Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
-
The week before Halloween Home Depot had more Xmas decorations out than Halloween decorations. But I digress..
Happy Turkey day to those that partake.
-
[John Rofrano] “So…
Cost to own FCP X for 4 years = $300.
Cost to own Adobe CC for 4 years = $2,400.
Savings of $2,100 … Priceless! :-D”
[Bill Davis] “And it’s kinda hard to see how choosing what is in the subscription package would have earned me one extra dime toward the difference in the same period. YMMV.”
To riff on this, return on investment is probably a better barometer to go by that just price. For example, there is currently little-to-no FCP X work in my corner of the world, but there is a growing amount of PPro work, so even though Adobe CC is more expensive than X it’s also significantly more lucrative for my situation.
So even though
-
[Bill Davis] “Absolutely. Which of course means that X would have a MUCH easier time accurately re-creating a HUGE percentage of the television ads, movie trailers and promo videos we all see every day. “
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t there 3rd party plugins that use the 3D text ‘engine’ (for lack of a better term) in FCP X to allow users to work with other things in 3D, not just text? This keeps with the ‘FCP X as a platform’ direction that was talked about when X first launched. It seems like 3D text was the low hanging fruit feature that Apple provided, but FCP X has more 3D capabilities than that if 3rd parties want to tap into them.
-
[David Lawrence] “I’m all for pragmatism. But I’m not happy about having less choice as a customer. “
As am I, though obviously we have different preferences when it comes to which choices we can life with and without.
[David Lawrence] “The key is a fair exit strategy instead of “Like it or leave.” I don’t think this is asking too much.”
Does any public company similar to Adobe have a fair exit strategy though (a system that allows you to take what you’ve already paid for a subscription and apply it towards purchasing a perpetual license)? Even with Avid there is no off ramp from their subscription. They just offer a totally different road (buying the perpetual license + maintenance contract).
-
[Bill Davis] “So sorry, but I SOX regulation can be seen as the really having much to do with the primary REASON Adobe went subscription. Maybe it was one small factor. But the reason? Hardly, I think.”
To the best of my knowledge no one (outside of making a straw man argument) has stated the SOX forced Adobe to do what it did or that SOX was the primary reason Adobe went CC only.
The decision to go CC only was multifaceted and the point of brining up SOX and accounting is to shed light on why Adobe can do some things but not others after going CC. For example, Adobe can offer much more specific product roadmaps and release feature upgrades whenever they want** now that they offer just a subscription. One thing they apparently can’t do (and I wish they could) is offer some sort of loyalty ‘buy out’ option (ex. after X amount of years of subscribing you get a perpetual license for whatever version you currently have). As Tim has pointed out this ‘rent-to-own’ option can’t work accounting wise which would help explain why Avid offers two paths (maintenance contract or subscription) that never intersect.
I think Adobe’s main goals were to become more nimble (more frequent feature upgrades), branch out into services that their competitors lack (Cloud storage, BeHance, the marketplace, etc.,), and generate a more reliable revenue stream. For example, I think when CS 5 came out Adobe announced that they were going to a 12mo cycle, as opposed to an 18-24mo cycle, and that upgrade discounts would only be applicable if you were upgrading from the previous year. So, basically, if you skip a version (skip a year) then you have to pay full price. Presumably this would motivate a lot more people to upgrade every (more steady revenue stream), and make Adobe a bit more nimble (shorter release cycle) but it could also piss people off, it wouldn’t solve the problem of people that are okay skipping multiple versions, and even feature upgrades once a year might not feel fast enough for users that are increasing exposed to software upgrades multiple times a year.
As I mentioned in another post ( https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/85551 ) Adobe could have technically gone a similar route as Avid, but given the number of Adobe products I don’t think it would be very practical.
On a related note, if the product teams are to be believed then life under the CC model is an improvement for them as well. They are allowed to communicate more openly with customers, spend more time responding to users requests, and there is less emphasis on upgrades that ‘demo well.’
