Andrew Kimery
Forum Replies Created
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Oliver,
Thank you for links!Michael,
I’d love to see a write up about your experiences if you have the time to do a write up.Thank you everyone for chiming in. Sorry I haven’t been able to be more active in the discussion.
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Michael,
I don’t suppose you have links to any articles/blogs about people using Resolve primarily as an NLE and/or DAW do you? For Avid, FCP X and PPro it’s easy to find ‘case studies’ (across the world) but even on the Resolve FB group I’m part of (I think it has around 15k members) almost all of the talk is about the grading side of Resolve (or tech questions of course). I’ve yet to stumble across posts about people using it for primarily NLE or DAW work.David,
Could you expand more on what you think Grant meant by ‘traditional’ NLE? Did he mean an NLE that was primarily focused on editing while capable of doing other things ‘good enough’ like audio mixing, GFX/VFX, color grading, etc.,? -
The anecdotes from Shane and Michael are exactly my point. BM gets an insane amount of ink with every update to Resolve, but when it comes to finding users in the wild it’s always ‘I know a guy who know’s a guy’. ???? The real world usage just doesn’t seem proportionate to how excited we get about the strides that Resolve is making.
I remember at NAB in 2015 (when Resolve added multicam as well as a bunch of audio and general playback improvements) everyone was talking about it being the year Resolve breaks out… but not so much. Eventually it will be ‘the year’… or maybe not. ????
[Walter Soyka] ” I think the Good Enough Revolution favors the all-in-one approach.”
I agree, though I don’t know how compatible Blackmagic’s approach is with the Good Enough Revolution. The GER in video post seems to centered around a strong NLE that has ‘good enough’ abilities in audio, grading, GFX/VFX, etc.,., with the trade off being that the tools are slimmed down (‘good enough’) and easier to use, but at the cost of having limited breadth and depth compared to stand alone audio, grading and GFX/VFX apps. For example, getting up to speed on the first party color tools in X or PPro in order to get good enough results will take much less time than teaching someone how to use Resolve.
Blackmagic is coming at this from a different angle though by pretty much putting four stand alone apps inside of Resolve. From their own marketing material, ” It’s like getting 4 high end professional applications for the cost of one!” The GER approach doesn’t jive though with having to learn multiple high end apps (with their breadth and depth) in order to get your work done.
Blackmagic’s ideal situation seems to be the vision of a post house full of NLE, DAW, grading, GFX/VFX specialists that will all use Resolve for their respective disciplines. The major hurdle here is of course getting all those different specialists to use the tools BM is offering. It’s the same hurdle Apple faced with getting specialists to use Soundtrack Pro or Motion, and the same hurdle that Adobe still faces today with apps like Audition (and formerly PPro). An ecosystem is only a selling point if everyone wants to join the ecosystem.
On an related note, I’ve seen two video editing jobs at Apple pop up in the past few months and both of them were looking for people with FCP X, PPro and AE skills. No mention of Motion. I don’t think that’s a slight at Motion’s capabilities, I think it’s more of an indication that the talent pool for Motion users isn’t as broad or deep as the talent pool for AE users. If the best talent available doesn’t use Resolve are you going to go with them and their software of choice, or are you going to keep going down the talent ladder until you find someone that uses Resolve (neither is the right, or wrong, approach for all situations)?
Assuming that Resolve as an NLE, DAW, GFX/VFX, grading super-tool does catch on then I think it’s a big problem for all post software venders as even pay-once-upgrade-forever FCP X is way over priced by comparison.
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Between independent contractors and staff employees there also sit freelance/temp employees. Almost every editing gig out here in LA is for a temp/freelance employee. I know some editors that form an S-corp and then loan themselves out to work on productions, but I’m hearing about fewer and fewer production companies willing to do loan outs. For a number of years the state has been cracking down on employers initially misclassifying employees as ICs so production companies only hire people as employees (freelance/temp, not staff) so there’s no gray area that might attract the state’s attention.
At least in LA I’ve noticed a pattern where Company X starts out paying a third party/IC to make their videos and then they need so many videos that they create an in-house, staff video team to get costs under control. After they build out the in-house team they realize that they don’t need all these staffers all the time, and it’s getting quite expensive, so they lay off all but a skeleton crew and the hire freelance/temp employees as needed. Some of the ‘temp’ employees actually end up working there for years (known as perma-lance) but they never get any staff benefits because they aren’t technically staff. The Company then gets the great idea to categorize their freelance/permalance/temp employees as ICs so that they can save even more money by not paying payroll taxes. Eventually this gets back to the proper authorities at which point the company hires the freelance/permalance/temp as full time staffers.
