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OT Sony sells Vegas?
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[Tim Wilson] “I’m sure that this is a regional thing, and Hollywood is its own thing, but I know that Bob Zelin has reported that Orlando is virtually an all-Premiere town. Not even Avid is worth as much there anymore.”
At our semi-regular Orlando Post Pro meetings we have from time to time asked for a show of hands for FCPX users. The other night at our NAB Wrap-up meeting, that show of hands went from 1 or 2 to several. Not a huge leap, but actually a trend as it’s been in the 1 or 2 range for most of the time until now.
There are actually a few places (not just individuals) that are set-up around FCPX. However, by and large the area is shifting to Premiere Pro CC more so than anything else. In some cases from FCP legacy and in other cases from Avid.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Skimmed the thread and just a drive-by posting (for now). 😉
[Tim Wilson] “Unlike me, you actually work for a living, so I’ll ask you. Is it now easier to find a job in LA with Premiere than X?”
Based just on job postings I’ve seen there is much more work for PPro in LA and NYC than X (FWIW I mainly look in the doc/unscripted sections though scripted in LA is still almost exclusively Avid). FCP Legend seems to have finally dropped off the map and I think most of those places have gone to PPro. Avid is still being used at bigger places, but the mid-sized and smaller places seem to have mainly shifted over to PPro. To be totally honest (and I’m sure I’m going to incur somebody’s wrath with this), I’ve seen more posts for spanish or mandarin speaking editors (for Avid or PPro) than I have for X editors over the past few months.
X job postings seemed to start picking up last fall/winter but I’ve been seeing fewer and fewer of them since then.
[Tim Wilson] “You.
Can.
Buy.
It.
Today.”
[Bill Davis] “I believe Tim’s contention has always been that making sticking with Legacy “smoother” would have been a MUCH worse call.
In that, I tend to agree with him.”
Bill and Tim, you guys are proving my point. 🙂
1. Apple yanked FCP 7 overnight w/o warning from all official retail channels when X launched, and that is one the things that made people mad.
2. After 2-3 months Apple back tracked and whatever copies were sitting in warehouses became available again (though that change couldn’t undo the fact that they pulled it in the first place).
3. To Tim’s point, FCP 7 has been for sale along side X for almost 100% of X’s existence.
4. Has this nearly 100% co-existence negatively impacted the adoption of X? I’m going to say no. What do you guys say?
5. If this nearly 100% co-existence has not negatively impacted the adoption of X then what did Apple gain by yanking FCP 7 overnight w/o warning other than bad PR? If Apple had left FCP 7 available for purchase, the same way Adobe left C6 available for purchase, the launch of X would’ve gone smoother than it did, the adaption of X would not have been hampered, and it would’ve been a win/win for Apple.
[Bill Davis] “Or they were’t pissed AT ALL. A subclass of those with significant video editing expertise limited EXCLUSIVELY to those with iMovie expertise were pissed.”
Or people actually were upset because basic things like importing from DV and being able to play footage in reverse were gone. iMovie ’08 got dinged in reviews and by users because it dropped so many features (most of which were brought back in iMovie ’09). I’ve been a member of MR for a long time and a lot people weren’t happy about how many features that version of iMovie lacked.
Whether or not you agree with my assessment of the how many people were upset though is beside the point though because ultimately it was enough to make Apple react to it. Apple should have learned from the iMovie ’08 release and changed their approach, but they basically did the same thing with the X launch and got the same result (user backlash they then had to quell). Apple finally changed tactics with the Aperture/Photos hand-off and that went much smoother than the iMovie or X hand-offs. Are Aperture users just not as invested in their tools as iMovie or FCP users? Or could it be that users react more positively when they don’t get the rug pulled out from under them?
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Hey for now, all I’m going to say is that I apologize for my tone. Reading it back now, I was a lot more of a dick than I meant to be. You all deserve better than that from me.
So I’m going to put myself in a time out, and I’ll be back tomorrow to engage in a more appropriate manner.
Im the meantime, I’m reading along. 🙂
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It wasn’t all Apple.
Most people were not in that room for the sneak peek and the ones that I saw were clapping.
One of the main things that hurt this product were one-sided reviews that only talked about what the program couldn’t do, and none of what it could do.
It was missing features but it was better than 7 in other ways.
It’s 64 bit made things faster.
The skimmer made things faster
The organization made things faster
The connected clips made swapping things faster.
Having all those audio tools inside the program made things faster.
Being able to hover over effects before you applied them made things faster.It had a lot going for it but people didn’t hear any of that. All they heard was one-sided. Not to mention people giving their “reviews” online who flat-out didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
All I did was go to work and tell people what the program could do. They liked what they heard and decided to try it and never looked back. Some didn’t like it and went to Pr
What Apple should have done was have their people out there day one to counter those people with what the program “could” do, instead of relying on people like me to do their job for them.
People didn’t have all the information to make an objective decision. They just had part of it.
Most people I spoke with had never opened the program because they didn’t hear anything positive about it.
If everybody had tried it and didn’t like it, that would be one thing. But it didn’t go down like that.
