[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “It seems to me that these new switchers are particularly targeted towards the Asian market now and other markets in the future. Note the 8K capabilities, including 8K DVE. ”

I want to underscore that I don’t disagree with Bob thinking, “Wait a minute, is the right message?” in his first post, especially because so much of the messaging was around live events and sports. Tiptoeing lightly around politics, I’d say in the US and northern Europe, that pitch is premature.

In Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, etc., it’s not premature at all. Not that those markets are ready to open all the way up today, but that the second half of their 2020 will look very different from what’s going on in “our” market. They’re going days and even weeks at a time with zero new cases, while “we” are still breaking records of new cases more days than not.

(btw, it’s worth remembering that the US and Canada combine to make up only a third of the COW’s traffic. EU+UK is another third. There are MILLIONS of people coming to the COW every year from nations who have seen impacts along the lines of 1% or less of what “we” have faced, and whose numbers are trending very much down, if not flat near zero.)

[Oliver Peters] ” I would imagine that Grant is looking past the next 6 months to a year, and rather further into the future.”

Yeah, infrastructure for broadcast (in the sense of big control rooms) and major concert production are on very different buying cycles. It’s not unusual to have to lock in next year’s spending by the end of summer. Grant is coming out a little ahead of the traditional IBC timeframe to lock in 2021 dollars (and for many companies, FY 2021 starts in December anyway), but this is pretty typical for Blackmagic. They go big into IBC, but they usually start their “fall” pitch in July and August.

I’d be surprised not to see another big round of announcements from Blackmagic next month too, and I won’t be surprised if not’s especially “work from home” focused again.

Other than Resolve, of course. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “Or maybe BM had it in development for so long, they said, we gotta announce and get this thing off the books! ☺
“

Haha! Always a possibility! I’ve always admired that Blackmagic isn’t coy about holding releases. If it’s ready to go, let’s go!

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “But is it possible for a network to use a production switcher controlling many remote-via-online inputs”

This, absolutely.

Always sniffing around for what’s happening across the industry, just seeing what people are up to in various corners of the world, I found THIS picture this morning, exactly what you’re talking about Doug: lots of inputs of home sources, mixed with broadcast graphics, being managed from home, for broadcast.

The company is the Broadcast Management Group, and their product is called Live At Home. From context, I’m going to assume that it’s pronounced to rhyme with Hive, as in “Live From New York!”, but honestly it could just as easily rhyme with Give, as in, “I’m broadcasting this from where I live, which is now also where I work.”

They’re really going all-in on this, across their product line.

You can read more about it here.

That said, I thought the same thing that Bob did, and noted that BMD’s hero image is definitely oriented toward not-at-home scenarios.

Then I thought, wait a minute, don’t I remember that Australia has been kicking COVID’s ass, instead of the other way around? I don’t want to belabor this, lest I stoke the ire of the crowd who thinks that math is political (me, I think that math is the ANTIDOTE to politics)….but here’s the number of total deaths from COVID in Australia: 106. (More here.)

By itself, that doesn’t mean much because Australia has such a smaller relative population to, say, the US, but looking at on a proportional basis, Australia has seen 356 cases and 4 (FOUR) deaths per million people, compared to 9727 cases and 410 (four HUNDRED ten) deaths per million people. Numbers galore, here.

So really, in the scheme of things, Australia and New Zealand (similar to Oz: 308 cases and FOUR deaths per million people) are still closed up pretty tight, but they’re a heck of a lot closer to opening than the US.

Numbers in places like S. Korea (260 cases and 6 deaths per million), Japan (161 cases and 8 deaths per million), Thailand (46 cases and POINT EIGHT deaths per million, in a population of 69 million people!), and Singapore (where BMD has an office, also 4 deaths per million) are similarly one percent or less of what they are in the US.

And combine just those few markets (Australia, Japan, New Zealand, S. Korea, Singapore, Thailand), and you’ve got nearly 300 million people living in conditions that have ACTUALLY flattened the curve, or come close to it. You don’t need to add too many more countries to get to nearly half a billion such folks.

(Did you know that Morocco has 39 million people? 8 deaths per million. Indonesia isn’t so much smaller than the US at 273 million people, but they’re at 259 cases and 12 deaths per million….again with the US at 9727 and 410 respectively, still a lower death per millions number than UK, Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, and Sweden. )

Again not wanting to get into the politics or arguing about why this or that, but when people ask themselves what their broadcast and live production business needs to look like over the next couple of quarters, much of the world is looking at a picture that looks a lot different than the US and northern Europe.

