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The Fog Thickens
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[John Godwin] “Yeah, but then there’ll be another massive argument about whether the Prozac is actually “Pro”…
Best,
John
“I’m a fully licensed professional, and I am able to tell you officially that that is funny!
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[Andrew Richards] “Walster Biscardi reports FCPX is still very much instrumentum non grata and that Apple is either On Notice or Dead To Me for most editors he’s spoken with at NAB.
Terence Curren said he tried to line up someone, anyone, using Premiere Pro for film or TV work to come to this year’s pre-NAB Editor’s Lounge. But he said he couldn’t, even after calling Adobe. Was Team Coco unavailable?
Avid says they are losing money again, and it is the “creative enthusiast” market that is hurting them the most.
What gives? If every film and TV pro is flocking back to Avid, why are they back in the red? Was everyone waiting for CS6 to hop to Premiere? Does Smoke 2013 change everything?”
We provide dailies, color and other post services to a lot of indie features, mostly NYC based indie features. The Internet narrative about FCP’s fall and Premiere’s rise has no relationship to what I’m seeing on the ground. What I see is that FCP 7 and Avid projects are coming through in about the same ratios they did before FCP X. For all that people talk up Premiere as the solution to everything in various online forums, we have yet to even receive an inquiry about whether we can handle a project edited in it. We also haven’t received inquiries about finishing projects cut in FCP X, but in my capacity as our resident workflow geek several clients/contacts have at least asked for my opinion about it, which they haven’t for Premiere.
IMO the framing in the discussion of FCP X has always been wrong. It was viewed as an instant failure because it wasn’t a drop-in replacement for FCP 7. But it’s not FCP 7’s successor in any technical sense. It’s a new product. FCP X is properly viewed as a promising challenger that needs some time to mature, and I think people would have recognized this had it been from a company other than Apple or had Apple’s messaging been better. Viewed in this light, consider the fact that it’s radically cheaper than alternative apps and in many ways easier to use, it adopts interesting new paradigms for organizing media and sequences, it has been updated on a very aggressive schedule, and it’s backed by a company with virtually unlimited resources. Does this really seem like an app doomed to failure in the long run? In a certain light it seems to have better odds than Premiere — yes, neither app has really broken into the market yet, but Premiere has been around much longer — it has less of an excuse.
I find the idea that we’re going to see a meaningful resurgence of Avid to be highly unlikely. Will some people switch as a consequence of FCP X? Sure. But — and I realize that people who’ve been using Avid products for the last decade or more can’t, for the most part, really see this — Media Composer is virtually impenetrable to new users. We’ve seen this in-house. People with FCP 7 experience can pretty much just figure out FCP X, but are completely lost in Media Composer. I don’t think this is because of similarities between FCP 7 and FCP X, because there barely are any. Basic things (like, say, how to get a folder full of natively encoded media files into a bin so you can edit with them) are just bizarrely counterintuitive in Media Composer. As we saw with ‘classic’ FCP, the way to succeed in the long run is to get the ‘kids’ using your product today. Having user interface that new users bounce off of is fatal in the long run.
To sumarize my view of the market… I don’t think Apple’s “missteps” will do more than slightly delay Avid’s long, slow decline. I think that continued Avid decline and the rough introduction of FCP X will give Premiere an opening. I think FCP X itself is maturing quite rapidly and its price and easy app store distribution will make it the go-to option for many new editors. My guess is that in five years FCP X will be a major force, mostly battling it out with Premiere, and Avid will have further retreated into specialty niches.
And Smoke? Honestly, I want to find some excuse for us to buy it — it’s now in that sort of ideal price range where it’s cheap enough for us as a small post house, but expensive enough that most people won’t buy it for themselves, meaning some people might conceivably give us money because we have it and they don’t. But I can’t quite figure out what we’d use it for. If we did e.g. in-house end-to-end post production on music videos I can see how it would be an extremely useful tool. But for the work we presently do it seems like its benefits over our current tools would be fairly marginal. I don’t think we’re alone in this — Smoke seems like a tool that’s insanely useful to a particular slice of the market and nearly useless to the rest.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Herb,
Thanks for catching this – I was going to chime in about waiting on Lightworks yet, but I had missed this announcement.
It’s a bit thin on details for the Mac version though; I suppose it will be clearer at the end of May.
Franz.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “It’s a bit thin on details for the Mac version though; I suppose it will be clearer at the end of May.”
With the apparent demise of any OSX workstation options, I’m no longer interested in the Mac version of any product. I’ll be downloading my Windows version on the 28th.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
Well yes and no. What I believe is being seen in this industry closely parallels what has already happened in a business I use to be in, semiconductors. When I started in that business back in the mid 70’s designing and manufacturing semiconductors was the private domain of large corporations with very deep pockets that made huge investments in capital and software. A “typical” software suite one needed to competently design a chip was around 1 – 2 Million dollars with another half to 1 million dollars in hardware. Designers were a specialized breed with very specific knowledge at a detailed level. They used very complex and sophisticated tools.
Fast forward to what that industry looks like today. Today a moderately competent individual, with no engineering degree and using software that costs from free to less than a $1000, can design in days, a very sophisticated device. They “manufacture” it themselves because the entire device is programmable. Hardware costs are nothing more than a mid level PC with a USB port. This has fostered a complete proliferation of custom low cost devices that are used in thousands of applications. None of the demand today could have been supported with the design flow that I started my career. Over the course of my previous career I literally watched what I use to do for a living get reduced to nothing more than a mouse click on a software package. I’m not bitter but I realized for myself that I had to move on. Now granted, Intel still uses an army of engineers and millions of dollars of hardware and software to design their chips. But the total semiconductor market has been completely changed and a huge portion of the lower and mid range end of devices has exponentially expanded to what I describe above and the very, very high end has shrunk to a much smaller list of large players.
