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OT: Apple pulls out of NAB
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[carl bergfors] “Is this really happening and must we wait until April to know?”
As you said, it’s just rumors. Personally I’m not worried at all and I have 10 Macs in our shop and a ton of support equipment around our FCP systems. So in short I have a lot of money invested in FCP and am not worried about it going away.
We’re all just speculating. Probably someone at Avid decided to release a rumor of FCP’s demise to get back at all of us for proclaiming the death of Avid a few months ago. 🙂
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow! -
[Mark Raudonis] ”
[Scott Thomas] “To me, this sounds like a rumor circulated by Avid to make themselves appear to be a more sound choice.
” Bingo!”Before I came to the Cow, I worked at Avid, and I strongly disagree.
You’d think from reading the Cow that FCP was “the beginning of the end” for Avid, but it’s simply not true. Indie post has not been a primary target for Avid’s growth.
Avid have been skyrocketing in digital newsrooms and IT-based infrastructures, with little real competition. Their future was nothing but bright if they could get their supply side together, and they were moving in the right direction.
FCP staying with Apple would be far better for Avid, because Apple would never have added the pieces that strike at Avid’s heart: IT-based ingest, massively scalable collaboration tools, hardware transcoding, enterprise-scale distribution and live-to-air playout servers.
FCP staying at Apple helped keep Avid safe in the areas that matter the most to Avid. Good software, but no collaboration tools, and no meaningful hardware to back it up.
On the other hand, Thomson already has all of the heavy iron and collaboration tools that Apple never will, but no serious front-end software.
If Thomson can successfully integrate FCP, Thomson finally presents a seriously challenge on every current path of Avid’s growth.
I believe Avid will see this as the worst thing to happen to them in a very long time. Bad, bad news indeed, with likely a negative impact on their stock.
It’s likely that Avid still has tricks up their sleeve — like discreet, they keep going, no matter how many people declare them dead. But there’s no way Avid would have started this rumor. They don’t want it to be true.
On the other hand, it will be great news for Thomson, and for FCP. I talked about this in a post just above this one, responding to that part of the thread.
I could be wrong. But that’s how I see it from my perspective as a former Avid employee. Bad news indeed.
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Question is would the whole suite continue to be developed or would Thomson just concentrate on the higher end of the market and dump some of the other elements.
I would imagine the price would rise as FCPS would no longer be subsidised to sell more Macs.
As competitors to Sony and Panasonic, would they get the same level of co-operation with them as far as integrating codecs etc, I seriously doubt it.
Would they be keen to sell software to people like me who have no interest in buying ANY Thomson kit to support the software.
Personally I don’t care about FCP taking on Avid in the high end environment, it doesn’t affect what I do and I suspect it doesn’t affect the vast majority of FCP users.
I would be very unhappy about a sale to Thomson at this stage, I desperately hope the rumours are untrue.
Steve Connor
Adrenalin TelevisionHave you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.
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[Tim Wilson] “If Thomson can successfully integrate FCP, Thomson finally presents a seriously challenge on every current path of Avid’s growth.
“And why does this make a sale a given?
First of all Final Cut Server will likely happen and will help BUT (as Tim alludes to) that’s not Apple’s FCP market. If FC Server is really meant to fill a need . . . and maybe it can’t on its own.Far more likely is that Apple feels the return on it’s current market is getting saturated. At least it’s not worth expending money on NAB which will have little impact on its momentum. More likely is that Apple is NOT selling FCS but looking to expand into NEW markets.
More likely would be a PARTNERSHIP with Thomson. THAT could benefit both companies.
Again, I think it’s virtually impossible to for Apple to sell FCS and not get seriously hurt in its MacPro (desktop sales).
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[Tim Wilson] “IT-based ingest, …scalable collaboration tools, …live-to-air playout servers.”
Hi
As a small-as-it-gets one-man-band facility producing low-budget cable/satellite programming your list forms EXACTLY whay I see as the future needs of my business.With the video production world moving to IT-based server media stores, frame-by-frame embedded metadata is ESSENTIAL. Everything has to remain with the clip forever more
FCP is stuck in the old world paradigm of tape in/tape out – with any clip information held in a computer equivalent to the tape library’s original paper-based archive database. That’s not good enough anymore.
I don’t underestimate the amount of work (ie the costs) needed to bring the back-end concept of any NLE up to date.
As I see it the same metadata handling needs apply to the iPhone and iTunes, and especially to a mobile Wi-Fi world of continual communication with datastores elsewhere.
The more Apple can add an effective data and metadata-handling engine to OS X, the more any device, and any software like FCS, can benefit.So Apple is essential to a thriving future for FCP – any other owner would end up marginalising or fossilising it 🙁
Since the days of CP/M and MS-DOS, a DOS and a GUI have been enough for a computer application.
Not in future… -
Tim,
Your thoughts are well reasoned, and considering your past work experience, certainly well informed.
But, through out this whole discussion there seems to be one perspective missing….APPLE.
NOBODY, through out this lengthy thread, has delivered a believable, attributable reason WHY Apple would want to do this. All the speculation has been from the other side. It’s good for Thomson, it’s bad for Avid, Adobe would like it… who cares?
