[Bill Davis]

Following the meme of the Edison riff on knowing a thousand ways NOT to make a lightbulb?

We’ll likely never know if the iPhone, and iPad could have come out of a shop where everyone was focused on building incremental revisions of “standards” rather than a culture of “try something different and we’ll see what sticks.”

But I don’t think Apple’s patent portfolio came about by accident, Tim.

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

[Bill Davis]

So explain to me how the App store is a play to sell hardware.

Explain to me how iCloud is a play to sell hardware.

Explain how Thunderbolt is a play to sell hardware (after all, it’s licensed from Intel and we know that other mfgs have already announced implementations – so it’s NOT going to be an Apple hardware differentiator.)

“Apple software sells Apple hardware” made huge sense 10 years ago.

“A strong market perception of leadership in customer empowerment tools AND services will drive bottom line results” is something I think will be closer to the new paradigm.

You can make a customer feel “empowered” via a nice piece of hardware – an elegant piece of software – an integrated approach like iPods and iTMS – or a transparent “virtual storage” capability (iCloud) — they are all just ways to make customers feel connected to your brand.

I bet you can also enhance that by giving people a tool that lets the “not classically trained” person who wants to create visual media do that at a level that matches their personal abilities in a package that is affordable, easy to download and once learned, has a constantly evolving feature set designed to do what most users want to do most of the time, even if it doesn’t do everything all users need all the time.

If it evolves enough, it’s going to eventually evolve to include all the features that pros want – because a pro is nothing more than an amateur that’s kept learning and growing.

Period.

“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]

So why are you stuck using your hands?

FCP-X running on an iPad – with a small bluetooth keyboard in play – gives you a simple travel system that could do basic rough cuts incredibly well.

My wife is doing a rough cut of a string of interviews in FCP-X right now destined for a client window dub. That means opening each card, using I and O to mark very rough in and out points on each clip in the Event Library, hitting E to append each select to the magnetic timeline – and moving on.

It’s super efficient. Much quicker than Log&Capture, drag to a timeline and trim the head and tail of each clip.

It’s the kind of editing prep task where the magnetic timeline really shines.

“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]

Paragraphs are good when they’re good.

I commonly have to strip and recreate them because paragraph codes are downright destructive when one is moving a script into, for example, a tab-delineated database for script analysis.

My son seldom uses them in his text posts to all his friends and yes, I’m trying to convince him of their value – but he and his friends parse them seamlessly.

Plus don’t forget they’re kinda senseless in the “twitterverse “(note that button at the bottom of the screen below!)

I agree, that here, in this forum, in it’s primary format, traditional “write for the eye” text formatting helps readability.

But if I was gonna write this like a decent script – with better spoken word emphasis – clear pauses for breath – and compound sentences that sound like people speak – then punctuation becomes less important in achieving good results.

Bottom line – it might not be what you (or I) prefer. But that doesn’t make it worthy of criticism.

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

[Bill Davis]

It has to do with the PERCENTAGE of overall work that is suited to each environment.

I don’t dismiss that there are all sorts of projects that benefit from or even REQUIRE the fully-equipped video suite model.

But every time they add capabilities to the simpler, more agile systems, more and more of the work can be effectively done outside the older model.

I believe that’s accelerating. As I said, there are still big, professional purpose-build recording studios where the top tier artists pay top dollar for access to the most professional gear and talent available.

Once that was the ONLY way.

Today you’ve got some of that. But you’ve also got Jimmy Buffett recording in his home studio that rivals the finest rooms on the planet.

And you’ve got bands like Owl City who do amazing work on laptops and ProTools.

Even scarier, you’ve got the YouTube stars, who make amazing sounding, rich, layered compositions in crappy conditions and with barely adequate hardware.

Here in Phoenix (a city of 2 million) I’m not sure there’s more than one or two rooms left following the old “dedicated studio” model. (And NONE like the long gone Audio Video Recorders where there was a recording space big enough to bring the Symphony in for recording!) That type of work is done exclusively via location recording today.

I suspect video will follow that path.

It’s what I’m seeing anyway.

“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]

Aindreas,

Are you actually telling us after all months and months of posts bemoaning how horrible the software is that you actually don’t even own it and use it yourself – and that everything you’ve posted here has been based entirely on your occasional use of it in the local APPLE STORE?

Wow.

(I honestly hope I’m mistaking this situation.)

“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]

The really scary thing is that I bet one or more of them will ask at the end of the project that you give them a copy of the FCP-X file that they can “tweek” it as necessary after delivery…

Which actually means that in 24 hours one of those “clients” will be showing your hard work to someone else and referring to it as: This video I just finished…”

TIME TO MENTALLY DEVELOP A NEW RULE: Only deliver watermarked file exports until the check clears, and then only monolithic file exports to your clients. Never, never EVER copy your projects for anyone.

