense.
[Chris Jacek] “In what scenario do you think that the cost of commercial licenses will be relevant to fresh-out-of-college graduates? Do you think their entry-level jobs will smack them in the face with the “harsh reality” of “real world” pricing?”
Unless something changes most will wan’t something for “home” use just as in the early 00s people used Avid at work and bought FCP for their “home” use. Their “home” use became their “business” use when they began to get their own clients. That’s the “attrition” route I keep mentioning for FCPX. Youth will use it and it’ll be their opening business tool.
When you’re ambition and maybe even talented and living on Ramen Noodles $300 looks better than $2500 or even $1500. Adobe has a different but viable approach as well because the monthly cost isn’t any worse that what that kid is spending monthly on her smartphone bill that she’ll keep along with the Ramen Noodle dinner.
While Avid might seem like a bargain at $300 or so educational, the chasm is big when one has to jump to the “real world” pricing and while on one level the chasm is small compared to 2000 pricing, in today’s downward economic spiral in which the young educated jobless are hit the worst, the Avid chasm is actually widening. Even if they actually do get a job in the industry and get to touch an Avid as an assistant (and how many of those jobs are there?) they’re going to look for something they can afford for “home” use… or they’ll use the educational version they can’t upgrade (just the thing that helps Avid’s bottom line of course [obvious sarcasm].
There’s Lightworks, costs nothing now. Seems like it’ll cost nothing later. A kid can go into business with that. Tangentially maybe EditShare has a business model that Avid doesn’t (not that I know that’s really what EditShare’s motives are). For you as an educator on a budget it might be your best bet.
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