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The Fog Thickens
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[TImothy Auld] “I asked you a very pointed question which you are very pointedly not answering.”
I’m sorry, Timothy. I do not mean to obfuscate, especially at the highest order, and I agree there’s trust issues.
I can’t answer for you, but if you’re asking if I trust Apple, I’d guess I’d say, maybe?
I guess I simply can’t project what my career is going to look like in 13 years, let alone what gear I’m using. Perhaps that’s something I should try and figure out.
I guess I am trying to tackle the bigger problem, and I am generally curious for my own knowledge.
If trust with Apple has run its course, is there an entity you feel more comfortable dealing with?
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No.
Tim
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Example, Company X sells you a product for $60,000 and pulls the plug on it long before you get a reasonable return on investment. You’re now faced with a huge expense.
Company Y sells you a product for $1000 and within one year you’ve made many times that. Then pull the plug on it and it only costs you another $1000 to move to another product likely to give you the same or better ROI. No big problem. Move on.
Imagine Company Z sells you a product for $15,000 and then next week announces they will sell an improved version of the same product to all your competitors for $4000, now making it harder for you to get the ROI because they’ve just facilitated competitive growth, probably limiting your growth in the same target market.
Any number of the above were concerns for any number of facilities resulting from actions by any number of companies along the history of post production give or take changing some of the details.
One of the worse case scenarios was a company I worked for that bought two CMX6000 systems along with an enclosed room to burn glass discs to use in the systems.
You might find this an interesting read.
https://www.smpte-ne.org/articles/eulogy.html -
[Herb Sevush] “It has created a vacuum for a specific type of editor, not necessarily one interested in new paradigms. The companies poised to fill that vacuum are making it part of their marketing approach to emphasize how uninterested they are in creating new paradigms – to wit this from Autodesk:”
Apple says there are now more users using FCP X than FCP 7, and the latest SCRI report shows their share of new NLE installs hasn’t collapsed — it’s actually ticked up a couple of points. The logical conclusion is that FCP X is a) actually being pretty widely used (far more widely than Vegas ever was) and b) actually is a suitable solution for a lot of FCP 7 customers.
I think FCP X’s detractors might have to start acknowledging the possibility that Apple might have known some things about how people were using FCP that weren’t obvious to them. It’s quite probable Apple had data along the lines of (and I’m making up data here, but I suspect the general impression conveyed by the numbers is correct) “10% of users export XML files, 5% export EDL files, 25% use multicam, 15% use broadcast monitoring — and given the overlap, we can leave all of these things out of our first version and still address 65% of the FCP 7 user base”. At which point why should they have held it off of the market for an additional year (particularly with FCP 7 getting so long in the tooth) just to address the remaining 35%?
[Herb Sevush] “This article was not addressed to this Cow forum, it was addressed to the editing public at large, and it reflects Audtodesk’s impression of what the world wide editing audience is thinking at the moment. “
Smoke is a fairly specialized tool. It has zero relevance to literally 99% of the “editing public at large”.
[Herb Sevush] “I would say the paper they published within days of the release outlining the features they were planning but hadn’t had time to implement, like multicam, was plenty of evidence.”
I’m sure they were always planning to implement these things — I said this myself when people claimed Apple was “backtracking” by agreeing to implement these features. But it’s standard practice to have a roadmap that goes out beyond your initial release — “planning to implement X” doesn’t mean “planned to ship X in 1.0 but screwed up”.
[Herb Sevush] “They made a car with a great GPS and autoparking but it lacked headlights and breaks.”
This is a bad analogy. See the top of this reply. A car without headlights and breaks is useless to essentially everyone. FCP X turns out to have been useful to a large fraction of the FCP user base. Not most folks working on features or in broadcast, but those folks are a tiny fraction of the market.
And really, Apple has plugged the gaps pretty fast. To focus on my segment for a second, you could absolutely cut an indie feature in FCP X today. If you took it to a large post house to grade they’d probably look at you like you were nuts, but if you brought it to us we could have it in Resolve (with your primary grades intact!) inside of an hour I think.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andrew Kimery] “I think that’s only part of it. I’d be very surprised if having FCP classic used on high end productions, and having very successful people evangelizing for it, didn’t play a large role in creating a halo effect.
Sure, but that came later. Murch didn’t edit Cold Mountain on FCP until 2003, four years after it was introduced. FCP X could have high-profile champions as well in another three years.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Joseph Owens] “And while its nice to think that it alludes to some kind of prescience or Hidden Understanding, you also have to comprehend the degree to which the game bent to his individual force of gravity, that was like the Einsteinian “warped space-time” which really means that the puck position, like gravity, was a tendency that found Mr. Gretzky, and why not if you are the leading scorer of all time?”