Coming back to the accounting rules, if it the accounting rules were total BS why would Apple charge for a software update that activated a WiFi radio and why would Avid tank it’s stock by not submitting required paperwork to the SEC and get delisted from NASDAQ? Maybe there are so few issues with SOX cases because doing the accounting wrong and hoping not to get caught is more trouble than just doing it right in the first place? Maybe someone with ethics is running the accounting department? Maybe the investor class as a whole doesn’t take too kindly to massive companies losing 76% of their stock value overnight (see WorldCom) and that puts non-governmental pressure on companies to not cook the books the way Enron did?
[Bill Davis] “Just make it as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe = and code in a mechanism that allows the content creator unfettered access to their own creative work done via the software – permanently. Then I’m fine with it”
I agree that signing off should be as easy as signing up though I’m obviously not as averse to it as you are. My major complaint with Adobe CC, which I have voiced many times before, is that I don’t feel like there are enough Cloud/service offerings. I’m still waiting for the, “Yup, there’s no way in hell they could’ve done something this awesome and useful under the old CS business model” moment. There have been a lot of improvements to existing products, but I still think Adobe CC, as a concept, is still missing its killer app.
**Yes, Adobe could try to figure out a way to determine fair market value to every feature upgrade and withhold accounting that amount of revenue from every perpetual license sale until the feature upgrade is released, but the logistics of that for a company with as many product as Adobe has just doesn’t seem viable at all.
P.S. Wrote this piecemeal while working so apologies if it is a bit scatter brained.
-
[David Lawrence] “Yep, I guess some people are fine with letting a multinational corporation control access to their native project files because for them it’s all about business. “
Or just pragmatism. Best tool for the job and all that. I’m certainly not all about business (if I was I’d seek out more lucrative work as opposed to more enjoyable work), but editing does have to keep the lights on and put food on the table so the business side is inescapable if you do it for a living.
[David Lawrence] “That’s it. SOX and business arguments aside, there’s no technical reason whatsoever why Adobe couldn’t offer perpetual copies of their creative applications if they wanted to”
Business and/or SOX arguments aside, there’s no technical reason whatsoever why OS X can’t run on non-Apple hardware and Avid can’t give away upgrades for free. Take business and/or SOX arguments into consideration and we have Apple’s DRM preventing OS X from running on anything but Apple hardware and Avid won’t even give you a bug fix anymore unless you have a current maintenance plan or subscription. Putting aside business considerations means putting aside major factors in the decision making process I mean, aside from the business argument that I’ll very quickly go out of business, there’s no technical reason why I can’t edit for free.
Could Adobe take the same path as Avid? Technically yes, although the size of Adobe’s product offerings makes it impractical IMO. And, to be honest, I’m not overly keen on Avid’s setup because of the massive penalty for letting your maintenance subscription lapse.
For example, a few weeks ago I went to upgrade my Avid from 8.0 to 8.4.2. But I had accidentally let my maintenance contract lapse so I couldn’t go beyond 8.4.0. If I wanted the two rounds of bug fixes (8.4.1 and 8.4.2) and to be running the same version as my collaborators I’d either have to pony up $1300 or signup for a subscription. Both options felt like a kick in the nuts due to my own mental lapse, but thankfully Avid customer service took pity on me and allowed me to re-up my maintenance contract for the normal $299 rate. Now, the backward compatibility with Avid is excellent so I probably would have been okay on that front, but what I really wanted were the latest bug fixes. Having to live being capped at 8.4.0 wouldn’t have set well with me.
If Adobe had a similar offering, then new users would probably pay $2500 up front for the whole suite and then $600/yr for the ‘maintenance contract’. This would satisfy the perpetual license seekers but what about the downside? What if you accidentally let your maintenance contract lapse? That’s another $2500 if you want to get back on the perpetual license upgrade wagon. Or what if you let it expire on purpose (say CC2016) but you later need to collaborate with someone and it requires CC2017? Of course you can just sign up for a month of CC2017 to get the work done, but now you have work in CC2017 that might not be openable in CC2016 which defeats the purpose of buying the perpetual license so you’d always be able to open your work.
To be 100% honest I feel more locked in to paying Avid annually to keep my maintenance contract active than I do to Adobe to keep my CC subscription active.
-
For anyone looking for yet another example/illustration of SOX here is one from Walter from another thread:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/378/11382[Walter Soyka] “SOX doesn’t care what you charge for a sale. It cares when you put that sale on your books.
