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Should FCPX be at IBC and NAB
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I don’t go to trade shows anymore. Partly because I live so far from any but also because they no longer represent the way I access equipment and information. So whether Apple goes to trade shows anymore or hovers on the fringe is not an issue for me. I get what Peter is saying about it being a demonstration of intent and commitment but anyone who thinks Apple or Microsoft really give a rats about our industry is just engaging in wishful thinking.
Adobe, Avid and Blackmagic do give a rats as we are their core business. They must get advantage from NAB etc or they wouldn’t bother. I’ll back them to engage and care about feedback over companies for whom our industry, as diverse as it maybe, is scraps from the table.
If I was Peter, I would be pushing FX Factory to make their plugin bundle cross platform and support OFX. I used to enjoy their set on FCP7. Lots of nice goodies, restricted to OSX.
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[Scott Witthaus] ” I have never heard real data on the real business damage not showing up did to the company.”
I’m going to have to tread lightly here, because I worked at Avid right before I came to Creative COW, and my role in Avid’s NAB was, let’s say non-trivial. Calling me the public face of Avid’s NAB at that time is by no means stretching the point, but I was just one of over 400 people who attended the show for Avid in those years, to say nothing of the massive teams in marketing, engineering, support, and others who were on-call 24 hours while remaining at HQ, on the east coast, and at offices around the world. My NABs at 10 days felt long enough, but plenty of other folks were there for as much as a full month before AND after the show.
And I’m only scratching the surface in my description. The commitment in company resources for two-thirds of the year was staggering. I was pretty far down the food chain, but I sat in my first meeting to evaluate carpet swatches and mockups for the following year’s NAB booth in September, which meant that there were people narrowing the choices down in August.
The decisions to drop out of NAB, and then to return, were made after I left, but people were very candid with me as a former insider. I won’t get too specific about THEIR observations, but I’m adding theirs to my own as I offer some broad strokes.
— The case made AGAINST attending NAB was, “Look, most of our key customers can’t come to the show, because they’re cutting TV for May sweeps or the early summer blockbusters.” It had already been the case that C-level execs were gone from NAB by the end of Monday, in order to spend the rest of the week in LA.
So the thought was, we’re already doing road shows. Let’s double down on those, go more places, stay longer, meet more customers. We’ll spend less money, draw down fewer company resources (the engineering effort going into NAB was more vast than you can imagine), and the net net will be more people seeing our stuff up close and personal, without the chaos, and nobody will be driving themselves crazy. Everybody wins!
— This is MY OWN observation, but that was always a hopelessly post-centered vision, and anybody who thinks of Avid as post-centered is missing the big picture. You know who still does NAB in a big way? Actual BROADCASTERS. And if look at the shape of Avid at NAB these days, it’s overwhelmingly broadcast.
— It also missed a huge shift in NAB, driven almost entirely by the FCP community, but extended through others, which is that the shift in NAB’s economic base from the North Hall to the South Hall reflected the extent to which NAB became less and less an equipment sales show — which at one time, it almost exclusively was — and increasingly a show that was — let’s be blunt — an excuse for people to get together.
Official user groups, yes, but also industry organizations (Hollywood Professional Association, Blue Collar Post Collective, Association of Independent Commercial Producers, gazillion others), ad hoc meetups (the community that developed around the #postchat Twitter chat for example).
Then there was the rise of NAB as an education destination. The Broadcast Education Association STARTS their meeting during the Wednesday of NAB, and goes through the following weekend. We’re familiar with the Postproduction Workshop (where many of you teach, as well as attend), but there are a dozen conferences of varying sizes and interests.
— And every one of those groups included among them Avid users who were infuriated that Avid wasn’t there. Perhaps they weren’t elite enough to merit a site visit, or from a place with no road show coming anywhere near. They were in Las Vegas RIGHT NOW dammit, ready to talk to their favorite vendor. Who wasn’t there.
— So it wasn’t SALES that drove Avid back to NAB, because NAB isn’t a sales show for many companies outside the North Hall anymore. It was RELATIONSHIPS. Relationships with partners (yes in the North Hall, but also many others), and relationships with customers, none of whom were going to pay Avid a dime more or less than they were going to anyway. There was no incremental business to be done, but there ARE things in the RELATIONSHIP that need to happen, and happen best in person.
— I mentioned earlier that you miss the most important part of the Avid story if you look only at post. Broadcast is only half of that. The other half is the customer event. That thing ain’t cheap. Over 1000 people came in from all over the world for that thing last year, and you know what? A lot of them wound up NOT STAYING FOR THE NAB SHOW.
