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OT Sony sells Vegas?
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[Noah Kadner] “Anyone ever see Vegas in use outside of a home project studio?”
There very same question could have been asked of FCP X until some brave and smart people including yourself bucked popular wisdom and made it happen.
But I do think “Why should I switch to Vegas?” would make an interesting question.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “There very same question could have been asked of FCP X until some brave and smart people including yourself bucked popular wisdom and made it happen.”
fwiw, Vegas has typically been one of our very top forums at the COW. The only reason it has dropped out of the top 3 is because of increased traffic in Resolve, Premiere Pro, After Effects and this here forum.
Quite a bit of the work using Vegas is taking place at a level very similar to non-broadcast work edited with other products here, but yes, like FCPX, the feature set is ample for just about any kind of work. More than a few of Vegas’s long suits aren’t natively available in most NLEs, including robust scripting, motion tracking and more.
I’ll also add that I’ve never seen a more passionate user base than Vegas. Not FCP, not FCPX, not After Effects — nobody can hold a candle to those folks.
[Walter Soyka] “But I do think “Why should I switch to Vegas?” would make an interesting question.
“Of course, a number of high-profile Vegas users (including our own John Rofrano) have migrated from Vegas to FCPX. 🙂
To a point I’ve made many times over the years, Sony’s attention has been divided with trying to develop both Vegas and Catalyst, and Vegas has paid the price. That MAGIX has bought Vegas and NOT bought Catalyst (which will stay at Sony) has already pumped up the enthusiasm in that community beyond anything I’ve seen in years. I’ve already been seeing a number of profoundly disheartened users remind themselves of what they’ve loved for years, with great hope for what’s to come.
And when’s the last time you could characterize an entire user base as energized and hopeful? Maybe Resolve? Maybe, but not like this. It’s gonna be fun to see what comes to pass.
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[Andrew Kimery] “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“
I don’t think that that last point is true at all, for a bunch of reasons.
Chief among them is that it’s still available today. Here it is on Amazon, $669 with Prime shipping. You can have it Saturday (on Memorial Day weekend no less!) with free shipping. If you can wait a couple of extra days for it used, you can get it for about half that.
So at the very least, let’s end the myth that it’s no longer available, because it is. Thirteen boxes in stock at this one link alone.
Let’s say that it was actually gone forever. (Let me emphasize again: NOT TRUE.)
People had 3 months to see what X was about, based on a rare, incredibly widely distributed NAB presentation from Apple themselves. There was wall-to-wall coverage here in the COW, including this very forum (which sprung into being DURING the NAB presentation as the conversation overwhelmed the original FCP forum). Calling it well-discussed on the internet at large is a colossal understatement.
As a result, there was no doubt whatsoever that this was coming. For three months, anybody who wanted to squirrel away a few boxes of Final Cut Studio for their fallout shelters beside the jerky and powdered milk could easily have done so.
Apple never made any suggestion that there would be parallel development between X and Legacy. None. NO suggestion that ANYTHING resembling Legend even a little would ever see the light of day again. Anybody who failed to act in those three months has only themselves to blame.
(But honestly, is somebody arguing that there was some urgent need to buy boxes for seats that hadn’t existed in April 2011? Maybe here and there, but the evidence that this can’t possibly be true on any wide scale is that fact that Legend remains relatively abundant at a discount, rather than rare at a premium.)
The fact that Apple briefly relented rather than dump the leftover boxes in a landfill doesn’t change that. Three months warning. That’s plenty of time for anyone who’s not cruising for a fight.
And let’s be honest. It’s clear that, mixed in with plenty of well-earned good-faith consternation, there were also scazillions of people who were just looking to vent, and were happy to point their quivering outrage wherever they could.
Perhaps so busy quivering in their outrage that they failed to notice that, five years later, they can have a box of Legend on their doorstep with free two-day shipping.
Now then….
….to my point about it being impossible to sustain two divergent development paths with one set of resources, and the folly of assigning two sets of resources to competing goals, knowing in advance which of them will win and which will lose, I note that Sony ONLY sold Vegas, the equivalent of FCP Legend. They’re KEEPING Catalyst, the equivalent of FCPX, for themselves.
Which raises an interesting what if. What if Apple had done like Sony: kept the shiny new thing (FCPX), and sold the neglected old thing (FCP) to somebody else?
Who might they have sold it to? What might it have become? Discuss. 🙂
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last day or two. I’ve called FCP 7 zombie-ware on many occasions (still shuffling along, but with neither heartbeat nor breath), and will do again on many more. I truly believe that Apple bestowed a mercy upon both FCP and its ever-awaiting fans by putting a shovel in the zombie’s head and ending the charade.
But I’ve never let my enthusiasm for X or my enthusiastic support for Apple’s perfectly executed launch take away my belief that SOMEBODY could have been developing FCP Legend since some point soon after 2007 and far into the future from now. Just not Apple.
