Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah, I use that phrase all the time and get caught too.
I think we can unfilter that word now, but back when we started the COW, this and “w arez” were among the most common words in spam posts advertising unauthorized software downloads…and bots were deluging us with hundreds, sometimes thousands of these a day.
Most people have no idea the scale of such problems on a site our size…since there’s only a tiny handful sites our size…but no kidding, we literally didn’t have the money to hire enough people to block the spam for this one word.
That’s the thing for other words that we filter for case by case review. We started with no filters, but, just like your email program does, we’ve flagged words as they’ve shown the need for watching, and we review flagged posts ourselves to make sure that legitimate ones get through in a timely fashion.
(Don’t forget: we’ve been doing this for so long that when we started, there was no such thing as an email spam filter!)
I’m going to double check, but I think it’s been a while since this word was an issue. If so, we’ll lift the filter on it, but a heads up: given the immense scale of problems with it in the past, it’s possible that we’ll need to resume filtering it.
Thanks,
TimTim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Herb Sevush] “Who would have thought BMD would be interested in DaVinci? The way I understand it, Grant used DaVinci in his editorial workflow and when it was up for grabs just decided to take it on. “
Yep, that’s what he told us in an interview we posted here at the COW. A fun listen.
I asked him if there was anything else he was using in his post business that we should know about. He laughed and said, “Pretty much all of it.”
Also a good summary of his current business plan for BMD: pretty much all of it.
The interview’s title is a quote from Grant, “We want to blow people’s minds.” And that was just BEFORE they announced the camera….
[Michael Phillips] “When this comes up, my current response is: “Grant is crazy enough to do it, but smart enough not to.””
And when I asked him straight up if he was interested in Avid, he laughed and changed the subject. See? A wise man.
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[Chris Kenny] “How much value would an app like this really have to a company like Blackmagic? It seems like almost the exact opposite of the NLE they’d build if they built one themselves.”
Looking at the software utilities they’ve developed in house, you could expect something lightweight, super simple yet deceptively powerful.
In other words, more like FCPX. 🙂
I’m with Herb on this. It’s fun to kick around, and I’ve done it many times myself, but seriously, it makes no sense whatsoever. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Avid could spin off Pro Tools easily enough, although they have no incentive to. No way could they sell Media Composer by itself, though. None of Avid’s shared storage, workgroup offerings, I/O hardware or newsroom offerings make sense without it, and I can’t imagine Grant wanting to get into any of those businesses.
Although who knows? Nobody’s going to win any money betting what businesses Grant doesn’t want to get into.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Michael W. Towe] “BTW does anyone know if Noise industries has a support forum anywhere? They seem to be rather covert with their support operations.”
We used to have one at the COW, but found that, even there, they were rather covert. 🙂 Members were asking questions that only the developers could answer, and after it became apparent that they just weren’t going to, we pulled the plug.
I’d love to have ’em back.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Chris Harlan] “I’ve done quite well with Motion. So I get peeved, a bit, when people speak ill of her, even when she probably deserves it.”
I think that we have a little bit of the same phenomenon we see with FCPX, where people who like Motion are generally not inclined to spend a lot of energy on threads like this, whether because saying nice things puts them in an uncomfortable position, or because they’re busy just USING the thing.
The most-viewed clip in the Creative COW Videos section isn’t one of the tens of thousands of demo reels or shorts — it’s the commercial that Stephen Smith made for his COW training DVD “Moving with Motion.” Even though he did this in 2009, and DVD training as a whole is obviously no longer where the business is mostly at, we’re still selling quite a few of these, and people are providing very positive feedback.
I have a front-row-ish seat to some of this. My predecessor as the Boris RED product manager actually left to become the head of the team for what became Motion. (He was especially proud of the particle engine, which he felt was Motion’s stealth technology, powering many other feeatures that don’t look anything like particles.) In the Boris office, I sat next to Gabriele de Simone, an early adopter of Quartz technology who left Boris to start Noise Industries.