SOX is accounting regulation, and the key element we discuss here is about revenue recognition: specifically, when can a company say they’ve earned revenue on a sale?
Let’s put software aside for a moment, discuss a different example. Let’s say a company’s business is trading complex energy contracts. Under previous accounting rules, they could have made the unexpected choice to use mark-to-market accounting, which would allow them to show the net future cash flow of a contract as its current value today.
The idea behind mark-to-market is to try fairly indicate the value of something on your books by “marking it market” or declaring it’s worth what you could sell it for on the market. However, when misused (such as in cases of highly complex contracts that are difficult to value or actually liquidate), mark-to-market lets you count unrealized, future profits as if they were real and current on your books.
This method of accounting, thus misused in conjunction with a complex business model and some other accounting tricks, is highly misleading to investors. Reviewing a company’s books would show lots of healthy revenue from trading activity, not lots of dangerous liability from risky contracts. Sprinkle a little fraud on top, and you can completely misrepresent your business to investors.
This was the basis for the Enron accounting scandal, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 sought to make sure Enron could never happen again. SOX is meant to make a company’s accounting more transparent to prospective investors.
To address the above scenario, SOX prohibits the recognition of current revenue for the future delivery of some value. In software, that means that if you deliver software today, but then improve the software later, you may not recognize the full value of the software sale right now. You must leave some of that value on your balance sheet as a deferred revenue liability, even if you’ve already collected the cash, until the value you charged for is realized. Otherwise, you are essentially able to count future profits today instead of tomorrow.
“ -
Adobe offers a free 30-day trial so you can play with it and see what you think.
-
[Bill Davis] “So no matter HOW you digitize or process it after this stage, you’re NOT going to get back what was tossed out in the original capture – nor can you accurately bring back bits lost along the way. “
Right, no one is saying that you can. What people ARE saying is that the assumption that DV is DV is DV is false.
Mitch gave a first hand example of this (which was confirmed by the people at Sony). Adam also mentioned how different DV codecs will interpret/display the 1’s and 0’s stored on a DV tape. If the same DV tape was played back in the same DV deck and captured over the same FW cable you could get one result in FCP Legend, a different result in Avid and a different result using Matrox’s DV codec. And if you capture over SDI instead of FW that’s another set of different results. To Walter’s point, those 1’s and 0’s have to be turned into an image in order to be viewable and there are variables with regards to how the image is decompressed, manipulated and then displayed.
I know the article I posted by Graeme Nattress is long, but you can just skim through the side-by-side image comparisons to see the different in the chroma. Again, capturing via SDI didn’t add in any additional info, but it presented the available image info in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion by smoothing the chroma a bit. If A looks better than B then most people would assume that A is higher quality than B even if the same amount of visual information is being presented.
Adam also highlighted the perceived image quality superiority of BetaSP over DV. It wasn’t because BetaSP could retain more image information than DV but because the artificating in BetaSP was more aesthetically pleasing than DV. This made the BetaSP look higher quality even if it wasn’t resolving more image detail than DV. My point being that it’s not just about retaining the available image quality but also maintaining the perceived image quality by keeping digital artifiacting to a minimum.
Also, your exchange with Adam only touched on one aspect of compression which contained around the amount of detail in the image. Again, I’d like to know what the bitrate threshold is for H.264 not to fall apart when a bunch of flashbulbs go off. VHS won’t fall it apart (it will just clip) but when an LGOP codec becomes bit-starved the image turns to macro block mush. Maybe H.264 has improve so much over MPEG2 that it’s not really anything to be concerned about anymore. I don’t know as I haven’t done any tests with it.
And nobody has really talked about scaling even though that’s a big part of retaining as much image quality as possible when going from SD to HD. If someone takes an DV tape and makes an SD H.264 file how well would that scale up to HD vs an SD ProRes file scaling up to HD? The best cause would of course be to do the SD->HD scaling during the initial transcode process but if space is an issue then that may not be an option. I dunno, just brain storming.
-Andrew
-
[Adam Spencer] “I’d love to drop down to 2.5″,”
Why?
Speaking in generalities, the only advantage to a 2.5″ drive is lower power consumption. A 3.5″ drive will be faster and less expensive for the same amount of storage.