This raises another interesting point as well. It’s not like Apple just passively observes where markets are headed and figures out how to get in front of them. Take what they did with the iPhone — they looked at a market where their traditional strengths weren’t necessarily going to be useful and asked themselves “How can we ship a product that is based on our traditional strengths, and bends the entire market toward valuing products built along those lines?” The abrupt discontinuation of FCP 7, some of the features Apple has chosen to leave out of FCP X (e.g. deck control), the adoption of Thunderbolt, FCP X’s pricing and distribution model — Apple is up to some hardcore market engineering here.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[TImothy Auld] “No”
So what are you going to do?
Personally, all options are on the table.
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[Chris Kenny] “The logical conclusion is that FCP X is a) actually being pretty widely used (far more widely than Vegas ever was)”
Damming with faint praise. Vegas is an example of a new paradigm that never made a dent in the market.
[Chris Kenny] ” b) actually is a suitable solution for a lot of FCP 7 customers.”
Actually we don’t know what those numbers mean. We never did before. I never trusted things like Legacy had “2 million seats.” Where did that number come from? How many were upgrades, how many were abaondoned? What I am confident in is market awareness. FCP Legacy had plenty. FCPX has a curiosity factor, but in my small circle it doesn’t exist as a viable option. I know more people using Edius than using X. I am aware that I am not the center of the editing universe, but I put zero faith in any of the numbers quoted, till they define their terms and show how they arrived at them.
[Chris Kenny] “I think FCP X’s detractors might have to start acknowledging the possibility that Apple might have known some things about how people were using FCP that weren’t obvious to them.”
I never doubted that Apple knew the market they were aiming at, I simply concluded that it wasn’t me or mine.
[Chris Kenny] “I suspect the general impression conveyed by the numbers is correct) “10% of users export XML files, 5% export EDL files, 25% use multicam, 15% use broadcast monitoring — and given the overlap, we can leave all of these things out of our first version and still address 65% of the FCP 7 user base”
If true, and it well might be, then it was an incredibly stupid business decision to release X and EOL Legacy at the same moment. They managed to piss off the most vocal and influential 35% of their user base. Not all users are equal. They would have been better off pissing off the other 65%, who would fall in line anyhow, rather than the influential few. I don’t think they really liked the Conan segment, do you?
[Chris Kenny] “A car without headlights and breaks is useless to essentially everyone. FCP X turns out to have been useful to a large fraction of the FCP user base.”
Not in it’s first release. For Bill Davis, yes. But many other current X’ers couldn’t use it at first. I stand by my statement that the initial release was useless for a large portion of the pro user base, even if they liked the paradigm. This has changed with subsequent releases.
One of the big differences between Legacy and X is that Legacy was solely for the pro market. That doesn’t mean that X is not “pro” but it does mean that there are a lot of hobbyists that use it as well. That tends to skew arguments about relative strength in the pro market.
[Chris Kenny] “Apple has plugged the gaps pretty fast. “
Yes they have, much quicker than I believed they would.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
From the hallway in McCaren where I’m recharging my iPhone while sitting on the floor…
Thank you both, very much.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Herb Sevush] “I never doubted that Apple knew the market they were aiming at, I simply concluded that it wasn’t me or mine. “
I don’t recall your specific position on the FCP X release last year, but what I’m addressing with this argument is the notion that it was valid to draw significant conclusions about Apple’s long-term interest in high-end customers from the feature set of the initial release. Shipping an initial release designed to serve your median customer as soon as possible (rather than waiting until you can also serve high-end niches) is just good business sense — it doesn’t really imply a lack of interest in serving outliers later.
[Herb Sevush] “They managed to piss off the most vocal and influential 35% of their user base. Not all users are equal. They would have been better off pissing off the other 65%, who would fall in line anyhow, rather than the influential few. “
I’m not sure this is right at all. I think our hypothetical 35% (really if we’re exclusively talking about broadcast/post people it’s probably much less than that) are more vocal, but I think the weight of that mass of users on the other side counts for more in the long run.
[Herb Sevush] “One of the big differences between Legacy and X is that Legacy was solely for the pro market. That doesn’t mean that X is not “pro” but it does mean that there are a lot of hobbyists that use it as well. That tends to skew arguments about relative strength in the pro market.”
Meh. The lines between “hobbyist” and “professional” are really, really vague these days. Are you a hobbyist if you use FCP X to cut comedic web sorts you shoot with your friends? How about if you make money from ads on your site? Does it matter how much money?
Or how about if you work for a post facility in some technical capacity, but cut personal projects in FCP X on the side?
Or take the indie film world. Say an individual with a day job that has nothing to do with filmmaking puts together a self-funded feature project, cuts it himself, gets into a festival, wins a prize and gets a distribution deal. Is this person still a hobbyist? If not, exactly when do they stop being a hobbyist? If so, are they still a hobbyist if they do the same thing a couple of more times?
The “hobbyist” vs. “pro” distinction has gotten really complicated. There are no rules anymore.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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