Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Don Walker] “[Tim Wilson] “Anything else you’d like me to disclose, just ask.”
Kirk or Picard?”Dude. C’mon.
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Seriously.
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The usual disclosures. Everybody I’ve mentioned is a COW advertiser. I do not speak for Creative COW here.
I have bought all 3 NLEs I discuss. My primary NLE as the owner of a video production company was Media 100. My time as a third-party software partner with Adobe and Apple extended to my time working at Avid. In the context of trying to be historically accurate about complicated pasts, I was only talking here about Premiere Pro, and not its relevance as a choice for any particular customer.
I prefer chocolate shakes to be made with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce, rather than with chocolate ice cream. I’m not sure why, but that just seems wrong.
I like them both a lot, but evaluated from a distance, I prefer Dick Sargent, who it turns out was offered the gig even before Elizabeth Montgomery.
Julie Newmar IS Catwoman. Sorry, she just is.
Anything else you’d like me to disclose, just ask.
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[Dennis Radeke] “part of the reason that they didn’t immediately move to Mac was that they were doing a complete re-write of Premiere at the time which became Premiere Pro 1.0…..”
I hoped I didn’t imply any disrespect to Adobe. It was the right call.
I was working at Boris FX at the time, making plug-ins to support Premiere Pro and nearly two dozen other NLEs, including Final Cut Pro and Media Composer. Before that, I built my Mac-only business on…Macs. I was Mac-only, going back to February of 1984. I bought Premiere back when it was Mac-only.
But when I saw what Premiere Pro was doing on Windows, I had to admit that I simply couldn’t imagine that kind of performance on Mac. There was nothing, from any vendor, to suggest that it was even vaguely possible any time in the forseeable future.
And you know what? There WASN’T any way to get that kind of performance on Mac anytime soon. That’s why nobody else did it. It wasn’t possible.
And you know what else? There’s still not another NLE on Mac that offers that kind of raw performance.
I wasn’t Mac-only by the end of 2001, partly because of what I saw in Premiere Pro. I bought the exact laptop that Adobe used for the Premiere Pro demo I saw at Boris FX. Same color and everything.
Okay, an observational tangent.
The fact is that, as a platform, Mac has not been well optimized for third-party power. Now THAT may have been a factor for Adobe, and maybe Avid…but in the end, there are soooo many examples of cross-platform software performing better on Windows. It’s not because vendors “like” Windows better. It’s that Microsoft and their hardware partners for CPUs and GPUs aggressively support third-party power…because for them, there are pretty much ONLY third parties.
Again, speaking personally, my guess is that every hardware and software partner that Apple has ever had is waiting for the other anvil to drop, because they’ve seen it again and again.
Aaaaand, we’re back.
The turns in Premiere’s path couldn’t possibly have worked out better for Mac customers.
Which is exactly my point. Look at the product, and weigh it against your needs. Ignore the misinformation and fuzzy memories, and even accurate but irrelevant ones. There are no good reasons to make bad choices.
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[Craig Seeman] “You think Avid was “nice” when they announced they were dropping Mac support?”
But it never actually happened. A guy rattled his saber, he’s long gone, everybody he worked for is long gone, and Avid never stopped making Media Composer for Mac.
I’m not saying that the development history had absolutely feature parity. It didn’t, but neither has Adobe’s path with Premiere. Of course, both Media Composer and Premiere Pro are virtually identical across platforms today.
A big difference, though. Adobe DID drop Mac support when Premiere Pro was introduced in 2003. BOOM, gone, no Mac support for what used to be a Mac-only product. No warning. Gone, overnight. No path forward except on Windows. For FOUR YEARS.
This is of course no longer the case. I’m a fan of Premiere. I think that many FCP folks should have been using Premiere all along. It’s simply better suited to what they’re doing.
Let’s just be clear on the history. Media Composer: never dropped on Mac. Premiere: dropped on Mac for FOUR YEARS.
I still say full steam ahead. Premiere deserves your full attention as an outstanding alternative among several as you evaluate your next steps. So does Media Composer. But it would be unfortunate to let a misremembering of history be part of your decision-making process.
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[Craig Seeman] “[Tim Wilson] “Hmmm, I’m thinking the biggest piece of acquired code might be OS X. :-)”
From Steve Jobs failed Next Computer venture?”
Well, I don’t know about failed: Steve sold the company for $429 million and 1.5 million shares of Apple stock.
And yes, BeOS was in line to be Apple’s next OS, but talks stalled over money. Jean-Louis Gassee wanted $200 million, but Apple didn’t want to go over $125m if I recall. It worked out for the best, for Apple anyway. Nexstep, Openstep, and Web Objects…oh yeah, and that Jobs kid…seems like a pretty good deal.
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[Jeff Bernstein] “As one who helped create QuickTime in the early years, I can tell you that Avid and Adobe have well-placed fears of entrusting the core of their products to Apple.”
I think that many people at Adobe and Avid would agree with you. 🙂
As for Avid’s dependence on QuickTime, I can’t speak for today, but it’s easy to forget how long Avid has been at this. The first version of Media Composer shipped in 1989 — QuickTime wasn’t even released for two more years!
