[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “I use the Bene Gesserite litany against fear, it feels appropriate to the times. ☺

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”
“

I said to my wife across the room (yes, both working at home), “Hey, this guy at the COW says that instead of the Star Trek thing, he does the Bene Gesserit fear litany,” and she laughed and STARTED RECITING IT. LOL And now you know one of the keys to us keeping our marriage spicy. LOL

(And in fact, I’d never Dune before I read her hardcover first edition in 1983. Also, check this recent update on Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune and companion TV series coming later this year at IndieWire.)

She asked me to tell you that she loves you too. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

And now Adobe has pulled out of NAB. Making the Adobe Summit online-only was a no-brainer, because they were hosting that themselves, but pulling out of exhibiting at NAB is increasingly obviously a no-brainer too (sez me). I’ll let their announcement at The Adobe Blog speak for itself.

Each year, we look forward to seeing our video community at NAB to talk about the latest trends and our product innovations. Over the past few weeks, we have been closely monitoring and evaluating the situation around COVID-19 and have made the difficult but important decision to cancel our presence at the show this year.

While we are disappointed, the health and safety of our employees, customers and partners are always our priority. We look forward to engaging with our NAB community through a digital experience in the near future.

That’s it. That’s the whole announcement. Nothing extreme, no “this is the end of trade shows”, just an acknowledgment that this year is different, so they’ll do something different.

I came across an article at The Verge that presents a statistical model for what happens when you cancel public gatherings like festivals during epidemics called “flattening the curve” — not that event cancellations cause outbreaks to zero out, but that they keep peaks from occurring, which makes treatment easier and creates less burden on public resources. Canceling events early can help keep an outbreak from getting worse

One especially illuminating chart shows the difference between what happened in St. Louis in 1918, which banned sporting events and closed cinemas early in the influenza outbreak, vs. Philadelphia, which went forward with plans for a parade. One of them had a death rate that peaked at only one-fifth of the other, but spent most of the outbreak at more like a tenth of the other. Any guesses which was which?

How’d you do on your guess? LOL Thought so. There’s literally nothing to be gained by treating this year as business as usual, and a considerable amount to lose.

I saw another image in another Verge article that made me think some more about thinking different, in a much broader way. It’s kind of obvious if you think about it, but now that China is observing a number of travel restrictions, it’s made for a huge drop in air pollution. I’m not making any political observations about Chinese policy or government intervention in general. I’m just reading a map, and the map says, fewer cars on the road has meant clearer skies.

Here’s the article, which gets into a lot of extra nerdery. I am an extra kind of nerd, so I dug it, and you might too.

So I’ve been looking at things like, companies who’ve for years strongly discouraged working from home, if not forbidding outright, now requiring it. Companies canceling in-person events. Dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, business travel. Doing all hiring interviews using web conferencing.

What if, just as a tape shortage following a devastating tsunami forced us to acknowledge that there was really nothing holding us back from adopting tapeless workflows, we could use this challenging time to admit that we’ve been making ourselves do a lot of stuff that we just don’t need to do.

There will always be exchanges that are more efficient in person, making dozens of deals in little more time than it takes to make a couple, insights to be gleaned from informal conversations after formal presentations, boundless pleasures of finding miracles in the festival film we saw and loved when the one we’d wanted to see sold out, and so on — but really, honestly, we don’t need to go to the office so often or stay so long. We don’t need to take as many business trips. We don’t need as many events. We really can live longer, be happier, and have everything about our world be better if we just decided that we’d rather do that than chase one more widget that we’ll only believe exists if we see it in person, hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.

All this stuff will be around next year, but it won’t matter if we’re not. And yeah, in virtually no scenario are most of us in the most vulnerable populations, so we’ll all still be around even if we lick all the handrails at the airport….but wouldn’t it be cool if we spent some of the time NOT going to all this stuff and taking all these trips to think about how we can build a media production lifestyle that actually makes our lives more sane, instead of more exhausting?

[Tim Wilson]

[Roger Van Duyn] “The panic mentality has really taken hold. “

To me, “panic mentality” is something like stockpiling toilet paper, which is definitely happening where I live. Uhm, what exactly do y’all think is going to happen here?

