Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Craig Seeman] “What is unknown is whether it’s an isolated case of sloppy journalism from one reporter at a business publication or whether it’s parroting a belief held by some portion of the business community. We have no obvious way of knowing but my own personal hunch as that there’s a significant portion that still see Avid primarily as the “Media Composer / Symphony” company in which all other products play supporting roles.”
Aside from pro audio products (which, I know, are a significant revenue source), isn’t this largely true though? I mean, Avid presumably makes a bunch of money off of Isis, etc. but if Media Composer disappeared tomorrow, how many FCP or Premiere shops would really choose Avid as their default storage vendor? How many would choose DS as a finishing solution if they weren’t doing their offline in Media Composer? While Avid’s other video products can technically be integrated into workflows that don’t involve MC, I think they’d take a big hit if it really died.
Plus, hardware commoditization is a huge part of what has gotten Avid into so much trouble in the first place, which suggests that shifting even more to hardware products is probably not a great idea. I think Media Composer really needs to succeed if Avid is going to have a significant future in pro video.
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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] “The thing to look at is how GPU is handled.
That may be a clue as to how Apple handles it as well in the upcoming MacPro.”
it’s not really as informative as one might think. This is a Socket 1155 motherboard, meaning there’s going to be a video single from an integrated GPU to put on that Thunderbolt connection. A new Mac Pro (anything worthy of that label, anyway) will be Socket 2011. Socket 2011 processors don’t have integrated GPUs, which makes the whole thing a lot more complicated. We have yet to see any Socket 2011 system/motherboard with Thunderbolt.
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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] “Granted we have to see where Apple goes with their feature upgrades but, to date, no developer using the Mac App Store can charge for upgrades through that delivery medium so unless we hear otherwise, status quo free feature upgrades (catch up or not) continues.”
Note that you can do in-app purchases, though. So while with present App Store infrastructure Apple can’t just say “$100 for the 10.1 update”, they could hypothetically say “$100 for the new ‘pro workflow’ features we’ve added”.
But my guess is that they won’t do this. The Pro Apps have always been primarily about selling hardware.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Harlan] “This is an absurd argument. You are treating these NLEs as if they existed in a parallel Universes, and that has no bearing to reality. In my country, everybody drives on the right side of the road. That’s our workflow. It’s been that way for nearly a century. All the lines and turn lanes are painted to facilitate that. All of the drivers muscle memory is all about driving on the right. All of the steering wheels and control panels are designed for driving on the right. Driving on the left presents an equally valid workflow. If we’d been driving on the left for nearly a century, our workflows would be constructed around that. But, so what?! Fortunately for X, it isn’t THAT different. But that is the argument you are making.”
The driving analogy doesn’t map. There isn’t one standard workflow in the industry, which apps need one standard feature to support, and which FCP X doesn’t implement the same way as everything else.
Rather, the various NLEs have a myriad of features, which provide varying levels of support to various different tasks. These are combined in different ways on different projects to produce a diversity of workflows almost as numerous as individual projects themselves.
With respect to a particular project, you may be able to accurately make the statement “FCP X doesn’t offer a workflow for this that’s as fast/robust/affordable/whatever as [Other NLE]”. However, with respect to all projects, you cannot accurately make that statement. Consequently, you cannot make a general statement that FCP X is worse than other NLEs with respect to workflow. It depends on the project and the other tools being used.
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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] “I don’t think so. I’m looking for features expected by the industry to function in professional workflows. Things like proper project/media control, list interchange (AAF, EDL, XML), media management, interoperability within its own ecosystem (Motion, Logic), proper mixing tools inside the app and so on.”
The objective fact is that all of these apps have different feature sets. FCP X has features not found in other NLEs, and other NLEs have features not found in FCP X. Had you been using FCP X for years, and designing workflows around that, you’d be looking at other apps and saying they had workflow weaknesses because they required external transcoding, or they didn’t have metadata support as good as FCP X’s, or you couldn’t create bundles of output settings and generate multiple deliverables with a couple of clicks, or you couldn’t add roles to specific timeline items and output each set of items to a separate file, or whatever — all of these are features that could become critical to workflows one might construct around FCP X.
But since you’re going in the other direction, and dealing with workflows that were constructed around other apps, it’s FCP X that gets identified as having workflow weaknesses.
In 10.0.0, when there was fundamentally no way to get a sequence into or out of FCP X, one could say that there were, objectively, very serious workflow limitations. Now that we’re merely talking about e.g. the fact that FCP X requires you to use an external app to generate an EDL, but not to competently transcode R3D media, while in FCP 7 it’s the reverse, determinations about which app has the stronger workflow features are necessarily arbitrary and specific to particular situations and particular individuals’ sets of requirements.
[Oliver Peters] “That’s not the only issue, but it’s an important own in the niche of high-end post. You of all people should know that, because I often cannot send anything other than an EDL to most of the top finishing/DI shops in the world. Why? Linux workstations and the ease of dealing with EDLs for them.”
I recognize that EDLs are still necessary for some DI workflows — but not for all DI workflows. For instance, we ask clients for NLE project files (in case there are issues that are best fixed in the NLE before exporting anything), and in the case of FCP X would simply output an XML file and bring that into Resolve. Or, I’ve heard that Technicolor’s DI workflow involves conforming projects in Smoke — if they’re on the latest version, that means that perhaps the most ‘name brand’ DI facility in the world has the technical capability to conform from an FCP X XML file with no intermediate steps (whether they know this and would be willing to entertain the possibility, I can’t say).
So, even at the high end, a given project could, for all you can say in the abstract, end up finding (for instance) FCP X’s metadata features absolutely critical, and finding that its lack of EDL exporting isn’t a problem at all. FCP X’s workflow features have reached the point where one can’t say it’s worse with respect to workflow in the general case. One can merely point to specific workflows where it’s worse. But one can also point to other workflows where it’s better. Which makes it like pretty much every other tool in this business.
