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OT Sony sells Vegas?
Posted by Steve Connor on May 24, 2016 at 7:45 pmBill Davis replied 8 years, 7 months ago 22 Members · 75 Replies -
75 Replies
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Noah Kadner
May 24, 2016 at 8:54 pmI never understood why Sony was in the NLE business in the first place.
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
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Shawn Miller
May 24, 2016 at 9:32 pmWow, that’s a bit of a shocker. I wonder if Resolve played any role in Sony’s decision to get out of the NLE business.
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David Roth weiss
May 24, 2016 at 10:01 pmNeither did the execs at Sony… Not one of their attempts to create an NLE ever really took off, and many were just outright failures. Just ask Mads Nybo Jorgensen, a Cow member who paid through the nose for Sony’s worst NLE failure, the name of which now escapes me – it simply never worked properly.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los AngelesDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Tim Wilson
May 24, 2016 at 10:05 pm[Noah Kadner] “I never understood why Sony was in the NLE business in the first place”
They’ve been in it a lot longer than you might remember. (Although maybe you do!) At the high end, editing was part of their SONAPS ingest-editing-playout-nearline-archive end-to-end broadcast TV production system. A Grass Valley-ish sort of enterprise, optimized around XDCAM. The editing component was XPRI. Remember that bag of dripping goo?
At the low end, remember Circuit City? Back in the 90s, there was a huge burst of people trying to scoop up the nascent home digital video business with boxes of $99 software for Windows. When I say “people” I mean companies that should have known better, like Sony and Pinnacle. LOL
This kicked up a couple of notches with DV, which removed pesky I/O issues. This was a smarter play for Sony than a lot of others, because of their camera business. Needless to say, as with XPRI and XDCAM, Sony was getting a slice of DV licensing and selling Sony DV cameras, and later HDV cameras, so editing software that was optimized for those Sony formats (including yeah, XDCAM) was a synergistic play that reinforced the value of the platform for capture, editing, and distribution/archiving via DVD.
At the low end, this wasn’t a joke. There was real money here. I don’t know about Vegas, but I know that Pinnacle Studio had 10 million customers. TEN MILLION! At $100/box, plus an upgrade or two along the way, it was well over a billion dollars gross across the life of that product. And talk about low-hanging fruit! It was built on just a few gleanings from high-end products whose tech was just as easily applicable to the low end.
But even Pinnacle Studio was too high-falutin’. Sony Screenblast Movie Studio was positioned against Windows Movie Maker and Ulead VideoStudio. Believe it or not, I recently stumbled across a review of this swath of the market, and while specifically nodding to the power of Pinnacle Studio, they also pointed out that it wasn’t included in the review because you really needed some more experience to take advantage of it. Take a look if you dare.
It turns out that the Screenblast tech was licensed from Sonic Foundry. Their audio stuff in particular was amazing. The price/performance for Sound Forge was off the charts, and ACID was a wall-to-wall blast. Sony had a whale of a time staying afloat vs. Adobe and Apple (and to a MUCH lesser extent, Avid…although in fact Sound Forge had the most compelling Pro Tools-like feature set out there), sold for seriously short money to Sony ($18 million!!!) who saw an opportunity to fill in the gap between Screenblast and XPRI. With audio and DVD tools up and down the line, they had an end-to-end solution in every price range and in virtually every market.
Vegas offered a lot of other features that were useful much higher up the product line than we typically talk about around here. Easy support for high-end formats, scriptability that made it right at home inside high-end environments, 3D DVE and compositing toolsets that tied into broadcast CG, etc. Frankly, not unlike FCPX or (dare I say it) FCP Legend. Looks like one thing, but can do lots of ’em.
Certainly played well against Pinnacle’s Liquid product line for sure, and helped Sony keep a straight face in the lower end of the broadcast market for a lot more years than you’d think. And both Sony and Liquid were doing vastly more business in other parts of the world than the US, so the value proposition for them was hidden from the plain view of American and far-western European eyes.
So the acquisition of Sonic Foundry was an actual strategy, tied to a strategy being executed across the entire company.
Any number of moderately well-educated chimps can tell you that there was a countdown clock attached to this strategy, but I think every one of said chimps would have said that the clock would have run out a long time before it actually has. It turns out that there’s actual money in the consumer electronics market, and the consumer software adjacent to it. Who knew?
Perhaps a longer answer than the question warrants, but I know you expect nothing less from me.
FWIW, our friend John Rofrano had posted this in the COW’s Vegas forum last night. He was one of the true giants in those circles, but transitioned his own work onto FCPX a while back. Hopefully he’ll weigh in with some insights that will outweigh mine. 🙂
[Shawn Miller] “I wonder if Resolve played any role in Sony’s decision to get out of the NLE business.”
Probably not, because even at a price of $0, the markets were different.
I’m going to say that the biggest bite was taken by FCPX. You can see it in the product that was in the process of supplanting Vegas, Sony Catalyst. Their strategy was identical to the one suggested here many times: send out the new thing in its current state — amply usable, but feature incomplete — while leaving the Legacy product in place for people who need the “full” feature set of the “real” product.
The problem is that the “real” product’s customers kept hanging on, demanding development that was never going to happen, because Sony was investing its energies into the new thing. The outcome: Sony could NEVER EVER EVER make money with this strategy, because they were the vampire sucking their own blood. Eventually, there was no blood left.
Apple knew this from the beginning, so they never insulted their users by pretending that there was ANY future for FCP Legend. In fact, they did this in reverse, by essentially freezing development at 2007 or so, with no more than maintenance features after the introduction of Pro Res, which wasn’t exactly a feature…leaving the last major FEATURE development at FCP 5 and multicam.
So there was your glidepath: 4+ years of no more than maintenance development, while the new thing was about to emerge.
You can (and many of you do) argue that Apple could have extended its glidepath forward, but I continue to maintain that this strategy would have cratered Apple’s business for both products. Sony’s experience isn’t exactly proof, but it’s certainly a perfect case study that this strategy is unsustainable.
I don’t know what MAGIX is planning, but you already know what my advice to them would be. Pick one horse and ride it.
I like Catalyst a lot. Just as Vegas (and Screenblast) was first optimized for Sony DV, Catalyst has been optimized for consumer 4K+ (think Go Pro) and Sony RAW, and is stupidly powerful for the money. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it looks like FCPX…but it doesn’t look entirely un-X like, and any longtime Sonic Foundry user will tell you that Sony’s approach to tracks has been ahead of the game…even if some folks now consider tracks to be by definition behind the game.
But it’s wholly legit, and more than capable for building a business on for MAGIX…but only if they commit to it. Otherwise, they’re in for the same self-vampiring that killed the product line at Sony.
Or heck, maybe the thing was making a mint and Sony decided to get out of the mint business. But I’m guessing it was more like the problem of sucking their own blood until there was none left.
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Walter Soyka
May 24, 2016 at 11:03 pm[David Roth Weiss] “Just ask Mads Nybo Jorgensen, a Cow member who paid through the nose for Sony’s worst NLE failure, the name of which now escapes me – it simply never worked properly.”
XPRI?
Did Socratto ever make it out of beta?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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Noah Kadner
May 24, 2016 at 11:55 pmAnyone ever see Vegas in use outside of a home project studio?
Noah
FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
FCP Exchange – FCPX Workshops -
Michael Gissing
May 25, 2016 at 12:13 amIt made sense to take a pro audio acquisition like Sound Forge and add video editing to a well featured DAW. After all Sony have been in the video game longer than anyone.
Staying in the NLE game now makes little sense however so I am not surprised that Vegas is no longer palatable to them. I think Resolve has had an influence as it offers yet another alternative on the PC platform. To be fair Edius, Lightworks, Premiere and Avid do too but non Mac NLEs are getting more not less. Hitfilm is also cross platform so the market for WIN based NLEs is much more crowded now.
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Mathieu Ghekiere
May 25, 2016 at 10:07 am[Tim Wilson] “Apple knew this from the beginning, so they never insulted their users by pretending that there was ANY future for FCP Legend. In fact, they did this in reverse, by essentially freezing development at 2007 or so, with no more than maintenance features after the introduction of Pro Res, which wasn’t exactly a feature…leaving the last major FEATURE development at FCP 5 and multicam.”
I think this is cutting Apple a bit short. There was Final Cut Studio 2 in 2007 (which included FCP6), that not only had Prores, but also had Color (first affordable grading program!), Smoothcam, Optical Flow, 5.1 support, open timeline format, Editing Motion 3 templates without leaving FCP (the whole send to… stuff), …
Which I think, was a huge and important release.
In 2009 they had Final Cut Studio 3, which included FCP 7, and this were only pretty minor feature improvements (although they were welcome), where everyone was kind of disappointed and looking out to what was going to come next.https://mathieughekiere.wordpress.com
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Tim Wilson
May 25, 2016 at 4:02 pm[Mathieu Ghekiere] “In 2009 they had Final Cut Studio 3, which included FCP 7, and this were only pretty minor feature improvements (although they were welcome), where everyone was kind of disappointed and looking out to what was going to come next.”
You are actually agreeing with me. People were disappointed in 2009 because development had largely stopped after 2007. 2009 was merely a maintenance release. Apple’s priorities had already shifted.
My point about 2007 is that the boldest headline feature was Pro Res. It was an odd duck. Released four years AFTER Avid had introduced DNxHD, based on the very same technology, with the very same intent. Pro Res didn’t take off until support for hardware encoding from companies like AJA was widely available…at which point Pro Res was understood to be one of FCP’s most important features yet…
…but go back and look through the Creative COW archive. There was widespread disappointment for Apple’s 2007 release as well. This is in strong contrast to every year before then, when enthusiasm was quite high.
Again, even if we disagree that Apple’s last major EDITING feature was multicam in 2005, we completely agree that Apple was coasting after 2007, leading to only a minor update in 2009.
It turns out that they were working very hard indeed on their 2011 release. Ironically, it’s most like the 2007 release. Initial disappointment gave way to an understanding that FCPX was a much more compelling release than it first appeared.
Noting again that I was among the handful of people who was IMMEDIATELY enthralled by X. I just happen to be honest that it was no more than a handful of us. 🙂
And in fairness to those initially disappointed, it took awhile for Apple to deliver the much-awaited features that made it a compelling replacement.
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Andrew Kimery
May 26, 2016 at 4:36 am[Tim Wilson] “You can (and many of you do) argue that Apple could have extended its glidepath forward, but I continue to maintain that this strategy would have cratered Apple’s business for both products. Sony’s experience isn’t exactly proof, but it’s certainly a perfect case study that this strategy is unsustainable. “
Apple continuing to sell FCP Legend for a few months after the launch of X wouldn’t have harmed the uptick of X, and that’s all that people basically wanted (a heads up and a chance to grab another license of 7 if they needed it). Apple eventually let you order it via phone for a time and I think they learned their lessons which is why they gave Aperture users a warning six months in advance before they pulled the plug.
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