Blackmagic, both based in such a country and doing business in lots of others, I think is doing a pretty good job of keeping its fingers on a lot more pulses than just ours.

Besides, they did a KILLER launch in March of a bunch of products for home and remote streaming that are still awesome.

And to end where I began, with this stellar observation from Professor Dempsey:

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “Or maybe BM had it in development for so long, they said, we gotta announce and get this thing off the books! :-)”

?

[Tim Wilson]

[Dirk de Jong] “Wow, such a long thread I decided to add another post to it…

In the course of creating these effects for use in Final Cut Pro I’ve come to know Motion well “

Ladies and gentlemen, Dirk De Jong, aka my one tether to sanity while working at Boris FX. LOL

I don’t ever want to drag anyone else into my nonsense just because they ever worked at a company at the same time I did, but he’s definitely one of the most creative guys I’ve ever worked with. (As well as kind, generous, hilarious, and killer music taste.) In addition to Simon Ubsdell at Hawaiki, one of the FX Factory developers you really need to pay attention to is Dirk at King Luma.

Our colleague Gabriele de Simone was a few desks away from us, banging away on Apple’s new Quartz display technology, and felt it offered a lot more than OpenGL, but Boris insisted on a cross-platform solution. (Ironically, since Boris was the most adamantly Mac person I may ever have met.)

Gabe was a neighbor of mine, lived around the corner, and witnessed the version of our wills that my wife and I updated before heading to Rome (with a day trip to see Gabe’s peeps in Sorrento)….

…but not at all pleased with the thought of wasting his time on OpenGL when Quartz was singing her siren’s song, so he left Boris FX to found Noise Industries and FX Factory.

(So yes, Boris FX was the seed bed for both Motion and FX Factory!)

I’m very happy to have an excuse to talk about some of this stuff again. Filters, presets, included assets, and extensibility for the kinds of work people do every day is what drew me to Boris FX as a customer, and advocate, and a developer, and it’s what made me flip for Motion, too. I love that folks like Simon and Dirk are out there still making it better.

Note how I stopped before adding, “even if Apple isn’t” LOL since for all I know, a fantastic new version is right around the corner.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Remember, “machine learning” does not actually involve any “learning.” It’s the software comparing the picture or sound against a supplied data set.”

Machines are stupid. LOL And the people who program, well, we’ll see.

[Oliver Peters] “Do an image search on any internet search engine for a known person. The first batch of hits will be the correct person. “

This isn’t my experience AT ALL. I think Google image search (the only one I use) is getting worse and worse, at least partly because it IS trying to learn, and data sets are becoming lower quality over time.

I have a couple of little hobbies like most of us do, and one of mine is posting about music, especially classic rock, over on tumblr. I don’t always have time to indulge, but when I do, I want to post the details of a photo whenever I can — I usually know who it is (even if I may not know who the OTHER person in the picture is), but I like to also credit the photographer, the date, the venue, all that kind of thing.

Look, I happen to know that this is Robert Plant, and I’m pretty sure that it’s from the 1976 film, The Song Remains The Same.

For guys our age, Oliver, this is as mainstream as any music movie ever made, right? And Led Zeppelin is hardly obscure. But what does Google have to tell me?

Check the top of the results. Singer? Is that all you can tell me? Well, I guess “singer” is a good enough start…but the text results are for SINGER SEWING MACHINES!!!! Not even the right kind of singer!!!!

Looking up John Paul Jones images within the Led Zeppelin universe, the most frequent result is “girl”. That’s fine as a start. LOL But come on, this is maybe the second-most photographed band in the world after The Beatles, and the online fan community (Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, etc) posting pictures of them may be even larger, but with all this data Google can’t figure this out?

This was definitely NOT always the case. When I first started doing this in 2013, I got useful results almost every time, or at least a clue where I could turn for more information. But I think that the combination of Pinterest and Instagram stripping metadata that’s usable anywhere outside their platforms has made it harder for Google to follow along.

I also saw this image, and thought, hmmm, when did Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey recently hang out?

So I right-clicked, asked Google, and they told me that they had NO results, but they DID have a “best guess”:

That’s pathetic. I wound up going to TheWho.com, and searching for Robert Plant by hand, like a wild animal. LOL Turns out that this photo was taken at the 2011 dedication UCLA Daltrey/Townshend Teen & Young Adult Cancer Program, which Robert was there to support. Photo by Andrew Evans. C’mon Google, was that so hard?

I could be wrong about the mechanics of why Google image searches within classic rock are less useful over time, but I get that feeling everywhere I go. Good information is getting harder to find, and it feels like less and less useful search engines are closer to the problem end of the spectrum than the solution end.

