Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Jules bowman] “Doomsayer Bill”
Tres Cool!
I haven’t had an official nickname since my post college roommate (a US Marine ex embassy guard) insisted on giving me one. Go figure.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Jules bowman] “Wow, Bill, that is the best you’ve ever posted.
In fact, given you can now communicate with absolutely authority for both yourself and everyone else, this forum is pretty much done. You can just post both sides of the debate with us certain in the knowledge that you are absolutely correct, in an almost godlike way, and we can just read the outcome.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
“Both castigated and humbled, my only recourse is to go back to posting from a totally polarized view, I guess.
I will henceforth play the same game as others here, posting only after each and every one of my thoughts has been fully vetted to give no quarter to any viewpoint other than my own.
Thanks for showing me the way Jules.
And how silly of me to try to express sympathy or appreciation for any other software company or approach in a posting.
Whatever was I thinking?!?
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Note that in the ad, they fail to mention that a 3 light rig like that will run one north of $5000.
At some point, LED based fresnels will get realistic pricing as the competition increases and the economies of scale kick in.
Right now, unless you’re paying a whole lot for your electricity – it’s going to take a while before the ROI makes sense for these.
I was also interested at NAB to see that some manufacturers are using the traditional “deep” lens and movable socket form factor, but others are looking at a flatter fixture that still manages to focus via the lens.
Here’s an iPhone snap of one of the flat fixture forms.
4031_ledfresnel.jpg.zipThe times they are a-changing.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Mark,
I believe it’s because they’re hand sewn by underage fairies who’ve been consecrated by the Gnome God.
It’s got to be something like that.
Or maybe that there’s no good machine approach to creating fabric squares in that configuration and it requires tedious human labor?
Just guessing on both counts.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Craig,
That makes sense.
Look, Adobe has valuable products. I don’t begrudge them for one second looking for ways to generate a revenue stream that supports their operations as a developer of useful software.
And for many users, this subscription service will be an extremely useful way to insure that they always have the most up to date and current software products to learn and work with.
It’s a change in emphasis from an ecosystem of support for ownership – to a “lease to use” model.
Both are fair. Both have value. The user gets to choose.
No harm, no foul as far as I can see.
Simple as that.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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I had a project a project six months ago that required Photoshop.
(I used it for about a decade, then didn’t have on-going needs, so I let my ownership lapse.)
Rather than plunking down hundreds for a program I use infrequently, I used Adobe’s then nacient cloud “subscription” service.
It worked fine.
But I realized that like all other rental agreements, it only made actual economic sense if I was an infrequent user of the item being rented. A few short years of rental payments was the equivalent of buying it. And after 10 years (the term I used Photoshop for in the 1990s, the cost of rentals would have far, far outstripped the cost of purchase plus upgrades.
The vendor makes a whole lot more money over time – while saving a huge amount on the costs of production and distribution.
That’s essentially the App store model. But in the app store, the prices are substantially low to address this new distribution reality. I believe that’s a large part of why FCP-X is only $299. It’s still wildly profitably at that price since the bulk of the distribution costs have vanished.
Eventually I simply bought Pixelmator via the App store which does about 75% of the core functions of PS but costs only 3 months the rental price – takes up less code space, is more modern, and loads and runs faster for me.
It’s absolutely NOT as full featured, and certainly not as “standard” as PS. So there are plenty of arguments against this path. But the point is that “Apps in the cloud” are inarguably convenient – but I don’t believe they represent a very good deal overall as subscriptions – only as a distribution medium.
YMMV.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Tony Sarafoski] “I’ve played around with this a few times now, however the thing I don’t like, is there’s no upload monitor when it begins uploading to YouTube or Vimeo.
The other was that it completely ties up FCPX not allowing me to do anything else.”
Agreed in both cases. The first, particularly can be a problem. But if it bothers you – you can always work the original way by Sharing out to the desktop and uploading the traditional way via the Vimeo or YouTube direct upload – so it’s an optional convenience, not a requirement. I also usually upload from my laptop – and go back to work on my desktop – so it’s not such a big deal for me to wait for the upload to complete.
