Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
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Thanks for the video. I’ll have to workflow test this for an upcoming project. Another editor and I were going to get up to give X a shot because of the fast export times, but if the PPro tests come back this fast on my end too then we’ll just stick with PPro (which we both know).
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[Craig Seeman] “So you would blamed FCP legacy for its $1000 price point because Avid was tens of thousands of dollars or would you blame Media 100 because it was thousands compared to Avid’s tens of thousands of dollars?
Or do you blame that digital video because it was significantly cheaper than 35mm film (or even 16mm film for news and indies)?”
I think the lower prices created more jobs and, apparently software only companies are still finding viable business models.”
There’s healthy competition and there’s unhealthy competition and I think the current state of competition in the creative professional software space (and in software in general) is headed down the unhealthy road (which will be to the detriment of end users/consumers in the long run). There’s a big difference between charging $1000 plus a few hundred every couple years for upgrades and charging $299 once, or nothing at all, and leveraging 1st party vender lock-in based hardware sales to make up for it.
Yes, software only companies are still finding viable business models, but they are getting demonized for it even though it’s a required reaction to changes in the marketplace (such as those caused by companies like BM and Apple). To the point of everyone that hates Adobe’s business model makes, yes at some moment in time it’s not going to make sense to pay for an ongoing subscription when you can get something like FCP X or Resolve for peanuts (and I wouldn’t be surprised to see BM eventually drop the price of Resolve to be cheaper than FCP X). So what’s Adobe’s play then?
Let’s say they take a page out of BM’s book and buy AJA and Tangent. Adobe becomes a hardware company that sells the entire Adobe software suite for $250 (and gives a away a free version that just has a few high end features missing). Tangent panels now only work with Adobe software and if you need any sort of video I/O you can only use AJA products. Both BM’s and Adobe’s support of their hardware with third party software is spotty best because they’d rather you use Resolve or PPro respectively.
So now, as consumers, we are stuck having to choose between purposefully incompatible ecosystems again even though one of the best things about the desktop NLE revolution was that these arbitrary hardware barriers were broken down allowing us to easily, and affordably, pick and choose the best tools for each situation. And what about smaller competitors like Pixelmator or Affinity? When the entire Adobe suite is only $250 (or free) for life I’m sure demand for up and coming competitors like those will contract significantly.
As consumers/end users we end up with fewer options and no real incentive for new competitors to enter the fray. That doesn’t strike me as a good thing, but maybe that’s just the inevitable conclusion to a maturing industry in this day and age?
For simplicity’s sake I left Avid out of the discussion, but I think at this point Avid is the least likely to be pushing market trends/change/disruption compared to Adobe, Apple and BM.
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[Bill Davis] “My concern has always been that the largest group of grumblers here are those truck drivers”
For the demo that kicked off this thread though it’s clearly a trucker talking to other truckers about trucking. Josh made it very clear that his talk was limited to higher end, scripted TV/Film editing in major US markets.
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[Bill Davis] “No need to address anything here, except to note that anyone who feels X is “too cheap” to be any good, must therefore find Resolve Basic “worthless?””
No, because it already achieved a high level of brand recognition before the price cuts. Same reason Shake, Fusion, MC, PS, Teranex, etc., aren’t seen as ‘cheap’ tools even though they’re all more affordable now than ever.
On a more general level though, I think the software price race to the bottom is bad for the industry (and thus bad for end users) long term. It devalues the products and leaves software-only makers with no choice but to go subscription, freemium, ad-supported, etc., because there’s no way to compete with companies like Apple or BM literally giving away software for free.
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[Neil Goodman] “Editors need a reason to switch – a bunch of people saying “hey look its faster”, month after month for the last 7 years obviously hasn’t made a difference to them or overridden the bad rep it got at the start.”
I’ll riff on this a second and say that a “reason to switch” typically needs to be something so broken in their current workflow that they are actively looking for alternatives. Someone trying to sell them a solution to a problem they don’t have (or don’t think they have) isn’t likely to get very far. This is why the comparisons to FCP Legend’s adoption rate are so fraught with holes. It’s not that ‘X is so different it scares people’ it’s that circumstances that existed in the early-to-mid 2000s don’t exist today.
With that being said, I agree that large swath of the editing community doesn’t follow every update to every NLE so I’m not surprised that FCP X is still feeling the effects of the not-so-great launch in 2011 (as they say, “You don’t get a second change to make a first impression”). So I think there is a need for education/getting the word out there about how things have changed, though there’s no point in being heavy handed about it. If the people you are talking to are receptive, great. If not, don’t waste time trying to badger/brow beat them into agreeing with you. It won’t work and it will likely just add to the negative association they already have with X.
I still run into people that complain about how horrible Avid is because they were wronged by Avid in 2003 or what a POS Windows is even though they haven’t touched it since Windows ME. It is what it is.
And it’s not like editors are the only people like this. Anyone that has spent time, money, effort, etc., on something (as a professional, hobbyist, amateur, etc.,) is likely to have a strong opinion on what they think works vs what they think doesn’t work (or doesn’t work as well). For example, I recently did a bit of DIY work on some hardscaping and in my Googling came across a number of very spirited discussions about whether or not you should use deck screws or nails (or a combination of both) when building a deck.
