Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Michael Gissing] “As younger film makers who are tech savy become the norm and the price of edit software continues to come down, this use that you see with X may be no more than price and access rather than something specifically about X being more producer friendly.”
Price and access are pretty much what won the last round on the NLE wars for Apple.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Oliver Peters] “1) Centralized shared storage with the bandwidth to handle multiple streams of high-res video
2) Enterprise-grade Windows servers (with redundant back-up) to handle the streams
3) Additional dedicated server for the Adobe Mercury Steaming Engine
4) Adobe software
5) High-end NVIDIA GPUs for real-time effects processing at the central locationTypically, you’ll need 1 server (not counting back-up) for every 10 concurrent users, so if you are trying to service 30 users at once, then this is a 3-4 server infrastructure. Not counting Adobe software and support, this sounds like you are in the $100K range with 16TB-32TB of storage. The servers are definitely NOT Mac-Minis. ;-)”
As nearly as I can tell, this is basically a ‘thin client’ model for video editing — all of the processing of video footage occurs on a centralized server (which obviously needs to be very powerful to do that for multiple clients concurrently), and the results are streamed to the client.
This is a very interesting model, and it may be very attractive for some users, but I think there are a whole bunch of use cases where it’s missing the mark a bit. Here’s the thing: today’s client systems aren’t all that thin. I am, in general, pretty damn happy with the performance I get editing, on, say, a 15″ Retina MacBook Pro. If the client system has the computational resources to do the job, duplicating those resources on the server and doing the job there instead is wasteful.
The tricky question with processing on the client is, of course, where does the footage come from? You can’t exactly stream uncompressed HD, or even common offline editing codecs like ProRes, over the Internet. I see, broadly, two approaches to this problem.
First, you could simply stream H.264 footage to the client (either converted live by the server, or transcoded in advance on the server — the latter obviously lets you get away with a less powerful server) and have that processed locally. This wouldn’t be 100% pixel accurate with respect to results, but then neither is just monitoring compressed footage, which Adobe’s approach involves. This would also still require things like final exports to be processed on the server, since the client won’t have access to full quality media anymore that it does with Adobe’s thin client scheme.
The other approach is to just simply ignore this problem. Don’t even try to solve it. Add features that make it easy for users to share project data, and let users work out how to share media. This probably means you can’t share media files over the Internet (generic file sharing schemes like AFP or NFS aren’t going to work for streaming editorial media to NLEs over the Internet). But it would still likely work fine for users with shared LAN/SAN storage. You could also simply give each remote user collaborating on the project an identical drive with all of the editorial media, totally eliminating the need to send media over the network at all.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Eric Hansen] “an expansion chassis for GPUs over current Thunderbolt tech wouldn’t work too well because Thunderbolt is a 4x PCIe connection. Each GPU is 16x. Even the PCIe expansion chassis’s are a compromise because the most common config – four 16x slots; is still sharing four 16x GPU cards over a single 16x PCIe connection to the computer.”
Not every workload has identically demanding bandwidth requirements. Even Thunderbolt’s bandwidth (at least when working at 2K or below) is more than sufficient to send a video stream to and from a GPU in real time. It’s unclear to me if substantially more than this would be required.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “… tangentially, I’m interested to see how Adobe Anywhere scales down (rather than up), appealing more to smaller groups, and wonder if they’re be developments in that direction over the next few years. Is that the end run around puck-expectant Apple?”
Adobe Anywhere does one better than Avid’s solutions by allowing the centralized infrastructure used for collaborative workflows to be built with commodity hardware. But ideally you want little or no centralized infrastructure to be required at all. Adobe doesn’t quite seem to be there yet. That’s still anyone’s game — though we might see Avid sit it out (to their long term detriment) since so much of their revenue appears to come from offering expensive proprietary solutions to this problem.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Kevin Monahan] “Perhaps you didn’t hear about this: Adobe plans to roll out new features for Creative Cloud members over the coming year. Stay tuned.”
Yeah, I commented in my other post on the update cycle issue that it wouldn’t be very surprising to see Adobe move to this model as well. It’s a natural fit for subscription-based licensing models.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Seeman] “They remained Producers… who edited their own production. As time goes on more producers will be editors. This is especially so on lower budget projects This will be the norm in corporate video. I see it happening on some lower budget broadcast (non narrative) shows.”
One also has to think about how this is going to evolve over time. Today’s aspiring directors, who are taking advantage of dirt cheap digital workflows to go out and start shooting their own no-budget projects… odds are they’re editing their own stuff. Who else is going to do it?
Some of these folks will actually be working directors sooner or later, and although some of them will likely hire ‘real’ editors as soon as they’re working on projects that allow for that, others will likely decide that they just want to keep on doing it themselves.
