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What to use when we stop using Final Cut
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Rob,
“It probably will become just as common, but I don’t think it will pay the same. You still have to know how to tell a story to be a good editor. As we all know, simply having the software doesn’t make you good at it.People aren’t better writers just because they have Microsoft Word…”
There is some truth to that. But the reality seems to be that standards have significantly been lowered in the past 5-7 years. At the same time so have rates.
Your example of Word is only partially correct. I agree that having easy access to Word didn’t make everyone that has it the next Stephen King. But what it did do is kill thousands of neighborhood print shops, and lower wages for the few remaining employees. It also lowered wages and eliminated jobs for high skill secretarial employees. The digital camera and photoshop is another example. It didn’t hurt Annie Leibovitz, but Kodak and the millions of film developing shops, and camera stores felt the market decline. And there are certainly fewer ‘no name’ professional photographers today, then ten years ago. And the survivors are making less money.
To see this happen time and time again, and say it won’t happen to us is living in denial.
Right now there are a few well established guys making the majority of the money in this business. And everyone else is working for wages that could be had at any no skill job, if they are working at all.
That is in sharp contrast to ten or more years ago.
Your statement of “It probably will become just as common, but I don’t think it will pay the same.” is just not how it works. And an objective look at average wages and rates show either a flat line, or a decline depending on the market. The laws of supply and demand don’t care what version of FCP you have, or how good you edit. When there is a glut of workers in any industry, the majority suffer from loss of work, and low wages. And there is a glut of workers in this industry, and more coming every day.
The writing is on the wall. Some will choose to ignore it for various reasons, mostly ego. But for the average person in ‘the media’, in five years this business is going to be just another job, and that is probably a best case scenario.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.comI have a system, it has stuff in it, and stuff hooked to it. I have a camera, it can record stuff. I read the manuals, and know how to use this stuff and lots of other stuff too.
You should be suitably impressed… -
Zane,
“You cannot be serious. Think about it a little, use your head.”I’m as serious as a heart attack. When the client can shoot and edit his own stuff, why does he need you?
Did the fact that professionally printed business cards (or whatever) looked better than DIY done stuff keep print shops in business?
This business is transitioning from an art or craft, to nothing more than an ordinary job, to something as common as shooting your own stills.
You can think your mad skillz can magically stop this trend if you want to.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.comI have a system, it has stuff in it, and stuff hooked to it. I have a camera, it can record stuff. I read the manuals, and know how to use this stuff and lots of other stuff too.
You should be suitably impressed… -
[Scott Sheriff] “There is some truth to that. But the reality seems to be that standards have significantly been lowered in the past 5-7 years. At the same time so have rates.”
Scott is right. In just my short professional career (7 years) I have personally noticed standards have dropped. Younger people entering the job market have a short attention span and a sense of entitlement. A lot of them don’t want to work for someone else, so they never get an entry level position where they are forced to learn broadcast standards, proper workflows, etc etc. They buy a computer and a DSLR camera and go into business for themselves. These days anyone who can shoot something 60fps and slomo it to a piece of music is an “editor”.
While I agree that real editing is about storytelling, and if you’re a good editor your work will be good no matter what system you are on, that’s sort of only true to people who appreciate. If the media world gets oversaturated with sub par editing…that becomes the new expectation or the new standard. So while someone who is an editor, or a storyteller, or an appreciator of those things will know good work when they see it, the common person won’t.
It’s no surprise that Post production houses made the recent list of America’s top dying industries.
[Scott Sheriff] “This business is transitioning from an art or craft, to nothing more than an ordinary job, to something as common as shooting your own stills.
You can think your mad skillz can magically stop this trend if you want to.”Well said, scott.
-mattyc
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[Scott Sheriff] “The laws of supply and demand don’t care what version of FCP you have, or how good you edit.”
Scott, I almost always agree with you, but I must partially disagree here.
How well you edit matters very much; this is a point of differentiation that prevents all editors from being considered substitutable. Budget is not the only consideration for all clients, and some are willing to pay for quality and experience.
Supply is increasing, but so is demand. There are screens everywhere today, they are on more often, and they all need programming. We can’t think of production in the same narrow terms we thought about it ten years ago.
