[Tim Wilson]

[Richard Herd] “Even worse than no money! In huge debt. It’s a real problem in the US.”

Over $1.2 trillion as of last June, just before federal college loan rates DOUBLED on July 1.

The total amount of student loan debt is now bigger than the total amount of credit card debt or auto loan debt in the US. It will remake the next generation of the American economy — my own guess, vastly moreso than the sub-prime housing crisis.

You can use your own politics to make a conclusion about HOW that will happen, etc…but it’s already starting to happen….

[Tim Wilson]

You can’t even begin to imagine the number of churches, as well as small businesses of every sort, who are using NewTek Tricaster for this. Use any kind of camera, crazy simple, with lots of other features (live switching, i-mag, record to disk. …).

Even broadcasters are using it. .. but in fact, it’s quite affordable. If enough people are asking, I’d recommend buying one and making this service a part of your rate card. Many people in the COW have talked about this as a way to avoid chasing post and shooting rates down the drain.

I’m also willing to believe that there are people who’ll rent you one, but make a beeline to researching Tricaster.

[Tim Wilson]

“Avid Video” includes storage, newsroom automation, playout servers, character generators and broadcast graphics, ingest, and literally over 200 products that never get talked about in this forum.

(No kidding. You can look it up. A lot of it is broadcast stuff that never touches post, which is why it’s so easy to overstate the effect that FCP has had on Avid’s fortunes. Only a fraction of what you’d think.)

So basically, everything but audio and services. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[TImothy Auld] “we are working our way back to film resolution.”

We’re pretty much there.

• The Canon C500 sensor is the same size as 3-perf Super 35.
• Alexa is dang near there (27.8mm vs 28.5mm for film).
• RED is there, and even bigger in 5K and 6K.
• BMD isn’t far off today (24.2mm), but let’s reconvene tomorrow. 🙂

Frame size ≠ resolution, but the latitude of these isn’t so far off film (these are all 12-ish stops or more), and of course lenses can be identical. It’s just the quality of the sensor to consider, and obviously a lot of previously hardcore film guys are coming around on the look and feel of some of these cameras.

If you want to have some real fun with the numbers at their most basic, our friends at Abel Cine have put together a dynamic field of view comparison page. Flip between cameras and lens lengths, and compare what’s being captured. Very, very informative visually, plus a lot of fun numbers too, including the sensor sizes I quoted above, and a nice visual overlay of sensor size comparison.

They’re not comparing picture quality or latitude of course — it’s strictly field of view, but no kidding, I think you’ll really get a kick out this.

[Tim Wilson]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “Does 1 million users support the idea that Apple is achieving a wider, less specialized user base outside of facilities and traditional ‘professional’ enclaves?”

I think that FCP has always excelled at exactly this. It grew the market WAY beyond the group of people like me and most of you, who built our businesses around $30,000 NLEs. While a lot of folks in that category turned to AJA, Blackmagic, Pinnacle, Aurora and others — a bunch of people said, “Wow, Firewire and a laptop, and I’m in the door.”

So even if one has OVERALL market sizing correct, there’s a huge gap between who’s posting here and who’s lurking here. The COW’s heritage has always been professional editors, using heavier iron…but there’s a gap between people posting and people lurking. People who edit as only one part of their job, or whose primary platform is a single laptop or iMac, tend not to post as much — but there are acres of them. Corporate will always be a bigger market than classic post.

My belief — SOMEWHAT informed, but absolutely not as well-quantified as historical user counts — is that FCP’s biggest platform is laptops. That’s something that HAS been visible over the years in the COW, even moreso now with X and a retina-book.

So to answer in another way, I think X HAS grown the market, but the fact is that the TV/film post market has been growing too. I’m not sure that 1 million X customers tells us anything about that either way.

It also doesn’t tell us anything about the number of people who opened it and said, “Welp, time to move to Premiere or Media Composer.”

Nor does it tell us anything about the number of Media Composer or Premiere users said, “No way was I gonna kick the tires on a $1200 suite, but maybe I can run this at home for a couple of projects. Who knows? Maybe the modern tech underneath it will make it worth my while to do more.” I’m pretty sure there was a meaningful number of those.

But “only” 1 million downloads in 3 years says to me that X hasn’t yet caused the massive market shift away from pro users that many had feared. I think the Venn diagram overlap of “X users” and “Hardcore Pro users” out that 1 million is pretty dang big.

[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “Marcus Moore] “we have an over-inflated sense of the size of our industry…..
”

Agree, considering the industry wide resistance against it I would say 1 million is a good number.”

I generally agree that MANY people have an over-inflated sense of the size of the industry, but I’m not one of them.

I’m not saying this to brag, or try to deflect from how far off my posts two years ago are LOL — but when I was a product manager at Boris FX, we had bundling deals that were paid by the unit. One of those bundling deals was for a title tool that shipped with every copy of FCP — I knew EXACTLY how many units there were.