I have a good memory.
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[Tim Wilson] “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. :-)”
I’m not sure that I am worthy of that introduction but I humbly accept the invitation to comment. 😉
For those of you who don’t know me, I am a long time Vegas Pro user from back when it was Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 3 on up to Sony Vegas Pro 13. I am also the developer who, along with Douglas Spotted Eagle, has created all of the plug-ins that VASST makes for Vegas Pro (e.g., Ultimate S Pro, Caption Assistant, ScatterShot 3D, GearShift, Fasst Apps. etc.). With VASST I also created DVD training for Vegas Pro and DVD Architect and ACID Pro. I create training for Boris FX’s Boris TV Continuum Complete for Vegas Pro episodes. I also developed Vegas Pro Production Assistant which carries a Sony logo so, as you might imagine, VASST and Sony have a close partnership going back to the Sonic Foundry days so I’m more than a user, I am a Sony partner. (in the interest of full disclosure)
Sonic Foundry Vegas Video (as it was known before Sony acquired it) was the best “multi-media” editor bar none. I carefully used the term “multi-media” because calling it an NLE would be selling it short. Vegas Pro started out as a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) called Vegas Audio and for a while Vegas Audio and Vegas Video were two separate products until they were later joined. What that means is that to this day, Vegas Pro has audio capabilities equivalent to ProTools and some people still use it for live and studio multi-track recording. It has Audio Buses and Audio FX Sends and Automation with Touch, Latch, Write capabilities. Needless to say no other NLE can come close to this, so Vegas Pro editors do all of their audio work right in Vegas. I can route my tracks to buses for dialog, music, and sfx, and have complete control over the levels of each.
As an NLE it has a wide range of options for adding FX. You can add FX to the underlying media of a clip which affects all clips that use that media (great for initial color correcting/balancing). You can add FX to the clip itself. You can add FX to the track which affects all clips on the track, and you can add FX to the Master Video Bus which affects the whole project. So ensuring that a project is broadcast safe or adding timecode to a project to send to a customer to review is a simple matter of dropping an FX on the Master Video Bus and the entire project is instantly affected. Other NLE’s don’t even have this bus concept but because Vegas Pro was an audio editor at it’s core, and summing buses are at the core of all DAWs, it has these capabilities. This flexibility is what attracted me to Vegas Pro.
I called it a “multi-media” video editor also because I remember back in 2005 watching Douglas Spotted Eagle demo Vegas to a group here in NYC that included several Final Cut Pro editors. He had a timeline loop playing and he was throwing media of all different codecs, frame rates, and sizes at it and it just kept playing without missing beat. They were amazed that #1 it was playing native formats, and #2 they were different resolutions and Vegas simply resized them to fit the project, and #3 they were different frame rates and Vegas compensated on-the-fly and then… Then he placed an animated GIF on the timeline above a video track. An animated GIF! and it animated on the timeline with transparency!!! I think it was a flying bat or bird or something and when the bird was flapping it’s wings with the video playing behind it I think the FCP editors almost fainted. They were awe struck. They couldn’t approach anything like that in FCP which required them to conform and transform everything before they dare place anything on the timeline. Sorry but us Vegas Pro editors would chuckle when we saw other NLE’s announce new features like “plays native media”, or “now supports mixed frame rates” when Vegas Pro had been doing this since day 1.
What makes Vegas Pro so special, is that Sonic Foundry dared to “Think Different” from the beginning. Other NLE’s tried to make editing with a computer familiar so they implemented artifacts that resembled “real” editing artifacts from the days of celluloid, video tape, cutting blocks, razors, and film bins. By doing so, they severely limited the software’s capability to working within that mindset. If the first word processors were implemented the same way, our computer would ring a bell when we hit 80 characters on a line and we would have to press RETURN to go to the next line and reach for the white-out icon and rub it over the screen to fix our mistakes. Ridiculous as that might sound… That’s EXACTLY what every NLE manufacturer did!!! And we were all happy to see our familiar razors and bins and we were all doomed to never transcend the physical world into a world of what video editing *could* be on a computer.
Vegas Pro was the FCP X of it’s day. It did not follow the 3-Point Editing convention of other NLE’s (and this is one of the reasons why traditional editors snubbed their noses at it). You dropped stuff into the timeline and if you moved the end of one clip over the other it magically made a crossfade transition. You didn’t have to look for a menu item to get things done, you manipulated the media directly. It was organic. Like working with clay. This is why I loved it. (This is why I love FCP X!) Vegas Pro had a Media Manager that cataloged all of your media, added meta-tags, and made it queriable much like FCP X does today. Vegas Pro’s Media Manager even had a query that answered the question, “What other projects have I used this media with?” It was a true external database and could show you all the ways that you used that media (great for stock libraries). But very few editors took advantage of it. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the power of metadata. It was later demoted to an optional component that you didn’t even need to install.
To me FCP X is what Vegas Pro could have been had Sony not bought Sonic Foundry and focused them more on supporting Sony hardware than adding editing features that their customers wanted.