Whereas canceling festivals and trade shows seems like the bare minimum of prudence, no more or less panicky than washing your hands for 20 seconds.

(Rather than singing the Alphabet song twice, my favorite way to count to 20 is to recite: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.” You gotta put the pause after the word “space”, and I’m sure you nerds know exactly how long to pause. Plus however much time you want to add to sing the theme at the end.)

I’m not saying that YOU’RE saying this, Roger, but the reason why I get nervous when people decry “panic mode” (and yes, y’all can buy the regular amount of TP, please and thank you) is that it can also prevent prudence.

Remember around Y2K, there were engineers saying, “Bad things are going to happen if you don’t address this, and here’s just a taste based on the simulations we’ve run.” It became a game in the media to see who could make the biggest deal out of saying THAT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. And what happened was that people of good intent DID listen, and DID act, and DID pay for the development and rapid deployment of patches to make sure that embedded systems kept working, and indeed they did.

And what happened? These same know-nothing nutsacks that were screaming about Y2K being a hoax were now shouting SEE? NOTHING HAPPENED. ALL THAT WORRYING FOR NOTHING.

No, it wasn’t for nothing. And it wasn’t worrying. It was a warning raised by people who are paid to look out for trouble and issue these exact kind of warnings. And smart people heeded the warnings, and THAT’s why nothing bad happened.

So the ideal scenario is that by this time next month, nobody in Austin will have gotten sick, nobody will have died. And I pray that a bunch know-nothing nutsacks don’t froth at mouths screaming SEE? NOTHING HAPPENED. ALL THAT WORRYING FOR NOTHING….when the truth is, it wasn’t for nothing, and it wasn’t worrying. It was listening to warnings from people who are paid to give those kinds of warnings, taking basic steps, and AFTER THAT, sure, we’re all here to tell the tale, if everything goes right. Let’s make it as easy as possible for things to go right by keeping fewer pieces in motion.

Because look, the best case scenario anyone is talking about is 100,000 dead in the US. THAT’S NOT MUCH, RIGHT? Certainly nothing like 675,000 in 1918. Only about 3x a bad flu season. But we’re still gonna lose those 30-ish thousand folks anyway, so this 100,000 is on top of that, and that’s a best-case scenario.

So let’s just nod calmly, admit that this year is a little different, so we’ll take little steps. Use the normal amount of toilet paper at home for a couple of extra days this year, and maybe not get super-frothy because we don’t get to climb in a germ tube of a plane to fly into a germ-bath of a convention center with thousands of people you don’t even like to be around the few dozen people you do, ???? and let’s do it next year instead.

[Tim Wilson]

And in fact, Adobe has now pulled out of NAB.

https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-withdraws-from-nab-show-2020/

Each year, we look forward to seeing our video community at NAB to talk about the latest trends and our product innovations. Over the past few weeks, we have been closely monitoring and evaluating the situation around COVID-19 and have made the difficult but important decision to cancel our presence at the show this year.

While we are disappointed, the health and safety of our employees, customers and partners are always our priority. We look forward to engaging with our NAB community through a digital experience in the near future.

This feels basic and prudent, no more or less panicky than washing your hands. NAB will be waiting for us all next year, but nothing that happens during that show is worth even one person getting sick, much less dying.

More to say about that on the the thread that started with AJA, here: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/105732

[Tim Wilson]

[Tim Gerhard] “We decided to pull our MagStor LTO systems exhibit this year due to the virus.”

Thanks for the update, Tim! Be sure to send us your news to press @ creativecow.net and we’ll get it posted for you.

I have to say that I’m not especially paranoid about getting sick in general. What strikes me as imprudent right now is getting into a tube of germs to fly to the one event in the world where I’ve come home sick every single time, then climbing into another tube of germs with people who’ve been at the same event, almost certainly as sick as me.

I was trying to remember the year that SARS affected the Asian community, and vendors from that part of the world pulled out of NAB. One thing I hadn’t considered until a recent conversation is that some companies might not be given a choice because of travel restrictions.