(He also lived around the corner from me, and signed my will as a witness. LOL I love this guy.)
And as a plug-in developer, Boris has obviously been working closely with Adobe since he shipped his first product in 1995, and his After Effects plug-ins remain among the most popular. You can’t even imagine how skilled those guys are with AE’s most intimate creative and technical features, and I spent a ton of time visiting AE groups for him. Needless to say, Boris also opened up a line of Motion plug-ins.
Not shocking, since Boris pioneered keyframeless vfx in 1995. This was a big part of why I bought the very first version – it was just eeeeeeasier than AE, which I still used for jobs that required *precision.* That to me is the threshold — the more you need precision, the more likely that your motion graphics needs will be met better by After Effects. (At least among the options we’re most immediately talking about here.)
There are a bunch of other sides my perspective of this, including working with vfx technologists in titling, compositing and 3D animation when I was at Avid….where Steve Bayes was part of hiring me, then left to wind up in my old job at Boris, then moved to Apple to become the Sr. Product Manager of FCP, the position he still holds.
(BTW, we almost never talk about the irony of Avid Symphony’s original primary product designer now being the Sr. Product Manager of FCPX, but it’s true.)
My typically overlong point being, I was a paying customer for all of the above, for use in my own video production company, and worked as a corporate weasel for and with guys working on ALL this stuff. It’s a big freaking world, except when it’s a crazy small one, and there a ton of great choices in it. Motion is definitely on the list, and for some tasks and users, it’s a stupendous choice.
But I think that Apple underestimated the value of precision for motion graphics artists. It doesn’t matter if they can work ten times faster to get work that’s really good, if they can’t get EXACTLY what they need.
Video will never have the complexity of more than intro-level mograph, and the relationships between the pieces are fairly straightforward. It’s much more amenable to what FCPX is trying to do for editing than Motion hoped to do for mograph, but balancing the needs for precision and speed are the same.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Chris Harlan] ” If I could conbine the two, at this stage of my development, I would build all my sellects in Avid, do a cut in FCP7, fine tune with Avid, make revisions with FCP7, and then fine tune again with Avid. Also, I’m not a Colorist, but I like the color tools in Symphony quite a bit. “
Can’t you do this? Especially for straight cuts, handling projects between FCP 7 and MC/Symphony is pretty smooth. Just a variation on offline and online.
Right? Or am I misunderstanding (again)?
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[Herb Sevush] “Inertia, comfort factor, safety of proven workflows will almost always win out over small efficiencies with newer workflows. If FCP 8 had come out these guys would be working with it despite PPro / AE dynamic link. They had a system that worked, which almost always trumps an unproven system that might work better. “
If you’re saying that inertia is a good technology management model 🙂 I think that Apple would agree to a point. They’ve been saying as clearly as they can for 18 months now that the legend of FCP will be more useful for many people than “today’s” version of X.
“Today” being a moving target of course. There have already been substantial improvements to X, and the end of the year timeframe will put X quite close to the 18-24 month release cycle that Apple has been on for a while now.
And for the record, my gut tells me that the next release will be massive. It still won’t work for some people, though, and for others, the light has dawned: other environments are better suited, regardless of what X is or isn’t.
Just another way in which Apple NOT going forward with FCP 8 may be the best thing that ever happened to 21st century NLE-ing….even if an unmitigated, life-changing disaster for individuals within it. The opportunity to reboot one’s entire NLE experience.
[Herb Sevush] “As long as you understand that I am not one of the “you’s”. I haven’t paid them a cent for FCPX”
You’ll note that “not downloading it” was the first slice on my imaginary pie chart.
You’re quite right, though, that I missed a couple of slices…and I normally NEVER miss a slice of pie. Those slices could be,
–doesn’t need to download to know that they’re done with FCP
–doesn’t need to download to know they’re through with Mac
–doesn’t need to download to know they’re through with Apple.[Herb Sevush] “Call me Higgs.”
I should know better than to speak for you, even rhetorically. LOL
[Herb Sevush] “If they had handled the X rollout differently they would have been at least +1 in their net gain.”
Only to the extent that it would have fed the inertia that kept you from seeing that better alternatives were available.
Right?
Because X is X regardless of how it was rolled out, and I don’t think you’re making your next move based on pique about something that happened 18 months ago. It’s already rolled out, man, and I can only assume that your decisions are being made based on what’s in X or likely to be, vs. what’s available elsewhere.
Or are you saying that X has given you a new perspective on Apple’s vision not taking you or anyone else in particular into account, and that your next move is based on finding the best alternative that’s not Apple, period.
[Herb Sevush] “I have to stop writing now because the latest update of Itunes has wiped out by my phone and my ipod and I have to see what the geniuses at the apple store can do”
Yet another reason to consider Samsung, their wiseass attitude in the “It doesn’t take a genius” campaign for the Galaxy S III. And yes, in general, attitude (eg, arrogance vs. wiseassery) factors in for me just below technology itself. As with the legend of FCP vis a vis CS6, I wish I had looked at Android sooner. LOL YMMV JKLMNOP
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I like the idea of “you want it fast, you pay me fast,” but I wonder how this has gone for you. Are people taking you up on electronic payment, or are they deciding to slow down? How are they talking about it to you?
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[Sorry for the long post, even by my standards. But hey, it’s a Saturday. Drink an adult beverage. Enjoy.]
[Herb Sevush] “…once they realized they would have to make a total change in their editing environment not matter which way they went then PPro / AE with dynamic link made the most sense.”
I don’t agree at all. FCPX merely provided an opportunity for them to see that FCP 7 had not been the best choice for them for a while now, and in some ways, NEVER was.
SNL’s original impetus in choosing FCP was that it supported HD on a Mac before Avid did. Dan Dome was the architect of this, and wrote an article for us about it. If Avid had HD on Mac when SNL was ready to HD, they would very likely have stuck with Avid.
It turns out that Dan took his experience and skills to the Tonight Show with Conan, and then to Conan’s new show, where they famously made the move to Premiere before SNL did, and for exactly the same reason SNL did: After Effects integration. Premiere would probably have been a better choice when SNL first chose FCP, and DEFINITELY since CS 5.5.
It’s simple math. Especially for high-speed turnaround short form, there’s a direct correlation between the importance of After Effects and the likelihood that you NEED to be using Premiere Pro. It was insanity that they weren’t already doing this.
All Apple did was provide the opportunity for them to see it.
I think that’s the big revelation of the past 18 months for a lot of people, that FCP may NEVER have been their best choice, EVER.
Or if it ever was, the fork in the road (using the example above, CS 5.5) may have come a while ago. This is nothing more than course correction, even if getting on course carries difficult workflow and emotional transitions between here and there, and never overcomes the feeling of loss.
With no downside for Apple. Apple got paid when the SNL guys (and you and you and you) downloaded FCPX, and the SNL guys (like you and you and you) remain adamant that they’ll only consider options on Macs. Which means that Apple got paid $295 and didn’t lose a customer. They won.
Look, Apple has made torching its customer base a foundation of its business model: we’re willing to lose every single current customer to get all the future ones. It started with Macintosh, and it works. You love Apple’s ruthless commitment to its vision for every other product you own. It just might not be working for you this time.
But for millions of others, it just might be. To Charlie and Craig’s points a few posts earlier, outside this forum, the “Apple doesn’t care about pros” meme is largely played out. The second most popular forum at the COW is the FCPX TECHNIQUES forum, and while not 100% Kumbaya, is mostly focused on getting actual work done — not sk8rboi videos, but the same kind of professional work that the COW was founded on.
Even in this forum, the positive perspectives (whether “it’s working” or “it’s not there yet, but there are things about it that look interesting”) now outweigh the negatives by quite a long shot.
The thing is, I guarantee that a bunch of razor-sharp children making more than you or me ever will have a bunch of spreadsheets. They carefully, and I’ll bet accurately, predicted the outcomes of launching FCP “in this state,” including:
–Nothing. Some people have been led to believe that there’s nothing for them in FCPX “in this state.” (There’s another spreadsheet that predicts what features will make them go ahead and download when FCPX reaches “that” state.)