I would posit that that is exactly what is going on within the video industry today. The internet, YouTube, smartphones and tablets with 1080p video cameras have completely destroyed what use to be a small and private market. High end solution providers will be needed for sure going forward but the huge bulk of video editing demand going forward simply cannot be met with solutions of the past. Net result is exactly what is going on. Tools are dropping dramatically in price. Totally untrained individuals are entering your sandbox and are competing with you for work at un-heard of prices.
So where do you go from here? I wish I had those answers. This is a very hard problem. Learn to love change is one thing I have had to do. Be innovative and keep reinventing yourself is another.
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[Herb Sevush] “… I’m no longer interested in the Mac version of any product.”
Well, I’m still hovering about. I’m currently on what may be my last Mac, though an upgrade would not be out of the question. My plan is to transition to platform agnostic software so that when it comes time for a new machine I have more options on the table.
A trial of Lightworks would be good to compare with PPro CS6.
Franz.
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[Chris Kenny] “For all that people talk up Premiere as the solution to everything in various online forums, we have yet to even receive an inquiry about whether we can handle a project edited in it.”
Most people I know were waiting for PPro 6 to make a decision. I’d give it another year to see if this holds true.
[Chris Kenny] “Viewed in this light, consider the fact that it’s radically cheaper than alternative apps and in many ways easier to use, it adopts interesting new paradigms for organizing media and sequences, it has been updated on a very aggressive schedule, and it’s backed by a company with virtually unlimited resources. Does this really seem like an app doomed to failure in the long run?”
If new paradigms were a precursor to success then Sony Vegas would be a market leader. It’s not nearly as cheap as Lightworks, which is free. Most of it’s updates were merely to fix stuff it was supposed to have in the first place. The virtually unlimited resources of it’s parent company are not aimed at this market at all and that same parent is infamous for it’s policy of software infanticide. In other words – who knows?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Walter Soyka] “I think a lot of people are still holding on to FCP7 and are just starting to evaluate their options now.”
[Chris Kenny] “What I see is that FCP 7 and Avid projects are coming through in about the same ratios they did before FCP X.”
I concur with these statements.
For all the rhetoric in this forum and elsewhere about anxiety and emotion, what I’ve seen is that most have just continued using FCP7 and their systems from last year (including some FCP6 systems). I suspect the next 12 months will see many more decisions and system changes now that all of the cards are on the table (or soon to be).
Franz.
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[Daniel Frome] “It’s funny. The “flocking back to Avid” definitely seems to be happening, but they aren’t buying Avid’s money-maker systems (ISIS, etc), just the edit software. “
And that certainly seems to be what the financial reports are showing. Some of the analysts I’ve read said the crossgrade itself may have cost them money on software that isn’t very profitable to begin with and loses money at the lower price point.
The brief bump last quarter seems to have been temporary as the Bunim Murray’s of the world switched. I suspect Avid is hoping to grab a few more with Symphony (hoping some of the crossgrades follow with big hardware purchases).
I really think that baring a major rethinking of business strategy, Avid is a sinking ship. The ship sinks very slowly because, based on the reports I’ve read, they cary no significant debt. That does buy them time though. Given that this has been going on for years, they don’t seem to be utilizing that time. Their attempts to “right the ship” seem to be some tweaks to the business model when they do need something more radical.
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[Herb Sevush] “If new paradigms were a precursor to success then Sony Vegas would be a market leader.”
It probably should have been, on the merits. But Sony didn’t really have much clout in the software market (Apple does), and the discontinuation of ‘classic’ Final Cut has created a vacuum that didn’t previously exist, making it easier for new products (a category in which I include FCP X) to succeed.
[Herb Sevush] “It’s not nearly as cheap as Lightworks, which is free.”
I’m keeping a close eye on Lightworks, but I’m skeptical if development of a serious NLE can really be funded in the way they propose. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a business model in which the primary product is given away for free and the developer tries to make money from extras, and success with this model is quite spotty.
[Herb Sevush] “Most of it’s updates were merely to fix stuff it was supposed to have in the first place.”
This implies that Apple intended to ship these features in the first release but was unable to complete them in time. There’s zero evidence of this. Apple has an established pattern of minimalistic initial releases, and it’s consequently probable that the minimalistic initial release of FCP X was deliberate. So, we have Apple shipping a free update with major new features within 12 months of the initial release — and planning additional major new features this year, probably within 18 months of the initial release, and probably also free.
It’s always important to ask yourself if you’re being mislead by trying to fit facts to a particular narrative. One good way to do this is to ask “If the same result had been achieved in a different way, would I have a more positive or negative view?” In this case, consider the fact that FCP X has a bunch of features FCP 7 never had. What if FCP X had shipped with broadcast monitoring, stem exports, XML and multicam (which it all now has), but things like tagging, auditions, automated shot analysis, and 4K support had been subsequently added over the past 12 months? Would people be claiming there hadn’t been rapid significant feature additions because FCP X was supposed to have those features in the first place? I somehow doubt it. Yet logically there’s no difference here — either way Apple’s accomplishments to date are the same.
[Herb Sevush] “The virtually unlimited resources of it’s parent company are not aimed at this market at all and that same parent is infamous for it’s policy of software infanticide. In other words – who knows?”
The modern Apple rarely kills is own in-house products (acquisitions are another story), and there is no particular indication that FCP X is being starved for developer resources.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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