OT-ish. Software Support – what are your expectations?

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] ” iMovie works just fine.

NLE’s just ain’t special and they’re not premium.”

I have long, long maintained that iMovie was feet and frames support shy of being the ideal film editing tool. It’s all that many filmmakers need.

There was only one big defection of A Famous Film Editor when I worked at Avid, so the question was raised, what’s your workflow that Apple is better suited for. The answer was that they played through all the footage, and wrote down favorite takes with a PENCIL on a piece of paper (gotta allow for changes), and then the editor assembled the cut, writing down THOSE values, and handed the piece of paper to the negative cutter.

It turns out that all those damn editing features in Avid were getting in the way of pleasurable scrolling and writing stuff down by hand, so they opted for an NLE with fewer features.

I jest not at all. Which is when I said they should be working in iMovie. I agree, Simon, for many workflows, there’s simply nothing premium.

HOWEVER, there was a time when this wasn’t the case. It goes back 20 years or so, a time I know you recall, and was related to things like sync (by NO means a given), reliability (ditto), and quality of hardware (which included not just image quality, but also…sync and reliability). All products were by no means created equal.

This is where I personally believe that Media 100 was ultimately more revolutionary than Avid, because it really did democratize video production, for the low, low price of $30,000.

And that $30,000 included a PREMIUM for 2 streams of real-time DVE…during edit, not output. You still had to render that.

You also payed a premium for Avid’s film support, which nobody came close to…until Cinema Tools, which Apple soon bought.

So, by and large, nearly all features (sync, picture quality, film support, real time, etc) that WERE premium are indeed NOW commoditized. Any additional premiums for hardware support and performance boost are very close to commoditization courtesy AJA and Blackmagic.

There are still premiums, though. Among them: paid priority, 24-hour access to software support. Because one of the things that Avid customers expect from software support is an immediate answer to a phone call, with virtually no time on hold, 24 hours a day. For THAT, you pay a premium.

But again agreeing with you, none of this is inherent in the software. But it is a premium feature, and does answer your original question about expectations.

The same goes for hardware, btw. I know people who’ve gotten parts for their HP workstations FedEx’d to the LITERAL jungles of the Amazon. Certainly anybody in the US gets next-business-day replacement for any part you can imagine. Bullet hole through your laptop screen? Shorted motherboard from the blood pouring from the bullet that had passed through you on the way to your screen? No problem. We’ll have somebody on your porch the next morning.

For the same price as Apple Care. And Apple customers have been trained to have low expectations for replacement time for anything that can’t be handled at the mall, and no expectations whatever for replacement due to water, blood, or bullet damage. But few HP customers would tolerate this. So they pay a premium.

A premium service — paid yes, but no more than one would pay for distinctly non-premium service from Apple.

A different question than software, to be sure. But you’re right, people’s expectation is to pay less and less for software – if not a couple of hundred bucks to own, a couple of dozen bucks to subscribe and bill to the client.

I do think that Apple has done more than anyone to lower expectations for direct support, though, albeit with enough apparent satisfaction with the original product that most FCP/X users are more than willing to tolerate it.