Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
-
[Charlie Austin] “You’re about a week too late. :-)”
Not exactly. It’s definitely one of the longer threads of late, but it starts with the assumption that there are people who HAVE switched back, and I’m not sure how common that is. Certainly nobody on that thread said “Yes.” There was one who switched FROM Premiere to X, and another who switched FROM Legend and Avid to X….but both of them said that they had no plans to switch back to their FORMER nles.
I may have been reading it wrong, but that’s what I saw.
Which is why I’m trying to come at it from a different angle. Somebody who said, “Okay, I’ve been using Legend, and X isn’t for me, so I’m going to Media Composer or Premiere,” and who THEN says, “Wow, I thought that that was going to work a lot better than it did. Turns out I didn’t like this other thing much at all, so I’m going to go to X after all.”
[Andrew Kimery] “Careful Tim, this sounds like a poll. ;)”
Which is also why this isn’t a poll. LOL I’m not structuring samples, not testing my questions for bias, not correlating a cohort to a longitudinal cross-sectional, and, above all, not expecting useful results that should guide anyone’s corporate policies or product development. LOL Just chewing the cud, nothing more.
So there it is. Did anybody here jump FROM either Legend or X, to Premiere or Media Composer, not like what they saw for whatever reason, and jump to, or back to, X?
-
[Charlie Austin] “Of former FCP X users moving? Or former FC 1-7 users moving. The latter I’ll buy in a heartbeat. The former I’d need a cite.”
The latter, absolutely.
Although I guess it depends how you’d count a “former FCPX user,” right? How long would they have had to try it before bailing in order to count?
But in general, I do think there’s a high incidence of people who saw what they needed to from the combination of 5 or 6 years without a meaningful FCLegend update, the early releases of X, and a not exciting Mac Pro. Making no value judgements myself (for once). Just an observation…
…but I do have some questions myself about the relationship between X, switching and other NLEs three years into this. The sociologist in me wishes that there had been a way to track the changes along the way….in a more substantive manner than this subject line. LOL
-
If the anecdotal evidence we come across behind the scenes at the COW is relevant, I assure you that the number is much higher than you think.
Unless you think the number is 20%. LOL C’mon.
[Shane Ross] “MacPro’s are probably their lowest selling product. Again, iPhones and iPads and even laptops are their bread and butter. I’ll wager they only did the MacPro to placate people…make them think they are still “serious” about the pro market.”
This with one million thumbs up. The most popular Macs are iMacs and 13-inch MacBooks. This has been true for a very long time. FCPX is a cool thing to use ON a Mac, and for pretty much everyone outside the COW, and plenty folks IN the COW, either of those will do mighty fine for FCPX. But it’s a ridiculous reason to BUY a Mac, and an even more ridiculous primary reason to buy a Mac Pro…which there are also good reasons to buy….but FCPX ain’t what’s driving those sales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-SJQdREDKM
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
-
So I was a little ahead of schedule, but this is very nearly EXACTLY what I predicted. I observed that Apple had made at least $2 billion from the software sales of FCS Legend, and that was assuming only one software upgrade for only one third of units sold. The number was surely higher.
That was over the course of 12 years. I predicted that they would soon be making more than that every single year.
Again noting that my timing was wrong, I have maintained from the beginning that Apple’s interest in Pro Apps had NOTHING to do with selling high-end Macs, and everything to do with their interest in being in this market.
But I’m right so rarely that I thought it was worth mentioning. LOL
Keep in mind that Apple pushed FireWire as a solution for laptop editing, and long positioned FCP as a self-contained system that could do everything it needed to on a minimal hardware platform. It was in contrast to everyone else that needed heavy iron.
This too goes back to Steve’s vision of a consumer-oriented video application to run on the colorful new bubble-shaped iMacs. It was only after Adobe declined to sell Premiere to Apple (!!!) that they went looking for an alternative. They happened to find it being developed by the former developer of Premiere, now at Macromedia, and running on Windows. The fact that it could easily scale up to something truly professional was a happy accident.