[Oliver Peters] “Fortunately, it will still be a while before the robots take over ☺”

Me, when I think of AI, I’m thinking, “I don’t care if it’s artificial or not. Show me something ACTUALLY Intelligent.” LOL

[Oliver Peters] “As an FYI – FCPX has already had a basic level of this since day one. That is the ability to analyze and identify clips by wide shots, close-ups, etc.”

My snark notwithstanding, that’s useful. I also like all of the language-related searches. Enter a text search term, and up pops not just anyplace I’ve entered that term into a metadata field, but also every clip where somebody speaks that word. I remember demoing the rollout of the product then known as Avid Interplay and doubleclicking a word in a transcript creating a subclip with that line in a bin.

A variation of this for news VO allowed me to delete words from a transcript, and the timeline would automatically rebuild itself to fit the slot that I’d allowed for the VO in the fixed-length segment, then either delete b-roll, or retime to stretch if there were no handles to lengthen the clips. That was in 2006, and it felt pretty dang intelligent to me.

So I’m not saying that there’s NO place for AI in editing, but yeah, I definitely agree, Oliver, very easy for our enthusiasm for what COULD be possible to outpace the utility of what actually is possible.

But hey, we change what’s possible when we wish for something better and start building it, right? 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Tony West] “Hahahaha I know it sounds crazy Tim, I admit it. I wasn’t really doing anything super over the top, just making dollar bills fall from the sky, glowing radioactive signs, but clients seemed to like stuff I was coming up with in it.”

Tony, nobody is ever going to get mograph judgement from me. I started working with the first version of Boris FX in 1995, when the hottest feature was DVE cubes. LOL Easy to laugh at now, but for local spots, I had HUGE demand for this kind of thing, and made redonkulous amounts of money with it.

When I started working with Boris (the man AND the company) in the late 90s, I helped develop the preset library. A TON of the DVE presets were cheesy, not because Boris (the man, the company AND the product lines) was especially cheesy, but because I got on the phone and called many hundreds of customers and asked what they needed. The answer was frequently some variation of “more cheese.” LOL

(This was before email was widespread, and many facilities forbade the internet in production studios for fear of viruses. If I was going to speak to actual users, it was the phone or nothing. And I do mean MANY hundreds of phone calls.)

I’ll give you an example. When we introduced a number of includes shapes to use as graphic elements for lower thirds, masks, 3D extrusion, etc., one of ’em was a heart. Pathetic, right? LOL My phone started ringing off the hook — “Man, I’m beggin’, build me a whole category of heart presets. Valentine’s Day is coming up, and my boss/client/news director/morning talk show host is demanding more heart graphics and transitions.”

Done. I created a couple dozen of these, enough to show what you could do with them as masks, using the masks to build transitions, mapping video to extrusions, and so on. All for free, if you give us your email address. You will probably not be shocked to hear that this was our most successful harvesting of email addresses in company history.

People need what they need, even if they don’t WANT to need it. LOL Even if they want desperately NOT to need it. This is also why they don’t want to waste time building this stuff themselves. It’s not what drives them creatively, but it’s going to drive revenue, or at least get someone off their back — and what should ANY software developer care more about than helping customers make money and relieve pain?

And this is why I loved Motion from when I first saw it, a year before it launched, before the product even had a name — which, I will note again, was developed by my predecessor at Boris FX!!!! I didn’t work with him at Boris at the same time, but I’d bought Boris FX on the day it was launched at MacWorld Boston 1995, and as a customer who used it a ton, wrote tutorials for it in the COW’s first incarnation, then eventually as full-time outside demo artist, I spoke to him quite regularly.

Many of the concepts at the heart of Motion are concepts that he first developed when he was at Boris — auto-animation (applied motion effects do something before you add any keyframes), auto-keyframing, libraries of graphic elements, presets out the wazoo….I could go on and on, but virtually EVERYTHING I saw in early Motion came DIRECTLY from what he’d learned at Boris.

How was I not going to love it? And envy the ever-loving shit out of it. LOL

Right after that, and before Motion’s official launch, I had moved from Boris to Avid, and guess what I encountered when I began working with hardcore broadcast and film editors? Requests for more presets, more automation, more graphic elements.