Which brings me to the insights on the MAGIX acquisition that Tim was hoping for…
Sonic Foundry was very customer driven. They listened to the community and they built an NLE for everyone else that didn’t want the razor blades and bins paradigm. They were very responsive. Then Sony purchased them and the small Sonic Foundry team was suddenly part of a major corporation and someone else was pulling the strings. It seems to me that Sony Japan had their own agenda for the Sonic Foundry team and wanted their camera equipment and formats supported (which is understandable). So a lot of work went into that. Vegas Pro got support for XDCAM and other Sony formats. I was the first NLE to be 64-bit and to support HD and 4K which was a good thing. Unfortunately, I was also the first NLE to support 3D. Nobody asked for it. Nobody wanted it. There were plenty of bugs to be fixed in the core code and new features to be added but that’s not what we got. We got 3D. This was clearly not a customer driven decision. Sony was making 3D cameras and they needed a 3D editor. The community was upset.
So… The sale to MAGIX is HUGE! MAGIX is a small company like Sonic Foundry was. Those Sonic Foundry employees that survived Sony and moved to MAGIX are going to get their spark back and I have confidence they are going to do wonderful things. MAGIX seems to be very customer focused. The Vegas Pro community (who is about the most loyal community that I have ever had the pleasure to be part of) is optimistic that MAGIX is going to continue to develop and support the most productive NLE that they have ever used with Gary Rebholz (from Sonic Foundry days) at the helm. This is a very positive development.
Vegas Pro was never meant to be used by Hollywood. (btw, it has been used on several indie films) It is designed for the lone-wolf editor. It is purposefully built to do-it-all. Need to mix 24 track audio… Vegas Pro can do that. Need to cut a 30 minute episode with 32 tracks of video, Vegas Pro can do that… need to add 3D compositing… Vegas Pro can do that too. There is pretty much no reason to leave Vegas Pro to use other tools which is why lone editors love it. An all-in-one tool for the all-in-one editor.
I edit with FCP X now not because anything is wrong with Vegas Pro. I edit with FCP X because several years ago I converted to Mac for other reasons (I develop technology for cloud computing and Windows is a horrible platform for open source developers) and I got tired of requiring a Windows VM to run Vegas Pro so I looked for a Mac native solution and tried FCP X and instantly fell in love with it because it is NOT like Premiere, Avid, or FCP 7. It is a LOT like Vegas Pro. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Great post John! I wonder if the new owners are considering a Mac version
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soory erased comment. had many tabs open and placed comment in wrong forum.
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[John Rofrano] “It has Audio Buses and Audio FX Sends and Automation with Touch, Latch, Write capabilities. Needless to say no other NLE can come close to this, so Vegas Pro editors do all of their audio work right in Vegas.”
Certainly, Vegas has always had a strong reputation for doing audio and its heritage as a Sound Forge program certainly supports that. When I was a kid in the early days of audio software, sonic foundry was a real player for a while.
As it relates to the above quote, it wasn’t the only one though… All of these things were in Premiere Pro 1.0 which was 2003 (or perhaps 1.5) and included 5.1 surround sound to boot.
Dennis – Adobe Guy
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Then according to the Transitive Property of Internet Discussions – Randy Ubillos created Sony Vegas!
Did not know that…
; )
New signature under construction and coming soon. Please stand by…
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[Herb Sevush] “It’s called the human condition”
And that’s what Apple, under Jobs, was so masterful at manipulating (which adds to the glaring nature of how rough the X launch went). I mean, with a straight face and sincerity Jobs called the iPad “magical” and the tech community just swooned in response, preorders flooded store.apple.com and people prepared to campout in front of their Apple store. That emotional door swings two ways though.
[Tim Wilson] “I was a lot more of a dick than I meant to be.
Emphatic, yes, but I didn’t think you came off as a dick. Although it seems you wanted to come off at least somewhat like a dick but you dicked it up. 😉
[Tony West] “If everybody had tried it and didn’t like it, that would be one thing. But it didn’t go down like that. “
I agree that it’s not all Apple’s fault, but what you are describing is a given though and is applicable whether you are talking about NLEs, video game consoles, cars or power tools. Companies have to take that into consideration and do their best to mitigate it, and I just don’t think Apple had a very good game plan in place. IMO the sudden takeover of the NAB Supermeet at the last minute was the first sign of trouble/disorganization within Apple. Now that I say that, it was more like the second sign of trouble. The first sign was the super weak update to the ProApps in 2009. Like many people I assumed FCP was coasting because Apple was busy doing a ground up rewrite since FCP was getting long in the tooth. And like many people I expected that ground up rewrite to be FCP 8, not FCP X. Many users had been waiting since 2007 for a meaningful update (Tim would say waiting since 2005 for a meaningful update) and that was just another facet that helped create the perfect storm of explosive conditions for the X launch.
I think that’s what fascinates me about the launch is all the different factors that were in play and if even one of the factors wasn’t present (or at least dramatically reduced) then I think the launch, while still rough, wouldn’t have turned into the event that it did.
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