Not that we need to decide NOW what we’re going to do with every trade show ever. But this year is different, and treating it like it’s the same just doesn’t seem prudent to me.

[Oliver Peters] “Avid, EditShare, and many others started there.”

They started in very different NABs. They were dramatically smaller shows then, and much more focused on people who had the money to attend. There weren’t free tickets in any large numbers, and travel to Vegas was difficult and expensive — nothing like the Disneyland-ified travel packages, tons of flights available world of today, where the majority of people walking the floor aren’t there to buy five and six figure systems like the ones Avid and EditShare launched with.

You used to need money to fly to Las Vegas, you needed money to get on the floor, “cheap” NLEs like Media 100 ran $30,000 and up, “cheap” camera rigs like BetaSP ran in the same range, and you can double those prices for today’s economy. THAT’s who went to NAB. People who had mid-five to low-six figures to spend for the CHEAP stuff, so you COULD launch companies like Avid and EditShare there. It’s not the same now.

I’m all for the democratization of video — I’m only in this industry because of it, and it’s why the COW exists at all — but I can also tell you that after working in the Boris FX booth for three years at the turn of the century, the Apple booth in 2003, and the Avid booth in 04-06, that I spent easily half my time explaining to people what video editing even is. You really haven’t experienced tire-kicking until you’ve actually worked an NAB booth.

That was fine by me, though. We all start somewhere, and I’d rather help people who knew they didn’t know stuff than waste my time with the NO-it-alls who came to the booth just to yell at me or try to make me feel stupid. (You’d be amazed, or maybe you wouldn’t be, by how many people seemed to come to NAB for the SOLE purpose of yelling about something.)

Along the way, I definitely saw people’s inclination to spend money plummet like a stone.

I mentioned in my earlier post why I think the North Hall crowd will be around until the sun goes nova, but for our end of the market, I think NAB could prosper more as a training and meeting event….but I’m not sure that even THAT is necessary for anything more than habit. There are energized user groups around country (I’ve presented to scores of them myself) and around the world (I’ve presented at a good handful of those too), and I think that as vendors find that it’s cheaper AND SAFER to do road shows, regional events, and user groups that the ROI on NAB is fading fast.

Think about a company like LumaForge. I’m sure that they’ve made money at NAB, and will for as long as they feel like going, but they don’t NEED it. At this point, I think they do way, way more to add value to NAB than NAB is adding to them, and they could do darn near all of it online, with a handful of local events or a road show that they could do for a fraction of NAB.

I hope nobody anywhere gets sick, and I hope everyone recovers. Get your flu vaccines, people. I don’t have any doubt that we’ll solve this problem and be able to jet around wherever we want next year.

But I’m also aware from having some immuno-compromised folks in my family that I could easily survive something like the flu or Coronavirus that I might pass along as a carrier, that would kill THEM. I gotta tell you, I’d really rather not live with the burden of killing an older or younger loved one because I felt the need to see a bunch of new widgets or old friends. It can all wait this year.

And to Mark’s point above, I think it’s also a good time to re-evaluate whether a show done in this manner, in this place, is the right way to do any of this.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Raudonis] “Much like the Tsunami in Japan was the death of HDCAMsr and tape based delivery, this event may be a watershed moment for the grim future of tradeshows.”

Funny, we were talking about HDCAM SR just the other day. There were people willing to pay 10x for tape after the tsunami, but there were other people who said, you know what, enough already. We’ve been meaning to get around to this for years, so let’s just spend that money to finish the transition to tapeless.

[Mark Raudonis] “I predict that this moment is the turning point to the “remote editing” capability that we’ve all been yakking about for years. The tools are available now. We just need to formalize and legitimize the workflow. It’s as much a “human” problem as a technical one.”

Yeah, whether the event is cancelled or not (I’ll go on the record and predict NOT) that this is going to be the before and after of the show at the current scale.