Maybe the film crowd wanted fewer DVE presets, but you better believe that many of the broadcast guys had already installed the heart presets from Boris. LOL

I’ll tell you one more story from the dawn of time to underscore why I never prejudge anyone for what they do or don’t do with mograph. If you work for a living, your art HAS to be driven by commerce, and clients often have terrible taste. LOL

Elastic Reality is a company that invented morphing as we know it. It existed in the precursors of film going back to the early 1800s, but a lot of people, including me, first saw it on a large scale in Willow in 1988. (Look up “Willow morphing scene” on YouTube, and watch how fast YT autocompletes it for you — this still looks incredible.) That was done by ILM, but they did it the hard way. The guys from Elastic Reality wanted to make it easy, and they succeeded. They won a Technical Academy Award for it, too!

Turns out that you can’t make enough money *only* selling high-end VFX tech, so they sold a consumer version of it that was FANTASTIC. They also productized their morphing technology into a set of DVE transitions called Transjammer that evvvvvverybody had. Maybe you wouldn’t use the Falling Cows transition — which, as you might guess, filled up the screen with falling cows LOL — but you might use the variation with falling dollar signs. Or the incredibly high-quality ripples and bulges and such, which weren’t treated as distortions, per se, but warped transformations.

Elastic Reality’s “Willow moment” came in 1994, with two movies. In Forrest Gump, there’s a feather that lands on Forrest’s shoe. The real feather just wasn’t cooperating LOL so Zemeckis brought in the guys from Elastic Reality to perform a morph to make it land juuuust right. And in Stargate (which I think holds up really well!), they used morphs to animate the masks on and off the Egyptian soldier god thingies. (I said that the movie holds up, not that it makes any more sense. LOL)

So what was Elastic Reality promoting in 1993 that made Hollywood come calling in such a big way? THIS, their 1993 demo reel.

I’m not a fan of high-brow/low-brow distinctions in much of nuthin’. I’ll tell you about my Ivy league graduate degree if you make me, but you’ll have to yell loud enough for me to put down my book about teenage vampires in love to answer you. LOL

But I really REALLY don’t want to hear anything from anybody about the “right” way to do mograph. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “I would love to switch to the integrated Fairlight in Resolve but I still prefer to use my stand alone version of Fairlight, even though Resolve is my integrated post tool of choice.”

I have seen this from every angle myself, as an editor, designer, and a developer.

When I worked at Boris FX, my long suits were FCP (which I started working with in Windows when it was still at Macromedia) and Avid, with a twist of AE. Enough to demo and test our stuff in it, but once I stopped using AE as an artist myself in 1998, I admit that I couldn’t keep up. LOL

I also recruited and onboarded the (then) Sonic Foundry team, although I didn’t help develop the plug in integration for it. I eventually got up to speed on Boris’s integration with Premiere, Sony Xpri (!!!) and a few others, by which point I knew as much about integration as almost anybody on the planet not named Boris. Not a brag. It was my job.

And yet my biggest concentration was the relationship between those plugins and Boris’s standalone product, RED. That was my baby. I learned lots and lots of advantages to plugins standing alone, which is why I was also so delighted to see just last week that Boris has developed and released a standalone version of the venerable plugin Particle illusion.

Because RED was a standalone application, being used by people who also worked with plugins, who obviously, also worked with a variety of host applications, I immediately saw the advantages of Automatic Duck, and began work with West plate and his father Harry on Automatic Duck integration for Boris RED.

(Auto Duck enabled sections of NLE timelines, first Avid, then FCP, to be opened in AE, while retaining things like DVE, markers, filter settings, layers, and more, then bringing something comprehensible back to the NLE. Fiendishly clever stuff, WAY ahead of its time, if now common as a built in feature, largely because of Auto Duck’s efforts.

Talk about an education in interchange, though! Working with Auto Duck to make RED’s timelines (not just rendered output) compatible with all these took me under the hood of the timeline architectures of Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Media Composer and Symphony, as well as understanding the relationships between plugins and standalone compositing for all of these.
And not just things like filter values, DVE, and tracking data, but what it means to share camera data and software lights, which may or may not have any relationship to real lights or real cameras, but might in fact be entirely artificial creations, each unique to its own environment.

It happens that my predecessor in product management for Boris RED left to develop a super flexible real time particle and compositing system for Discreet. His entire team was bought by Apple, and that product was released as Motion. I was working in the Apple booth at NAB the year before Motion was released, and he gave me a preview on his laptop. The product didn’t have a name yet or even an interface. It was running in a shell, but it was jaw dropping.

That was the same year I saw India Titler further down the floor, and was clearly not the only one to think “Wow, real-time particles and procedural media combined with real-time procedural textures on titles, that would make a dynamite combination! ” LOL

So then I wound up at Avid. Lost now to the sands of time is a suite that I led the product marketing for, that is to say not the engineering, and it wasn’t my idea, but the product development and release, called Avid Xxpress Studio.