[Scott Sheriff] “When there is a glut of workers in any industry, the majority suffer from loss of work, and low wages. And there is a glut of workers in this industry, and more coming every day. The writing is on the wall. Some will choose to ignore it for various reasons, mostly ego. But for the average person in ‘the media’, in five years this business is going to be just another job, and that is probably a best case scenario.”
This I agree with, but I’ll take it a step further — downward price pressure crosses industries. Everyone is feeling it.
If you do tomorrow exactly what you did yesterday, you will be forced to charge less. If you do a little more tomorrow than you did yesterday, you can charge the same amount. If you do a lot more tomorrow than you did yesterday, you can charge more.
I think that simply saying the industry is declining is a very static point of view. The horse buggy industry certainly declined as the automobile industry rose — but the transportation industry grew dramatically.
Our industry is certainly changing, but there is still money to be made here if we understand and meet clients’ changing needs.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Ahh, good points, Scott. Good points.
Rob Grauert, Jr.
http://www.robgrauert.com
command-r.tumblr.com -
Honestly, I think what will happen is what I’m currently going through. After college, I got a job with a company that has their own in-house marketing team. I do everything from conceptualizing through delivery. And I’m lucky enough to be with a company that doesn’t skimp on money. We don’t use flip cameras. We usually use an EX3, but a RED has been rented for larger shoots.
Most post houses will probably go away, but the jobs probably won’t. The jobs with be with a corporation’s own in-house team. And if they’re smart, they will hire the talented ones.
Rob Grauert, Jr.
http://www.robgrauert.com
command-r.tumblr.com -
So far as I am concerned when all production equipment, be it edit suites or cameras is economically viable for everyone then the difference between a good production and a bad production will become obvious;- the talent and experience of the people using the gear. Corporations will pay more for a standout product and they will be well aware of what it takes to make the product stand out and why they need to make their product stand out more than their competitor’s product.
Fast food hasn’t sent every restaurant out of business just because their product is cheaper and faster, a lot restaurants survive very successfully because their is a profitable market in serving a quality dining experience to people that can see the value in paying a premium for excellent cuisine served in a wonderful environment by a friendly waiter / waitress.
If the new FCP makes it easier for novice users then it’s going to be super easy and faster for pros.
The sky is not falling chicken little!
Cinematographer, Steadicam Operator, Final Cut Pro Post Production.
https://philming.com.au
https://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/ -
Here’s the thing, guys:
We’re all getting prematurely worked up about an update we don’t even have specifics for yet.
The thing you have to ask yourself is this: even if FCP goes to a more “consumer-based” model (which is not likely if you ask me), will that really keep you from using FCP–even if it’s an old version? Just because the average, everyday consumer may be able to afford it, does that change what you do? No. It should be quite the opposite; if you are talented, and you do great work, it shouldn’t matter how many other people use the same program. Can’t you tell the difference between a professional PhotoShop job and someone who obviously just opened the box? Do you think Walter Murch is going to stop using FCP because more and more people may be able to figure it out? Hasn’t stopped him yet. And just because someone has the program doesn’t make them Walter Murch.
This fear of the “everyday” consumer is the same fear that a lot of people have of DSLR’s. Yes, there are cheap(ish) cameras that can shoot high-quality footage. Does that make everyone who owns one a great filmmaker? Of course not. What we have from people owning DSLR’s is a lot of good-looking, but overall crappy filmmaking–terrible audio, composition, acting, editing, and direction. Yes, we’ve made everyone a filmmaker, but in all honesty, it just makes you appreciate the “good” stuff when you see it.
I think the same will be said “if” FCP goes the way of the consumer-market.
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I know this song. They just changed the beat.
The desktop publishing revolution of the 80’s is a relevant model for what’s happening in video.
Computers and software got powerful enough and easy enough and cheap enough that you could typeset, design, and print your own brochures, posters, books, etc.Thousands of companies and individuals bought them, and there was a mighty disruption in the established order of the graphics arts biz. Prices tumbled. Many typesetters and print shops went out of business.
And then…?
It turned out the software had no button for “create brilliant layout”, nor did it have a filter to ban improper use of papyrus and comic sans.
The majority of the huge wave of new users created… a bunch of ephemeral cr@p.
