[Tim Wilson]

[Darren Roark] “Nobody wanted to wear the stupid glasses.
“

People will wear glasses for the right content. Over 80% of the audience for Gravity saw it in 3D. More than Avatar.

The larger problem is that the overwhelming majority of 3D movies bite. I’m a HUGE enthusiast, and other than the Hobbit, I can’t remember the last 3D movie I saw and liked.

(Actually, stay tuned for Stalingrad, a Russian movie that’ll have its US debut at the end of the month. Stunning on every level.)

More important, movies at home are a TERRIBLE business model. It’s simply not sustainable for building a platform. Can you imagine if the ONLY reason to watch HD was movies? No way.

HBO and Netflix have learned this. They’ll keep selling movies because it’s easy, but they way they’re making REAL money, now, and even moreso in the future, is off their original…what? Their original WHAT? Their original TV series.

And hey, it used to be boxing. Back in the early 70s, the only people I knew with HBO got it for the boxing. It’s still around, but it’s no longer the core of HBO’s business model.

Movies are a core product for Redbox, but almost exclusively to the extent that HBO and Netflix are softening their grip on them.

You might disagree with my assessment of that, but it doesn’t matter. LOL The only reason you can watch movies and sports in HD is because you bought an HD TV to watch TV shows.

It’s the chicken and egg, and the egg always comes first…and last. 3D TV is on its last legs because there was never any 3D TV to actually watch. 4K will live and die by the same thing. Not the hardware. The software. For TVs, that’s TV SHOWS. NOT MOVIES. NOT SPORTS.

For better AND for worse, you’ll get a 4K TV when you want to watch the 2015 equivalent of Breaking Bad or Spongebob in 4K. No amount of remastered 1960s widescreen epics mixed with Adam Sandler in “Grown Ups 4K” is going to get you there before then.

But, to my earlier point, we’re years away from 4K being driven by anyone but indie producers and filmmakers with snowflake workflows. Compelling content that isn’t movies or sports will drive broadcast LAST. It happened with HD, and it’ll happen with 4K.

[Tim Wilson]

[Darren Roark] “I wonder what they will announce at NAB?”

You heard it here first: a time machine, bus-powered over Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3.

[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “BMD have just announced their 4K camera is now shipping and they’ve dropped the price to $2,995!”

This is where it starts to get interesting: when you don’t need to charge extra for 4K because there’s no premium to produce it.

There are obviously infrastructure costs, but most Tube purchasers who are buying them to work in HD will have what they need for 4K. So, a relatively inexpensive camera, and voila.

No kidding, this happened with HD. The broadcast guys had a very hard time justifying it at first (and hey, the majority of my TV channels are still SD), but non-broadcast guys had a hard time justifying NOT doing it.

We’re not quiiiite there for 4K, but for many people already, we’re not NOT there either.

[Tim Wilson]

[John Heagy] “Nope… most are shot in 2K which is just a bit over 1080×1920. Arri understands there’s more important things than resolution when it come to making a good image. “

Alexa maxes out at 2880 x 1620, but yeah, I entirely concur and was writing a post to say this very thing when I saw yours go up. You’re absolutely right: it’s mostly 2K, because pixels do NOT equal resolution.

(FWIW, the last two Cinematography Oscars went to Alexa pictures, and if Gravity wins…and I think it will…that’d be the third 3D feature in a row!!!)

Even though it was 4-ish years ago, Avatar was indeed shot at 1920 x 1080, even though 4K cameras were available. The big screen doesn’t NEED big captures if they look good.

What’s especially interesting to me, though, is that indie shops, even one-man bands, get to this new tech long before features or TV do. While engineers were still arguing about how to deliver HD, event videographers were selling future-proofed wedding videos shot on HD.

The same was true with corporate video. You could shoot HD, and show it in the boardroom on plasma screens long before there was a way to broadcast it or put it on a disk. The smaller the scale project or shop, the easier it is to quickly adopt new formats — and it’s very much underway already.

So I would expect lots and LOTS of 4K/5K production for spots, music videos, corporate, and yes, even weddings, long before it’s common in either features or broadcast.

The other irony is that with HD, there was no idea how to stream it, so HD internet was the last thing anyone was thinking of. We can yap about compression, but you know what? I’m totally OK with the HD video I stream from Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube through my Blu-ray player. The 3D streams are noticeably fuzzier than Blu-ray, but still, streamed, smothered, chopped and doubled 720p totally passes the straight face test.

(Credit to Kylee Wall for that Waffle House tech humor.)

And this time, ironically enough, it’s going to be streams and downloads leading the way. Sony is already selling a 4K server with their 4K TVs that comes loaded with some of their movies (Taxi Driver! Yay! Beethoven! Ooops…), with a pretty decent download selection with reasonable prices for both rentals and purchases, and Samsung already has partnerships with Amazon to start streaming 4K in the next few months.

(For you tech nerds: the 4K big dog at Amazon is Ben Waggoner, the King of Compression. He was showing it at CES, and I can’t imagine he’d miss NAB.)

