Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
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[Mathieu Ghekiere] “For a freelancer, much less so.”
I think it depends on the individual situation. For example, with the freelance work I’ve been doing in LA I’ve found that being flexible is very important (in the past two weeks I’ve used FCP 7, PPro and Avid) and that means NLEs having a lower cost of entry is very advantageous.
I don’t remember the math off hand, but I think the break even point for an Adobe subscription vs the old perpetual license cost is something like 6 or 7yrs (assuming you upgraded every year). Maybe I’ll subscribe to CC continuously for that long, maybe I won’t. The NLE market is changing so much in my neck of the woods (just look at all that’s happened since 2010) that trying to guess what NLE I’ll be using in 2020 is just about pointless. Doing the work I do in LA it’s a pretty safe bet that Avid will still be a widely used in the year 2020, but beside that it’s a total crap shoot.
Other people might have more control over which NLE they use so projecting long term can be a bit easier, but for me I wouldn’t even try to guess beyond 2-3yrs.
[Bill Davis] “Yes Andrew, but you were conditioned that the tools and the seat would be the property of the COMPANY. If anything has changed over the past decade it’s the end of the “only a commercial enterprise can afford the means of production” era.
I’d say I was exposed to it more than conditioned to it because I’ve had a foot in both worlds for a long time. For example, around the century (I love being able to use that phrase) I built a PC running Premiere (the old Premiere) with a Matrox RT2500 card for I/O and hardware acceleration to cut my own projects, but at the day job they leased all their Avid hardware.
Off-the-shelf desktop hardware becoming ‘good enough’ certainly broadened the playing field and allowed a much more ‘horses for courses’ type approach as opposed to the one size fits for all, ‘big iron’ approach of the past when the investment in all the required gear was such a massive expensive.
But coming back to my point, if I had only been exposed to the “I’ve always owned what I use on a daily basis” scenario then I would think what Adobe is doing is completely out of left field, but I wasn’t so I don’t.
What happens when the “hot editor” can simply come with his or her workstation in a bag, jack in – and contribute at the same level as the dedicated suite editor of today? Or even drop in via Skype, edit and upload a scene and log off?
“It depends on the situation. If all that is required from the hot editor is a final QT then the bring-your-own-NLE approach works very well. But what happens when the hot editor has to conform to an existing workflow but doesn’t have a copy of the required NLE? Certainly a case can be made for renting/subscribing being a better solution to that problem than having to pay full price for a perpetual license that you might only use for a matter of weeks.
I ran into a situation kinda like that last year. Long story short, I came in as a 2nd editor on a doc (working out of the company’s office, the main editor worked from home) and it was only for a couple of months so they subscribed to Avid MC for the two months as opposed to buying a perpetual license. After the project ended everything got boxed back up and put into storage (the director/producer only rents office space when projects are in post).
[Bill Davis] “Everything current I read about “big time” editing now seems to be a management team in LA, the Director in London, the EFX crew in Bangkok and what does it really matter where the editor is sitting? I know corporate cutters in Albuquerque working with scene loggers in Birmingham, England. “
It depends. It matters if the people involved want to make it matter. AFAIK much of the FX work that gets farmed to India or Southeast Asia is more along the lines of manual labor (wire removal, rotoscoping, etc.,) where as the final touches and more skill/creative work is done more local to where the production is based. Same thing when there was an animation work exodus in the 90’s to the same region. The creative work was done in Hollywood, but the actual coloring of the animation was done overseas. Apple is another example. Their products (besides the nMP) say “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China” on the back.
FWIW I’ve read that some big VFX shops in India and SE Asia that sprouted up 5-10yrs ago to do Hollywood movies have started shuttering recently. I’m not exactly sure why but I assume part of it is that the labor isn’t as cheap as it used to be (and it has to be really cheap to make sense). That’s a big reason why Vancouver’s film/TV industry, which was called ‘Hollywood North’ in the 90’s, crashed. The exchange rate between the Dollar and the Looney started evening out and more US (and Canadian) municipalities started offering film financing kickbacks. When Vancouver stopped being ridiculously cheap productions moved on to greener pastures. But now I’m just rambling…
Getting back to editing remotely, it really depends on the people involved in the project. For example, I do a lot of doc work where the producers/directors are very personally invested in the project so bringing in an editor is like bringing in a new member to the family. It’s not taken lightly so trying to score that gig from 1000 miles away is incredibly difficult. And on the flip side I’ve landed other types of gigs after only a phone interview. Just boils down to the situation and those involved.
One of my long term goals when I moved to LA was to build up a network and then hopefully be able to someplace else once technology made remote editing feasible. The longer I’m out here the less likely I see that as happening because of the type work I typically do it. Even when tech makes remote editing viable I still need to be local to continue to seek out, create, and cultivate these personal connections.