We were starting to put this together at the same time that Apple was working on Final Cut Suite, its first name, now also lost to the sands of time. Neither of us was copying the other. We were both running terrified of Adobe, with a bigger software user base than Apple and Avid combined (true then, and true now), and neither of us as yet had a good enough story to answer Adobe.

Apple’s solution of course was to buy a whole bunch of stuff in addition to Motion/Live Type. Spruce DVD, Final Touch, Logic, etc etc. A ton of stuff. Many of you remember this well.

Avid’s solution was likewise obvious in retrospect. A very popular set of NLEs and IO hardware, a very popular audio software and integrated hardware toolset, a 3D application in Softinage XSI and much more.

Remarkably, nobody had ever tried to get any of it working all the way together before! (AAF and OMF, yes. Anything else, not so much.) I traveled back and forth between Montreal, San Francisco and Boston, where the three teams were located, trying to bang it out.

This was a gargantuan effort that was directed from on high, but I was the grunt interfacing with the teams putting it together. I talked to engineers to get Pro Tools hardware talking to Avid timelines as a control surface for the first time ever, creating 3D rigs in XSI (whose long suit had been character animation) that were useful for broadcast animation and titling (ie, the opposite of anything vaguely resembling character animation)…

Oh yeah and an Avid branded version of Boris RED (Avid FX) that would now fit into the mix to answer the mograph, tracking, paint, compositing, and titling pieces. Where I also learned more than I ever wanted to know about integrating DISPLAY processing, thanks to a handful of entirely unrelated OpenGL implementations.

By this point, combining everything I’d learned about timelines, interop, plugins, hardware, software, audio, video, 3D, for Avid, Apple, Adobe, and more, I was it. Nobody was juggling more of it than me.

(I’m skipping the DVD authoring and our unique integrations with SmartSound that I worked with them closely on. I’d been a customer since the 90s, and an still a fan, and yeah, learned STILL MORE about integration from these two. NLE markers to DVD chapters was just the beginning.)

Heck, I was even having to learn about integrated dongles, because the Pro Tools plugins all had their own dongles IN ADDITION TO the dongles for Avid and Pro Tools. Audio guys were used to this. Audio freelancers carried around suitcases of dongles, but I knew that even one dongle was too many for many people, and insisted on just one.

Well, I talked them down to two, which nobody had even tried before. And a ton of people did a ton of work to pull it off, so I called it a victory and moved on

But I wasn’t done yet!

I’m going to take a pause in that story, though, to tell you this one.

I’d already been a road warrior, on the road for 100 days a year or more. I met many of you at some of these presentations going back before the turn of the century at Boris. At one time, I’d presented to every FCP UG on the planet, and most of the ones for Avid, Premiere, and AE…. but travel for Avid Xpress Studio was through the roof. Approaching 200 days on the road that year.

I had a rough time at IBC that year, and was genuinely delighted to see some of my friends from Apple’s road team third row center for my presentation at the historic Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Avid spent a fortune on this thing, too, their big after hours event that year. Two giant Barco protectors worth a quarter million each, filling a pair of 30 ft screens, incredible sound, an open bar, 3000 people, it was insane.

And I ended my pitch the way I always did, emphasizing that Avid’s was “the most complete suite” – the industry’s definitive video editing, the only suite with integrated hardware for video IO and an integrated control surface, the only suite with 3D, and the only suite with Pro Tools.

“Why would you bother with a suite that doesnn’t have ANY of these things when Avid offers THE MOST COMPLETE SUITE right here in Avid Xpress Studio ?” ….I said looking my friends from Apple’s Final Cut SUITE right in the eye. LOL

We’d been giving each other playful grief on the road for years, and they rolled their eyes at me, as well they should have. They really let me have it later, too. “Most complete suite, very clever. Ha ha ha.” All good fun.

Fast forward to NAB the next spring, Apple and Avid across the aisle from each other just inside the front door to the South Hall. Apple’s booth was shrouded in curtains, and had been for the past month. (Yes, it takes a month to set up a major booth.) Five minutes before the doors open, the curtains rise, and a 40 for banner pointing ONLY at Avid reveals Apple’s big news for the show.

Final Cut Suite is dead and gone.

In its place, Final Cut….STUDIO.

We laughed out loud. We’d spent a year beating them up with “Avid Xpress Studio: The Most Complete SUITE, so they turned both barrels on us to face Avid Xpress STUDIO with Final Cut STUDIO. Ya gotta love it.

So for anyone who prefers the name Final Cut Studio, you’re welcome. LOL

Anyway, as all this drama was playing out, Avid bought Pinnacle, for one big reason: the intersection between integration and inter op.

People in our market tend to forget that Avid is even bigger in broadcast than post. They were running the table on digital newsrooms conversions at the time, and newsrooms are INSANELY complex. Avid’s systems designers took sole responsibility for developing turnkey neesrooms that were absolutely bulletproof and tied together, and a typical invoice would have products from as many as 200 companies on it.

Plenty of stuff like wires and connectors, but also switchers, routers, CG, MAM, playout servers, archive and nearchive servers, NLEs and shared editing storage, on and on – and it all had to talk to each other.

Pinnacle offered a lot of pieces like CG and playout servers that Avid was never going to build, so after buying Pinnacle, Avid could offer more streamlined systems from fewer vendors, and keep more of the dough. Nice!

The only part of this I had anything to do with was graphics. I’d become the defacto titling and graphics nerd n chief because I not only knew how Boris FX, XSI, and Avid’s other two titlers (Title Tool and Marquee) fit together, but I also knew After Effects, the defacto animation engine for Pinnacle’s Title Deko. My job was to create a scope of work for integrating sooooome aspect of these.

So I flew to Mountain View from Boston, and figured out before lunch that it would cost more to develop than it would ever make. LOL Oops. Had a great Indian lunch and flew back across the country early. Avid wisely punted and created something new for broadcast graphics.

If you want to see something REALLY cool if there’s ever another NAB, check out Avid’s broadcast graphics solutions. So so amazing… and again, nothing to do with me, but you can in fact add the integration of broadcast graphics and post graphics, and reconciling incompatible approaches to alpha channels, to the stupid integration tricks I had to learn.

Part of the acquisition of Pinnacle was Liquid, a low cost NLE ($1000, same as Final Cut at the time) that completely rewrote the book on integration at that time: video, audio, 2D and 3D titling and animation, and DVD authoring not in one suite, but in one application.

The dev team was in Munich, my counterpart in Pinnacle product marketing was there in Mountain View, but here comes Mr Integration, ME, to run point on the Avid side from Boston. Plus a whole new set of user groups to visit.

I spent a TON of time banging on Liquid, and grew really fond of it. I led the press demos for the rollout under the Avid banner, and was of course fully up to speed on the pluses and minuses on Liquid’s approach to integration vs Xpress Studio (still in charge of that), AND vs Apple and Adobe.

Seriously, NOBODY was deeper into EVERY angle of this than me.

Here’s the last story about this. Liquid had developed such a space age interface that longtime users found it disorienting, so Pinnacle did something I’ve never seen before or since. They had a button in the prefs that let you flip back to classic mode. You lost a ton of features, sacrificed a ton of performance, and kissed much of the integration with other components goodbye, but if you were going hard into the edit itself, muscle memory is worth a lot, right? Flip back to modern mode, or whatever it was called, for when you needed those other features.

Best of both worlds! I have no idea how they pulled off the compatibility between the two modes, but it ROCKED. German engineering, son.

So this one time I spent all morning demoing the shiny new Liquid to a member of the press who Oliver will probably guess from this description. One bullet point right before we broke for lunch was to mention, hey, for people who want to edit in the old way, you can turn on classic mode to edit, then flip back to the modern UI for the rest. I didn’t spend 90 seconds on this out of a four hour briefing. No kidding.

And what was the review? The longest review I’ve ever seen for a product I managed, BLASTING us for not updating the old UI. I screamed at him, “You had to TURN OFF the new, modern interface you said we didn’t have

WHICH WE DO

WHICH YOU KNOW

BECAUSE YOU HAD TO TURN IT OFF. The old interface was just there for compatibility, which is A GOOD THING!!!”

He shrugged and said, “Yeah but you didn’t update the old interface. You’re telling people who LIKE the old interface to pay you for an update that doesn’t give them anything, and I think that’s wrong.”

So I turned my screaming to the Liquid team and said, Look, if you want your customers to go all in on your future, YOU have to go all in FIRST. Burn the old stuff to the ground, or you’re in for a lifetime of this pain, for NOTHING. Worse, every day you spend supporting the past is a day you’re spending preventing your own future from happening. Get out of your own way!

Note that I did not say burn the boats. My metaphor was terrestrial. But the principle is the same. If you know your future, and you only want your customers in that future, you have to remove the option of the past.

Which is why I remain the only person in the COW to have gone on the record supporting Apple’s call to torch FCP classic upon the release of FCPX. Many of you said they shouldn’t have, they didn’t need to, yadda yadda. It’s not true, even a little. I lived it, and I’m telling you, it can’t be done any other way.