I also think you’re right that what’s been stopping us from flipping the switch on TRUE remote editing on the scale of film productions and the vastly-larger scale of production at Bunim/Murray is more conceptual than technological. It has seemed easier to fly people around than actually figure out the name brands to plug into making remote collaboration work, but how this year unfolds might be the push that people have needed to say, enough already. We’ve been ABLE to make the switch, so let’s just do it.

[Bill Davis] “AJA and ADOBE have announced they are both doing what would have been their NAB product rollouts via webcasts. “

Slight modification Bill — so far, I think that the only thing Adobe has announced is that May’s Adobe Summit is cancelling its Las Vegas event in favor of online-only. News about that here.

Over the past few weeks, we have been closely monitoring and evaluating the situation around COVID-19 to ensure we are taking the necessary measures to protect the health and wellbeing of Adobe Summit attendees. As a result, we have made the difficult but important decision to make Summit/Imagine 2020 an online event this year and cancel the live event in Las Vegas.

While we are disappointed that we will not be together in-person with our community this year, we are excited to host Adobe Summit as an online experience.

This is an event that they were hosting, with 16,000 folks on hand last year. I can easily imagine a world where they cancel a major event that they’re responsible for, but still attend a show in the same city a few weeks earlier as one exhibitor.

I definitely agree with one of your points about Blackmagic, though: Grant’s pre-NAB videos the past few years have brought some of the show’s most compelling news. I’d love to see more of this from a lot more folks, whether or not they go to the show.

Still, though, I can also imagine AJA as the first of many. GDC is off, Google Next is off, no Facebook F8, Facebook and Twitter are among the major pullouts from the tech section at SxSW, and so on. My wife is in medical education, and she showed me an article listing 32 medical conferences canceled so far this year. I guarantee that that number is nowhere near the end of it.

On top of all the medical uncertainty (if indeed you’re still uncertain — I AIN’T) is the fact that our business has changed quite dramatically in ways that directly affect the value of the vendor-focused part of the show. NAB used to be among the only ways to see gear in person — and we NEEDED to see it in person to make sure people weren’t lying to us. LOL Or to talk to vendors to take their measure — is this somebody I can trust?

I remember speaking to a storage vendor in 1995 and asking if their demos were running off drives or off tape decks, and he acted like I insulted him. “Of COURSE the demos are running off tape decks. There’s not a drive manufacturer in the world whose stuff is reliable enough to work all day at a trade show. Anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar or an idiot.” LOL

Hey, and remember when we needed to be persuaded that HD was real? I know very high profile pundits at high-profile magazines (one of which is still around even LOL), and well into the 21st century, he was adamant that HD was a scam, that nobody would ever be tell the difference, and that for SURE you’d never be able to get it over cable. (Nobody even talked about it over the internet. AOL was still in more homes than the internet WELL into this century.) But the rest of us still went to NAB to see for ourselves, our own noses against the glass, because nothing else would persuade us.

Same with RED’s first NAB. People were lined up for hours just to see if it was real, to see if the pictures were really any good, whatever. Show me.

There was also this sense that we NEEDED something new NOW. As in, all of us were upgrading our computers every year 20-25 years ago, because we had to keep up. If Apple would have offered a new computer every six months, I’d have bought it, and I bet you would have too. Plus this endless array of doo-dads, plug-ins, and all kinds of things that we couldn’t imagine. We had to go to EVERY BOOTH to find out wha t we didn’t know, and ended the show exhausted, dehydrated to the point of hallucination, and certain that we’d still missed something that would have changed our lives IF ONLY WE’D KNOWN.

It was Fear of Missing Out while being IN THE ROOM. It’s insane that anything should have ever had this kind of power over us.

Now it’s more like, “I guess this is the year that I can swap out my 2008 Mac.” LOL Stuff works. What I have this year will probably work for as long as I want it to.

And if Sam Mestman at LumaForge tells me he has a new box of Jelly for me, I’ll believe him. I don’t need to sniff it in person. I’ll let Aharon demo the new Red Giant plug-ins for me on YouTube.

I mean, kinda the question I have for you folks still working for a living (me, I TALK about working for a living), what do you even need from ANY manufacturer? Sure, new stuff is always fun, but do you need to SEE it? In person?

