Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
-
[Franz Bieberkopf] “I think you have to choose one of those statements or the other.”
The fact that we don’t know the exact ranking algorithm doesn’t mean we can’t establish some things about it (like what sort of time period it reflects) with a fair degree of accuracy.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “Frankly, I think 134K is an unlikely, low number. But the exercise is useful as a negative proof. It suggests that absent a known methodology, App Store rankings are not a viable source on which to base sales numbers.”
Sure, they’re mostly just useful for establishing relative sales (e.g. that FCP X is probably one of the bestselling apps on the platform) and for ruling out extremes (e.g. ruling out that FCP X is a horrible failure in the market).
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Franz Bieberkopf] “Wrong math? Wrong estimates? Misleading ranking?”
The exact methodology of App Store rankings isn’t known (ranking algorithms are routinely kept secret to make manipulation more difficult), but they’re certainly not measuring cumulative sales since release. They seem to be heavily weighted toward recent downloads. One analysis I ran across suggested they’re only looking at the last four days worth of data, and even within that window they’re giving more weight to more recent days.
So all we know is that Mountain Lion has brought in more revenue than FCP X over the last couple of days, which isn’t very surprising given that it’s brand new and probably has more mass-market appeal than a $300 specialty market app like FCP X.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Jason Wood] “By EOLing Mac Pro, the core of my workflow, did Apple knock over the first domino in what might lead to complete computing paradigm shift for me?
Has anyone else thought about this? “
The recent (lack of a) Mac Pro update is probably going to have me building a Windows machine for our new DI theater, but just because Windows is, right now, the best choice as the core of a ‘Resolve appliance’ doesn’t suddenly mean I want to run it on my personal laptop, on my tablet, or even on systems used for creative editorial.
The last of those might be up for grabs if you need your offline NLE running on a massively powerful system, but how many people still do? Today’s MacBook Pros are faster than 2008’s Mac Pros, and Thunderbolt provides both RAID and video I/O connectivity without slots. I picked up one of the new Retinal MBPs, and FCP X in particular just runs like melted butter on this thing — it’s the most fluid and responsive video editing experience I’ve ever had.
There’s no doubt that Microsoft is doing some interesting things these days, but realistically, their new Metro environment is going to take a while to really catch on. Those tablets aren’t going to immediately have the kind of ecosystem of touch-optimized apps that iPad has. The ‘RT’ (ARM processor) version of their tablet doesn’t look to be on par with iPad 3 hardware (seems to only be a 720p screen, for starters), and by the time it comes out iPad 4 will be only a few months away. The ‘Pro’ (x86 processor) version of their tablet has a nicer screen (1080p), but is basically a MacBook Air without the keyboard — it’s chunky by tablet standards (a full two pounds), battery life (which they carefully didn’t discuss) isn’t going to be great, and it’s certainly going to provide a compromised experience when running desktop apps.
On the PC side, users — particularly users like us — are going to be stuck primarily using the traditional desktop interface for years, as apps like Photoshop and Media Composer are not going to get ported to Metro anytime soon. The whole dual-mode UI, switching back and forth between Metro apps and desktop apps, seems like it could be a bit frustrating. And really, one could construct the same sort ‘X doesn’t care about pro users’ narrative about Microsoft that has been constructed about Apple. In some ways, that narrative works even better for Microsoft. Apple is talking about how they see the Mac and the iPad as being different, and requiring different approaches with respect to their operating systems. Microsoft seems to be trying to move both tablets and desktops to Metro, which is clearly more oriented around consumer tablets than pro workstations.
The computer industry is in a state of flux right now, undergoing change of a sort of hasn’t seen in 20 years. Our industry is clearly going to have to change with it. But there’s no particularly clear direction to jump in, and we may well be headed for a real multi-platform future, very unlike the last couple of decades of Microsoft dominance + Apple holding down some important niches. There’s no reason to think one platform will be all things to any given user. With all of this uncertainly, the best approach right now is to buy the products that serve immediate practical needs, and keep workflows and skillets as flexible as possible so that future options are left open.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Jeremy Garchow] “Can it be used as DVI with a cheap adaptor or are you stuck with video frame size and frame rates?”
You can use it with a DVI adaptor as a third general-pupose display output, yes.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Jimmy Christensen] “You might want to check out ffmbc which is probably better at creating metadata.
https://code.google.com/p/ffmbc/“Yeah, should have been more specific. That’s what I’m using.