Pinnacle stopped this nonsense immediately, and Apple saved itself, and ultimately its customers, a world of pain by sensibly avoiding this pain. Instead, they forced the decision up front. You in or you out? Wise, wise, wise.

Actually, one small PostScript. My insane Avid integration saga lasted three years and one month. I spent that time sitting next to the product manager for Avid | DS, another pinnacle (haha) in integration. Talk about one application that could do it all! It really could. What an elegant beast!

Its fans are adamant that Avid killed DS, and I’m here to tell you it’s not true. They kept it going long, long past its economic viability because those developers LOVED that product. It ultimately died a death of 1000 cuts from Symphony, After Effects, Commotion, eyeon fusion, an upstart grading system called Da Vinci Spirit, and Nuke from below, and Autodesk from above….

…. because in the end, the people who breathed and bled Integration Above All numbered in the dozens compared to millions who were only too happy to use whatever they wanted, for whatever reason they wanted.

ALL OF THIS is why I’m the LAST person to judge anyone’s reasons for any combination of plugins and native tools from allllll the companies, because I know an INSANE amount of how they ALL work together, and don’t, and can tell you a lot more stories about all of it.

Do what makes you happy. Don’t piss on whatever makes someone else happy.

Vendors who make it easy for us to pursue our happiness wherever we can find it make me happy. Vendors who don’t, don’t, but they can’t stop me either. Try as they might. LOL

To somewhat come back to the topic 3009 words later, I do hope that Blackmagic pursues a standalone future for Fairlight and Fusion for people who want to squeeze all the juicy goodness out of those that they can. Pursuing that AND integrated versions is quite doable indeed, as Boris has shown for 20 years.

More options make me happy, which I’ll take where I can get.

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. In 20+ years of doing this kind of work, I’ve exchanged AE project files with others for a number of different reason; an agency designs a motion graphics package for a campaign and another part of the business wants to use those assets for another project that I’m working on, I design a motion graphics package for an event and a vendor wants to use it for a number of videos they are producing for the company, someone from a different part of the company wants their design team (yes, we have multiple) to use some title cards that I designed for a another group, or vice versa, etc.”

The problem with anecdotal stories in any direction is that they always lead to the wrong conclusion. “I don’t need this” becomes “I don’t know anybody who needs this” becomes “NOBODY NEEDS THIS”, or “It’s edge cases only” when “nobody” and “edge case” in this industry could refer to millions of people, and millions of people beyond them in their extended workflows.

(We could certainly think of Avid in this context, but look at the original content on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and all the rest and tell me again about how Hollywood is an “edge case”. )

The lack of insight provided by this sequence of reasoning (I don’t need it >> I don’t know anyone who needs it >> nobody needs it/it’s an edge case) for Motion vs. AE manifests itself when you remember, oh, right, there are many millions more users of After Effects than Motion, and millions of those are making their living as full-time After Effects artists, when relatively few people can be said to making a full-time career in Motion.

To put it another way, the “edge cases” that “nobody needs” are in fact the core features that millions of people have been using for nearly 30 in After Effects for years now — features that these millions of people helped add to the product by virtue of an extremely responsive development team that has aggressively pursued user input. Adobe’s “old school” beta programs still had thousands of people in them, and open betas are now extending that to anyone who wants access.

Not that YOU need those features. Any number of untold millions of people might never need anything in After Effects ever, but the millions of people who DO use it daily, and have for almost 30 years, are anything but edge cases.

The feature set in AE is no doubt unwieldy to people who have a handful of specific tasks to perform, and Motion is one of the many options that many people will find preferable. Good! Prefer it for all the reasons you want to. One of the best reasons to prefer it is that Motion was explicitly NOT developed for full-time mograph professionals. That’s its best feature.

It’s also the feature that makes it unusable for many mograph professionals. Not all of them, of course, but no tool developed for non-mograph pros is ever going to fit the needs of most mograph pros. That isn’t its goal, and it’s not disrespectful to be truthful about this.

What’s disrespectful is assuming that the millions of mograph professionals who are using the deep, dark recesses of AE’s toolset, in a multiplicity of NLEs, are either ignorant or obstinate for failing to choose a tool that was not only NOT developed with them in mind, but developed with the OPPOSITE of them in mind.

I love Motion for what it is, but it’s not for everyone. By design.

[Robin S. Kurz] “But if you’re using FCP then you’d be stupid and shooting yourself in the foot big time if you used AE instead of Motion.”

I don’t agree with that, and I politely and gently contend that more FCPX’ers will agree with me than you.