Having worked for enterprise-class vendors, where salesdudes might make a significant portion of their entire year’s number in a matter of days, it’s hard to imagine that they won’t find SOME way to get together in Las Vegas. It’s not like NOBODY from Apple has been going to NAB since the company stopped doing booths on the floor.

And the North Hall crowd ain’t goin’ nowhere. Building infrastructure takes teams of people from bunches of companies, and they can’t haul their gear from customer to customer. It’s just more efficient to be in one place. But tens of thousands of civilians tromping through aisles of booths to pick up paper brochures? Not so much.

Bill, circling back to you, I’m intrigued that you’re not going because Vegas is a relatively short trip for you, and because you’ve said that for so many years, you didn’t need to see anything on the floor. You went to things like FCPWORKS presentations and user group events, and I agree. I’d long felt like seeing colleagues and a handful of suite presos were more valuable than gold, and the floor was skippable for anyone whose job doesn’t require it.

Like Oliver Peters. ☺ Back around the turn of the century, Oliver and I met for dinner on the eve of NAB every year. Even though we both lived in Florida at the time (he still does), it was the one time of year we got to catch up in person. What are YOUR plans this time, man?

I’m also curious to hear from anyone who’s of the “Just TRY and stop me from going” persuasion. I definitely remember the days of, “The survival of my business depends on me attending”, whereas maybe today it’s, “MY survival might depend on me NOT attending.”

Also just saw this over on the electric twitter machine, someone @’ing us here at the COW….

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Tim,

This is the right place, and you’ve got a great idea! Renovating and updating our services listings for 2020 is on the “sooner rather than later” list, and this will definitely be there…because you’re right, not so much now.

I’m afraid that I don’t have a date or anything like that, alas, so we’re probably not going to have it in time to help you with this particular project.

Thanks again,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Joshua Pearson] “kind of dug the Media 100 software, even though it only let you have two tracks of video!!! I cant actually remember why I liked it… maybe Premiere was crashy and Media 100 was more solid?… ah, the 90s.”

Thanks for the kind words!

I was a Media 100 customer too! It being a small world and New England tech being rather incestuous, I was hired at Avid by a guy who knew me from when he worked at Media 100 and I was a customer, and all three years I was there, I sat next to still another guy who worked at Media 100. I regularly bumped into Media 100 folks, and helped bring on one of the most publicly-identifiable Media 100 people, Marianna Montague, who’s now filling the same customer advocate role at Avid. VERY small world.

Anyway, yes, as editors, we loved the bullet-proofness of Media 100 relative to the (pre-pro) Mac version of Premiere. Even though Windows came later, in 1996, Premiere on Win + hardware from people like Matrox with DigiSuite ran like a dream. Mac, closer to nightmare, not least of which was no support for drop code, so your 30 second spot would be a full frame out of sync by the end. Completely not usable for broadcast at that point….but hey, to this larger conversation, that wasn’t the point of Premiere THEN.

The difference with Avid wasn’t price for me. The Media 100xs was only a few thousand less than a very, very similar featured Avid Xpress system, both in the $30,000-ish range. The difference was intent. Media 100 was focused on providing the highest quality images possible (the company started as an optical tech company, Data Translation), whereas Xpress was an unholy marriage of focused on offline and the lowest image quality they could get away with.

It had to do with being made with a different audience — film, since even the TV market that Avid was aiming for was still mostly shooting on film — and I was all video, all the time. I also had no clients or collaborators who cared about Avid, so even though Avid had something in the right price range for me, and had plenty of features that Media 100 didn’t, it was the wrong set of product priorities for ME. I spent all of about 90 seconds figuring this out. LOL And I was right.

That’s why these questions have never seemed trivial to me. The notion of “we’re developing for THESE customers, and to succeed, we CAN’T develop for THOSE customers” is so foundational that it can’t be separated from feature requests. It may well be the case that for FCPX to be what you need it to be, that you’ll have to rely on third party solutions to address any needs for specific kinds of collaboration, epic-scale film, what have you.

So, behind the question of “What do you want Apple to do for you?” is “How do you want Apple to understand itself, and what tradeoffs are you willing to make for Apple to be who you need them to be?”