“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’ll play.

The magnetic timeline may well be a superior convention in situations where screen real estate is at a premium and you don’t want arbitrary gaps between your pre-trimmed media import files.

And might become a superior rapid comping tool in the field precisely because of this.

In “fixed timeline” situations, there are far too many times over the past decade where I’ve had too little room to click on a gap and keystroke close it on the timeline – or when assets on adjacent tracks like composite tracks and titles have have prevented me from closing a gap.

On my Cinema display, not so big a problem. I can zoom in, trim the tracks that are causing the problem until the gap is clear in all adjacent assets, select the gap and delete it, then re-drag all the assets that originally prevented me from closing that gap into the positions they were in before I had to deal with the gap.

Magnetic timeline? No gaps unless I specifically put in a gap clip.

It defaults to what we’re all typically trying to do in the initial build of any typical assemble edit. Strings of scenes without gaps.

When we’re editing someday on iPads and it’s even harder to see those tiny gaps, the magnetic timeline could well become the best feature of the software.

Also the magnetic timelines ability to avoid clip collisions means when you’re moving blocks of scenes around, you’re never penalized by arbitrarily changing an already specified edit point because you’ve over-written that choice at the head or tail of a clip as in all other timeline implementations.

I struggled with the magnetic timeline at first as well. But nowI find it’s freeing me to move blocks of scenes around more freely, since there’s never a “repair” penalty for doing so.

That by itself is a big advantage over the FCP-7 workflow if your work in such that you have the option to tinker with scene order

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]

I suspect this is the growing pains of internet distribution of apps.

In my particular case, I’d downloaded the original purchase while working under one User ID, then didn’t realize that my machine was in a diffrent partition under a different ID when I bought Motion and Compressor.

That made it impossible to download updates for each in the same session.

I’ve got a similar thing going in my iTunes Music Store accounts – where I’ve used my son’s unused gift card balanced in the past to download apps or content, not fully realizing that if I did so under his Account name, the ownership of those would NOT be reflected in my account, even tho his was a sub account under mine and funded by the same credit card.

New era growing pains.

“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]

Chris,

History informs us about the future unless we ignore it.

Everyone here knows that when you can do 80% of what it took a tower system to do 5 years ago on a modern laptop, that means that we’re compelled to re-think the value of the “desk in an office” model.

Perhaps the traditional “post house” where I cut my teeth will remain. But it certainly didn’t in the other major recent creative industry that went through the digitization process – music production.

I suspect there are still “monolithic” recording studios out there. But a fraction of the number that were in business 10 years ago. What killed that model was when everything that was needed in the audio production, editing and manipulation chain got digitized and computerized.

ProTools altered the landscape.

Now the video production industry is following the precise same path.

Heck, I’m writing this in my own production studio – purpose built in what was once the hay-barn behind my horse property in Scottsdale. I keep looking around and thinking that even THIS model – built on the desire for economic efficiency (no separate office rent) and more flexible control of billing (stripped down overhead that means I don’t have to account for every quarter hour of time a client spends here) is looking awfully long in the tooth.

I’m considering that I may need to transform my plant from a studio building to a briefcase – and where my “shop” becomes wherever space I happen to find convenient at the moment.

I do a lot of voice talent work. I started in dedicated studios and radio stations where clients had to pay for other peoples’ real estate costs and depreciation. Then I built my own studio and built a dedicated voice booth with wires leading from the mic to the “control room” where the mixer and recorders lived…
today I look into my voice booth where 80% of what I painstakingly built as an audio chain is gathering dust. Today a Neuman TLM-104 feeds a Zoom H4n. That’s IT. The entire original studio chain is collapsed to 3 components – a good mic, an XLR cable, and a sub-$400 digital recorder. And ALL of it can be tossed in a bag and taken on the road. Add the internet for distribution and I can satisfy client needs anywhere anytime with no virtually no economic overhead at all.

And now video is following precisely the same path.

One bag with a 5dMkii body and lenses. The same H4n for audio. A laptop, and a modest array of grip, LED lighting and data storage gear – and we’re close to the point where my multi-hundred thousand dollar studio will fit into a couple of carryons.

All one has to add is the same thing people have always had to add to the gear to get good results.

Talent.

And the next generation of talent that will be competing with us don’t even conceive of video production as a thing done in a building. But rather as a thing done on a screen.

Pretty powerful difference.

“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