When I was a senior manager on the product marketing team for Media Composer, I could tell you not only how many customers there were, but how many boxes of our software were sitting in inventory on dealer shelves. I knew how many students were registered in every college media program in the entire country.

The ONLY part I got wrong was how many installs of X there are…and wow, did I get that wrong. LOL My ASSUMPTION, based on my own experience running a Mac-based video production company before I became a corporate weasel is that damn near everybody with a Mac would download a $295 product just out of curiosity, whether or not they’d even been using The Legend of FCP.

Back in MY day, you couldn’t buy a pack of gum for $295 LOL so that number sounds like no-brainer money to at least take a gander…but I haven’t bought production gear in the 21st century, so maybe $295 seems like a lot these days.

For the record, I never said one million is ridiculously low. I said I’d be embarrassed…but that’s the wrong word. The right word is disappointed. As a manager, I wouldn’t be at all happy to see that number cross my desk this far into the game.

But let me tell you a little story about disappointment and going with the story you’ve got.

You can look this up yourself, but one year around 10 years ago, Avid had precisely ZERO new news of substance for NAB. ZERO. So I came up with the only plan I could think of — if we can’t tell people about our NEW features, because there aren’t any, let’s tell them about our IMPORTANT features…because we do in fact have a ton of “important” features.

And so that’s what we did. That’s what we built the NAB demos around, and what we took on road shows. Our greatest hits. We didn’t even dust off old demos. We took our most important stories — media management, editing tools, etc. — and built new demos around them, to address the realities of how editors WORK.

As the guy who not only wrote them (with acres of help of course), but actually DID many of the demos – including all day, every day on the main stage at NAB – I was right in the middle of it. It not only turned out to be NOT embarrassing, it turned out to be a lot of fun.

Yeah, people were pissed to not see new features, but the overwhelming reaction was people thanking me for reminding them how much fun Media Composer is when they weren’t yelling at Avid. LOL It was a blast. One of my favorite experiences in corporate life.

Here’s the punchline. One of the strongest reaction was to an OLLLLLLD set of features based around voice recognition for clips in bins, called ScriptSync. I showed the shit out of that thing, and people LOVED it…and whaddya know, right after that, voice recognition is in other NLEs, both natively and with plug-ins.

Moral of the story: you can change the game with a GOOD story, even if it’s not the story you’d been hoping to tell. But it has to be a GOOD story.

Is 1 million users a good story? I think not. I don’t see it helping Apple much, and I don’t see it shaking up competitors much. It doesn’t seem to me like it would help generate new users, or make existing ones feel validated in their choice.

But hey, Apple has to love that you guys think 1 million really IS a good story. You’re a tough crowd, and if this sounds like good news to you, then they’ll take it as a sign that they’re on the right track.

Also for the record, I’ve ALWAYS said that FCPX is on a good track, and that I approve of everything Apple has done with it, INCLUDING killing FCP 7 when and how they did. I’m just surprised that they have “so few” LOL licenses to show for it. That’s all.

What I’m NOT surprised by is being wrong again. LOL THAT, I’m used to….

[Tim Wilson]

Ha! Franz, you amaze me. I was TOTALLY going to step up and say I got this wrong! LOL Oh my gosh, I was so far off.

Do note that I added at the end of almost all of those posts that I’m an idiot who knows nothing.

Here’s where I’m confused though. It’s very, very easy to find references to Apple saying that they had a million licenses in 2008, and two million in 2011. So what does THAT mean vs. what THIS means?

The one part I still stand by is that this is a ridiculously low number. I guess they have to say SOMETHING, I’d be embarrassed to have this be the flag I was trying to fly under….although in my software development career, I had to make do with less now and again, and I did it with a smile. You go with what ya got.

But this is WEAK. Both Apple and me. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

By leading. 🙂

To be honest, with the COW having grown as big as it has, we’ve not taken as active a role in this as we once did. We’re letting other COWs make that call through things like Likes etc., but we’re also paying much more attention to frequency of posting. It had seemed like a number of guys were treating their heads at the top of the page, and just stopped posting after that.

We’re also counting on people to help us fine tune choices. Again, it’s hard for us to keep up with every post in our busiest forums, much less across all 250-ish forums. We rely on members telling us that we’ve gotten something wrong, and the person posting a lot isn’t actually being helpful.

Because that’s the other thing. We were all active video producers when the site began, but as this became a full time job (duh), it has become difficult-to-impossible to even tell who has a clue anymore. LOL We can make educated guesses, but that’s where your direction is invaluable.

Does that answer your question? If you need anything more specific, please feel free to drop me a line directly using the Contact link at the top of the page.

Thanks!
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

The dot is a live hyperlink, so it turns orange after you’ve visited that post. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

In the top left corner of each post in a thread, you’ll see a small blue dot. There’s your link. 🙂

Best,
Tim