Which is also why I find the notion that you’re NOT making tradeoffs when you choose ANY product or platform to be so delusional. You’re also choosing what’s NOT going to happen for you. Of COURSE there’s no way that every NLE can work in every context. It’s impossible, and even if it was possible, it would be a genuinely bad goal. LOL

In fact, my favorite thing about this forum is the extent to which it has become a place for people who do in fact use multiple toolsets to talk about all of them in relation to each other. The more the merrier, sez me, but there’s really not much to say if we can’t be honest with each other about what each one precludes as much as we talk about what each of them offers.

Understanding that somebody else’s reality is different from mine isn’t a reason for either of us to dismiss the other. Ideally, it’s an opportunity for empathy, and for us to gain greater insight through multiple perspectives.

[Tim Wilson]

[Devin Terpstra] “I love this. We are running FCS3 on 10.6.8 with 6 – 2010 MacPros. Our X-Raid is still running strong. Use FCP, DVDSP, STP, Compressor & Motion all from 2010 daily. Making 2000 titles a year. “

Whoa! I’m definitely going to want to hear more about THAT.

Here’s the thing. It’s not trivial that you’re working in that environment. There are things you can do because you’re using THAT toolset that you simply can’t do in others.

THAT’s the relevance of these kinds of stories. Not to persuade you that you’re going to be like Mike if you wear Air Jordans, but to provide specific examples of how the combination of wizards and their tools create magic. I don’t give a ???? if I’m a candidate to use those tools or not. I liked the movie in general, but when I hear “Out of 960 shots in the movie, 400 were VFX shots”, I say “Tell me more. NOW!” His answer doesn’t make me feel any differently about Final Cut or After Effects, but the answer DOES make me say, “WOW! What a cool story!”

And it raised a bunch more questions for me. Okay, he knows Premiere, so why would he not use Dynamic Link to edit in Premiere and open the sequence directly in After Effects? Did he use Mocha for masking (and I assume tracking?), or use AE’s native masking toolset? And he certainly makes a watertight case for AE or another layer-based compositor rather than Nuke, Fusion, or a node-based compositor. They weren’t just doing effects within frames, or compositing layers across a sequence, which node-based compositors are arguably better at, but rather using animated masks to combine multiple layers of performances. You’d be insane to try that for any large number of shots in anything BUT After Effects.

But it feels that you’d be imputing a level of cynicism to him or frame.io that isn’t appropriate. Nobody’s trying to persuade anybody of anything.

Look, I can tell you the same thing about Avid and Apple. I worked AT Avid on these kinds of stories, and I worked WITH Apple on them, and persuasion was the dead last thing on anybody’s mind. Sure, because I worked AT Avid, I spent most of my days around Avid editors, and when they said, hey, I just worked on this show or this movie or this commercial, I’d say, “Wow! That’s awesome! Tell me more!”

Maybe it’s my own lack of cynicism, or the decades as I spent as an editor before I became a corporate weasel, but my assumption is that you can’t persuade nobody about nuthin’. LOL All you can do is show people what you got, and they’ll decide if it’s a good fit or not. If it’s not a good fit, there’s no point trying to persuade them it is.

And working with Apple PR was a pleasure, because they called me and said, “Hey man, you’re not going to believe this insane story. It’s so crazy that it made me think of you.” LOL Perfect. We ran it at the COW, too, and it WAS perfect. And genuinely insane — three guys ran across the Sahara. No roads. They just ran.

You can’t even imagine what James Moll (an Oscar winner for The Last Days) and his team went through to shoot it, either, so I really do highly recommend this story as one of the wildest we ever published. Click the link to check it out.

She wasn’t thinking that somebody would read this story and buy a Mac. That’s crazy. Nobody thinks like that in corporate PR, because nobody thinks YOU think like that.

It does indeed happen that this guy used a Mac to cut the film (I remember his NLE, and I’ll give you zero guesses what it was, but I don’t think I mentioned it in the story; this was more a production story than a post one) — but my friend in Apple PR heard it as a cool story that was worth sharing. We post cool stories at the COW. Simple as that.

