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Resolve XII…
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[Walter Soyka] “Do you really see walled-off separate crafts? Look at your own sig: “promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics.” “
It’s not walled-off crafts. It’s walled-off applications.
The thinking goes, “Adobe could have integrated AE and Premiere, and “Avid could have integrated Pro Tools and Media Composer,” “Apple could have integrated Final Cut Pro and Motion.”
There are four reasons why it hasn’t happened. In the case of Adobe and Avid, it hasn’t happened after 20 years. With Apple, it’s been 16. But those four reasons are…insurmountable is the wrong word, but it’s close. See what I mean.
1) The essential codebases came from different places. Pro Tools After Effects, and Final Cut Pro Legacy were adopted by their current parents. None of these pairs was designed to work together at the root level, and to use Aindreas’ wonderful phrase, you can’t bolt this stuff on.
2) The applications work at cross purposes. To oversimplify, editing is horizontal and compositing is vertical. To put it another way, editing is Time, and motion graphics is Space.
No matter how many layers an NLE TIIIIIIIIMMMMMMMMMMMMELLLLLLLLIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNE has, or whatever the F FCPX cares to call it, and no matter how nonlinear the creative process, the orientation of production is forward in time. The layers are more organizational than compositional.
Compositing sometimes wants to hide the layers, but the spatial nature of motion graphics more often wants to expose them.
That is, the 400 layer stack is INTENDED to show depth and complexity, even if the viewer can’t describe what they’re seeing as “lots of layers.”
Pro Tools in that sense is spatially oriented BOTH to hide the layers AND expose them. You want to hear the birds and monkeys in the jungle, but you still want to hear the voices, and all of them are perceived to originate from different points IN SPACE. Hence, SPATIAL organization, rather than temporal.
3) The requirements of the two creative process require such incredibly different toolsets that, Flame, Pablo, Baselight notwithstanding, no single interface could contain the full range of each of them. The requirements for modal interfaces to support them is impossible to manage, because each of those applications have modal interfaces, disguised to one degree or another, but inescapably modal at the source.
The more of these you add, the harder it is for users to use them, and the harder it is to develop.
4) Which brings us to the kicker: so few people need the full richness of both feature sets that there’s no way to monetize the superhuman efforts to overcome obstacles 1-3.
Even though most editors do graphics and graphics people do editing, most editors will never work with 3D cameras or need to support 25,000 pixel x 1125 pixel layers or whatever crazy aspect ratios a tradeshow video might require. (Right, Walter?) The graphics artist creates THAT, and the editor manages the HD or 4K or 8K visible window.
Or for Avid, every Media Composer editor needs audio features, even if Pro Tools guys don’t need editing. The whole model is around picture lock, as indeed most VFX creation is. EDITING may be nonlinear, but not top-level audio or VFX.
There have been 2 *desktop* apps that have tried to have it both ways, and one more that tried to have it 5 ways.
The 5-way app was Liquid, but it was BEYOND modal. There was even a mode that let you choose between the “classic” interface and the new “modern” interface using a fundamentally different visual language and organizational scheme. In 2004!
It was EXACTLY like it would be for Apple to have a pref checkbox to select between a Legacy UI and media management scheme and X…in one app. It would have been a disaster, and it would have been foolhardy to even attempt.
You could in fact do some nifty stuff to extend DVD authoring far beyond markers in the timeline for example, but it was ultimately too dear a price to pay.
***Sidebar begins***
I’m sorry that this is getting so complicated, but I’ll add one more twist for Liquid. I wasn’t in charge of development in any way, but once it came to Avid, I was very much responsible for a meaningful part of its marketing and industry support.So I had to cultivate reviewers who could understand five feature sets MULTIPLIED BY TWO, because we wanted to continue to sell to editors more comfortable with the old ways, AND comfortable with the new ones.
A forehead-slapping moment was when the reviewer who best understood both the modern and legacy interfaces used each of them to illustrate how the other was a failure.
D’oh!
***Sidebar ends***
A more analagous example is Sony Vegas, which grew out of Sonic Foundry. Mr. Rofrano is the expert here (and perhaps the single most expert expert in the known galaxy — he probably knew that Pluto was a planet all along), but speaking as an observer and former plug-in development guy, it appears that you can in fact do terrific audio work in Vegas.
Now that I think about it, you can also do some terrific effects work and DVD set-up in Vegas, so they may be trying to have it FOUR ways, to varying degrees of success.
(Modal, modal, pants on fire.)
But there still comes a time when you need to go into a specialized application for greater depth, whether in audio (spatial) or DVD authoring (spatial menus plus temporal timelines) so, unlike Pinnacle, Sony does in fact sell specialized apps for each of those.