Also, QuickTime didn’t support timecode until 1995 — SEVEN years after Media Composer shipped. And those of us who were around at the time can testify that the word “support” is generous. It was a mess. Avid NOT using QuickTime as a foundation is a big reason why sync was so rock solid for Avid when that simply wasn’t the case for QT-based systems.
(And in the category of “been at this a long time,” Avid won a technical Oscar for Film Composer in 1998 — a nearly 10-year-old, Mac-only product, back when Final Cut was still running on Windows at Macromedia!)
Like I said, I don’t know about how Media Composer works with QuickTime today, but it’s important to understand how long Avid had been in the game as a Mac-only company before QuickTime was even vaguely useful.
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[Bret Williams] “Their biggest piece of acquired code- iTunes!”
Hmmm, I’m thinking the biggest piece of acquired code might be OS X. 🙂
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[Andrew Richards] ” I could imagine the act of pulling the display down to table mode would even automatically shift the active app to fullscreen touch mode…It could happen.”
It has. The HP Touchsmart does this now, except it’s not an either-or. Keyboard, mouse, touchscreen are all active, all the time. And the monitor reclines quite nicely, too.
You’ll get the gist pretty quick, but it really is worth watching the whole two minutes. Why, you’ll even see a couple of seconds worth of editing video being demoed at around 1:25.
You’ll see that it’s very, very consumer oriented, but you’ll also see that there’s no reason you couldn’t use it for really advanced stuff too. Science/research seems obvious, but just one example. “Apple abandoning pros” notwithstanding, something like FCPX would sing on this.
In any case, it’s hard to imagine that something like this isn’t coming from Apple, and soon.
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[Mitch Ives] ” it just seems like we have an even bigger void in management these days though.”
That’s the thing. Nobody on Wall St. will care about this unless it affects Apple’s bottom line, and I think you’ll agree that the net result will be much more money for Apple. At the expense of some customers of FCP 7 of course, but trading off for what is surely a much larger customer base in the future.
The fact is that, on fundamentals alone, Apple is already significantly *under*valued. That’s true of a number of stocks in this sector of course — Microsoft shares are flat on doubled revenue and profits — which suggests that larger market forces are holding them back. But looking at Apple in isolation (never a good idea with stocks of course), I can imagine that the real drag on upside might be concern with Steve’s health, and the succession plan.
The next few months are looking awesome for Apple, with Lion, a new MacBook Air, iPhone 5, a rumored iPad 3 in Q4 (this has been rumored all year, but, frankly, looking more credible from what I read) — oh yeah, and this insanely hot video software running on iPad (you KNOW it’s coming)…
In short, if you can get past issues regarding Steve and the succession plan, I think that this is a fantastic time to buy Apple stock. $400/share seems easily within reach based on today’s fundamentals alone. Another couple of quarters with Apple blowing away the number, who knows? Another split?
The concerns you have about FCP 7 for yourself are exactly as legitimate as you think they are. They just won’t have any bearing on Apple’s course in the market. iPhone 4’s antenna issues affected a lot more people, and got a lot more coverage. A year later, the problems are still there! Nobody cares, least of all Wall St. The perception is that Apple can do no wrong…even though every news outlet in the country widely reported that they CAN, and DO.
I don’t invest in stocks at all, but I still enjoy keeping up with the market. If I was buying stock though, I’d be making a beeline for Apple. The numbers are the numbers, the perception is the perception….and on Wall St., that can be worth even more.
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[diala chibuikem] “I need sound professional advise on which cameras i need to start with, how many of the cameras too.”
That is a bit of a tricky question for us with regards to specific cameras. I know that HDV is a very popular format in Nigeria, perhaps even the most popular, but less so here in the US. The question is easier to answer from a business perspective.
–Are there other rental companies that you can look at? What cameras are they renting?
–You might also ask your propects what these other companies are doing well, and what they are doing poorly. Learning from success is good, but learning from other people’s mistakes is even better!
–Since you have clients, though, you would do well to start with them. If the Z7 is the camera they are most interested in, then by all means, focus on that. But you might begin by understanding the JOB they want to do, then helping them understand what the right CAMERA is.
Your friend knows the Z7. Maybe that is the right camera, maybe it is not. But as a business owner, your first job is to understand what your clients want.
Once you understand what they need to DO, you might ask this question in the HDV forum — my clients do this kind of work, I am looking at these cameras, what do you recommend, etc.
One more piece of business advice, though: whatever camera purchase you make, start preparations for the camera purchases you will need to make AFTER that. It is a fact of life for rental companies that clients will always want to have new models of camera — perhaps not the newest of the new, but it will be important for them to see that you are committed to keeping your customers ahead of THEIR competitors.
The whole point of this for them is that you will keep up with buying new equipment so that they do not have to. It is quite likely that your clients will not be asking for the Z7 a year from now.
Please ask any more business questions here! Many of us are entrepreneurs ourselves. These are exactly the situation that we ourselves went through.
Best regards,
Tim