And a quick update: I’ve got it embedding timecode and reel names that Resolve can read correctly.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Chris Martin] “Our engineers have been testing using FFMPEG open source to write out prores codecs. Not quite as easy as having it on the export but so far no shifts which is more than you can say about using quicktime…”
Funny you should mention this, as I’ve just been doing tests with it tonight and I was planning to spend some time on it tomorrow on some faster hardware at the office. The image encoding seems solid from what I’ve seen so far, and I’ve gotten it to embed timecode. If I can talk it into embedding reel names this might form the basis of an interesting workflow.
Still, if Blackmagic could see fit to include this in Resolve, it would solve a lot of problems on Windows. It seems especially important in light of the new dailies processing features in Resolve 9, ProRes being an extremely common format in which to deliver editorial dailies.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Timo Teravainen] “I wonder if there is going to be prores render implemented on the V9 PC version of Resolve. There was a beta version of V8 that had it, but it was taken away from the release version. I’m actually still using that beta, to make life easier..”
Yeah, we’re setting up a new suite soon (the walls are going up right now) and we’re also trying to figure out which way to jump given the apparent lack of a ‘real’ Mac Pro update until next year. The HP Z820 is very tempting (I don’t like Windows much, but what’s it matter on a machine that’ll basically be a Resolve appliance?), but we deliver to ProRes all the time. Knowing whether ProRes output is coming to the Windows version of Resolve would clarify our options immensely.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
Phillip’s technical objections aren’t very sensible (I do write code). But I do see the argument he’s making. You’re not quite setting in/out points in FCP X the way you are in FCP 7. You’re selecting a clip range, on which you can then perform various actions. This is the language the documentation uses, it’s how things are visually presented, and it’s compatible with the ‘primary’ way in which such ranges are specified — by dragging. Hell, it’s right there in the menus. The menu items for which the ‘I’ and ‘O’ keys are shortcuts are not ‘Mark In’ and ‘Mark Out’, as in FCP 7. They’re ‘Set Selection Start’ and ‘Set Selection End’.
People keep asking why FCP X doesn’t preserve in and out points, but the app doesn’t acknowledge such a concept in the first place. And if you ask instead why FCP X doesn’t preserve selections, well, that’s standard behavior — most apps don’t preserve selections when you open/close a document or navigate away from a view and back.
Perhaps there would be less confusion on this point had Apple not kept the ‘I’ and ‘O’ keyboard shortcuts. They could have used ‘S’ and ‘E’ or something (for ‘start’ and ‘end’).
Mind you, the fact that apps don’t normally preserve selections doesn’t mean Apple couldn’t make an exception for FCP X — it wouldn’t really interfere with anything fundamental. But it does explain why Apple didn’t think this was necessary. Perhaps if enough people harass them on this subject they’ll add it anyway.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Tim Wilson] “And we have Apple to thank for it. They very explicitly conspired with publishers to raise prices. This isn’t some shadow theory. I’ve read the emails and with a quick Google search, you can too. Raising prices was Steve’s explicit goal from the beginning. Again, not a shadow theory. He said so. That part is public even outside the DoJ’s filing. Look it up.”
The DoJ’s case against Apple is widely considered weak. There’s no need to invoke collusion to explain either why Apple would offer publishers a better deal than Amazon was — it’s the same deal Apple offers app developers, and Apple is less interested than Amazon in making money from content sales. Nor is there any need to invoke collusion to explain why publishers would all accept this deal and try to use it to impose similar terms on Amazon — you don’t nee to collude to decide to accept a better deal. Nor is there any clear reason why Apple would want ebooks to cost more.
The ‘collusion’ narrative makes little sense. As far as I can tell, the only thing Apple has done with respect to ebooks that is arguably anticompetitive is its ‘most favored nations’ clause, but this isn’t strictly related to high prices on the iBookstore.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Tim Wilson] “Apple is never going to get a penny of it because they’re doing it WRONG. Which is idiotic. They’re running their book business like they never heard of iTunes.”
In order to lure publishers away from exclusively supporting Amazon, Apple offered to take a substantially smaller cut than Amazon was taking and let publishers set their own prices. Did publishers turn around and say “Great! Now that we’re getting 70% instead of 30-40%, we can lower prices”? They did not. They raised prices. This is silly, and it is broken, but it’s hard to see what Apple could have done. With music, Apple had some clout to try to force record labels onto Apple’s pricing scheme. With books, because Amazon, not Apple, was the market leader, Apple didn’t have such clout.
(Apple also lets app developers set their own prices, of course, and apps tend to be priced quite reasonably, but this is probably attributable to the app market being so much more competitive — there are many more app developers than major publishing companies.)
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.