[Bill Davis]

The article pointed out 10 case studies of individuals who were making $100k plus off their YouTube work. The guy at the top made right around a quarter of a million bucks.

And as I’ve said here. These are the pioneers. They’re the Soupy Sales of the internet video era.

Nobody can tell where it’s going, but everyone here knows how the information consumption habits of the entire world are changing.

We no longer wait for information to necessarily come to us. With our “connected devices” we know we can seek out information anytime and anywhere, sifted from the great cloud to meet our specific criteria.

THAT is what’s going to change everything.

TV and movies will remain. But for every movie ticket sold, there will be a thousand click-serches – if not a million. And if there’s a way to monetize that – and the YouTube kiddies are doing exactly that – then there will be new opportunities for those who can see it and take advantage of it.

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

[Bill Davis]

I own about 3 of these. (remnant of my work with non-profits where we raise money by hosting events.

These “pop-ups” are very useful for a lot of things. And there’s no reason you couldn’t use the frame and custom-sew a diffusion material substitute for the generally opaque canopy they come with. (A surplus white parachute would probably be perfect!) But of course that’s also purpose-designed to catch WIND!

The biggest drawback with “pop-ups” is that they’re universally HEAVY, especially the ones built to last. (there are cheap ones at every home store, but their legs and even more, their “scissor braces” are prone to buckling and breaking.

The more robust (and expensive ones) avoid that problem, but they’re really too heavy for a one person operation. Two people who are experienced can do fine. And if you can get four people involved (one per leg) then they become really easy to deploy and strike.

So it’s a useful tool. But not an ideal one, IMO.

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

[Bill Davis]

A very, very small fraction of the kids are already figuring this out.

Do a search on YouTube stars making more than $100,000 per year – and you can get a glimpse.

These are the virtual-content-world equivalents of the “Bozo the Clown” shows in early TV.

Today, it’s stunts, pratfalls and silliness.

But when YouTube announced on Friday their content initiative, they set aside 100 million bucks to attract top rank stars like Madonna, Basketball-monster Shaq, and Sophia Vigara to their new “channel” array.

Is that clear enough about where things are moving?

“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

[Bill Davis]

Walter,
[Walter Soyka] “I think that a DAM (digital asset management system) that’s bottled inside an NLE is there for the editor. “

Of course, Walter, but the funny thing about databases is that while you may build it for some internal purpose, once it gets created, it’s much MUCH easier to build some hooks into it so that it can be accessed OUTSIDE the internal structure of the existing database.

That’s the whole point of being “relational” after all.

I think a HUGE clue is right in the design of the FCP-X Project Library.

It’s already a very useful “world view” level that gives one a clear view of the current state of all the included “content” visually. You can not only PLAY, but scrub through dozens of “timelines”, see if it’s been recently updated, and what is and isn’t available for use.

Currently, you could argue that distribution and consumption is done as a separate set of processes after the editor decides that the project is “complete.” And that there’s little linkage between the editing stage and the consumption stage. X seems to be poised to break some of that down.

All it would require is a way to “publish” one’s Project Library. Then suddenly, you have the core of a very agile, very accessible, very updatable CMS ready to go.

“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

[Bill Davis]

Oh settle down, folks.

This is boring. Unlike the X-files, not only is the “truth” out there, it’s finally pretty evident to all but the zealots on both sides.

In the beginning nearly EVERYONE got FCP-X significantly wrong. We did that because it was nothing like we expected. It was significantly harder to understand it’s new way of approaching NLE operation than everyone thought. That’s, IMO, partly because it was so fundamentally different, and partly because with so many people so knowledgeable about Legacy the natural tendency was to compare it TO Legacy rather than take it on it’s own terms.

Now the picture is a lot clearer. They moved many “legacy” needs down the importance list in order to elevate a host of new features that they believed would be critically useful to the future of editing. Those largely revolve around data management and smaller, less complex and formal productions the kind of which are well suited for web deployment rather than theatrical distribution and episodic TV creation.

From their public statements, it appears that the FCP team is fully aware that to make a great “general purpose” editing tool for the future, they’ll have to add many things back in that they “de-prioritized” in the initial release. But Apple has pretty clearly said that they are working on precisely that.

I admire Walter Murch like everyone else. Possibly more so. (I was lucky enough to run into him at NAB one year in the Grand Lux cafe at the Venetian and he graciously took 15 minutes to chat with me directly about FCP, having no clue that I was helping put on the users group event that night. That night I saw him do EXACTLY the same thing with a huge line of fans who lined up for a moment of “personal time” with him. He treated each and everyone in line incredibly graciously – staying for HOURS after the program had ended to make sure everyone who wanted to talk to him, could.. The mark of a man who truly cares about his craft and has a wonderfully generous spirit about sharing his knowledge.