I really liked the realistic, pragmatic approach that Josh Beal took in his demo. I think if we need more demos like that and less tribal pontificating.
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[Oliver Peters] “Well, at least after Jobs came back. I known plenty of folks (me included) with scrapped knuckles and sliced fingers after working on 9500, 9600, etc series Macs.”
Agreed.
An interesting aside about Jobs (and this is mainly source from the biography that came out a few years ago) is his problems balancing making the products he wanted and making products that were commercially viable. A big reason for his ouster from Apple is that his vision for the Macintosh kept blowing the budget and he wasn’t willing to bend. With Pixar, he basically told Lasseter and company to make great stories and don’t worry about costs which lead to some great stories, but also a some great costs This setup Disney buying Pixar in the 90’s. NeXT was more of the same.
I think tech advances, Ive’s minimalist designs, and Cooks supply chain management help usher in the success of Jobs 2.0 at Apple.
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[Scott Thomas] “I stopped listening after the author called Apple “luxury”. That is BS. In my opinion, Apple is egalitarian.”
Jobs might have envisioned the Mac as “the computer for the rest of us” but that was in terms of usability, not price. Apple products have always been positioned as a premium brand. Apple never competed with Dell or Compaq or IBM in the race to the bottom. I remember when Dell started pummeling the market with $300-$400 computers and Apple responded by making the eMac available to the general public at the low, low price of of $1000 (which made it the least expensive Mac at the time). Later $500 would get you a Mac Mini, or $500 would get you a PC that came with a keyboard, mouse, monitor and most likely a printer.
The high margins and PR/marketing that elevated the Mac to more than ‘just a computer’ obviously paid off well for Apple. And to be fair the fit and finish on Apple products is, or at least used to be, much better than on other competition. I remember opening up my old dual CPU G4 tower for the first time and being amazed and how the build quality and attention to detail was so much better than what my experience had been with Gate, Dell and HP.
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[Bill Davis] “But Simon, the mechamism to address this is already firmly In place.
If Apple isn’t serving their customers in a way that meets those customers needs, another vendor will inevitably come along and out-compete them.
There’s no lack of competing brands, after all.
In this era Computers aren’t magical obscure devices, they’re standard retail products.
If another company steps up to design better, manufacturer better, market better, or simply out hustle Apple, they presumably should start to sell better as well.
Last time I looked, nobody was standing outside Apple Stores forcing customers inside.”
Except Apple has been creating an ecosystem with higher and higher walls for the last fifteen years or so with the explicit purpose of making it increasingly painful for customers to move away from the platform. Whether it’s HomePod stiff-arming 3rd party music streaming services or Shake for Windows being killed, Apple keeps burning bridges to non-Apple options.
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[Herb Sevush] “Good enough is for when you don’t have any other options – due to money, size, availability. If you can afford better options, then “good enough” ain’t good enough.”
Exactly. Because budgets are finite, schedules don’t always mesh, and deadlines are real everyone arrives at ‘good enough’ sooner or later. Maybe ‘good enough’ is an iPhone, maybe it’s an Alexa, maybe it’s 35mm. Why doesn’t every project shoot on 70mm IMAX? Because it’s overkill for 99.9% of the projects out there which means something ‘inferior’ to 70mm IMAX is, wait for it, good enough. ????
I know this is mostly a semantic argument, but I’m just always amused when someone says, ‘We only offer the best to our clients’ when what they really mean is ‘We only offer the best to our clients… based on limitations such as budget, talent/equipment availability, and delivery deadlines.’
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Something I find interesting is how ‘good enough’ gets tossed around as negative term yet everyone lands on good enough eventually because projects have finite budgets and deadlines. If one has a client that needs a corporate training video created is one going to pitch them on getting Christopher Nolan to direct it, Rodger Deakons to shoot it in 70mm IMAX, Walter Murch to cut, and Morgan Freeman to narrate it because anything less would be settling for ‘good enough’? ????
Everything from sync-sound 35mm film to desktop publishing to the DV revolution is a product of ‘good enough’ yet all of those are seen as watershed moments in our industry, not poo-pooed for not offering the best solutions money could buy.
Different projects have different needs so while shooting on an iPhone or GoPro might work in one situation it might not work in another. Sure Soderbergh shot “Unsane” on an iPhone. He also shot “Full Frontal” on MiniDV. He does it to experiment with different looks, different tech, and different ways of working, not because he’s thinks they are replacements for 35mm film or an Arri Alexa. It’s an artistic, stylistic choice that’s not rooted in objective quality.
[Neil Goodman] “I don’t know, I like reading from all different scopes of post and in this thread, lots of pre pro. Im in such a narrow lane of post that I learn a lot from you guys and your specific disciplines…”
I agree. I like being exposed to the variety of workflows, projects, and editorial choices that are here. If someone is looking for advice about a specific niche/workflow they can just start a thread on it.