We’ve seen this sort of transition before. Back in the long-ago pre-computer days, typing was largely a specialized skill. It was routine for pretty much anyone above an entry-level position to have a secretary, or at least access to a secretarial pool, to prepare typed documents. Often one wouldn’t even write longhand, but would simply dictate.
Computers changed all of this, by making typing both easier (you didn’t have to be nearly as accurate, because it was much easier to make corrections, for instance) and more widely useful. Now nearly every adult can type at least somewhat competently. And many people would find it quite frustrating to create any non-trivial document by dictating it — they prefer the more direct control provided by just working with the text in a modern word processor. This is particularly true for people who especially care about the details of what’s written — exact phrasing, etc.
What’s happening with video editing is largely analogous. It’s becoming both easier, as technical constraints that previously required complex workflows disappear and editing UI advances, and more widely useful, as both the plummeting cost of acquiring footage and new distribution channels (the web, etc.) have dramatically increased the amount of video content being produced. We should expect to see similar effects in the long run, with a smaller and smaller fraction of total editing performed by specialist editors, and some people who particularly care about the details of the finished product (i.e. directors) feeling more comfortable just stepping in and taking a hands-on approach.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Marcus Moore] “As for the public roadmap, there was always going to be an end to this. As long as they were reintegrating Legacy functionality, they weren’t giving anything away by listing that past features were returning. But key features going forward are more likely to be new [or heavily rethought], and so there’s no chance Apple will be announcing them beforehand.”
Yeah, I really don’t think Apple needs roadmaps at this point. Especially if, as seems to be the case, they plan to continue pushing out new features on a 3-4 month update cycle, rather one with one big update every 12-24 months. You don’t have to reassure people that you’re working on new features when you’re proving it by supplying a steady stream of them.
In fact, unless Avid and Adobe switch to something more like Apple’s release cycle, FCP X users will find out about new features long before MC/Premiere users — and they’ll be able to download the update that includes them the same day.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Quoting:
Updates will be free and incremental every 3-4 months or so. This has always been the plan from the beginning. There will not be any one big, huge, overwhelming update at any time. What has been will continue to be.
This is a very interesting model, and I speculated that’s what we might be seeing with FCP X. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Adobe move to something more like this once they’ve got more of their users on Creative Cloud (there are already hints of it). This approach is certainly going to get features to market a lot sooner than waiting for the old 12-24 month release cycle to roll around, and it lets the direction of the product respond to market changes much faster.
But this also raises another interesting question about the way the market is evolving, and about the divergent needs of different market segments.
Right now, with most desktop apps, there are two development ‘branches’ at any time — one for the current release, to which bug fixes are applied, and a second for the next release, where major new features are added. Sometimes bug fixes are even provided for older major versions, even.
FCP X development seems like it’s going to occur on one branch (at least as far as the external world is concerned; there might be other internal branches to deal with features that take more than one 3-4 month release cycle to implement). This means you’re not going to be able to get bug fix updates without installing updates that bring new features and possibly changes in UI or other behavior. For most users, this is a great trade off for getting new functionality sooner. But some customers — I’m thinking here particularly of core Avid-type customers like major broadcasters — probably aren’t going to be happy about this. Larger shops tend to value consistency and predictability above new functionality.
So, the adoption of this model makes FCP X less appealing to those customers. But then, if Avid doesn’t adopt the same model, that will make Media Composer less appealing to other customers.
Of course, with enough resources you could do both of these things. You could push out new releases containing both features and bug fixes every 3-4 months, and also, every 12-24 months or whatever, ship a particular release that you designated as one you would support with fix-only updates for two or three years. But Avid probably won’t do this, because they’re looking to cut costs to return to reliable profitability, and Apple probably won’t do this, because Apple in general has little tolerance for investing resources in legacy support.
The next few years sure are going to be interesting….
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Greg Andonian] “I was thinking, If Apple really is skating to where the puck will be and FCPX really is the future of editing, you would expect the users of other NLEs to want their preffered NLE to follow in its footsteps, right? “
In this metaphor, users are the puck. The whole point of skating to where the puck is going to be is that the puck isn’t there yet. Now, maybe the puck gets there faster because you’re there waiting for it (the metaphor starts to break down here), but it still takes time. This is an industry where some facilities take a couple of years to install a routine upgrade of the same software they already use. High end adoption of FCP X was never going to happen quickly.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Nicholas Kleczewski] “Actually background transcoding does stop when you are editing if Avid feels it needs to too keep up. This was confirmed by Bob Russo at the Supermeet. Not a big deal in my opinion just didnt want people to get their hopes up.”
This is a feature, not a bug. It’s not like these systems can’t transcode while you’re editing because of some technical limitation. They’re designed to stop transcoding while you’re editing so that interactive performance remains good. Resolve does the same thing with rendering.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.