[Bill Davis] “Office space is EXPENSIVE. I know because I paid for it for 20 plus years. Thank you, no thank you. Not any more.”
I’ll have to take your word for it as I either edit out of my home or out of someone else’s office.
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X is the NLE that has a magnetic timeline like that. If you want to do an insert/ripple edit while dragging clips around the timeline in PPro just hold down the Command key (I assume you are using a Mac, not Windows). If you grab and move a clip in the timeline you’ll see mouse change to an ‘overwrite’ icon by default. If you hold down the Command key the icon changes to an insert edit icon. The timeline won’t animate like FCP X so you won’t see clips moving out of the way but when you do the insert edit everything to the right of the new clip will be moved down the timeline. Just like if you were doing an insert edit from the Source window.
S (and the magnet icon) are for snapping to the head/tail of clips. The insert/overwrite icon next to the magnet is for editing one sequence into another (you can either chose to have the sequence edited in as a nested sequence or as the individual clips that make up that sequence).
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[John Rofrano] “What if every application and plug-in on your Mac demanded a monthly fee. How expensive would it be to use a computer?”
Of course a bit of irony is people loving Apple and Blackmagic’s business model while condemning Adobe’s even though the inexpensive-software-that-requires-our-hardware approach is helping to drive down software prices, which makes it harder for software companies to make money, which is part of the reason we are seeing more software companies explore other business models such as subscriptions, freemium and ad supported.
And it’s not just in post. The devaluation of software (and IP in general) is happening across the board (from video games to business apps to software for post/production).
The doom-and-gloom of all software being subscription would be bad, but so would all software being tied to specific hardware. I, for one, don’t want to go back to the days of needing this card for Product X, that card for Product Y and of course the cards conflict with each other so you can’t have both products installed on the same machine at the same time. I’m already running into a bit of this with Resolve. The BM products I’ve used have been flakey with Avid and PPro but Resolve won’t work with AJA.
In the parts of the industry I came up in it was normal for the Avid’s to be rented/leased so not owning your NLE wasn’t a foreign concept to me when Adobe when subscription only.
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[John Rofrano] “That’s what Adobe has turned it into isn’t it? It’s not about the tools. It’s about whether you can agree to pay a monthly subscription fee or risk that your tools will stop working completely.”
I don’t think it’s really any different than deciding that Company X’s software is overprice for what you get so you don’t buy it, or you disagree with Company Y’s business practices so you don’t do business with them. I mean, I know people that avoid Windows because they are still mad that MS ‘stole’ the GUI concept from Apple (whom of course ‘stole’ it from Xerox), and people that still avoid Avid because of bad customer relations from nearly a decade ago. The decisions have little to do with the products themselves but a lot to do with the company behind the products.
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In the past 10 days I have hopped between three different jobs on three different NLEs (FCP 7, PPro, Avid). Haven’t done anything beyond basic poking around in X due to being busy and the lack of demand for editors that know X in my neck of the woods.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Obviously, FCP is entirely too professional to be on the very consumer and hardware centric apple.com homepage.”
As I quipped in a previous post, Apple just knows that pros are diligent enough that they’ll keep going until they find what they need. 😉
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Apple.com/finalcutpro is still the website, and has been for a decade. “
Memorizing specific ULRs and using the App Store are interesting work arounds to Apple’s poor site navigation although they have limits (ex. you already need to know what you are looking for and the app store is obviously Mac only).
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[Steve Connor] “Did Apple ever advertise FCP in the Broadcast & Film trade magazines? I seem to remember seeing adverts for “Classic” FCP somewhere”
I believe so, and they also used to attend conventions like NAB.
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[Bill Davis] “Apple doesn’t LOVE us enough to make this easier.”
Close. Apple doesn’t make enough money anymore from people buying Pro Apps or Mac Pros to warrant much of a marketing push. Hence the discussion about product visibility between Rich, Oliver, Mark and Shane and my subsequent example of how info about the ProApps is really buried on Apple’s site where it used to be much more accessible.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t like the times I’d go to Apple.com and see a info about a FCP update gracing the front page.
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[Bill Davis] “X has always been a vastly more capable video editing app than it has gotten credit for.
A large portion of the negativity that still surrounds its reputation is undeserved.
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Is that any clearer for you?”
Much, thank you. And I agree that X has never been as bad as it’s most negative detractors try and paint it and that Apple getting X off on the wrong foot still negatively impacts it to this day. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impress, as they say.
[Bill Davis] “a direct contradiction of the message “It’s not good enough for pro work” which is constantly implied in this forum “
Outside a few posters I don’t see that blanket statement here much these days. People might mention particular workflows where other NLEs might be be better options, but I think lumping the whole forum into the ‘it’s not good enough for pro work’ category is inaccurate.