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PremiumBeat: With Premiere Pro and FCPX on the Rise, Where Did Avid Go Wrong?
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[Tim Wilson] “So let’s ask the question, what did APPLE do wrong that has allowed Adobe Premiere to gain a foothold so quickly?
Anybody here have any suggestions about what Apple might have done wrong?”
I’ll play. I am stuck in the Lubbock airport because Denver is getting a big snow storm. Let’s see…
I think Apple did nothing wrong besides release a software that was still mid-beta. It was a crap PR event and a crap release. Very un-Apple. That’s what they really did wrong. But developing X was a very right idea.
My opinion is that Adobe gained far more of the Legacy editor market than Avid. In almost every market I visit, the vast majority went from FCP7 to Adobe, and rarely do I see new Media Composer systems. I would say that Adobe CC is a bigger threat to Avid than FCP7 or an FCP8 could have been. Adobe is very comfy to an FCP7 editor. Personally I don’t care for the software and all, but for most, it was an easier transition. Add to the fact that the first versions of X were crap and Adobe did very well at that point in time scooping up FCP7 users. More than Avid, I believe.
Apple has a mountain of cash and is a phone/computer company, not an NLE company. I have always felt that Apple really didn’t care about the old-fart editor network (me being solidly in this group!) when it decided to kill FCP7 and introduce X. Incremental changes are not Apple’s style. And since they don’t depend on the post industry, they can do these major changes without looking back. They are looking at the new folks, not the old folks. Who cares what the Cohen brothers cut on (I don’t care a lick either). If they get a few of us to switch to X, hey thats great. If not, no problem, as the idea never was to sway to current editor user-group. The company decided what it felt the NLE of the future will look like, built it and put it on the market. All this is good until Apple tires of the post production industry and kills the product. A real and understandable concern.
So if you put on the sometimes arrogant “Apple-goggles” I don’t see them thinking they did anything wrong. They can wait for their new users to be born and the old guard to retire. Until they kill the product. Or pull another “X” on us.
On to Houston!
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Scott Witthaus] “hey are looking at the new folks, not the old folks.”
If only there were a way to see such demographic study. We tend to look “up ladder” to see how widespread its use is in Hollywood, TV, maybe even higher end corporate work.
Apple may be looking to win an attrition battle though.
What NLE to people grab when making their first web series, indie film, even those entering the wedding video market, businesses bringing corporate/industrial video in house or, maybe the word or photo journalist being pushed into online video . These tend to be markets that have a younger demographic or, at least less experienced.
Is FCPX successfully grabbing the newbies and, more importantly, retaining them as they advance?
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[Tim Wilson] “but I completely agree: AE users are every bit as resistant to UI changes in particular.”
Yeah. Let’s just e.g. bolt a SIXTH tracker onto AE with a SIXTH tab and SIXTH way of making it work. That’s just so much more intuitive than finally biting the bullet and growing the maracas to make some real improvements and changes that affect the entire app in a positive way in the short AND long term. *sigh*
Like it or not, that’s simply not an approach (as we can see) that Apple would consider. They have expanded the functionality of things such as the stabilizer and optical flow, without ANY new menus, mandatory selections or convoluted tabs to deal with. Zero. Additions/improvements were either automatic or essentially transparent. I absolutely LOVE AE as a whole, having used it since somewhere around ’93, but MAN has it (along with all the rest), for me, become a confusing, over-tabbed patchwork of some sort of bizarre race to the Feature List Mount Olympus, with little regard for the users or (improved) usability… just PR. And still it’s exponentially slower than that (one time!) $49 dollar app I have running on the side, that does near any and everything in real-time since 2005. Hmmm…
[Jeff Markgraf] “On the other hand, v8 has some good, long-needed improvements.”
Far too little, far too late (as in 10+ years), no? And still… NO editing above 4K. Oh boy. Sorry, but even Avid can’t exist without making actual money, which they haven’t in something like TEN YEARS? Good luck with the “not going away any time soon” part, catering to such a microscopic part of the industry. Quite the optimism imho. But we’ll see.
– RK
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Deutsch? Hier gibt es ein umfassendes FCP X Training für dich! -
I wish heavens to Betsie that software makers focus on making improvements under the hood. The latest feature (fad) is of zero use to me when realtime performance is not addressed or there is, at best, some clunk interface to deal with. I tried Boris Red but that interface is killing me. Apple got it rignt with X though keyboard shortcuts to change workspace would be nice. It gets out of my way and lets me work so much better. Then again, to each their own.
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[Robin S. Kurz] “NO editing above 4K. “
FYI
Custom frame sizes up to 8192×8192 since v8.4.
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[Scott Witthaus] “I would say that Adobe CC is a bigger threat to Avid than FCP7 or an FCP8 could have been.”
I agree with everything you said Scott except for this. If Apple released FCP8 (retooled with new features such as 64-bit, GPU acceleration, redone multicam, background processing, etc., basically X but with a familiar GUI) then I doubt anyone gives PPro the time of day and Avid’s market share keeps getting eroded. Both Adobe and Avid were doing a lot to improve their respective NLEs between 2006 and 2011, but Apple killing 7 and releasing X created a much needed opening for the competition.
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This argument gets framed a lot in terms of FCPX, but that ignores the rather large percentage of Windows editing systems. Clearly that makes Adobe the logical alternative to Avid (or maybe also Vegas, Edius, etc.).
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Oliver-
I think, ironically, that many (may be even most) of the Windows based Avid systems came about because of Apple.
Remember the situation years ago when Apple was being destroyed by Scully and Amelio? I remember a lot of people here in Hollywood predicting the imminent demise of Apple. Then Avid seemed to shift focus to the Windows-based version, leaving the Mac version seriously behind in the upgrade and new features cycle. I seem to recall Avid vigorously denying any intent to do so, but the fact was that Mac-based Avids fell behind for several years. So a lot of previously diehard Mac facilities made the switch to PCs at the next upgrade point.
Frankly, there was at least a ten-year period in which PC Avids out-rendered and out-featured their Mac cousins.
So now there are lots facilities with a major investment in PC hardware and avid and interplay, etc. and Avid made some good deals on those HP systems. Sure, the graphics department stuck with Apple, but editorial wasn’t about to ditch their still expensive stuff for new Macs and new software.
And given all the hoopla over FCPX’s less than stellar introduction, it was easy to justify not even giving it a look by pointing at their entrenched investment in PC systems. At the same time, it was a no-brainer to give cross-platform Adobe a shot.
I think many if these people never really trusted Apple after their near death experience. Even the second coming of Jobs wasn’t enough to counter their fear of being left hanging.
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I assume this is due in part to the fact that many of the discussions about ‘the industry’ default to the more visible part of the industry (Hollywood feature films, Network TV shows, etc.,) and that is a very Mac-centric slice of the pie. Even when I was still in the Midwest (granted that was years ago) the post facilities and TV stations I worked at and/or visited were all Mac-centric.
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It was this abandonment of Macs that actually led to Apple buying Final Cut from Macromedia…
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def
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