But they know they don’t need all these staffers all the time, and it’s getting quite expensive, so they lay off all but a skeleton crew and the hire freelance/temp employees as needed…
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[greg janza] “There seems to be a fair amount of amnesia here with people forgetting that NLE software used to cost real money. Today even the Adobe CC subscription is a nominal business expense.”
If FCP X (plus say another $300 worth of plugins/software) met all of one’s editing needs why would one pay $600/yr for PPro instead $600 once for the FCP X based solution? If Resolve Studio met all of one’s editing needs why would one pay $600 for the FCP X solution instead of $299 for Resolve Studio? If Resolve Free met all of one’s editing needs why would one pay $299 for Resolve Studio?
While talking about what things used to cost ‘back in the day’ can be fun, it’s not really relevant when discussing contemporary pricing on contemporary products, IMO. The number of people that remember, or even care, that Avids used to run into the six figure price range is only going to get smaller while the number of people that care about the contemporary pricing of software is only going to get bigger.
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It probably varies a lot by location. In Los Angeles, for example, staff gigs are rare (and have been for decades). Some places run ‘permalance’ (hiring ‘temp’ employees and keeping them on indefinitely because they don’t get staff benefits) and others misclassify freelance employees as contractors (1099) so they weasel out of payroll taxes.
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[Bill Davis] “Ships or rail cars arriving with goods, storage warehouses across regions feeding hub distribution centers – those feeding regional and local DCs – further feeding stores with weekly re-stocks. Vast networks of trucks, drivers, and tens of thousands of workers, just to get the box onto the shelf in your neighborhood – and enable your purchase.
Now it’s one click and $299 gets exchanged for some IP, digitally.”
All good points, though Tim Cook comes from the Just In Time inventory management school so there is minimal stock sitting in warehouses, and compared to monitors, laptops, iMacs, desktops, etc., that Apple is also shipping I can’t imagine copies of FCP Legend really being impactful.
Also, AFAIK, Apple’s never really had a traditional relationship with retail (it’s generally been mail-order, store w/in a store, authorized resellers, or their first party stores) so they might not have the same amount of overhead since they’ve tried to minimize the role of middlemen? Economies of scale come into play too so a massive company like Apple or Electronic Arts is going to be spending less, relatively speaking, on shipping than small company.
For books (link), video games (link), and CDs (link) the costs for physical creation, shipping, etc., are a much lower than 75% price drop from FCP Studio to FCP X that are you largely atributing to the move from physical to download distribution. The CD article is very old article, but the song remains the same (pun intended).
There is also this really great quote from it, “The really big costs of CD’s derive from marketing, promotion, artists’ fees, royalties and, often, an arbitrary markup representing a calculated guess at what the market will bear.” I find the part about the markup fascinating because we diverge from objectivity to subjectivity . “How much did this cost to produce, market, distribute, etc.,” is a much different question than “What’s the most we can convince out target demo to pay for this product regardless of how much it cost use to make it?”
It’s that subjectivity that has helped keep prices for books/ebooks, CDs/downloads, and video games pretty consistent for decades. For example, what a console video game is ‘worth’ today is about $60 (and it’s basically been that way for nearly 15 years). The subjectivity also gives companies the ability to drastically alter prices while still, depending on the business model, keeping the product profitable (or not profitable if it’s being buoyed by another part of the company). I think Apple deciding that an NLE is ‘worth’ $299 and ditching all of the other software that used to be park of the FCP Studio bundle has more to do with X costing what it does than COG savings.
On a related note, since we are people that help create intangible things for a living, I think it’s important to remember (and stress to clients) that the created content is vastly more valuable than the medium that it’s stored/distributed on. And that the most valuable part of the ‘cost’ related to the creation of that content is the human component. “I charge a lot because my gear costs a lot” is a creaky position as technology changes quicker and quicker, where as “I charge a lot because my talent, experience, and knowledge will net you a great ROI” with weather changes much better.
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That’s great news! Though hopefully they will offer hardcopy copies (collector’s editions?) that have all the bonus content. People who really like and/or want to support the film will buy them and the margins will be much better than what they get from Amazon or Apple.
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[Joe Marler] “So in the independent documentary world, I’m not sure you can say not offering a rental option at release time is unusual. “
Some musicians (like Prince, the Beatles, etc.,) didn’t want their music made available for online streaming or download but I don’t think that was representative of musicians as a whole. ????
[Joe Marler] “Whether they release it on DVD, stream it, rent it, sell it or give it away is up to the filmmaker.”
Yup. All I said was that I’d rent it for a couple of bucks.
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[Bill Davis] “I think you (and maybe Shane too) are going to be very surprised when you finally see it.
Cuz you aren’t describing the movie I just saw very accurately at all.”Possibly, of course you and I have different opinions on FCP X, Apple, the botched launch, X users being victims, etc., so I wouldn’t be surprised if we have different opinions on the doc.
Go figure.