NAB still works as a great excuse to get a big group of people in one place, and for a lot of people, it’s cheaper and easier to get to Vegas than it is to get across their own state (or, say, from Long Island to New Jersey — the number of companies who think of Newark as a regional destination of any consequence is both hilarious and pathetic). But the reason to make the trip for those folks is to see Avid.
Yes, Apple is now doing something similar onsite. Adobe also built on the former Macromedia Flash community’s MAX event to do something similar onsite as well. Both of those companies are multiple exponents bigger than Avid, though, and are located in areas that have infrastructure for large-scale events that Avid — a long, long way from Boston — simply doesn’t. It’s cheaper and easier to host a large-scale event in Vegas, for both Avid and their customers.
So, Scott, on one hand, you’re right. MY OWN READ is that there wasn’t a big bag of money that Avid felt they were losing by skipping a booth. In those years, major deals were still being made in suites, just as Apple continues to.
But — again noting that this is MY take — the combination of Avid’s massive footprint in broadcast (and seriously, post folks have NO IDEA how huge Avid is broadcasting, including areas like sports graphics and virtual sets that make me wonder what people are smoking when they think of Apple as in any way competing with any meaningful part of Avid’s business — THEY’RE NOT….and to see some of the coolest technology in broadcast, you really do need to visit Avid’s booth, one of the shiniest things you’ll ever see in Vegas)….
….but vastly, vastly more important even than that, Avid is back at NAB because their customers insisted on it. Avid built on that energy to create a remarkable customer event beforehand for folks who only want to meet with Avid and get gone, but also have a dynamic, energetic booth for people coming to NAB to meet with their friends who are also coming to NAB, and DURING the show, want to ALSO meet with one of the companies that’s a big part of their orbit.
The idea is to get away from false either-or dichotomies, and embrace your customers where they WANT to meet you, the way they want to meet you, with the most options and fewest barriers.
I know that this is a controversial position, though, so blast away. ????
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[Oliver Peters] “Personally, I’d bet on the clock winding down over the next 4 years.”
I’m surprised to hear you say that! Why do you think so?
To me, even if all they do for X for the next four years is decide what’s up with the wheels, and make a few tweaks for format support, color space, and OS, running on iMacs and notebooks running Thunderbolt 4+ or whatever, I don’t see any reason why their industry footprint would need to change much at all.
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[Oliver Peters] “So, unless you created a booth with mainly third party partner-vendors, then an Apple-only booth would probably be pretty small. Certainly no larger than Adobe’s. The result might be counter-productive, since people would criticize if they had a booth but it wasn’t grandiose.
“Funny you should mention that. I worked Apple’s booth in 2003, my last year at Boris FX. The overwhelming majority of the booth was third parties in fact. My little pod was right next door to Avid, who introduced Media Composer Adrenaline there. There was storage, cameras, IO devices, all kinds of stuff.
People mostly hated it. Some were furious. A couple of them threatened violence. LOL I can summarize it as “If I wanted to learn about [this or that], I’d go to [this or that] booth. I’m in the Apple booth because I only want to hear about Apple.”
And yes, people were annoyed that there were no iPods or accessories for sale in the NAB booth.
Oliver, I heard this all day, every day. Even my pals from around the world who dropped by the Apple booth specifically to see me admitted that they didn’t really care that AJA or Blackmagic were in the Apple booth, because after they said hello me, they were going to those booths anyway. As pretty much everyone in this forum has observed in this forum at one time or another, we haven’t been Apple’s core audience for a long time.
The energy from the booth was actually being driven by the booth NEXT to the booth. We don’t talk about this much anymore, but the actual, literal stampede from main entrance into the South Hall was NOT to the Apple booth per se, but to get a seat in Steve Martin and Abba Shapiro’s official Apple classes across the aisle.
I mean, if Apple really wanted to blow the roof off the joint, they could skip their own booth with their own gear, skip the partners, and bring back Steve and Abba doing hands-on tips and tricks on the floor with the newest iMacs.
Because otherwise, I feel like what the majority of people who’d actually go to an Apple booth would want is in fact pretty much what they get in the Apple Store. The first year Apple did a billion dollars at the Apple Stores? 2006. Their last year for a booth at NAB? 2007.
And look, if we’re being honest, the flipside of the accessibility of NAB is that the level of discourse at the booths had already been dropping for years. By 2003, I was spending nearly all of my time explaining what a plug-in does, and why I wasn’t insulting Apple with the suggestion that there’s something important that Final Cut couldn’t do on its own….”because if it was REALLY important, Apple would be doing it, so you should just shut your face and get out of Apple’s booth.”