The fact is that Vegas itself had taken on some of the traits of zombieware. Just last month, someone in the COW’s Vegas forum started a “Sony Vegas RIP” thread, saying that it was time for Vegas users to come to terms with the fact that this thing was in fact dead.
I think some of the same dynamic was afoot at Sony as Apple. Sony had shifted resources to Catalyst, but the framework of Vegas was such that it could keep going for a long time without further development — but rather than take Apple’s course, they chose to sell it somebody who CAN breathe new life into it, and fulfill its still untapped potential.
So I think in addition to Sony shifting resources, there was some thought of well, let’s let the new guys invest in it, since we’re not going to be around to monetize any efforts of our own. This kind of purchase doesn’t happen overnight, and it honestly would have made no sense whatever for Sony to do work that could never be paid for, since they were never gonna be selling that product themselves.
Apple knew this about FCP Legend of course. No point in developing it if you can’t pay for that development with sales, since they knew that they were never going to sell that product again.
And indeed, one of the hazards of funding development via sales is that you can ONLY pay for development in arrears. This makes forward-facing development impossible.
Contrast this with subscription-funded development, which is all about funding forward-looking development TODAY. Subscription-funded development HAS to be forward-facing to justify its own value over the life of each and every subscription. That’s the theory, and both Adobe and Avid have amply demonstrated that it works exactly that way in each of their variations on the theme.
Anyway, I do think that the parallels and contrasts between Apple and Sony are interesting on this front.
I mentioned in another post on this thread that it has been exciting for me to see the industry’s most fervent fan base regain its fervor over just the past couple of days. I really, truly hope they see this effort bear the fruit they anticipate when the new version of Vegas launches in September.
I also think a lot of the developers on the MAGIX team, some of whom have been working on Vegas since the Sonic Foundry days, are chomping at the bit to do the work they’d been wanting to do for a very long time. I’m happy for them too. I’ve known some of those guys since my days at Boris FX around the turn of the century, and enjoyed developing the first major third-party plug-in for Vegas with them.
In any case, for a bunch of armchair yakkers like us, this is going to be a fun summer as we watch all this unfold.
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I remember seeing Xpri in the trades, back in the day.
Lots of physical panels with buttons and knobs. Seemed like they were going after Quantel in a way.
Never saw one in real life.
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Tim, we are going to disagree about this for eternity aren’t we. Oh well, let’s proceed.
[Tim Wilson] “People had 3 months to see what X was about”
Other than the few hundred folks in attendance at the nab event all the rest of us heard were rumors, and of all the rumors, none of us heard that Apple would be releasing a program that A) couldn’t open FCP7 files under any circumstances B) was missing a host of essential features for many workflows and C) was discontinuing all sales of FCP7 on the day of X’s release.
It is demonstrable that Apple screwed up this release because they then proceeded to “step back” from some of these problems -they began to, very quietly (almost secretly some might say) release copies of FCP7 thru the retail chain and then issued a unique (in my Apple “x”periance) white paper outlining their future plans for X (plans they would meet with great accuracy.) If the release was such a success why did they have to change their minds in mid stream? Why the white paper, something that hasn’t been matched in the following 5 years, if all was going to plan?
[Tim Wilson] “Three months warning. That’s plenty of time for anyone who’s not cruising for a fight.”
The NAB demo did not constitute a warning.
The white paper showed that Apple could, when it was in their interest, communicate with their customers. I wasn’t at the demo but did anyone there say all sales of FCP7 would end when X was released. did they explain that X was 100% incompatible with FCP7 as far as transferring timelines go? if so I must have missed that part of the discussion.
[Tim Wilson] “Which raises an interesting what if. What if Apple had done like Sony: kept the shiny new thing (FCPX), and sold the neglected old thing (FCP) to somebody else?
Who might they have sold it to? What might it have become? Discuss. :-)”
Why would Apple allow someone to offer another alternative to X? To be fair to their customers? That would be even more novel than the white paper.
A bit of history. When Autodesk/Discreet announced that they were EOLing edit* a number of the users gathered together to try to get management to sell the software so that we could still use it. Pinnacle back then was using the same i/o boards as edit* and seemed like a match, but Autodesk wouldn’t sell to a competitor. Then the users tried to initiate a user base purchase direct from Autodesk, we went so far as to contact the development team to see if they would want a stake in it, but eventually Autodesk refused to deal with us because — well, because why bother, they had already counted on writing it off their books and who give’s a rats ass about some noisy customers anyway, business is business.