Now, to be fair, there was a lot of low-level work out there where that was not an issue. There are many kinds of projects that could accept a low-quality product as “good enough” for the amount of investment the client was willing to make. The financial squeezes of periodic recessions caused many clients to re-evaluate a lot of work that was previously worthy of their time but now was not cost-effective to bother with. They did less work, but when they did it, they threw more money at the higher-end product, and the low-priority stuff got done by some company amateur when the stakes were low enough. Or, they just didn’t Do that kind of thing any more, since the web was now in ascendence and offered some useful alternatives to many problems where video was once the only solution. .
But it became apparent thru all this that even easy-to-acquire tools were not as useful, if you lacked the education and training to apply them.
A lot of people got back out of desktop publishing when they found that owning the piano doesn’t give you the ability to play Rachmaninoff. Or even Floyd Kramer.
Companies that didn’t understand what they did in moving to DTP without building a skill base, finally got the message when their badly-designed graphics, done by Bob in Accounting, didn’t compete in the marketplace for quality. They went back to letting outside pros handle much of the most important work.
The real professionals adapted to and adopted the best of the new technology and combined it with the design skills they already had, and it made them faster and cheaper… and they went on to bill the same but carry more profit.
The hacks that were only doing garage sale posters and the like, faced so much cut-rate competition that they killed most of each other off. The high end survived, the low end was drowned out by over-competition, the middle suffered great attrition and mostly survived by moving a little more upscale.
Then we saw much the same happen with the DV desktop video revolution of the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The pace was a little faster, but the results were more or less the same. The pros that adapted to the new tech were able to save some time and money and still make a great product, despite the fact that their tech was (on paper at least) often of inferior quality to the previous broadcast standards. The point was that it was orders of magnitude cheaper. The saving grace was they they upheld production standards and used their knowledge to light and frame and mic the project to get superior results to any beginner with an entry-level DV setup. The wave of opportunistic ingenue users came and went, just as the desktop publishers did. What remained was again a sector of the business that had been shaken and somewhat re-arranged, but not destroyed. Only more stratified.
With streaming, youtube and flip cams, the “cloud”, and the mobile platform society of the new century, we’re seeing another shift that’s again about market stratification. The new tools are very democratizing. Now anybody literally can make their own videos and make them as complex and nuanced as they have time to devote to it. But they usually just limit their editing to rough hacking off the front and back of one relevant little clip.
You’re not going to make any money editing for clients like that. They don’t need you, or if they do, they don’t understand why they do. Business clients that find flip cam rough footage “good enough” are not clients that you can make money off of. They don’t understand the value proposition of higher-order principles of design, of craft, of good writing and design. They have to learn generally by failing a few times or more, until they un-learn the idea that “TV is easy, you just press a button and there it is”. I use plumbing every day but no way do I want to try and be a plumber in my own home or at work.
When the stakes of the project get high enough, THEN the client is ready to be taught the value proposition your higher skill sets offer. And you can bill well for this, because now they have tried installing the shower themselves, they appreciate the plumber a whole lot more.
Cheap editing software burns away the bottom end of the client base, the lowball stuff that has no decent profit margin in it. The clients that are left after that, want more than a noob with the latest version of whatever. And they will pay you for being really good.
Often you will hear someone use a line about buggies or buggy-whips, when they want to make a point about technological obsolescence. But have you PRICED a horse-drawn buggy lately? Sure, they don’t make them in the large numbers they used to, but the ones they DO make are VERY pricy. And as for buggy whips, well, the whip-makers are still in business, but serving a more… exotic…. clientele, again, at premium prices. The point being, the guys that survived turmoil in their fields did it by aiming upscale, and not by racing to the bottom.
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When I stop using Final Cut, I’ll use the new Final Cut.
Everyone chill out and wait a day. If you honestly think all the signs point to iMovie Pro you’re reading them wrong. You don’t think Blackmagic et al have seen the new version?
And ‘that panel’ is mostly a bunch of people bemoaning a process that’s been occurring since 1999: Editing software is getting easier to operate and cheaper to buy. Good. I already charge a lot more for my time than I do for my edit gear. Cheaper software makes my life easier.
My money is still with Apple – but then I generally agree with ‘skating to where the puck is’ in business as well. Avid have taken 10 years to implement features that have been in FCP since it launched. It’s time to move the game on – touch surfaces, lower costs, faster renders, tapeless.
Edit Out Ltd
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FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
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