Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Andrew Richards] “Aye, there’s the rub. Who in the Post business isn’t particularly price sensitive?”
Plenty of folks. for someone who’s just signed a deal for 26 episodes of a TV show – I suspect the problem isn’t “how much is each seat.” but much more – how fast can you get me up and running and can you assure me it will work perfectly right out of the gate.
Horses for courses.
“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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[Walter Soyka] “Coupled with Apple’s how-low-can-you-go pricing, I can understand why someone might want to think twice before funding development.”
Walter,
If Apple is anything like all the other large companies I’ve worked with — including a few who went through formal “efficient assortment” and similar pricing initiatives that are commonly used by large firms to develop price points) — I don’t think the $299 price for FCP-X is a “how low can they go” deal at all.
I imagine that they looked at all the typical pricing metrics before they set that price. They looked at how much development, sales and maintenance overhead they needed to cover – calculated likely sales verses profit metrics – and settled on a price that met their goals.
The big driver was their ownership of the “end to end” supply chain represented by the iTunes store. THAT is the huge Apple competitive advantage that makes a modern price like $299 for a sophisticated piece of software like X possible.
Believe me, I’ve done enough “supply chain” videos to understand something about how large scale pricing works. Apple can make PLENTY of margin on $299 if they come in at the point on their proposed demand curve where features and price present a compelling “buy” decision for the largest group of customers.
No product – at the high or low end of any line – can escape this. As price falls, costs and demand must BOTH be balanced. The companies that do this best, are those that establish a superior value proposition – and win in the long run. Part of that is definitely the ephemeral “product superiority perception” that is causing pro editors so much grief – and that clearly is something Apple has long used to maintain margin.
But over time the bigger game is actually a lot simpler. If they don’t present that value proposition constantly, the demand will fall off. The massive question with X is will there be enough users who’s features it matches to replace (and even exceed) those who it loses at the (special ist) end. (sorry, i’ve finally learned to split that word since it always trips the “spam” filtering by containing an evil string of interior letters!)
Apple feels that $299 is the right price point for X. I suspect they’ve got that right. It’s a LOT less than they used to have to charge – but enough in an all electronic distribution “end to end” revolutionary system that quashes most of the cost of sales – that leaves plenty of room for generating profits.
Win-win, IMO. But definitely not a “how low can we go” strategy at all, IMO.
“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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Another area to watch out for when working with still photos is the size of the photos you’re importing.
It’s incredibly common in these days of high-rez cheap cameras to simply “drag and drop” what are actually extremely large photos onto a video timeline.
The thinking is that since it’s a photo rather than a video – it must be comparatively small – but the exact opposite is often true.
Even high def video is vastly less “information dense” a raster than a high-rez still photo.
So if you’re working with large stills, pre-processing them into a smaller raster can have amazing effects on how fast they work for video editing.
The basic rule of thumb is to start by looking at your timeline settings. If you’re set for “high-def”, the raster will be something like 1920×1080. You can reduce a huge camera master image down to say 3840×2160 pixels (twice the timeline rez) – and that will let you “zoom into” it at twice its native size and still hold full detail. Compared to a camera master “8 megapixel” still, that’s a MUCH smaller file for the computer to have to process for each frame.
Also if you want REALLY fast performance, a TV screen can only reproduce a pixel density of about 72 dpi natively. So resizing photos to something basic like 640×480 pixels often yields perfectly usable video images that look great but that are so small a data profile that you benefit from virtually instantaneous performance when you’re moving or combining them on video.
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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[Walter Soyka] “I joked about FCPX pricing yesterday [link], but by setting the base price of the application so low, Apple may have also established very low pricing expectations for third-party plugins and possibly damaged the viability of the market.
“I dunno, Walter.
When I worked in advertising early in my career, one of my clients was a local Cadillac dealer.
I learned not to be surprised at the people who were adding “premium” features such as very expensive solid-gold-plated hood ornaments to what was essentially a upper-mid priced stock automobile purchase. (These weren’t Rolls Royce or Ferarri customers, after all.)
It was merchandise aimed for the customer who wasn’t particularly price sensitive but wanted a way to “trick out” their mid line purchases to the nth degree.
There will always be customers like that, in every purchase class, IMO.
And Cadillac’s “premium gold package” market was perfectly viable for many decades.
FWIW.
“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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My particular thanks go out to those who’ve “pushed back” at what I’ve written here.
These days where all too much “single side” media bias (on both sides) is common, I probably hang here more than I should simply because I still value the old style debates where two opposing views can freely duke things out for all to see.
After all, the position that’s never challenged often turns out to be one thats really not worth holding.