More broadly, though, NLEs are NOT created equal. There’s not one of them that is created for every kind of customer doing every kind of project. Some of them are in fact very much NOT suited to certain kinds of work.

Using the example in the post just above mine, it would be ridiculous to say that Devin could edit faster in FCPX, because nothing else in his life would be possible if he used it. He’d go from editing 2000 projects a year to zero. Apple very clearly and publicly presented that certain workflows would no longer be supported, speaking in unambiguous English-language sentences by native speakers, yet this is still somehow seen as controversial for anyone besides Apple themselves to admit.

Certainly in the collaboration thread currently also active in the forum right now, one thing we’re talking about is that FCPX has never had certain collaborative workflows in its sights, and as a result, Apple hasn’t developed the infrastructure to support them. That’s good. It has everything to with why FCPX is good at the things that that it IS designed for. Focus is good.

That’s why it’s not only reasonable for somebody to say, “I’m doing my project a specific way, so I need to know if your product was developed with me in mind,” it’s CRITICAL. Maybe you’ll luck out if you choose a toolset without looking closely at whether it’s actually suitable, but why on earth would you leave something that important to luck? You LOOK first.

Stories like these are also important for helping people understand what’s possible. It’s conceivable to me that most filmmakers aren’t thinking in terms of “How can I use rotoscoping to combine the best performances of my actors in different takes, while keeping them in the same frame with lots of camera movement, maybe even some VFX?” — but in fact, it’s a way to use software to extend the reach of small budgets, and to give directors and editors vastly more options.

Parasite used the combination of FCP and After Effects for this, but one reason Fincher moved from FCP to Premiere Pro is because he and his very FCPX-friendly workflow guru at Light Iron found that *100%* of their shots were VFX shots of some sort or another, even if only a DVE to reframe shots in post, plus tons of grading and relighting. Fincher’s feeling is why bake ANYTHING into the frame on set? So he went down an editing path that kept him as close as possible to his preferred effects toolset.

A terrific blog called The Fincher Analyst has a tag for Adobe Premiere, collecting articles and videos from all over the web on this topic. And in no case was Kirk Baxter ACE, Fincher, or anyone else suggesting “If you liked Gone Girl, you’re gonna love Premiere Pro!” The articles and interviews collected were all editors and other post pros speaking to editors and other other pros, saying “This is how we did it.” And those stories were cool. They’ll change your mind about what’s possible for the most traditional narrative filmmaking that doesn’t APPEAR to have a single effects shot in it, but has a vast VFX-focused workflow that started on set. Astounding.

And certainly, before Cold Mountain, it was reasonable to ask if FCP was suitable for epic feature film production, and the answer was no. Frankly, the answer in the wake of Cold Mountain was debatable. I’ve mentioned this before, but I think that the book on Cold Mountain has everything to do with why Avid is thriving in film production more than ever. I was there when it came out, and I’m certain that hundreds of copies were sold into Avid HQ and Avid dealers around the country. Editors were calling us every day saying, “Is this for real? Is this REALLY what using FCP on a film is like??? Holy Spit, I’M STICKING WITH AVID!!!!”

You can look it up — Avid revenues skyrocketed in the year following that book’s release, and doubled again in the couple of years after that. It made the case better than anything coming out of Avid that FCP on a large-scale film production was more difficult, while also more limited, than what Avid had already been delivering for years.

FCP got better at it of course, and I don’t mean any criticism of my dear friend Ramy Katrib and the workflow wizards at DigitalFilm Tree. There’s certainly no question that many, many folks took the opposite message of these Avid dudes (and they were all dudes that I heard from), and felt like the vision they saw in this book was something to aspire to and embrace.

It’s not that the movie itself gave FCP any kind of glow. I don’t know about you, but I freaking hated that movie, although I might change my mind if anything could induce me to ever finish watching it all the way through. It’s that the PEOPLE using FCP on a major, remote film production provided insight into their experience that helped people see, “Ah yes, this is for me” or “No way, this is not for me.” The irreplaceable insight of editors talking to other editors.