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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] “Sure it is. You cannot accomplish everything you need to do within the Apple software. You have to find outside solutions, which Apple does not directly support. At least within FCP7/FCS or Adobe or Avid, I’m working with solutions developed and supported by the company. Not so in X.”
I just think this is essentially arbitrary. You’re letting other NLEs define the feature set, and then pointing to FCP X and saying it’s missing features. But the same thing would work in reverse. For instance, FCP 7 can export an EDL, and FCP X can’t. OK, well, FCP X can work with most camera media natively, and FCP 7 can’t. How come in one direction this is “you cannot accomplish everything you need to do within the software” and in the other direction it’s not? I bet more editors want to work with native camera media than want to export EDLs.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “translation I’m not an editor really, but thats not going to stop me giving forth at very great length on all topics. Future of editing, what you should be using, what apple is going to do…. and on and on and on.”
Creative editors are not the only stakeholders who care about and influence outcomes in this industry. They’re certainly not the only people able to provide informed commentary about the industry or speculation about its future. In fact, while folks in this forum are, in general, reasonably engaged and well informed on the subjects surrounding this discussion, in my experience a lot of editors out there don’t follow industry ‘politics’, aren’t familiar with the history of computing or phenomena like commoditization (critical to understanding how the industry is evolving), don’t know anything at all about software development cycles, aren’t familiar with product development concepts like ‘minimum viable product’ (critical to understanding some of Apple’s decisions around the FCP X launch), and sometimes don’t understand end-to-end post workflows or just aren’t very tech savvy at all.
There is nothing about being a creative editor that inherently means one is qualified to comment about big picture industry trends, let alone that one is so uniquely qualified to do so that others should be silent.
But, hey, don’t let the fact that I predicted both that FCP X would be a radical departure, and the backlash to that a year in advance deter you from believing that I couldn’t possibly have the slightest insight here.
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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] “I think they had to. Apple devalued the market for color correction software when they rolled Color into Studio.”
Yeah, I agree that this made sense for Blackmagic, particularly since they were going into it making 100% of their revenue from hardware in the first place. Although I do recall comments at one point that as additional features are added to the full version of Resolve they might not all make it into Lite, so the products might more further apart in the future.
My point, though, was that I wouldn’t quite recommend that precise approach to Avid.
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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] “What makes you think there are significant numbers of Resolve users shelling out $1K for the paid version? Especially since the main Lite limitation is the lack of bigger-than-HD output. I’d bet almost no one, except for folks actually building grading businesses. Not too many of those. It’s a loss leader for the cards and sweetens the sale for the camera. Plus Grant has a soft spot for color correction. You’ll note he’s not giving Teranex away for free (and it has a software base inside all that hardware).”
I did propose selling hardware as part of the model for this hypothetical NLE vendor as well. And if I were running this hypothetical company, I don’t think I’d be quite as aggressive as Blackmagic is with Resolve Lite — I think maybe I’d do a very limited free version (unlike Resolve Lite, the limitations of which are pretty much irrelevant to most of the market), a mid-range product in FCP X’s price range (all editing features, but missing most ‘pro’ workflow features), and then a full version at maybe $800.
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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] “While I agree with that in principle, I see owners make plenty of evaluations of what software they think is good, based on a cursory exposure to it. Then in the “heat of battle” it falls over – but that’s the editor’s problem, not the person who made the purchasing decision.”
I don’t just stick ‘Digital Workflow’ in my title to justify the nerdy glasses. I do fairly extensive workflow testing before putting anything into production.
[Oliver Peters] “If the consideration is larger workflows, X completely “fails”, unless you are willing to use a lot of extra applications and/or workarounds.”
If you step back and stop taking the workarounds required by other NLEs for granted, it’s not clear that FCP X is really any worse.
OK, so you can’t directly export an EDL. But we seem to have less trouble taking FCPXML files into Resolve than Media Composer AAF files — and if you fall back on an EDL out of MC, have fun rebuilding all your reframes. So really, which is more problematic, workflow wise?
And you can’t export an OMF. But roles are pretty powerful. And is this really a more egregious workflow limitation than, say, not being able to natively work with R3D or H.264 files in FCP 7? I mean, at least this can be pretty much addressed by an external tool; FCP 7’s format limitations couldn’t.
I have lists of workflow annoyances and limitations for Media Composer, FCP 7, FCP X, Resolve, Compressor, Adobe Media encoder, ffmpeg, Motion, After Effects… hell, OS X and Windows. A very big chunk of my job is to figure out “We need to start with A, and get B out of it. What’s the best way to do that with sensibly priced hardware and software?” And then I go off and try a dozen things, using various combinations of tools. And I often run into situations where I’m saying to myself, “If only this worked a tiny bit differently, it would solve everything” or “How can this feature not exist in this app?”
FCP X does not stand out as being uniquely problematic in this respect. It certainly was with the feature set in 10.0.0, but not so much these days. In fact, I’ve recently come up with a new workflow for generating various deliverables out of FCP X that works much better than any workflow I had ever found for doing the same in any other way.
[Oliver Peters] “Also from a facility owner’s POV, Apple should give you great concern, since they burned users of a number of their apps, like Final Cut Server. I freelance at such a shop and FCSrvr is all but completely dead in the water, thanks to all the Java/MacOS issues. They are moving on to something else at even more expense.”
Apple has a penchant for killing software. Avid is perpetually losing money and restructuring. Adobe seems to have decided to totally change the way its software is licensed, in a way that honestly seems like it’ll cost a bunch of extra money.
No vendor is safe. The only safety is in flexibility.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.