To flip this around, I don’t think that any AE artist who needs an NLE would be stupid or shooting themselves in the foot if they chose FCPX. They would be sacrificing SOME built-in integration between the two, but if they preferred editing in FCPX, I think you would agree that might more than make up for it, without even having to resort to third-party interchange tools.

The goal is never to take some manufacturer’s word for what the best workflow is, but to combine the best tools for ME, for all of MY tasks, and MY clients, and hopefully not get in my way if I need to expand my workflow beyond their four walls.

Stepping away from my immediate reply to Robin, I’m going to make a larger observation: living inside the wall-to-wall integration with tools from only one vendor? THAT’s the edge case. In practice, hardly anybody does it.

Look at it at the broadest consumer level. Some Apple users believe deep in their bones that the best, nay the ONLY way to live the best life is to combine iPhone, iPad, Mac, iCloud, Apple TV, FCPX, and on and on.

But Apple themselves will never produce a TV spot pointing out the advantages of tying together the iOS experience with Macs because they know that the majority of iPhone customers are NOT using Macs, and never will. If people thought that they NEEDED a Mac to use iPhone, they wouldn’t buy Macs. They’d stop buying iPhones.

I know some “I’d kill everyone I’ve ever met and then myself before I used Windows or Android” people who feel just as strongly in their preference for Gmail, Spotify, and Netflix on their Macs and iPhones and iPads over Mail, Apple Music, and Apple TV.

Sure, there are advantages to integration, but every single day, people opt out of integration in favor of *preference.*

So there are good reasons for people to edit in FCPX, animate in After Effects, and grade in Resolve, or any other way that they care to mix and match (throw in Pro Tools for mixing and Propellerhead for instruments and Sibelius for scoring!) that vastly outweigh the advantages of doing everything using only the tools from one vendor.

No matter how much they all want to say so, nobody has the best in class products in every single category for every use case. The best that they can do for us is enable interop, respect our metadata, and stay out of our way.

[Tim Wilson]

[Tony West] “I was using it before X came out and I actually wan’t going to look at X if they didn’t have a new version of Motion with it. “

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that you MIGHT be the only person for whom that’s the case. ? That’s awesome though!

Can you tell what you’re doing with it? What about Motion was so compelling that compatibility with Motion was your go-no go for adopting X?

[Tim Wilson]

[Gerry Fraiberg] “ON1 has just released a free photo app that gives you manual settings and RAW processing on your phone. It’s available for Apple and Android and allows you to tie in with ON1 360, their cloud based service for a fee. The app works as a standalone, so no purchase is necessary. I downloaded it to my original iPhone SE, but haven’t had time to play with it.
https://www.on1.com/products/photo-mobile/
“

Whoa! This looks cool! Downloaded it for my Google Pixel, which natively shoots RAW, and am having some fun poking around with it.

Honestly, I’ve been thinking some more about how to have more conversations like this. I was talking with the COW’s co-founder Ron Lindeboom the other day about photo editing apps for our phones for maybe half an hour. We eventually got into video editing apps too, with the idea NOT being that we’d edit this stuff for anything professional. We have “real” cameras and apps for that….but we’re also not Instagram models (thank goodness), and there’s really not much of a place to talk about these tools in this specific context: we have professional tools for other purposes, so it’s a little more than just goofing around, but not THAT much more. LOL

I’m up for pretty much any ideas you folks have. Maybe it’s just a matter of starting more threads like this in this forum, which is fine by me. Or something else. If you’ve got ideas, lemme have ’em.

In the meantime, thanks again for this suggestion, Gerry!

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “[Simon Ubsdell] “Don’t you start!

Otherwise, I might have to make a reappearance …”

LOL – that seems more like an enticement than a deterrent. ☺ It might be fun to hear what others think the state of the industry is considering current tools, technology, and processes.”

But of course! These conversations don’t freeze in time. Things change.

[Walter Soyka] “Ae’s MOGRTs have grown up a lot and cover most of my titling needs, but there is still no equivalent to Motion footage dropzones or effects. I miss them sometimes, but it’s been a couple years since I’ve even opened Motion.”

This is what I’m talking about. Any evaluation that somebody made about Motion vs AE in 2016 would necessarily be at least a LITTLE different because the feature sets are different in AE, and maybe the lack of progress in Motion has become a dealbreaker now when it wasn’t in 2016.

And I do confess some curiosity about this. Do any Motion folks find that something missing has become a problem? Or is Apple’s stasis point sufficient for now?

And yeah, does all the other progress we’re seeing suggest a new version on the way?