That’s why stories like this will always be my favorites. Whether it’s a music video, a commercial, a TV show, a movie, a museum installation, you name it — I WANT to hear how it was made, I WANT to hear about the tools, I WANT to hear about the creative leaps that enabled the tools to work in ways I hadn’t considered. I want the magicians to tell me how they did it.

How can you not think that these stories are the best thing ever? Because I’m here to tell you that they ARE the best thing ever to ME, and this particular story is one of the best of the lot.

Smile. Nobody’s trying to take your favorite toys away. Your peers are doing awesome work. Read the stories, even if you know that they’re not using your favorite toys, then smile some more.

[Tim Wilson]

One thing that jumps out to me is that of 960 shots in the film, 400 of them were effects shots!!! The house was built on a soundstage, so there were lots of set extensions and such. The ground floor of the main house was built on a backlot but the second floor was full CG.

The article Oliver links to (highly recommended for ALL the movies!!!) has some excerpts from a much longer article with Bong’s longtime editor Jinmo Yang, here. Here’s a photo from that article of the house. Take THAT, nattering nabobs of “CG is ruining movies” negativity!

Most often, Bong was using a Fincher-inspired approach that joined multiple performances of a single take into one shot. That is, in Shot 1, he might prefer Actor A’s second take, and Actor B’s third take, but using After Effects, they’d roto together the two different takes to create a new, single shot.

Because of the camera movement that made the film seem like it had a lot more than only 960 shots, it was more complicated than just drawing a line down the middle of the frame. Masks had to move, to put it mildly….but that’s what an awful lot of the VFX were, what we typically refer to as invisible effects.

What really struck me about the editing as we tend to think of it — arranging what starts as a lot of shots into a fewer number of shots, maybe rearranging sections of the story (the trope that “editing is the final draft of the script”) — is that there was honestly virtually none of it in this movie. Bong storyboarded everything, and doesn’t shoot master and coverage style. He keeps the shots moving, and doesn’t overdo it. Jinmo was on set, helping organize shots coming out of the Alexa’s video tap. When Bong felt that he’d gotten what he needed, he moved on.

That’s not to say that this was simple. There was lots of time spent on rehearsing camera movement and actor blocking, for example. This graphic really REALLY jumped out at me from the article Oliver first linked to:

Within half a week of the shooting days for “Once Upon A Time…” and a full MONTH longer on principal photography than “Joker”!!!! And yet they only spent $11 million on production! The preparation clearly paid off in a shorter post schedule, even with 40%-ish of the shots being VFX shots. Sure, they were more roto than CG, but wow, it’s wild that weeks in post were about the same as Marriage Story and The Irishman, and less than Joker, Little Women, or JoJo!

This is very much the opposite of the received wisdom that shooting days are the most expensive, and post is cheaper. Admittedly, shooting on a South Korean soundstage is probably cheaper than shooting on location around LA for OUATIH, or Boston-ish (Little Women) and NY (Joker)….but still, lining these up side by side

But there wasn’t the kind of massive media database to manage that we associate with feature film workflows. The shots that they shot were exactly the ones they intended, no more, no less. The editing really was essentially more vertical — picking which of the takes for each of the actors that would be layered up into the frame. The finesse came in timing the cuts to drive rhythm, and yeah, not especially difficult in the scheme of things. Any NLE could have handled this.

Indeed, Jinmo mentions knowing Avid and Premiere Pro as well as FCP 7, which he uses because he likes it. WHAT A CONCEPT. Not driven by fear, ego, inflexibility, being old, or any of the nonsense usually trotted out around here. He’s using what he likes because it solves the problems he has.

This also reminds me of some of the observations on the Time for FCPX to step up – collaboration thread that not all workflows are the same, and that nobody can encompass them all. In our conversations about the newest options, we speak less about the best options for very specific settings, and there’s abundant evidence that the combination of “old” NLEs and After Effects are still getting an awful lot done.

Thanks to Shane and Oliver for firing this up! And of course our friends at frame.io for these fantastic articles. Fun, fun stuff!