I can also anecdotally observe that the level of discourse being directed at Apple product managers was similar in both level of user experience and tone. ????It appeared to be no more pleasant an experience for them than it was for me.
Nor for that matter do I want to exempt ourselves from that. A number of very high-profile feature film editors used to be quite active here, but stepped away when their days became consumed by people tracking down their personal contact information to berate them for using Media Composer instead of FCP. Oops.
In another post on this thread, I decried barriers to access, but I gotta tell ya, if you want to separate signal from noise at a trade show, barriers can help. ???? If you’ve gone to the trouble to track down an FCPWORKS session, you’re probably closer to the signal end of the spectrum. Any one of those sessions is miles and miles more productive than an entire day in Apple’s old booth, I assure you.
That’s why I think that Apple’s presence at NAB is actually pretty well calibrated. You can find Apple if you want to, and if you need somebody to explain to the ontology of plug-ins, you can find plenty of folks to help you out with that throughout the South Hall. They’ll probably sell you a charger for your phone, too.
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[Tim Wilson] “I’m surprised to hear you say that! Why do you think so? “
First, that was the time frame originally mentioned publicly, although offhandedly. Second, it’s basically the time frame of FCP “legacy”. Third, the industry – an Apple’s focus on it – has and will have changed significantly in 10 years.
What I see is an enhanced iMovie that replaces both iMovie and FCPX with a workflow based on iPhone/iPad. Take a look at their HDR strategy. It seems most closely set up to fit into the iOS/Apple TV ecosystem.
So to clarify, I don’t see Apple out of the editing software business. Rather, I see Apple going more down the alternative route, with less attention to traditional uses/workflows.
The one caveat, which would make me completely wrong, would be if Apple felt they still needed Final Cut Pro X/Motion/Compressor/Logic Pro X as a way to showcase performance on desktop machines and laptops (assuming they continue to make those). Demonstrating them with Apple software, not third party software. Not just to showcase hardware performance to customers, but also to those same third party developers, so that they (Avid, Adobe, BMD, etc) continue to develop for the platform.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Third, the industry – an Apple’s focus on it – has and will have changed significantly in 10 years.
“I think their focus is moving TOWARDS content production – after they have acquired Netflix and they launch a series of curated online channels based partly on user created content, I think they will still have lots of need for a Professional NLE 🙂
\”Traditional NLEs have timelines. FCPX has storylines\” W.Soyka
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[Tim Wilson] “I know that this is a controversial position, though, so blast away. ????”
Actually, I have the controversial position (and maybe Bill) and enjoy feeding the debate machine…
Everything you say might be true, but qualitative. Again, where is the quantitative data that says staying away from NAB is bad for business? Can we track a company that failed in our industry because a lack of attendance at NAB?
You can make all the statements you want about where and when you meet the customers, but my experience at NAB (lots of them), even in “whisper suites”, is that it’s mostly show, no go. With todays technology and communications platforms the need for NAB’s is less and less. Would the broadcasters you mention above stop buying from Avid if they eliminated or severely reduced their presence at NAB? I think not, and the six figures the company currently spends on that presence can buy a lot of tickets to LA, NYC, wherever, for more personalized, targeted meetings. Of course Avid would have to communicate properly why they are not attending, and that is not their strongest suit!
Of course my opinion only, not speaking for any other “pro’s” out there…. 😉
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Visual Storyteller
https://vimeo.com/channels/1322525
Managing Partner, Low Country Creative LLC
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[Steve Connor] “I think their focus is moving TOWARDS content production”
It’s a nice thought, but it won’t be Apple that actually creates any content, just as Netflix doesn’t create content. Both are and will simply be aggregators who get their content from approved suppliers. Those prod cos will use the tools they deem best.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Neil Goodman] ”
I didnt make the statement to begin with, just pointing out alot of Apple content isnt made with Apple software and its easy to find out who cut where and on what. “Sorry, I was responding to Greg’s comment.
It got attached to yours via the quote.
Perils of mobile OS as a portal to discussions…
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Also, the year Avid did not attend NAB was the year of a one year CEO and VP of Marketing in between other longer lasting CEO’s. So saying Avid as a whole is not quite correct but by whoever is running the show at the time and what they believe. I am pretty sure that if any other CEO, Avid would not have left.
This does not mean there aren’t discussions by any company as to the value of any show they attend and the ROI overall. Clearly, it didn’t hurt Apple but 90% of their business is not dependent on the broadcast and studio markets.
Michael
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