The MOST analagous example is actually FCP. It arguably did the best non-Sony Vegas job of any application to integrate compositing and editing. In some ways, I think even better than Vegas.
But who actually used the full range of effects in FCP? NOBODY. And neither FCP nor Vegas has much to offer in the way of motion graphics. Neither application does entirely what it needs to do for title animation. Neither actually comes close.
So both users turn to After Effects, and the Apple guys add Motion to the mix.
And, to wave the flag for the former applications for which I WAS the product manager, many users ALSO had some combination of products from Boris FX in the mix.
Which means that any effort to enrich the entire toolsets by merging them will never pay off, for either developers or users.
From the user’s perspective, it’s better for developers to focus on better links between horizontally and vertically oriented environments, and to make each of them, independently, be the best they can be for the customers who need each of to BE the best.
Walter, you may be the only person on earth who needs both sets of editing and motion graphics to the extremes that you do…so you can imagine the nightmare of that degree of modality, the drain on development, the drain on performance, and the cost of merging 100% of them.
All of which, incidentally, is why Pablo, Baselight, and Flame keep selling, even though they cost a fortune: the cost it takes to develop them, and the uniquely-tuned hardware requirements to enable that kind of performance.
And the difference between them and Adobe, Avid, and Apple is that the different environments they’re trying to merge all came from the same place. But the scope of the work costs THAT MUCH to develop.
To extend the example one more time, Flame and Maya are ultimately two different applications for allllll of the reasons above.
So IN PRACTICE, it doesn’t work. It CAN’T work on any of the four vectors: merging incompatible code bases, merging two otherwise incompatible orientations (time and space), merging incompatible feature sets, and the potential to monetize this superhuman effort, because the effort to create all this is humongous, and the number of customers to pay for it is miniscule.
All of which is why the merging of Resolve and Fusion will never happen. The freemium model would bear an unimaginable weight.
Raised a quantum level of difficulty because NEITHER codebase comes from BMD.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
This forum is replete with examples of my confident assertions that have been proven wrong, but I don’t think I am this time. I think anyone who has spent much time in either will understand in an instant what a bad idea this is.
And as I’ve noted, the existence of somebody who needs the full range of feature sets and NOT named Walter Soyka is only theoretical, and otherwise easily disproved.
And Walter, I’m not sure that even YOU need the full range of features in both Resolve and Fusion so badly that it would be worth BMD’s effort to merge them.
Avid and Adobe have had 20 years to do it, Apple has had 16, and it hasn’t happened yet, and those are the four biggest reasons why. There are of course others, but I have to end this post eventually.
And that time is now. LOL
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Wowsers, Tim, epic post! Let me start with your list of four, and I’ll try to come back to the rest.
[Tim Wilson] “1) The essential codebases came from different places. Pro Tools After Effects, and Final Cut Pro Legacy were adopted by their current parents. None of these pairs was designed to work together at the root level, and to use Aindreas’ wonderful phrase, you can’t bolt this stuff on.”
No, you can’t bolt it on. But if you’re reconsidering the architecture of your product anyway, you can get there over time. Each of the products you listed evolved considerably from their original capabilities.
[Tim Wilson] “2) The applications work at cross purposes. To oversimplify, editing is horizontal and compositing is vertical. To put it another way, editing is Time, and motion graphics is Space.”
Graphic design is space. Motion graphics is space-time. Neil deGrasse Tyson will back me up on this. The poor editorial control in our toolsets today is holding mograph back right now. Your answer is very “no but” and I think it could be “yes and.”
[Tim Wilson] “3) The requirements of the two creative process require such incredibly different toolsets that, Flame, Pablo, Baselight notwithstanding, no single interface could contain the full range of each of them. The requirements for modal interfaces to support them is impossible to manage, because each of those applications have modal interfaces, disguised to one degree or another, but inescapably modal at the source. “
So? Check this out: in Flame, a clip is a timeline is a flow graph:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wabshSHUUpEDS, which I can assume is at least a little bit near and dear to your heart, was like somewhat this. NUKE STUDIO is somewhat like this, too, today. Heck, MC with Eyeon Connection or whatever it’s called today is like this with Fusion right now:
https://library.creativecow.net/kaufman_debra/Editor_Hunger-Games-Alan-E-Bell/1
(just in case you missed my link before)[Tim Wilson] “4) Which brings us to the kicker: so few people need the full richness of both feature sets that there’s no way to monetize the superhuman efforts to overcome obstacles 1-3.”