Where’s the smoking gun? What’s the REAL reason for this “deal” to take place? Until someone can point that out, the rest is just noise… and I’m tired of it.
mark
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[Mark Raudonis] “Where’s the smoking gun? What’s the REAL reason for this “deal” to take place? Until someone can point that out, the rest is just noise… and I’m tired of it.”
Return on investment, or the lack thereof. How much does it cost Apple to develop and maintain the ProApps? How does that compare with how much it costs Apple to develop all of their consumer products?
If you consider that Apple essentially subsidizes all of us using Final Cut Studio by selling it at a ridiculously low cost just so we will buy Apple hardware, eventually that has to catch up. It’s possible that time has come where Apple is simply not selling enough hardware to Pro Users to make it worthwhile to essentially give away their software. It costs a lot of money to develop and maintain that software, but Apple has kind of put themselves in a box with pricing.
Consider Final Touch HD. $25,000 for 2K, $5,000 for HD, $999 for SD. Apple buys it and simply absorbs it into Final Cut Studio. In my mind still a very bad decision as they really get no return on investment. They have to sell a LOT of copies of Studio and hardware to make that investment pay off.
At some point, giving away Studio means you have to keep selling a lot of hardware, preferrably for Apple, Mac Pros. Ok, you have to pay $1,300 for Studio, but honestly, it should be a LOT more considering everything you get in the package. How many people do you see on these forums running Studio on laptops and iMacs? Quite a few, so there goes the Mac Pro sales.
So if you want a reason why Apple would consider this, it’s because the iPhone, iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook and all things consumer are far outselling the Mac Pros, or they at least have a much higher return on investment than the Mac Pro and Studio.
I’m not saying they’re really selling, I’m just saying if you need a reason, there you go.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow! -
[Mark Raudonis] “What’s the REAL reason for this “deal” to take place? Until someone can point that out, the rest is just noise… and I’m tired of it.”
Agreed!!!
If Apple pulled its Pro Apps presense off of the Internet that would be meaningful, but pulling out of NAB is hardly a blip on my radar, and it certainly doesn’t mean the sky is falling.
On the other hand, its not every day that Cow Associate Publisher Tim Wilson comes right out and spills his guts so openly. So, maybe Tim really knows something??? I certainly hope he’s just speculating, but old Timmy is a sly one…
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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[walter biscardi] “How many people do you see on these forums running Studio on laptops and iMacs? Quite a few, so there goes the Mac Pro sales.”
Yep, Apple sells the ProApps and they LOSE iMac and MacBook, MacBookPro sales too. Just shows how much a MAJOR hardware loss to Apple if they sell the ProApps.
[walter biscardi] ” It’s possible that time has come where Apple is simply not selling enough hardware to Pro Users to make it worthwhile to essentially give away their software.”
It certainly seems they’re selling a healthy number of MacPros based on reports that MacWorld publishes when they do the Apple Financial Quarterly posts.
As I’ve said before, there’s fundamentally similar technology on mos of Apple’s computers so it’s not like they save anything substantial on hardware R&D.
[walter biscardi] “Consider Final Touch HD. $25,000 for 2K, $5,000 for HD, $999 for SD. Apple buys it and simply absorbs it into Final Cut Studio. In my mind still a very bad decision as they really get no return on investment. They have to sell a LOT of copies of Studio and hardware to make that investment pay off. “
Andy maybe they did this because they EXPECTED to sell lots of hardware.
Keep in mind COLOR my be driving a lot of G5 users to Intel upgrades.
Keep in mind Apple, to this point, probably hasn’t put in much software R&D to get that benefit (and why Color has use and interface issues).
Keep in mind the possible cost BENEFITS of motivating G5 users to move up to Intel that Color encourages. It means they can drop the backwards compatible R&D sooner for example.
Keep in mind that when Shake’s replacement hits, they’ll be ANOTHER INCENTIVE for user to further upgrade their hardware.If anything I think Apple is looking at way to continually accelerate hardware upgrades by Video pros. The more demands software makes on hardware and the faster that happens, the faster we need to upgrade CPU/GPU boxes to keep up. Selling FCS would be a MAJOR hardware loss for Apple.
The delay in Shake’s replacement may be because they’re looking to push hardware purchases for a system that’s not yet ready.
The delay in Final Cut Server may be that they need to develop hardware PARTNERSHIPS so the can compete against Avid in the “heavy iron” department.
If anything, if FCS isn’t selling enough boxes to justify the R&D, Apple’s approach would more likely be to INCREASE the software’s demands on the system to push more hardware upgrades.
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I´m from Spain.
There was a convention months ago called “Broadcast” (similar to Nab, but smaller).
There, the rumors were so different. Actually, the rumor was Apple is going to launch a new set of aplications oriented to desktop publishing.
A new suit of aplications to compete with Adobe Photoshop, etc..
Anyway, I think is just bad news for Avid or FCP editors. I mean; we don´t know anything about the future of our tools.
I have the strong feeling that Apple doesn´t care about pro software, about its development. All they do is buying technology, then giving it away for free…
We have secrecy from both companies, delays of announced software, etc..
Not fair…
Flavio.
Flavio G. Garc
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