[Tony Sarafoski] “Bill I’m a little confused with this part. When you upload to YouTube or Vimeo via FCPX, it’s unusable till this finishes?
“No, in X, when you publish, you’re concurrently refreshing the available version in your Project Library – so you have a persistent “display” of all your current projects easily accessible. Sharing them (to YouTube or elsewhere – exports that version directly, without leaving the timeline. If you want to export and get back to work, you can do the same thing you did in Legacy and make a standalone file to work with outside X, but it generally takes essentially the SAME amount of encoding time to just post out of X that it doest to export to the desktop, so X is simply saving you an unnecessary step.
[Tony Sarafoski] “Ah yes… thought so. I’m working on testimonials for a website and was thinking this would have come in really handy.”
Just create an empty project. Copy and paste any part of any other project to it – then share that via email. Then delete and replace that clip (not the project, no need for that – it’s just a temporary container in this use) with a new one, and do the same again. Repete as needed. Your original clips never actually leave their original project.
It’s the way you share “parts” of projects out of X rather than the “range export” that we had in legacy.
Working across and understanding Projects is a bit different than always working inside the “one at a time” timelines of Legacy – but it’s no less efficient in my experience.
Hope that helps.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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I’m looking forward to seeing the feature set of this.
And I honestly hope it’s fine software and meets the needs of many, many editors.
But I will also point out that if this was a rollout for Apple – there would be countless loud voices here speculating (unfairly I might add) that the fact that they couldn’t do this in time for NAB is a clear sign that the entire development effort is understaffed, underfunded, and a sure sign of the ineptness of everything the dev team stands for. Hundreds of post would follow trying to to parse out what caused the “delay” – why this important software wan’t totally finished and ready for prime time for a formal roll-out at NAB.
Those voices would have been wrong – and for whoever reasons Adobe chooses to release their software whenever and however they choose is up to them – and I don’t think it means squat.
And for the formal record, I personally hope CS-6 launches and is a success. I believe more good choices are always better than fewer in any marketplace.
But if it was an Apple release you can bet your boots all of that would be part of the discussion here.
Just sayin’.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Herb Sevush] “When they re-do this very important consumer Ap, we’ll see if they also make it incompatible with the previous version and require users to reload everything and throw out all their song lists.
“Sounds a bit like the iCloud rollout to me.
; )
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Herb Sevush] “Adobe and Avid among many others have managed to upgrade their basic software without destroying the workflow of their users. Apple chose not to, basically because Steve Jobs found it hard to edit his family’s home movies. Now there’s a great reason for change.”
Upgrade yes. Transform no. Different approaches.
And I’ve never read a single thing about Steve Jobs ever editing a home movie.
Randy Ubillos noted that he was frustrated that iMovie was overly complex for a simple home vacation video edit – so he based part of the big re-write that became iMovie 08 on that premis.
But I don’t recall SJ ever mentioning video editing in any quote I ever read.
SJ pretty much created Apple’s unique 20th century business success by making it easier for people to get better results from their digital tools.
So actually, smart simplification has proved to be an extremely excellent reason for change – and one that vast numbers of people have rewarded with continued patronage.
What’s proving problematic is designing software for a small elite cadre of users who’s economic impact pales in relation to the development resources required to serve their niche requirements. For good or ill, fulfilling the software needs of the top 10% of working editors may not be a sustainable model for software development.
If I’m wrong, then Smoke and Premier should have a chance to inherit a nice chunk of 2 million Legacy users over the next couple of years. But evidence of that is extremely scant.
A drop from 54% o 52% as discussed in Phil Hodgetts recent quoted post here just isn’t going to budge a needle enough to notice.
This is totally anecdotal but it came from a different but similarly well-connected friend at NAB. He asked me to guess how many seats of AVID they sold when they were offering their recent cross-grade deal to individual new retail customers.
His answer honestly shocked me. It was in the SINGLE digits. Like less than 10.
That’s pretty scary if it’s true.
And unless Premier is doing many many orders of magnitude better than that (and I honestly hope they are) how long can they support the constant and on-going development required of any software company faced with the pace of hardware revision we see today?
We’ll know the truth as the years unfold I guess.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor