[Tim Wilson]

I’ve repeated the story of the original name of the forum often enough that I don’t need to do it again….maybe ever LOL….but the real problem with the name is that, in addition to no longer being vaguely applicable, it came to represent the opposite of everything we ever wanted from Creative COW.

A place to argue? We NEVER wanted that. People who want that can get a bellyful at Reddit or Facebook or something. The purpose in creating the forum was strictly as a holding pen to keep the hoof and mouth disease from destroying the entire herd. Don’t forget that we had our first 200 posts here before that first NAB 2011 presentation was finished, and over 1000 by morning, with another 1000 that day — and none of them happy.

We were delighted that the forum became such a better thing! It’s a testament to the COW’s REAL heritage of curiosity, creativity, empathy, and generosity of spirit that not even such a contentious origin would allow it to remain anything like that for long.

The name became the biggest problem, in a dozen ways or more that I can rattle off from the top of my head. I’ll stop at three.

1) It indicated that we thought debate was valuable for its own sake, which we emphatically do not.

We could have stayed angry and argumentative at our old jobs for a lot more money. LOL We started the COW as a place of hope and help. We’re also glad to have a forum that expands on tha to include wild speculation and carefully considered takes on angles of the industry that transcend any particular toolsets.

Not that there haven’t been number of folks over the years who engaged in debate for its own sake often enough. We’re likewise delighted to have helped them to the door to find more appropriate places to whip their adrenaline into a froth.

2) It suggested a negative position toward FCPX.

This was especially exasperating to me, who is plainly documented as FCPX’s earliest and most enthusiastic exponent in these halls, as indeed I championed Final Cut when it was still at Macromedia running on Windows. Also well documented in these pages, including my oft-posted photo of the CD-ROM of Macromedia Final Cut that I still have — and it lists Windows FIRST! As far as I have been able to determine, mine is the only photo of that original CD-ROM to have ever been posted online. Mine was certainly the first.

Of course, many here have mocked me for my early enthusiasms, starting with my insistence that anything less than 10 million seats by the end of its first year should be considered a catastrophic failure, grounds for dismissing the entire marketing team. I believed it then, and kind of still do.

Others of you have gotten downright furious at me for my enthusiastic support for Apple burning all the boats, and admitting that FCP was already EOL. I say “admitting” it was EOL because it WAS already EOL, as many of you had lamented here in the years when Apple was in retrospect clearly marking time until the next thing was ready. I’ve only become more convinced of that since then. Continuing the charade would have been an insult to everyone — and hey, if you still want a copy of FCP 7, they’ve got ’em at Amazon.

Not to restart those debates, but to underscore — I don’t think anyone who has ever passed through this forum in the 9 years since it began can point to a stack of posts with more than a fraction of my unbridled enthusiasm for everything Apple was up to.

So I took the suggestion that “the COW hates FCPX” personally. It’s not true, and never was. And certainly, a vibrant FCPX forum, and the best Motion resources on the web (thanks in large part to Simon’s tutorials!), and stories of FCPX projects like this one I wrote on Whisky Tango Foxtrot (where I suggested that FCPX would be the tool that finally moved Hollywood off Avid, that it would forever change VFX, AND that it would change the way movies are financed — OOOPS lol) — show there was just no basis for saying any such thing about how “the COW” felt about FCPX….except for our inability to shake the gol-dang NAME of the forum.

3) Not only have we wanted to dim the light on “debate”, we’ve NEEDED to expand its charter beyond anything connected to FCPX.

Look, we haven’t debated anything substantial in ages, and THAT’S GOOD. What’s not so good is that the roots of the forum are so deeply tied to FCPX, and only FCP.

The things we talk about here SHOULD be engaged with by not just FCPX-ers and a handful of multi-tooled folks, but people whose ONLY tools are Premiere Pro, or After Effects, or VEGAS Pro, or Avid. Every conversation we’ve had here for years would have benefitted from MORE perspectives, including experiences that had nothing to do with FCPX….

…but at least as important, would have benefitted from the input of even more FCPX-ers who didn’t want to be seen endorsing any kind of debate around something that was an unqualified positive force in their lives.

I’d tried inviting folks from other parts of the COW who were looking for general conversation to drop by and take a look, and was told by some of them, “But I have no interest in talking about FCPX.” Not that they had any negative feelings either — just that, as a topic, it didn’t seem particularly interesting to them.

There were other folks who said, “I avoid places on the web that debate things. That’s why I’m not on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit.” This was equally true for people using FCPX and not. They come to the COW as a respite from debate.

FAIR ENOUGH, both for folks who are into FCPX, and who aren’t. The forum name was offputting to them, and became intolerable to us.

So those are just three reasons why the name had become a problem over the past few years. Anybody who came here for the name (“ooooh! Debate! Lemme in!”) was exactly the same kind of person that we’ve spent 25 years throwing out. We don’t want anything to do with them.

I’m not saying that this name is the Be All and End All, mind you. Too many words, too many letters. Give me a better idea, and I’ll take it. But anyone with the idea that the old name was doing us ANY good simply hasn’t been paying attention. Talk about a debate not worth having!

This is a whole ‘nother conversation, but seriously, anybody who says that really has no clue about the COW. We’ve got 800,000 people a month passing through here. It’s clear from the LACK of debate in our dozens of forums, including this one of late, that they haven’t been coming to debate.

This particular forum also skews to be the oldest one in the bunch. A bunch of us here are in our 60s, when folks in our age group represents about 3% of our traffic overall. 71% of our readers are under 34, and half of them are women.

More often, the old name was keeping out the kind of people we DO want here. Which is remarkably similar to the folks who ARE here, except that we want more of them. ☺ And more representative of EVERYONE who comes to the COW. And one way to do that is to decouple the forum NAME from one aspect (debate) of one NLE (FCPX).

The forum itself has already done that, or course. We just needed the name to catch up.

And frankly, as fond of the forum as we’ve been, we’ve intentionally kept some of the best threads off of our social media feeds and out of our newsletters because we had ZERO interest in propagating a wildly inappropriate name that was the opposite of everything that was important to us as community organizers. I tried sneaking around this by remapping some posts to our Business & Career Advice forum, or to the Art of The Edit forum (now absorbed into this one), and using those names to promote threads that originated HERE.

The FORUM is dandy, and doesn’t need to change anything. The NAME needed to GO.

Changing the name of the forum is just the first step. Changing those submenus at the top of the page to make this forum show up in ALL forums, not just under the FCP family, is next. (That’ll take a while.) It’ll NOW start being featured regularly in our feeds. Instead of keeping it off our front page, we’ll be featuring it in regular rotation with our other most popular forums, because the name reflects what the forum actually IS — a place to have conversations about anything related to creativity and the creative enterprise.

In general, it’s silly to suggest that the authority of anything comes from its name. How does FRUIT apply to a computer? Or a phone? Ask Apple. What do mud bricks have to do with fonts or analytics or software? Ask Adobe. English-language books and a South American river? Wait a minute, and what do books have to do with food, lawnmowers, sex toys, and cloud servers? Ask Amazon.

The world’s largest creative community and bovines? Well now THAT, I happen to know something about.

A name is a name. The authority of a thing comes from the DOING of a thing. I like what we’re doing here. The old name was the opposite of everything important to us, and prevented us from achieving any of our goals for the forum’s future. The new name makes it at least possible. Now we have to keep doing it.

I’m not worried, though. Those 800,000 people a month that come to CreativeCOW.net, about 375,000 of whom pass through this very forum, will keep coming because Google sent them directly from a search to a thread. Those people never stopped to look at some list of forum names. They came STRAIGHT to a thread from a search.

Hopefully more of those visitors will post when they see a forum name that shines light on what’s truly relevant to the proceedings, while leaving irrelevance, nonsense, and performative enmity further and further behind.

Thanks to everyone who contributed such constructive suggestions for a new name in the previous thread, and even the playful ones. I’m sorry that this one doesn’t have a bovine pun…YET. I haven’t given up!

????

Yr pal,
Timmy

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Rob,

There’s no policy about test posts. Rather, the policy is that all new accounts, regardless of forum, are moderated until we can establish that accounts belong to real people. Generally an easy thing to establish. ☺

We don’t have a general video capture forum because we’ve been around since 1995, and you’re the first one to ask for it! Because we’re a community for video professionals, most people have already made some choice or another. The questions for one topic are generally tied to the next, so people tend to post questions in their own “root” forums.

For example, the choice of video hardware is directly connected to choice of video software. The best video capture hardware for Premiere Pro may not work as well with Final Cut Pro X. Some capture choices are platform specific, and others are expressly designed to be platform independent.

So in general, video capture hardware questions belong in the forums related to the software you intend to use: Premiere Pro, FCPX, Media Composer, Resolve, Vegas, or Media 100. (Listed in alphabetical order by manufacturer, of course!)

I hope that helps! If not let us know, and we’ll try to help with more specifics.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “I prefer this -“

I retweeted the original tweet on the COW’s official account. This really is sheer genius.

My kid wrote a song called, “I Wonder What’s Inside your Butthole” Quite honestly, it slaps. pic.twitter.com/A65m6XeZ2r

— Lisa Shmeesa ???????????? (@LisaRieffel) May 2, 2020

[Tim Wilson]

[greg janza] “Tim, I do believe this is the single most entertaining post I’ve ever read on the Cow.”

Thanks so much, Greg! I love the work of all three of these guys, including their mix of commercial and “pure” filmmaking, and I can’t believe that it took me this long to write about all three in one place.

[greg janza] “I also want to thank you for posting the Errol Morris Oscars short film. I remember watching it live and being stunned and awed at it’s greatness and I hadn’t seen it since that Oscar’s broadcast in 2002. I could watch that a hundred times and still be just as entertained on the hundredth viewing as the first. “

Having watched it hundreds of times, I can testify that it does indeed hold up. LOL I also just noticed that Errol posted a list of all the people he spoke to in it, which you can see here. You can definitely get lost in his site, which I strongly encourage. ☺

I mentioned that Morris is unapologetic in his love of making commercials, and indeed, of his NEED to make commercials to pay his bills, but he really does love them, too, and it shows. Even more than the commercials per se, you can see from Errol’s commercials that I linked to earlier, and this one here, that he genuinely loves people. His way of making commercials is very much a way of telling kinds of stories in a specific context, but they’re definitely stories.

He made an ad for United after 9/11 that I found very moving. You’ll see a number of his classic moves in this one — lots of unscripted conversation, looking right at the camera — but it’s still unique. Dark background, very quiet solo piano version of the United theme in the background, some alternate angles, and it hit VERY hard at the time: “We Are United.”

It’s still good, but at the time, it was overwhelming. There was a lot of pomp in post-9/11 advertising, not that I begrudge anyone trying to figure out how to talk about tragedy in the context of getting back to business. We see the same difficulties now, and it’s surely going to get harder to be both tasteful and compelling as we sort out a post-quarantine business landscape. Errol’s quiet, intimate, humble approach set him apart though, and really made the United campaign stand out.

I mention this because one of the people moved by it was one of the producers of the 2002 Oscar telecast, Laura Ziskin. This was obviously the first Oscars after 9/11, which is a fact of chronology, but also speaks to a very specific time in America, which was very much still in a mode of mourning and rebuilding. How on earth do you talk about that in context of f***ing Hollywood pageantry bulls**t? All Laura knew is that she didn’t want to start with a big musical number, and she’d been thinking about a film instead, without knowing what kind of film, or who should do it. When she saw the United commercial, she said, “THAT’s the guy.”

There was a fantastic article in the New Yorker in March 2002, just after the ceremony, called “A Movie For Everyone” that tells the behind-the-scenes story. Highly recommended for a number of reasons. One is understanding the scale of the thing — five locations, 24 hours of raw interviews (!!!), nicely condensed to just over four minutes. But also some great quotes that didn’t make it into the final piece, as well as some production insights like this one:

The interviews were stacked up, one per half hour, and by mid-morning the schedule was a shambles. Walter Cronkite was [on camera.] Donald Trump was waiting, with mounting impatience, in the wings. Mikhail Gorbachev and entourage were trudging up the stairs. And Iggy Pop was in the greenroom.

Those names really do mean something different in the shadow of the fallen towers than they otherwise might. The voice of traditional authority, the quintessential New York hustler, the guy who de-escalated the Russian side of the Cold War, and IGGY POP, who is the same in every context, the survivor who somehow matters more as each day passes.

So, the next time you watch it, consider that context, too. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate what a terrific piece of work this is. One of the greatest short films anyone has ever made, imo.

[greg janza] “Tim, all of your examples perfectly support your main points but I think this discussion of film makers as hustlers would be lacking if we didn’t mention the most infamous hustler of them all – Orson Welles.”

I was mostly thinking about contemporary filmmakers, still making movies and still hustling TODAY, even with multiple Oscar nominations in their pockets. They’re answering the question TODAY whether filmmaking is still possible as a career, and the answer is, “Yeah, but it never gets easier.”

But you’re right, Welles is a special case. We sometimes treat him as a joke because his demons so often got the better of him, and he never really did achieve what we’d conventionally call success for any length of time, but yeah, talk about a hustler!

One thing that jumped out at me in reading about “The Other Side of The Wind” when it came together was seeing not ONE, but TWO different articles ranking the top 10 OTHER unfinished films in Welles’ archives, and the lists were almost completely different! “A Guide To Orson Welles’ Other Unfinished Movies” at Vulture, and “The 10 Best Films Orson Welles Nearly Made” at BFI, both highly recommended.

There’s actually a very long section on his unfinished projects at Wikipedia that includes other of his dimensions besides directing — and it’s easy to forget how many of these there were! (And honestly, after Kane, you could argue that NONE of his projects were ever properly finished!) One of the “unfinished” acting gigs that jumped out was that he’d agreed to play Baron Harkonnen in Jodorowsky’s Dune!!!!

Thinking about another classic-ish filmmaker from a few years later, is Robert Altman, only 10 years older than Welles. I saw him mention in an interview that he’d never gotten final cut on any of his films. He was mostly happy with how they turned out, but he felt like arguing for the right of final cut was both rude and arrogant — it’s not his money, and the people whose money it IS have surely earned the right to have a say in how they might best recoup their investment. And besides, by that point in the process, he was already too aware of the many compromises he’d had to make. What’s a few more?

I think we can agree that are few auteurs as distinctive as Altman, so I think it’s instructive to see that he could make this distinctively visionary pictures without being a nozzle about it. I think we could all do with being a little less precious about our visions and our artistic integrity. ☺

Another guy I think of in this context is Terry Gilliam, who had an entire movie made about his inability to get a movie made, “Lost In La Mancha” (2002). Anyone not familiar with this should definitely check it out. (My wife and I saw it in theaters back in the day. We felt we owed Terry the debt of honor of seeing this on the big screen, although we doubt he made any dough from the proceedings.) Terry couldn’t get his Quixote adaptation made because of a string of natural and personal disasters (sets flooded, lead actor dying, etc etc), and some of the craziest funding stories you’ve ever heard. Here’s the trailer, complete with a blurb from Robert Altman!

One of my favorite film festival experiences was in 2012 at Entertainment Weekly’s inaugural Capetown Film Festival – “capetown” as in “capes”, as in a lot of superhero stuff plus other nerdy stuff that was really just starting to take off. Kurt Russell was there to talk about Escape From New York following a showing of that, Leonard Nimoy talked about the first JJ Abrams Star Trek movie, and Terry Gilliam was there to show and talk about Twelve Monkeys, one of my all-time favorite movies.

All three of these guys talked about anything that anybody else felt like talking about (Kurt told some stories about “Ladyhawke” that still blow my mind to this day), and Terry talked about Lost in Mancha. He said, ten years later, the movie was in exactly the same state as it was at the end of the doc. Nobody wanted to pay him to make it, or anything else. He did in fact have a recent movie (The Zero Theorem, starring Christoph Waltz), but he said, unless somebody told him otherwise, it would be his last. Not because he was done, but because he couldn’t raise money. He’d keep trying, but he couldn’t find anyone who wanted to get into the Terry Gilliam business.

Somebody mentioned the still-new-ish Kickstarter, and he made a face. Not really up for learning new technologies to beg, he said, so he’d stick with the begging he knew. Paused for a beat. “Anyone want to make a movie?” Never lost that comic timing. ☺ And indeed, has made exactly one movie since then, ironically (and amazingly) enough, 2018’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”. I don’t have anything to tell you about it, other than it took more than 20 years to make. THAT’s hustle.

Talking about Twelve Monkeys and the different kinds of compromises you have to make to make a movie, Terry had some amazing stories about having to fight tooth and nail not just to have Bruce Willis (Bruce was ready to go, but the studio wanted nothing to do with him: his reputation was such that all three of his last pictures were considered “comebacks”, but he was by no means “back”), but also this young kid whose career had gone exactly nowhere since his abs made a splash for Ridley Scott in 1991, Brad Pitt. (Se7en would come out the same year as Twelve Monkeys, with Fight Club still a few years out.)

It definitely brought to mind the observation from William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride), “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”

Terry also spoke about a 2011 project he’d done for an Italian pasta company, a short called The Wholly Family. He got a LOT of grief for it as he tried taking it to various film festivals, some of whom categorically rejected it because it had been paid for by a company. “It wasn’t selling out,” he told the BBC after it was accepted to a film festival in London. “The only stipulations were the film had to be made in Naples and nobody gets killed in it. I did exactly what I wanted to do.”

Good ol’ YouTube has it. It’s 20 minutes long, in Italian, natch, and plays like a cross between Fellini, Guillermo del Toro, and an acid flashback from Baron Munchausen, which I mean as no faint praise. LOL

He showed us the trailer, and said very much the same kind of thing. Almost all of your time making a feature is spent on the fundraising, and almost none of it on making the movie, whereas on this, he spent zero time fundraising, and 100% on making the movie.

btw, Gilliam was on fire during this Q&A, and a handful of quotes got preserved here. Time Bandits fans will definitely want to take a look, but he doesn’t hold back about ANYTHING.

Bringing this back to lions still making pictures that reap both box office bank and critical acclaim, Scorsese is having to find new funding partners for his second picture in a row after Paramount threw him out. With “The Irishman”, they pretty much told him to go find his own money, but seeing that Netflix opened the door to non-traditional financing and distribution, for this next picture (“Killers of The Flower Moon”), Paramount is saying that they’re done paying, but are open to deals that bring in someone else. (Read more about it here.)

So even for old white dudes who are literally synonymous with mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, easily considered as among the best of their field — what makes anybody think that they’re going to have an easier time getting paid than Ridley Scott, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, and Marty Freakin’ Scorsese, much less Terry Gilliam??? NOTHING is easy. NOTHING is a sure thing, not for them and not for you….

….but even while we’re wondering when movie theaters anywhere in the world will be open in any large numbers (and while I personally am wondering what it will take to make me excited about going to a theater with you germy slobs ever again LOL), I think the one thing we can say with confidence is that there IS a future for FILMMAKING. It’s definitely an option.

Whether there’s a future for you in it, that’s more up to you than anyone else I think.

Oh, and Errol Morris returned to the Oscars in 2007, with an opening short that featured 129 nominees. (All of them?) It’s not quite as strong as the 2002 piece, but I loved it then and still love it now.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Rich,

I’m doing some forum cleanup, and got interrupted in the midst of it. I promise that all the posts are still up, but making their way to a new consolidated Storage forum, taking shape here. I hope to have this wrapped up by the end of the week, with my apologies for having to step away mid-task.

There was definitely a time when the COW was in practice a storage community. We had a dozen or more forums related to storage, and they were our busiest and most intense. This reflects the reality in the early days that storage was make-or-break, and most of it didn’t actually work as well as advertised. And the conversations in all the forums were deep enough that we really NEEDED to keep things like SAN and NAS conversations separate, and very few solutions for one vendor applied to another.

Nowadays, this is much less true, so we’re consolidating all the storage forums into one. We had definitely seen some conversations orphaned before their time because there weren’t enough people around.

btw, this is a critical observation for how we’ve built the COW. In general, general forums work better. Most forum organizers split things up into sub-forums because they can, or because it SEEMS like a good idea to split up FCP Editing, FCP Titling, FCP Plug-ins, etc, and when the forums wither on the vine, harumph about “forums don’t work, so we’re going to Facebook.” Well, I’m here to tell anyone asking, 25 years later, that forums DO work if you don’t choke them by over-sorting.

That said, we really did have a reason for splitting up things like RAID Set-up into their own forums, and if we do again, we will again. We change forum configurations all the time, but most people don’t notice, at least partly because I finish the tasks soon after I start them. ☺

Thinking some more about how forum organization reflects the COW as a whole, as storage started receding a little bit in the conversation, in the early days of HD, we became in practice a camera community. Choosing a camera meant choosing a format, and the workflow implications were massive. This includes implications for storage, too, of course! But really, cameras and formats were THE thing keeping the lights on here.

By around 2010, that was very much calming down, but along the way, we had four forums each for Sony and Panasonic at one point, all with very different cameras and use cases, but honestly, there’s really just not that kind of fever to sort out which is which anymore. Pretty much every camera works with pretty much every workflow. We’ve consolidated Sony and Panasonic into a total of two forums (one each), rather than eight….but I’m honestly wondering if one forum for ALL cameras might be more useful right now. I would think that most people work with more than one anyway, right?

This how we’ve come to today, when most conversations are around software. That is, there’s not much need to talk about RED cameras as cameras. We’re a decade past anybody needing to prove to themselves whether or not RED is “for real” or not, but LOTS of people are asking things like how to get RED camera files from Media Composer to Resolve and back.

So for maybe our first 20 years, our busiest forums were for hardware — storage, followed cameras….and now that I think about it, computers were HUGE back in the days when Apple and others had something new pretty much every single year — but in the past few years, it’s mostly been software.

The one software two-fer that still feels worthwhile is a general After Effects forum with a separate forum for AE Expressions. The latter features pretty hardcore coding conversations that may not have anything to do with core AE functions at all. I’m under the impressions that some of those folks don’t actually do VFX and mograph per se as their primary jobs, so the two forums don’t have much to do with each other at all. In fact, it’s rare to see people who post in both forums.

This is obviously a longer answer than anyone needs, but that’s why I’m here. LOL I’ve also been thinking a lot about how and why we do the things we do, as this month does in fact mark the 25th anniversary of the founding of the first incarnation of the COW back in 1995. The two reasons we’re still around are: 1) Ron and Kathlyn Lindeboom got an awful lot of things right that nobody else did, even if they got beat up for it for years (things like moderating content and requiring real names — we STILL get beat up for those every week), and 2) we keep refining the specifics of what we’re doing based on what we’re seeing from the 800,000+ people still passing through the site every month.

Lots of good stuff still ahead of us, too!

Apologies again for the temporary misplacement of some posts, Rich. All will be set right in the next few days.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I would even venture to say that quite possibly this might even be free to people who already own FCPX. After all, it would only run on the newest iPad Pro, which you would have to buy anyway. But what would really seal the deal is a viable method of sharing – possibly only synced Libraries and proxy media via iCloud. Money comes in via an in-app purchase of more cloud space.”

That’s exactly how I see it. If you own FCPX, you own it. Otherwise, Apple has a two-pronged pitch. One, if you own X and want to run it in a set of contexts that can be expanded by an iPad, buy a new iPad Pro plus One)a): if you have a new iPad Pro already, yes, no need to limit yourself to Rush. Two, there’s this nifty new combination of X and iPad Pro that will make some people sit up and take notice and maybe buy ’em both.

In any case, it’s all about creating new, incremental sales that lead to new services, increased stickiness to the Apple ecosystem with new stuff to store on iCloud, paying for more space, etc.

[Oliver Peters] “Clearly Apple sees the pro side of the iPad, which is why Adobe, Affinity, Pixelmator and others are being coaxed into bringing more heavy-weight apps to the iPadOS environment. “

I wouldn’t expect to see the full version of Media Composer, although now that I think about it, why not? The new version is very much about optimizing for the single-screen experience. But I would absolutely expect to see things like logging and other set-related functions, as well as tasks related to assistant editing.

We’ve already seen Grant demo insane things from Blackmagic on both MacBook Pros and iPhones, but I can imagine a whole new suite of experiences for remote production optimized for iPad Pro in the very near future — anything from camera setup, to pre-grading, to switcher functions. The more, the merrier.

This gets to a point I made earlier, that Apple’s hardware opportunity is ALWAYS going to be larger for non-Apple software running on Apple kit, whether it’s Adobe, Microsoft, Google, or anything else. That’s true for professional software as much as it is for business and recreational software.

There’s already been some very interesting audio things happening on iPads, especially for music creation, and I’m genuinely excited for what might happen for heavy lifting with video.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mathieu Ghekiere] ”

I was coming to share this very image! When it comes to Mac rumors, you can take Jon to the bank.

In fact, there was an article about him in MacWorld just a few days ago, “Meet Jon Prosser, the new Apple rumormonger who hasn’t missed yet“.

It’s been a while since there’s been anyone in the Apple community who carried this kind of weight. Maybe John Gruber at Daring Fireball a few years back (not that he’s not still around of course), but really, maybe not since the days of MacWeek in the 90s. A true controlled circulation magazine that you had to reapply for each year, and by no means was everybody renewed each time, it came to be known as MacLeak. I’ll bet you can guess exactly when in the 90s it came to an end, and I’ll bet you can guess exactly why.

Jon had actually brought up the idea of Pro Apps on iOS a few days earlier, just from looking at the code. (There used to be a lot more of this kind of reporting, too, and I’m glad to see him reviving it.)

The “You can trust me or not” caveat in his first tweet comes from people refusing to believe him, even though he keeps delivering the goods. No doubt, one of these days he’s going to be wrong, perhaps intentionally discredited by leaked disinformation, but I’ve been impressed by his efforts to get multiple sources. Any disinformation campaign could become the story pretty quickly. In the meantime, no kidding, you can take this to the bank.

Me, nobody tells me nuthin’. LOL I’m just reading the tea leaves like most everybody else. It really seemed the only possible next step, and more than that, the BEST next step for both Apple and its customers. Those don’t come along often, so again, even if this move isn’t for YOU, it’s something to cheer for the health of the company and the world of Pro Apps including FCPX.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I think one thing that skews this argument is Apple itself. You are using metrics that make sense for a normal company. I really doubt Apple cares much whether or not their applications make a profit.

I’m sure they do, but for Apple, selling applications is a marketing expense, based on their unified accounting system across all sections of the company.”

I agree with that in general. My point is that the ONLY reason to prime the pump and say “Pay us” is if they want to be paid. And if they want to be paid, a substantial shift in their “pay once, you have it all” strategy is exactly the wrong one.

It’s not that they care about the noise from the yammerocracy, per se, but they do to the extent that it affects their ability to do business. Never forget that the most aggressively anti-customer CEO in history, the guy who proclaimed from the rooftops to anyone who would listen that only idiots listen to their customers, was forced to concede that “You’re holding it wrong” was an insufficient reply to the yammerocracy. WE MADE HIM take a billion dollars out of Apple’s pockets and pay for iPhone bumpers that he was adamant that we didn’t need.

Then proved he was right when he didn’t spend a penny to fix the very obviously malfunctioning antenna on the next release, and indeed, nobody screamed for a bumper or case. Of course, by that point, we’d been sufficiently trained by Apple not to expect an iPhone capable of making or holding a call, and that anyone who bought an iPhone needed to expect to use it in a case for even the substandard level of service of iPhones at their best.

They obviously sorted this out later, and iPhones hold calls no better or worse than anyone else, but the point is that in the short term, Apple found that the drag on the business was more intolerable than the notion of a billion dollar set of shiny keys to distract us.

None of that is the case this time of course, and I completely agree with you about the relative insignificance of Pro Apps to Apple. I’ve gone even further than this of course, and argued that Pro Apps USERS don’t contribute to any meaningful part of Apple’s hardware sales, either. Apple gets far more business from everyone else by definition, because the universe of Mac users of other apps is so much bigger.

But Pro Apps does exist, and is responsible for SOMETHING. Obviously not a separate line on the P&L, but it’s not like the self-proclaimed “hobby” of the Apple TV device, where any revenue was treated as a happy surprise.

So we’re back to the starting place — what’s the most effective way for Pro Apps to fund the next round of development? I’m planting my flag on new users. It HAS to be new users. Not existing ones. Apple going back to current users with their hands out will not only piss off the large number of current users who aren’t [fill in mini rant of your choice here], but it will be the first time that many potential new users will hear, LOUDLY, “Oh, so THIS is what it’s like to buy Apple’s pro software. No thanks. I’ll stick with iMovie.”

Again, the only reason to ask for money is if you WANT money. And the only money Apple wants from its customers, other than the odd subscription here and there, is for NEW stuff. Not upgrades.

This is why, when they release the new version of IOS-enabled version of FCPX, it’s only going to run on the newest iPads. This is Apple’s par for the course with every update, of course, and the cornerstone of how they preserve “the Apple experience.” The big friction is almost always when you try to combine new software with old hardware (and software). See also: every Catalina thread at the COW and every forum, blog, and article across the web.

Apple wants NEW customers for FCPX, and they already know that no substantial number of new ones comes from new computer releases. The market isn’t growing organically as much for Apple anymore (no disrespect intended; just an observation that I trust is non-controversial, but VERY germane to this conversation), so what’s going to move the needle?

New ways of working, new locations for working, new devices in the mix, new attractiveness for people who would never have considered it, AND a reason for a few thousand people to buy new new iPad Pros.

Let’s do a back of the envelope calculation. One percent of 2.5 million FCPX users is 25,000, times the $1000 price of a mid-range iPad Pro, that’s $25 million gross. In the world of Apple’s overall revenue, that’s small, but I think that anything in the eight figure range enters the conversation at some point….

….especially when you try to imagine the last time that the universe of current FCPX users dropped $25 million cash in Apple’s pocket. And that’s if only 1% of FCPX users think, “Yeah, you know what, it’s been a while since I got a new iPad. I’ll use it for a bunch of other stuff, so might as well check it out.”

But they won’t get those iPad Pros if they’re annoyed at having to pay for basically only this new feature, or this plus some other new features that for the past nearly decade, they’ve been getting free.

Whatever else Apple has learned since the iPhone antenna debacle, it’s to avoid unnecessarily standing in the way of cash flow. Creating a brand new, udderly unique upgrade message NOW would do exactly that. They’d stop the software business dead in its tracks, would take the opportunity for new iPad Pro sales to those customers for nothing. Not one possible advantage.

The ONLY way FCPX grows is with a strong iPad Pro-enabled release. That’s it. There’s nothing else.

You may not want it on iPad. You may hate Apple for its i-focus when they’re ignoring what you need from them to do your job with your all-Apple office. Doesn’t matter. It’s FCPX on iPad Pro or bust.

I’m not casting a vote here. I’m not a customer, no matter what. I’m just looking at the business case, and everything you guys are telling me is only making me more certain I’m right. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “Or they could say “hey guys, pretty sure you’ve all had a lot of value out of that £299 FCPX license now, here’s FCPXI it’s faster, packed with loads of new features and we’d like another £299 for it please””

They could, but I don’t think they would. They’ve had nearly a decade to kick that idea around, and it hasn’t bubbled up yet, I think because the downside would be higher than the upside. Every headline would be negative, to say the least. “Doubled the price for early adopters” or some such.

They also can’t do it for at least the next year. Imagine the squawking about the insensitivity of asking for more money when nearly the entire production community is curtailed if not shut down altogether “when they haven’t even fixed basic issues in the original.”

Where they could maybe get away with it is an iOS-only version, but they’d hang themselves with that too. Any price more than a pittance would freeze the potential to sell new, muscular iPads to current FCPX users who can imagine the usefulness of some remote-production features with an iPad.

No, the only way they sell either new seats of FCPX and new iPads is to keep the message the same as it has been: one price, all in.

[Tim Wilson]

[Patrick Sheppard] “I think that FCPX will not only continue to be developed well into the future, but also be optimized to fully take advantage of the new MP’s horsepower.
“

Maybe, but I think it’s a mistake to think of the two as causally related. Or even casually related. LOL FCPX isn’t even close to requiring the heaviest horsepower that Apple offers. Apple’s whole effort has been to make it lighter and lighter weight, which is why every major visual representation of FCPX has been on a laptop. Even when Apple was crowing the most about support for film workflows, they pictured an ARRI Alexa with FCPX on a Macbook Pro.