When people stop “finishing” in After Effects or begging for “Send to Motion” in FCPX, I’ll believe this statement is true. It’s not about the full richness of multiple feature sets: it’s about the features you need, when you need them.
[Tim Wilson] “It’s not walled-off crafts. It’s walled-off applications.”
Mr. Wilson, tear down this wall!
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/1538#1565
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/16706#16768
[Tim Wilson] “Walter, you may be the only person on earth who needs both sets of editing and motion graphics to the extremes that you do…so you can imagine the nightmare of that degree of modality, the drain on development, the drain on performance, and the cost of merging 100% of them.”
HitFilm?
[Tim Wilson] “And as I’ve noted, the existence of somebody who needs the full range of feature sets and NOT named Walter Soyka is only theoretical, and otherwise easily disproved.”
Ok, I giggled when I read this. You win, and I’ll assume this is some kind of compliment and wear it as a badge of honor.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Tim Wilson] “And as I’ve noted, the existence of somebody who needs the full range of feature sets and NOT named Walter Soyka is only theoretical, and otherwise easily disproved.”
//Shawn butting in
Neill Blomkamp (before he got famous), Andrew Kramer, Gareth Edwards (before he got famous), Freddy Wong and Ryan Connolly… I think the circle may be widening. 🙂
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “I think the circle may be widening. :-)”
Not at all. In agreeing with Aindreas’ point that integregating Resolve and Fusion is neither helpful nor practical, I’m addressing Walter’s response about no walls between craft.
In a way, my reply got off track by bringing in applications from other vendors. I’m also answering Walter’s observation that Aindreas DOES multiple tasks, but he USES multiple applications.
I then addressed 4 reasons why, even if Aindreas (or Walter or anyone else) would want fully integrated FCPX/Motion, PP/AE, MC/PT, it can’t happen in the real world.
In the real world, I can’t imagine someon saying, “Dadgummit, I need you to put 100% of the features of After Effects inside Premiere.” Or, “I’m taking my torches and pitchforks to the gates of Avid, and demanding that they put 100% of Pro Tools inside Media Composer.”
Because they would need BOTH torches AND pitchforks, because, outside of a theoretical use case, it would be useless.
So that’s the thing to stay focused on. Aindreas’s original observation that putting them in the same application makes NO SENSE.
My additional point is that, even if it makes sense, there are specific obstacles.
[Walter Soyka] “But if you’re reconsidering the architecture of your product anyway, you can get there over time.”
You’re getting theoretical on me, Walter. In practice, no.
Otherwise, Adobe and Avid would have done it at some time in the 20 years since they acquired After Effects and Pro Tools respectively. DS came a couple of years later, but still, no merging.
Apple had 12 years to merge FCP and Motion, but no. Not the first step toward it.
AND when Apple DID have the opportunity to merge them via a reconsidered code base, they did NOT.
At most, this addresses the first obstacle, incompatible codebases. But it would do nothing to address the other 3. Incompatible models, incompatible toolsets, and too few customers to monetize it.
OR you would have to say that neither Adobe nor Avid nor Apple is smart enough to do it.
Here’s an additional observation. You know who talks about merging 100% of the feature sets of motion graphics and audio into editing? Editors who do a little of that stuff, and would like to do more of it, more easily.
Like the people in this forum.
You know who DOESN’T say that? Audio people and motion graphics people.
Audio people work with locked pictures because it’s the way that has been shown to work best — and maybe the only way it can realistically work at all. Motion graphics artists don’t need a timeline or node cluster that enables real-time playback of 4 streams of different formats to cut multicam.
They just don’t care.
To summarize this part of the argument, the majority of people using AE alongside an NLE are using NLEs other than Premiere. (Not that any one of them has a bigger market share, but as a total.)
And most motion graphics artists don’t need the full feature set of Premiere.
Likewise, Avid wants to sell Pro Tools to people who would die before they’d use Media Composer.
So in a theoretical world where money, human resources, and customers with the interest and ability to take advantage of an infinite number of tools IN ONE APPLICATION, maybe.
But in practice, no.
With a reminder that I am ONLY answering Walter’s reply to Aindreas about the difference between walls between CRAFTS (not necessarily the case) with the walls between APPLICATIONS (which is NECESSARILY the case), I’ll note that I’ve not seen a single person here asking for FCPX to integrate all of Motion. Rather, they’re asking for Send To.
It’s a tacit understanding that different applications are designed to do different tasks in different ways — even by the same person.
[Walter Soyka] “When people stop “finishing” in After Effects or begging for “Send to Motion” in FCPX, I’ll believe this statement is true. It’s not about the full richness of multiple feature sets: it’s about the features you need, when you need them. “
But we’re only talking about WHERE you need them. I actually USED the example of Send to Motion to make my point, but obviously buried it in way too many words.