I don’t know if I should mention this, but my PHONE shoots 4K, and I gotta tell ya, the downcoverts over both HDMI and streaming are STUNNING. But c’mon, no reason to bring this up, because nobody in their right mind would dream of shooting anything important with their phone, right?

Right? RIGHT???

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] ” encodes a bit of editorial intent”

You’ve cracked the code. The “X” in “FCPX” is for “Existential.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Evans] “If I may, can I ask why ‘basketball’ trips a word alert?”

I’m happy to reply to that one. We get a TON of spam posts with links to watching those games on pirate sites. Right now it’s NBA games, but it will switch to March Madness, then back to NBA playoffs.

These pirate spammers are relentless. We simply couldn’t chase them down manually, so we had to automate the process. We’re trying to review those posts as quickly as we can to get the relatively small handful of real-person posts approved.

You can probably guess which are the two other sports we get spammed for, as well as which event generates the most spam. Hint: we’re a site whose members are all over the WORLD. “World.” Get it? LOL

Thanks for drawing the slow responses to the email alert. We’ll work on that. But that’s the annoying but true story behind filtering a word that looks so innocent.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “[Herb Sevush] “But no ADK. so go ahead and develop something if you want, but don’t expect us to help or encourage you.”

You should welcome your new open source overlords…”

I went on at considerable length at the time that Open Source is a great model for some environments, and a terrible one for others. For this one: terrible.

Even the things open source was supposed to be best for, like web browsers, reveal the entropy at its heart: optimizing code and supporting developers isn’t fun. It’s WORK, and with no money to subsidize, and no managers forcing the point — do this OR ELSE — guess what? It doesn’t get done. The inevitable state of open source software is reduced speed and stability through bloat.

Not that you can’t have fun before the entropy kicks in. You can!

And of course, one way to forestall entropy is to aim low in the first place. There’s certainly an extent to which there’s no way to aim lower than feature film editing. LOL

Entropy is true for commercial software too, of course, but in those environments, there’s incentive to periodically blow up the code base and start over. That’s really the only way to do it, and there’s no practical way to do that in open source.

Just for grins, I checked our browser stats. For YEARS, Firefox was #1 here, long before it was #1 on the web as a whole. Safari actually roared into a close second in less than a year, and is now 30% ahead of FF…but Chrome is now comfortably bigger than the 2 combined. (That’s true on both Mac and Win, btw.) Safari and Chrome kept getting faster and more robust because there were bosses cracking whips to get unglamorous tasks done on schedule.

I also said at the time, and I’ll say again here, that I have no idea how this will play out with Lightworks as the source code is turned into the wild. Maybe ES will continue to actively develop and make those subsequent changes open too. I’m just talking about the state of open source IN GENERAL: open source users have only open source users to depend on….

…although it happens that we here at Creative COW are quite fond of this particular model of support. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “[Andrew Kimery] “Who said it did? I think it’s weird that people are so fixated on that specific number like I threw down a gauntlet or something.”

Relax. It’s just a reference point in this thread.”

I get Andrew’s point though. He put out an ACTUAL number, based on his ACTUAL work. I think maybe some people heard it as a ridiculous, rhetorical number because it’s too big to sound anything but condescending. LOL

Which of course, it isn’t. There are tools that are optimized to work with projects like that, others that aren’t. Andrew was doing what Herb rightly observed is essential for conversations like this, being specific about workflow. And, for that matter, work.

[tony west] “This is all old news : ) People have posted their favorite tools since the forum started.
“

The fun of debating for its own sake notwithstanding, the reason that the forum is still going so strong is that people are coming to X for the first time every day. Or maybe they tried it earlier, found it a poor fit for whatever reason, but as X evolves and a new job comes along where it fits just right — well, that’s when the lightbulb goes on.

In that sense, there’s no such thing as old news. The software, the projects, the people trying to manage them — all of them are in constant motion. They won’t always align…but when they do, well, that’s when the lightbulb goes on.

That’s why threads like this are among my favorites. They point to this fundamental truth about the plasticity of experience.

On the flip side, some aspects of this can never be in motion, like the size of Andrew’s projects. By definition, each will be bigger than the last — but Andrew is still open to hearing that X is NOW up to a task that, in the beginning, was universally agreed it was NOT.

If that’s the case. Maybe it’s not.

So, X is changing, projects are changing, people are changing, which means that every conversation ever had in this forum will happen again…will NEED to happen again….because the more things change, the more they change.

Unless they don’t, because they can’t.

Yr pal,
Timmy

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Joseph W. Bourke] “Now…if you had the original Mom’s Apple Pie album…”

…then we’d have to block that post. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

I think that the idea of looking for objective quantification of how much faster X is by counting keystrokes or putting up a timer somewhat misses the point. Even if “faster” means nothing more than “it feels faster and it drives me less crazy,” wow, wouldn’t you take that trade-off in a heartbeat? That your work FEELS faster?

Maybe even more fun? I know that I often choose driving routes that are longer, just because I feel better when I get where I’m going. Qualitative measures can at least as important as quantitative ones, no?

And hey, sounds like maybe it objectively too. Thanks for the reports. 🙂