It’s part of why I’ve also never bought the idea that Final Cut X was EVER intended for consumers, AT ALL. iMovie a nifty product that does that just fine. The distinctions are meaningful, even if, in the long run, the two have informed each other along the way.
It’s ultimately a confirmation that Steve was right, that a low-cost video creation platform could be a money-maker for Apple, WITHOUT heavy iron, which was never the point. Computer sales, yes. Top of the line computer sales, absolutely not. Monitor sales, absolutely not. It’s no accident that…wait for it…the IMAC is such a sweet spot. That was the plan from the beginning.
BTW, this is an overly brief summary of an extremely well-documented set of stories from volume 2 of John Buck’s Timeline: A History of Editing, a marvelous overview from 1925 to roughly 2011, just before the release of X. (Now THERE’s the start of a third volume for ya.) You’ll enjoy the heck out of it.
And as a reminder, although my timing was off, I was in fact right three years ago: that Apple would be making more from an APP version of the ProApps in a year than they’d made in the entire history of FC Legend.
I’ll let you know the next time I’m right, but it may be a while.
-
[Michael Phillips] “Except that unlike ScriptSync, there is no unified view of text and all related clips. “
That’s what struck me too. There are a lot of different implementations, including several built around licensing the same Nexedia technology that Avid has, but if it was easy to build something as feature-complete as ScriptSync, more people would.
Or maybe not enough people have seen it work that they know the target to hit, or surpass, or to understand the transformative potential of getting this right.
The fact is that even the less capable or less complete alternatives are pretty amazing. Whether it’s a plug-in, or something built in to one’s NLE of choice, more people should be using it, and telling developers how to make it even more useful.
-
[Simon Ubsdell] “Or the one that one that comes with the OS that comes after Yosemite.”
That one’s called Glacier I think.
-
[Andrew Kimery] “Yeah, FCP did the job but it took a small team of specialists to make it happen. ;)”
And a workflow so complicated it took a book to explain it.
People keep talking about waiting for X’s “Cold Mountain Moment,” but I swear that that book may be the only thing that has kept Avid locked into Hollywood. It doesn’t matter that the story got better. No matter how much people hated Avid, they’d hate going through THAT.
(I was also amused by how many people at Avid had that book on their desks.)
I can’t wait for Fincher’s story though. I’ve never done work like his so I can’t imagine that it will be exactly applicable — which is why The Cold Mountain story didn’t do anything for me personally, one way or the other: I wasn’t shooting epics in Romania, and I didn’t have a team to manage my workflow. It didn’t scare me, but it didn’t excite me either.
Hearing Fincher’s story — THAT I’m excited about. (The movie, whatevs. LOL I’m sure it’ll be outstanding, but srsly. He’s always pushed things just a little further than they can actually be stretched, and pulls it off anyway. Even when his movies aren’t my favorites, he may be my favorite movie MAKER because of stuff like this….and I have no doubt that his use of PPro will be a cracking yarn. Bring it, baby!
-
[Franz Bieberkopf] “Metaphor, on the other hand, is fire.”
I was about to say “Metaphor is fire metaphorically speaking,” but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a metaphor in this phorum.
You used the word “analogy,” but the word more closely twinned with metaphor is “simile,” which is built around “like” and “as.” And indeed, most of those posts begin, “It’s like a car” or something similarly simile-esque.
But analogy is a good word too….
-
[Franz Bieberkopf] “[Walter Soyka] “… the way that FCP X rolls a DAM into an NLE is new …”
Walter,
How so?”
Well for one, it’s a heckuva logging tool.
-
[Richard Herd] “and in some cases a photograph of a building”
Man, I love bringing up buildings when we’re talking about trademarks.
A short list of trademarked buildings include the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Art Deco Building (even the elevator doors are trademarked), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Transamerica Pyramid, Wrigley Building, the Guggenheim, the Flatiron Building…it’s a pretty dang long list.
Assume NOTHING, except that you’d better ask before you take your lenscap off, your phone out of your pocket, or what have you.