People DO want Send to Motion.
They’re NOT asking for 100% of Motion in FCPX,
They’re NOT asking for 100% of Pro Tools in MC, or MC in Pro Tools, or Premiere in AE or AE inside Premiere.
They DO want reliable, robust roundtripping.
[Walter Soyka] “Check this out: in Flame, a clip is a timeline is a flow graph”
I used this as an example to support my argument too. I conceded that Flame does this.
I added that it’s possible because Autodesk has managed virtually the entire toolset the entire time, and because Autodesk charges enough to subsidize the development for such a small customer base.
But they’ve also not dramatically extended the scope of their market, not because of the cost, but because so few people need that breadth of tools.
Quite the contrary, the growth of Pablo and Baselight have shown that there IS a market for big iron….for a small set of tasks.
And that’s really the issue for Apple, Adobe, and Avid. They have wide toolsets spread across multiple applications, and they specifically want to reach out to an audience that mixes and matches these things across vendors. They limit that potential by over-integrating.
[Walter Soyka] “[Tim Wilson] “Walter, you may be the only person on earth who needs both sets of editing and motion graphics to the extremes that you do….”
HitFilm?”
Okay maybe, but I’m still addressing the original dichotomy: does one artist doing multiple tasks need them all in one application?
For merging applications, I’m describing 4 actual obstacles that have been established over and over, with the exception of Autodesk, which I conceded TWICE.
With now, an additional observation that, if this is what heavy iron people wanted, Autodesk would dominate, rather than having its market share nibbled away by specialty applications like Pablo and Baselight.
THIS is what killed DS, an otherwise fine example of integrating entire feature sets.
The editing was cannibalized by Media Composer, Final Cut, and Premiere.
The performance benefit of purpose-built hardware was eclipsed by the speed of desktop systems and commodity GPUs.
(The big, showstopping feature of DS in my first demos at Avid? Realtime 2K DPX. People literally jumped up and said it was impossible. They demanded that we prove that this wasn’t a trick by crawling under tables to establish that there were no decks.
Within a couple of years, EVERYONE could do realtime 2K.)
The color grading eclipsed by Resolve.
You know what REALLY kicked its ass? After Effects, because integrated toolset notwithstanding, nodes notwithstanding, people kept asking, Can it do what I can do in After Effects, and the answer is no.
(The other problem: it cost too LITTLE, but that’s a story for another day.)
You might say that this isn’t true, that I don’t understand, but I’m tellin’ ya, I sat next to the DS product manager, and I went to more demos than he did (because he was busy managing THE ACTUAL PRODUCT), and I heard this over and over.
My point being that, by 2007-ish, DS no longer had a single best-in-class feature. Not because Avid didn’t care, but because they couldn’t fight every application on every front.
Autodesk CAN because they were designed to do from the beginning. But their primary audience has always been Autodesk customers!
And while there’s surely a Soyka-sized subset of Autodesk customers who want both Flame and Maya in one feature set, it ain’t happening.
[Walter Soyka] “Graphic design is space. Motion graphics is space-time. “
Yeah, you’re right. I said I was oversimplifying, but I missed that nuance for sure.
It still supports my contention that there are separate vectors for all three of them. Even the bivectoral nature (you like that? LOL) of motion graphics has nothing to do with 16 camera real time mixed format multicam, and editing has nothing to do with irregularly sized media that might be 25,000 pixels in one dimension and 1000 in the other — stuff you do all the time…in After Effects, and wouldn’t be improved by living in a single interface in a single product within Premiere.
Otherwise you really do wind up with a bolted-together modal interface that’s only paying lip service to integration.
This is starting to get long enough that you won’t even see me agreeing with you anymore LOL but IN PRACTICE, there are precious few AE editors who are demanding real time multicam with as many cameras as their systems can support. That single feature has more needs in nuanced practice that there’s no realistic way for those features to be visualized in After Effects.
If a third-party developer could have done it, don’t you think they would have? And if they theoretically COULD have, they HAVEN’T, because there’s not enough demand to justify the cost.
Which brings me back around to Aindreas’ point: there’s no reason for Resolve and Fusion to be any more integrated than any two non-Flame applications, and that, even if it could happen, a freemium model couldn’t subsidize it…
…but I think his first point is the key one: in practice, among the people who are the customer base for BMD-era Resolve and Fusion, one artist doing many tasks requires more than one application.
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[Walter Soyka] “it’s about the features you need, when you need them. “
But isn’t a major sticking point that different people need different features at different times?