I don’t know what “genius” is so I’m not qualified to comment on whether Mr. Murch is one. But he’s clearly and unarguably a superb film editor, a world class sound for picture artist, and an amazingly decent and generous guy. And that’s way more than good enough for me.

I suspect that like everyone else, he will come to FCP-X in his own way and in his own time. And whether it “gets” is better than anyone else is entire dependent on the amount of time he’s been able to personally spend with it, because as we see time and time and time again in these debates – what’s different about FCP-X takes significant time to learn and understand well enough to appreciate.

But please, don’t invoke his name on the pro or con side until he makes a clear pronouncement that he has explored it to his content, and has formed an opinion either way.

Then take that opinion and do him the respect of acknowledging that it will relate most closely to the kind of work that HE does, and that as thoughtful and well schooled in the editing arts as he clearly is, it won’t necessarily relate to the kind of editing tasks he does NOT regularly do. Unless he makes wider pronouncements on his opinions of it’s general utility. If he does I too will listen.

But I’ll still make my own choices based on what I have to do. Not what any Hollywood film editor does, regardless of how much I respect him or her.

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

[Bill Davis]

And at the center is this shift from

The old models of:

“let’s see what’s on.” or “lets’ see what’s in the theatres”

to

“What do *I* want to see right now.”

Which is as big a shift in content consumption trends as any we’re likely to see over the rest of our lifetimes.

Google saw it first. Apple, as often has been the case, didn’t invent it, but they they may well be positioning themselves to drive it farther than anyone else.

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

[Bill Davis]

Wow,
Are there THAT few “announcement days” available on the calendar?
That’s the day Canon is scheduled to have their big “video related” announcement in Burbank that the invitations have been out for a while about.
I thought only batteling politicians in the modern era scheduled announcements designed to suck eyeballs away from each others scheduled events!

If this is accurate, that’s going to be a day where a lot less regular work gets done in my studio.

“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

[Bill Davis]

Far from it, Oliver.

I not only don’t rely on such a “Grand Plan” vision to make X relevant, I think the very LACK of one is critical to it’s long term success.

In my view, they’re building an agile tool based on what’s currently possible. And they know perfectly well that the market will adapt that tool into what the market needs and wants.

A database is not designed to be a particular type of thing. It’s designed to be a thing that you use to make different kinds of other things with – to solve many different kind of problems in many, many different ways.

That post from the guy at FOX sports is precisely on point. It indicated they were using it as a “player video search” tool. The program presented a new capability (robust relational search within a clip-file based video storage system) and they immediately saw that they could leverage that capability into a tool to meet their specific need to assemble player-keyed videos rapidly.

It all comes back to my initial complaint about this thread from the beginning. It was initially stuck on what the program is NOT – and only recently turning it’s attention to what the program IS (and of course what it might become.

I accept that the jury is out. But we are starting to see how X is making a few folks with solid professional needs view things in some different contexts. And I think that’s very healthy for the industry.

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

[Bill Davis]

Walter,

I think the question is whether PULL remains at some arbitrary “program” level as is currently. Or whether Apple sees a future where PULL takes place INSIDE a broader content management system where the program creator can step in, adapt and change elements, and the links to the outside can remain accessible to the audience that you’re serving.

Why else build a editing program with so much database stuff INSIDE?

In a world of search, allowing the option for customers to go into your own purpose managed and structured system to access content is pretty powerful. And I think that’s part of the long-term X plan.

“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

[Bill Davis]

Yes Shane,

They did EXACTLY that.

Now the big question is WHY. And the scary answer is that they saw that what you and I used to do (build large, expensive, top quality content that is expensive, rare and therefore must attract a major audience to succeed) is NOT necessarily the same thing the market will want done in the future. In the future, the market may be more suited to smaller, more targeted, “micro-info blurbs” that people can seek out, access, and consume more rapidly and with less time and attention cost than the big, monolithic “PROGRAM” of the past.

There already were good programs to do the “BIG JOB” work.

But nothing really great to do the videos that the market will increasingly want in the future.

Big programs will still happen, but for every one of those, it’s quite likely that there will be a hundred or a thousand smaller information videos that drive even better economic results in more situations and to more people.

This change isn’t all just about FCP. It’s about editing itself and where it’s going overall.

Interesting times.

“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