Not that FCPX-ers don’t like heavy iron, or that the people here don’t like both FCPX and heavy iron. But I disagree that the Venn diagram has much of an overlap at all in Apple’s eyes. Think of the number of Mac users of Creative Cloud, plus Nuke, plus Media Composer and others in our space, plus science apps, enterprise apps, servers, on and on — I doubt that FCPX is more than single-digit percentages of Apple’s Mac Pro opportunity.

That’s why I think that Apple developing FCPX on iOS is the single most critical thing for the vivacity of FCPX’s future. What makes the difference is NEW seats of FCPX that would never have been sold any other way.

Certainly no number of new Mac Pros is going to do squat for sales of FCPX. There may not be any person left on the planet who said, “I’ve been putting off taking FCXP seriously until Apple gets their computing act together. What’s that? A new Mac Pro? Woo-hoo! FCPX, here I come!” LOL No. Not a chance.

What’s far more likely is that there are a bunch of people like Herb, or our old friend Marco Solorio. Herb bought a new Mac Pro to run Adobe stuff. Not FCPX. Marco sold his HP Z workstations and spent $25,000 on a new Mac Pro to run Blackmagic stuff. Not FCPX.

I guarantee you that Apple isn’t losing sleep over the $299 of “lost” FCPX money to either of those dudes….and I don’t know about Herb, but I bet that Marco spent the money on FCPX just to see it for himself anyway. The money’s the money.

Which is also to make my first point conversely, that I think it’s a mistake to think that FCPX accounts for more than single digit percentages of new Mac Pro sales. Plenty folks here running on old Macs, iMacs, laptops and such. The future of FCPX and Mac Pros have nothing to do with each other, because the revenue streams have so little effect on each other.

That’s why the key to FCPX’s future is NEW sales of NEW seats of FCPX. Apple already knows how many or how few new sales of FCPX that they get with every new computer release. They’ve had plenty of cycles to suss this out, and I’ll wager that their prediction models land within a few units of the target every time. Although honestly, the number is so small that it might fall within the margin of error anyway.

The main thing is, when I think about FCPX on iOS, I think, “Why the heck not?” It seems insane that they’re NOT doing it. Not because anybody thinks that an iPad is the best way to do FCPX, but because getting it right would require getting a bunch of other stuff right, which would also benefit people working on Mac Pros. Not least of which is proxy workflows, for sure!

It’s definitely not an either-or, though. Yeah, SOMEBODY is going to go all-iPad, all the time, for FCPX, and if they can, why not. But I sure don’t think that too many people who CAN use FCPX on an iPad will sell their Mac Pros…and even if they did, Apple won’t care. They’ve already gotten paid for those Mac Pros. LOL

And THIS is why anyone who cares about the future of FCPX needs to have all their fingers and toes crossed that Apple IS planning to bring FCPX to iOS, and hope that it works like magic: this is exactly the kind of thing that will make Apple new money for both new iPads and new seats of FCPX that they might never have gotten any other way.

That’s the thing. The ONLY thing funding new development is new revenue, and nobody who has bought FCPX already is making Apple any new money that Apple wouldn’t have gotten out of them otherwise.

Heck, they’ve made more money out of Herb and Marco switching back to a Mac Pro — just those two guys by themselves — than they’ve probably made from everyone else in this forum for new FCPX revenue since you first bought it years ago.

No matter how much you might want to equate FCPX sales with Apple sales for heavy iron because it argues for the relevance of our market in Apple’s eyes, they’re not even connected a little, which is exactly why THIS part of this market hasn’t been a major part of Apple’s strategy.

Honestly, even the message that you CAN run FCPX on an iPad would be enough to move the needle, I think. Doesn’t matter if anyone actually DOES. The point is to get NEW people buying NEW seats of FCPX.

Surely most people who are suddenly inclined to look at FCPX for the first time will do some research and find that it would be better for them to run it on nearly anything else BUT an iPad, but they’ll at least be looking at FCPX when they hadn’t before.

And of course another major revenue stream for Apple is services. Having FCPX run on iOS now opens it up more directly to the rest of Apple’s ecosystem, maybe an upcharge for extra iCloud storage, who knows. You’ll all be able to come up with ideas for this better than I would….

…but the ball to keep your eye on is NEW sales for FCPX. That’s what Apple needs in order to fund new features and new releases. Nothing that Apple is doing with new heavy iron (or even MBP or iMac-weighted iron) is moving the needle enough, but iOS might really make a huge differerence.

There’s also a lot to be said for hybrid workflows that have iPads on set doing assistant editor/DIT/pre-grading kinds of work, feeding directly into full-scale editing back in the suite. No need to develop a separate logging or grading application when they’ve already got the feature set they need. Running it on the processor that they need to, and enabling it on the devices they need to, will immediately extend their workflow in ways and locales that nobody can think of matching for a very long time, and they get it more or less for free.

There’s nothing bad about doing this, and everything bad about not.