As for FCP Legacy, who would be interested in taking over software development for the fastest growing NLE, with somewhere around 2 million paying users – oh I don’t know, maybe Black Magic, or some Chinese or Korean hardware company that wanted a bigger presence in the US market, or Boris, or Edit Share, or almost anyone who wanted to make a buck. It doesn’t matter who was interested, or who would be interested, because Apple had zero, none, nada interest in competing with itself.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “Other than the few hundred folks in attendance at the nab event all the rest of us heard were rumors, and of all the rumors, none of us heard that Apple would be releasing a program that A) couldn’t open FCP7 files under any circumstances B) was missing a host of essential features for many workflows and C) was discontinuing all sales of FCP7 on the day of X’s release.”
I agree with Herb.
The NAB preview was just sold as just that, a preview of the new features coming in the new version of FCP. It wasn’t until the launch that it was clear that the preview of new features was actually the preview of all the features and that the new, shipping version couldn’t open existing FCP projects, couldn’t do multi-cam, couldn’t do video out, etc.,. That plus FCP 7 getting yanked from the retail outlet was all part of the perfect storm that created the massive blowback Apple got from users. Why would any ‘stock up’ on FCP 7 licenses after the NAB preview when you’ve ALWAYS been able to take projects from old versions of FCP and open them up in a newer version of FCP?
Apple saw the error of their ways and later put copies of FCP 7 back into the retail channel. They also changed their Mac App store policy to allow for a trail version of X to be downloaded. And later, like I mentioned before, they gave a six month warning that Aperture was going to be EOL’d and pulled from the Mac App store. Heck, even Adobe was paying attention which is why they didn’t pull CS6 when the launched CC. Did some people with older copies of Adobe software buy CS6 instead of signing up for CC? Yeah, but that’s a short term loss which is a drop in the bucket compared to the user revolt that would’ve happened if Adobe wouldn’t pulled CS6 from store shelves when they launched CC.
Apple made a similar stumble prior to X and you’d think they would’ve learned from that. When Apple released iMovie ’08 it was a total rebuild that had a new interface and lacked many of the features of the previous version of iMovie (iMovie HD 6). It was universally panned and users were pissed (sound familiar?). Apple’s solution? They gave iMovie ’08 users a free copy of iMovie HD 6. When iMovie ’09 came out (which had restored many of the missing features) the iMovie HD 6 give way ended. I’m not saying Apple should’ve have given away FCP 7, but someone, somewhere in the company should’ve been smart enough to go, “Hey, remember when that iMovie re-boot blew up in our faces? Any ideas on how to avoid that when we launch X?”
It was a combination of decisions that resulted in a tone deaf launch by Apple which, 5yrs later, still reverberates among many long time FCP users. That it could’ve been so easily avoided is what’s always going to stick in my mind, I think.
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[Herb Sevush] “…who would be interested in taking over software development for the fastest growing NLE, with somewhere around 2 million paying users – oh I don’t know, maybe Black Magic, or some Chinese or Korean hardware company that wanted a bigger presence in the US market, or Boris, or Edit Share, or almost anyone who wanted to make a buck”
I bet Adobe would have been first in line for that sale. 😉
Shawn
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Sorry Tim, but Andrew’s play by play resonates with me more than yours. You certainly know about about the inner workings of the manufacturers, developers, and marketers, but your take on the reason FCP users were so pissed- off sounds more like a reaction from an Apple insider than someone who understands the customer response, and you seem to have an “open market” mentality, that all is fair in business, not matter who gets hurt in the process. The reality is, Apple abandoned its customers with NO warning (not 3-weeks or 3-months), gave no thought to providing an interim solution to ease the pain of those who had invested long-term in the legacy product, and in fact, as you nicely pointed out, planned that long before springing it on their loyal customer base.
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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Why Shawn? Adobe just made their 64-bit full rewrite of Premiere into a very FCP 8-like NLE with better support for migrating from FCP 7 than Apple’s own replacement product. They had no need to purchase FCP and we’re obviously already in progress on CC long before Apple gave them the big boost that FCPX handed over to them.
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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[Shawn Miller] “I bet Adobe would have been first in line for that sale. ;-)”
Ironically enough, Apple had tried to license Premiere tech (not buying Premiere itself, as has often been reported) as a consumer app to be included on the shiny new bubble(gum) iMacs. Adobe declined, so Apple went shopping for this thing they’d heard about from the guy who originally developed Premiere, now working at Macromedia.
It turns out that flipping Macromedia Final Cut into Apple Final Cut Pro was pretty easy work, so I don’t think it’s any accident that Randy Ubillos spent most of his heavy lifting at Apple working on iMovie. That was the product Steve had first been looking for, which is why I also think that X was the first pro-focused NLE that Steve was really excited by. Not because it’s iMovie Pro (an old joke that I don’t think is true), but because it’s actually Mac-like, which FCP never was imo.
Which certainly would have made it easier on anyone who was looking to adapt it to their own look and feel. 🙂
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