The best part of this group is that there’s never a shortage of alternative views – something I’m honestly grateful for.
Happy holidays, everyone, from my small part of the desert.
“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 just use the same workflow I’ve been using for the past two years and it’s still working perfectly. (Including under Lion – which I’ve used for the past six months without a single problem in my editing workflow.)
Mount your camera card via the finder. (I happen to use a USB card reader, but direct connecting the camera via USB works the same.) Then launch the Apple free “Disk Utility” software and choose “new disk image” from the menu bar. Select and image the card.
Done.
If you want to take the time to re-name the disk in the finder prior to imaging it, feel free – or don’t – it really doesn’t matter in the long run and freshly formatted cards that are UNTITLED won’t cause fatal problems later – but you might like having ID tags on your desktop for your mounted cards later – your call.
Even if you launch a dozen archives so that you end up with a dozen “Untitled” cards on your desktop – X keeps it’s act together, likely referencing the underlying “virtual disk ID” data rather than just the finder names.
The bottom line is that there are workflows and habits that lead to success in all complicated processes – and usually small “gotchas” in all sorts of specific workflows. Thus it has ever been – thus it will ever be.
I honestly don’t think it’s on Apple to protect us from ALL possible workflow snafu’s, since there are just WAY too many possible combinations of ways to do things.
It’s on us to do what this thread is all about – share “best practices” so that people can learn about what avoids the problems.
If we wait for our software to be “perfected” before we use it – we’ll likely be waiting forever.
FWIW.
“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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If I read all the threads correctly, it seems this isn’t actually a Final Cut Pro issue so much as an underliing Unix file tree issue.
It starts with the poor practice of doing FINDER copies of card data that creates essentially false directory tree branches that X “thinks” leads to cards – but don’t.
How can the program tell whether a particular DCIM file is a proper camera clip or a finder tag for an asset collection? My brain can supply context based on where amongst the thousands of possibilities I put it – but I don’t think the computer’s directory is going to parse that.
I”m also suspect since thee original posts about this were from September, and if this was persistent and universal, I think we would have seen a LOT more squawking about this – since tagging a clip as a FINAL has got to be a pretty universal convention and I’ve done it quite a bit myself without any hassles.
Bottom line. Archives and/or Disk Images are your friend, since it appears that FCP-X never gets confused no matter how many of them are on a hard drive and how many you open to re-populate your projects. They just work and simultaneously keep all the directory structure info in precisely the same state it was when the card came out of the camera.
FWIW.
“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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[Walter Soyka] “Depends — how many puts are you, Jeremy, Bill, and Evan Schectman prepared to write? I think you’d find a lot of buyers if you’re comfortable with the risk…”
As a personal rather than brokered futures play I might well be interested.
Anyone who wants to can transfer me their software licenses at retail today along with a contract that specifies that if they EVER decide to use any future version of FCP-X — they contractually agree to do so only via buying back the license from me – at a multiple of the market price PLUS interest. Something maybe like what they still peddle to our teens. You know those rates roughly equal to their age, along with so many “annual fees, late fees, transaction fees, low balance fees, and “you didn’t take the free 6 hour on-line electronic banking ‘security training’ so we’re imposing a $5 monthly “risk” fee (a non-profit who’s board I chair got hit with THAT piece of brilliance last year!) – so it ends up being maybe a 32% annualized “sucker” rate?
Maybe I’ll get lucky and the “all pro all the time perfect X” of everyones dreams won’t arrive for a couple of years – if so, this play could be my “cruise into the endless sunset” retirement plan!
(grin)
“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 Seeman] “If FCPX shows itself to be popular, they will equate populism as proof of pedestrian intent.
“Craig, dude. You forgot to mention the locust plagues and the inevitable hastening of the apocalypse that is sure to any significant X adoption! Didn’t you get this weeks talking points?
; )
“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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[David Lawrence] “AVID ScriptSync has been doing something like this for years now so the concept isn’t new or unique to FCPX.
“This idea keeps coming up but how “other software” also does what X does but I’m kinda surprised it merits mentioning. EVERY editing software that’s popular shares a whole host of editing operations with all the other competitors as well.
Nobody that I can recall has ever said that ONLY X does meta-data handling or has clip tagging tools.
The point is will it’s feature MIX present a robust “value proposition” to enough editors to cause them to select it over the distinctive feature array in AVID or Premier.
Some will. Some won’t. And that’s fair. As long as those choosing have a clear idea of the capabilities of each, the choice is fair. It’s only when patently incorrect information is propagated (it’s a totally incompetent editing tool, for example – a proposition miss-implied many times here, tho never, to my recollection by Mr. Lawrence) that the game goes sour.
FWIW.
“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