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Touché, Tim. All good points. I’m inclined to agree with you that “no one” needs 100% of the features in an NLE and 100% of the features of a composting and animation package (all the time). Though, I’m also willing to bet that many of us would like a decent, hybrid compositing/NLE/animation/color grading tool at least 50% of the time. Further, I suspect that’s a completely different conversation. 🙂 Lastly, I agree that there is absolutely no danger of BMD smooshing Fusion and Resolve into a single application… or Adobe “fusing” Premiere Pro and AE together.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “hough, I’m also willing to bet that many of us would like a decent, hybrid compositing/NLE/animation/color grading tool at least 50% of the time. “
Isn’t that what FCP Legacy was? There was some very slick stuff there that I think most people never tapped into. Once you added a tiny handful of plug-ins, the compositing/animation capabilities were off the chain.
Maybe I just got more excited by them than was appropriate…but I felt that it (and Sony Vegas) towered above other options.
I haven’t used X so I’ve avoided any opinions on it other than the business side — perhaps the first time I’ve avoiding opining on things I know nothing about. LOL
But I haven’t seen anyone talk about how great the effects tools in X are relative to, say, Lumetri in Premiere. People have talked about its shortcomings too, but people were excited by the possibilities it opened.
Is it that X has taken a step back from the compositing environment Legacy offered? Or that it pales in comparison to the renamed reorganization? LOL
I’m genuinely curious about that.
Anyway, I think that Smoke on Mac offered exactly the environment you’re talking about, but I only know what I saw in demos. I’ll defer to astrophysicist, editor, and motion graphics researcher Professor Soyka to tell it like it is.
(And yes, Walter, this counts as my highest compliment to you as one of the true Renaissance men in these conversations.)
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[Tim Wilson] “Isn’t that what FCP Legacy was? There was some very slick stuff there that I think most people never tapped into. Once you added a tiny handful of plug-ins, the compositing/animation capabilities were off the chain.
“Unfortunately, I missed the FCP boat. Just as I was seriously considering the Mac platform (because of Shake), Apple eol’d it. I found comfort in Vegas for compositing, mograph and audio mixing for a while, but quickly reached its limits, so I jumped over to Adobe fulltime. 🙂 Now, PPro has some decent compositing tools, and the Lumetri Color panel is nice… just a bit less than I wanted for grading. Resolve would be perfect if it had a better playback engine and design tools (IMO). So, overall, Tim I think your right… there probably aren’t enough editor/animator/compositor/mograph folks out there to make the effort of building a Smoke like tool worth it (for established software companies). I think there’s even less insentive for smaller players to try, because companies like BMD are giving premium software away for little or nothing.
[Tim Wilson] “Anyway, I think that Smoke on Mac offered exactly the environment you’re talking about, but I only know what I saw in demos. I’ll defer to astrophysicist, editor, and motion graphics researcher Professor Soyka to tell it like it is.”
Smoke was on my list for a while as well, but it never seemed to keep my attention long enough to consider picking up, so I would also be curious to hear Professor Soyka’s thoughts on the matter. 🙂
Shawn
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[Andrew Kimery] “But isn’t a major sticking point that different people need different features at different times?”
My point was not that you didn’t have to develop or integrate all the features. My point was that the audience is larger than people who think they need all the features. It’s people who need just a few more features than they have now.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Tim Wilson] “In a way, my reply got off track by bringing in applications from other vendors. I’m also answering Walter’s observation that Aindreas DOES multiple tasks, but he USES multiple applications. I then addressed 4 reasons why, even if Aindreas (or Walter or anyone else) would want fully integrated FCPX/Motion, PP/AE, MC/PT, it can’t happen in the real world.”
Tim, did you read the links I posted to a couple old posts of mine?
I don’t think the answer is necessarily single application. I think the answer is deeper, better integration between apps, with a goal of making the boundaries between apps matter a lot less. Right now, we’re working the way our applications need us to. That’s backwards!
[Prof. Soyka, circa May 2011] “I’ve made this comment in other threads as well, but I think that what we’re all looking for is not necessarily a unified application, but a unified data model and media database…
FCP, Color, STP, Motion, etc. are all fundamentally applications that store and process information about creative decisions with media clips and effects over time. If they could all “understand” their own parts of the same timeline and refer to media based on a centrally-organized database — instead of each application creating its own separate interpretation of the original editorial timeline — we could have all the power and flexibility that the separate apps provide without all the pain of round-tripping. This would create entirely new workflows and offer new possibilities.
Bonus points if the database is multi-user. The necessity of picture lock before audio sweetening and color grading could disappear entirely. Editorial would be the hub, and the other departments could work on their shots or their scenes throughout the process.”
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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