–People download and love it.
–People download it and hate it enough to choose another Mac NLE.
–People download it and hate it enough to leave Mac altogether….but they’re not going to give up their iPhones or iPads, so we’ll keep getting their app money until the sun goes nova.There’s a theoretical slice that indicates people who hate FCPX enough to throw away their iphones, but seriously man….
This NEXT one is what I guarantee was the largest slice of the Keynote pie chart:
–Hating it for now, or at least not liking it…and publicly freaking out about it because that’s what people do…but waiting to make an actual move to another NLE to see what Apple brings in the next version or two, because Apple fans do. They would rather stay with Apple no matter what, and have confidence that Apple will figure this out.
Apple not only gambled that this was the biggest slice of the pie, but they made unprecedented moves to ensure it, including direct outreach to customers, and crisp statements explicitly acknowledging what you were expecting and wasn’t going to be there, and indicating when those things would be added.
None of this ever happened before. By itself it indicates that Apple DOES care about this market — but as always with Apple, they care about this market as Apple WANTS the market to be, not what it is right now. Apple plays a long game.
But do you see the pattern here? EVERYBODY PAYS APPLE EVENTUALLY. A LOT. Even if they leave Mac.
So what happens if you download FCPX again in 2 years because you’re hearing good things? That would be about the right timeframe — FCP didn’t really get traction until version 3, which was 3 years into the game, and it’s not inconceivable that they might be past the stage of free upgrades for X when you’re tempted to give it another try.
Apple already has another spreadsheet underway for this, with the exact same fields as before. They’ll just update it along the way.
The spreadsheet has already told them that they grew their NLE business by an order of magnitude or more in that time, so here’s Apple’s worst possible outcome for that increasingly tinier slice of legacy customers:
–They download FCPX and NOW hate it enough to make their move.
Bottom line: Apple gets paid TWICE by the people who hate FCPX the most.
Even if they NOW leave the Mac platform, the slice of people who will hate FCPX enough to leave iOS is as theoretical as the Higgs boson, which for the record is still not PROVEN to exist.
Apple wins, no matter what the outcome.
My antipathy for Apple is well known, but I’ve never said that they aren’t geniuses. They are. I admire the shit out of almost everything they do, even if I choose to use other people’s stuff. And I’m telling you that in 100 years, people will still be studying FCPX as the best roll-out the world had ever seen to date.
And for the record, the marketing and roll-out for X were beyond flawless. They had that Apple elegance that every company dreams of, even as they admit to themselves that they have neither the vision to even imagine it, nor the balls to pull it off.
Even though they CALL it marketing (which drives me insane) the issue some people have is ACTUALLY with the product life-cycle management aspects of it, and fewer and fewer people are finding that an insurmountable obstacle by the minute.
See, Apple doesn’t care if you’ve been complaining about THIS thing. Look at iPhone 4. They care if you still love them enough to PAY THEM for the NEXT thing. And for the thing they love most, their iOS business, you DO love them that much.
And all the love you shower on them won’t make Apple hesitate for a minute longer to burn you to the ground when they feel that’s what it takes for for them to achieve their vision.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COWTim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
I don’t know of a forum anywhere on the COW, maybe anywhere on the web, where there are more geezers cursing kids and reminiscing about the good old days than this one. LOL
This is a great topic though, very much in keeping with the “lifestyle”aspect of this forum that was a huge part of why we started it: a place to talk about issues that transcended “fixes.”
Let’s keep taking about this, and see how it evolves. If the threads become too long or too many to manage in this forum, our magical elves will open a new forum and transplant all these conversations there.
Carry on, you geezer bastards. LOL I’m in my 50s too and am thinking about the specifics of what it will take to retire too.
Of course, Zelin will be doing this long after the rest of us are in the nursing home. Nothing keeps you young like kicking people’s asses.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW