[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “In contrast, Avid has generally catered to an existing market. Adobe tends to have a foot in both camps. Blackmagic is taking a page from Apple’s playbook more so than from the others.”

In fairness, Avid created that market in some substantial ways. Anyone else is free to go after it, and some people obviously are. I remember one year when I was working for Avid at NAB, I watched a then-VP at Adobe poke my then-VP of Post in the chest and say, “We’re coming for you next.” They added support for feet and frames immediately after that, but found that there’s ultimately more to it than that…and indeed, Productions may be getting closer to the heart of it.

More interesting, I think Adobe has gone even harder than Apple at social media creators, and they’ve done it more broadly. Some of it is invisible to us because it’s happening outside the US (Behance), in the photography market (Fotolia), and both below and adjacent to the folks who frequent the COW. They’ve built a dashboard into Premiere Pro that allows you to upload once to a variety of platforms (Facebook, Insta, Snap, etc), WITH ANALYTICS RIGHT THERE.

We haven’t really spoken about how seriously Adobe is taking analytics. It’s now almost a third of their revenue, and is putting them head to head against companies like Nielsen for tracking streaming.

And you might say, “What does that have to do with the influencer in her bedroom?”, but the way they get to be influencers is by building and tracking their audience, and being able to pitch it to brands in ways that include stats about engagement. But certainly for brands working at enterprise scale, this component of Adobe’s development is creating the kind of stickiness for them that Script Sync and collaborative editing have for Avid.

(And frankly, so has the subscription model. A bane for folks here, perhaps, but for anyone who’s doing business at any scale, the tax advantages of subscribing to software make any non-subscription options a non-starter.)

I hadn’t thought to mention this earlier, but pointing people again to your terrific interview with Steve Bayes, it’s easy to forget for how very long he was the product manager for both FCP and FCPX. Having literally written the book on Avid when he worked there (his Avid Handbook was certainly how *I* learned Media Composer, and never left my desk when I worked there), there’s nobody who would have been better positioned to build in Avid-ish features than the father of Avid Symphony….but why would he? It wouldn’t have been relevant, and that interview goes into a lot of tremendously insightful specifics about why.

[greg janza] “The market I work in is dominated by Adobe but if that market was to soften the most logical/probable replacement NLE is Resolve.”

I’m always going to find Blackmagic’s approach here endlessly fascinating, just from the perspective of a longtime fan of the industry if nothing else. They’re not having to work to serve investors, and Grant is only interested in having the business make enough money for everyone who works for him to have a good life (which includes NOT working around the clock), to have enough money to do the next fun thing he thinks of, and that’s about it. So piling in more products and features for free, or close to it? No problem.

But there are a lot of business and enterprise-scale Adobe customers who need the collaborative features that the paid versions of Resolve provide, but who won’t budge until they can subscribe. Same for film productions who categorically refuse to own anything. The business entity of the film production isn’t around long enough to amortize anything, so it’s write it off now, or never. (Seriously, the tax advantages of subscriptions are HUGE.)

I think that Blackmagic is leaving those opportunities on the table, but I’m also inclined to think that Grant’s okay with that. His ambitions may well not include creating another layer of financial and development infrastructure to chase what’s ultimately a narrow-ish slice of the larger pie. I’m also willing to bet that Blackmagic’s 2020 NAB booth will once again be the biggest at the show, and that rather than wheel and deal in back rooms, Grant will once again be front and center on the floor, looking forward to hearing whatever is you think he needs to hear.

I do think a lot about my days as an editor, and think about what’s happening now through that lens more often than the lens of my life as a corporate weasel, even if I talk about that perspective more here. Yeah, it’s been a while since I edited for a living, but it was the longest career of the many I’ve had, and other than managing bookstores, my favorite gig in some ways. The combination of Resolve with the Mini panel would have made a huge difference in the work I was doing, which included hours and days using keyframes and the pen tool to build masks for grading in Boris FX and After Effects because I couldn’t afford Resolve as it was configured in the 90s. LOL

I definitely remember people saying, “Here comes DV, nobody’s ever going to do color correction ever again,” which is equally obviously both true and not true. But I certainly don’t feel a need to stop people in the street *(ie, social media LOL) and yell at them about their failure to understand the value that integrated grading on dedicated hardware provides. I don’t honestly think people need persuading about anything. They blink and decide, and the whole point of that observation is that the blink is almost always right for them. People need to trust that first blink more, not less. The agony of evaluation is a distraction, and tends over time to take you further off course.

My larger point in this forum has always been that most people get most places in their lives without overthinking this stuff. It’s just that in this forum, we tend to psychoanalyze the OTHER guy’s choice (he’s too afraid to choose FCPX, his ego is wrapped up in it his old way, he doesn’t understand what’s really here, etc) without imagining the possibility that our own fear, ego, and inflexibility or whatever traits we ascribe to THEM might be exactly how we wound up here ourselves.

Probably not true for you, though, and probably not true for the other guy either. That doesn’t make it any less fun to talk about the differences between these toolsets, and the kinds of work they enable, and how the tools and the companies that manage them could all be doing better. On the contrary, it’s MORE fun to talk about when we remove relative judgements that go any deeper than the blink of an eye.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Along with Steve Hullfish, I’ve probably interviewed more feature film editors than others and most are Media Composer users.”

Me too! By a long shot, and not at ALL because the project was brought to me by Avid. One of my all-time favorite interviews with an Avid editor came to me directly from Apple (somebody who works at One Infinite Loop, no less), and others have come from people like Amazon inviting me to speak to any number of below the line artists — but there’s just no getting away from how overwhelmingly that community has solidified around Avid, at least partly in response to Avid overwhelmingly focusing on that community.

I come at this a couple of ways. I remember being there when they said, “How can we go after [insert name of market vertical here]?” and my reply was, “You need a product as well suited to that market as Media Composer is to film and TV”……typically followed by…. “which we don’t.” LOL

So yeah, even at Avid, I adamantly refused the notion of “try to get everyone to use what your thing.” It’s a colossal waste if the end result is that people buy the thing and it’s a bad fit, and we know in advance that it’s unlikely for more than a few market verticals to line up on MC’s feature set as well as film and TV. There definitely are some (science, certain kinds of corporate / military / enterprise production that need large-scale collaboration, etc.), but there are a few, and not more than a few.

Contrast this with Apple visiting Joshua. Apple understands who’s in Hollywood. They understand those workflows. They take those requests face to face, by the dozens if not hundreds, and decline to develop that way. GOOD FOR THEM. This is exactly why FCPX is so well suited for the things it IS suited for. I CELEBRATE that FCPX isn’t optimized the same way Media Composer is, and I think everyone should.

Including celebrating all the people for whom FCPX is a very, very bad fit, exactly as Apple intends. Strokes, folks — all different.

[Oliver Peters] “Like range-based selections and keywords in FCPX – some editors think it’s the greatest thing ever and others just don’t work that way and prefer to organize in the timeline.”

As usual, you said it better and more succinctly than me. ☺ I believe in Script Sync, and showed it at what must have been 50 non-Avid user groups I was invited to, maybe more — but you’ve got to do a LOT of work to set it up. If you don’t have a bunch of assistant editors, it’s useless. But I saw some reality production guys who’d had 30 cameras going around the clock for a month perform what might as well be magic with Script Sync.

It’s really just one of a handful of examples, though, you’re right — just as limited and specific as range-based selections in FCPX. The larger point is that any number of Hollywood folks could build a long list of Avid-unique features at least as long as any FCPX-specific list that anyone here would create, and both would be equally valid.

That’s what I’m talking about. Equally valid outcomes for companies who develop for equally valid if only nominally similar target markets.

You could even state it in reverse: there’s an inverse relationship between FCPX’s suitability for YOU and it’s suitability for anyone whose work is different than yours. The less like your work theirs is, the less suitable FCPX is for them.

You could equally validly swap in “Avid” there. Or Resolve, or Premiere, or (heaven forbid) cars, clarinets, or guitars.

This is not by accident. It is by design. That’s why the further you get from a Hollywood-style workflow, the less suited Media Composer is to you. Nobody here seems to have any problem with that notion, so why so much angst about the same truth for FCPX applied in the same way?

[Tim Wilson]

[Joshua Pearson] “cut an Oscar-nominated doc “What Happened, Miss Simone” on it and rather enjoyed it”

And I enjoyed the documentary! Fantastic stuff that I can heartily recommend to everyone here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM9EA7XVIk8

[Joshua Pearson] “The our facility totally dumped FCPX becasue of the collaboration issue, as we often work on doc shows with two or three assistants and 3 or 4 editors… so we switched to Premiere and Avid.”

As sorry as I am to hear about your troubles, what I love about this is that it flies in the face of what is way, WAY too often the default narrative around here, that people who work with Avid (and Premiere to a lesser extent) are too old, scared, tired, etc., — especially ironic because the folks who regularly post here are the oldest in the entire COW (Google tells us that our average age is late 20s across all forums, definitely not the case in this one LOL) — without leaving room for the possibility that hey, maybe it’s about a tool’s fitness for the job.

(While also making room for the many folks here who regularly work with multiple systems.)

Which means on another level, it’s not even necessarily about preference.

[Joshua Pearson] “I will never move from Avid until transcript integration happens elsewhere.”

I spoke some about the origins of Script Sync in my overly-long reply to Oliver above, stories I learned when I was on the Media Composer team at Avid just before I came to work at Creative COW. You’re far from the only editor and/or facility that I’ve heard this from.

You’ve been in the COW long enough that you know that I’m not only NOT an “Avid above all” kinda guy, but was actually one of the earliest and loudest supporters of FCPX. I predicted in writing that Apple would sell 10 million copies the first year (oops! LOL), remain the ONLY public supporter (certainly here; maybe anywhere) of Apple’s EOL’ing of FCP (which I felt like they’d already done at least 3 years before they actually announced it), and predicted that the workflow advantages it offered had the potential to actually move the needle for FCPX in Hollywood in ways that FCP never could.

I was right about that last one actually, but the net net is that Avid has even MORE market share in Hollywood than before, and you’ve landed EXACTLY on some of the reasons why.

Script Sync is uniquely built for heavy lifting, and Media Composer is uniquely built for collaboration (again, the history of which I discuss above). Even when people prefer FCPX’s feature set, they find too much value in the ways that Avid understands and supports widescale collaboration to be able to stay away — again said with no disrespect toward FCPX, which remains uniquely suited to a whole lot of other things.

And equally with no disrespect to frame.io, or what looks like a very robust feature set in Adobe Productions, or indeed the many folks who are using FCPX collaboratively right now. It can be done…but Avid’s been building toolsets for collaborative editing for over 30 years now, though, and have gotten pretty good at the version of it specifically attuned to making movies and TV shows. Anyone who’s worked in Avid AND those others will tell you, they’re not the same.

None of which has anything to do with age, intransigence, failure to understand, fear, or any other negative trait that some folks here so often ascribe to anyone whose needs differ from theirs. Apple certainly understands that they’re not making FCPX for everyone. I have no idea why so many Apple customers refuse to accept this.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “I thought that I was the only old bag that was keeping up with modern music.”

Please, Florence is old news. She hasn’t put out a record since 2018. LOL Of course, once she puts out a new one she’ll be news again. It’s Florence’s world. We’re fortunate that she lets us live in it.

Somewhat kidding, but my general rule of thumb is that I’m ONLY listening to new music. I’m still digging into my best of 2019 playlist on Spotify because 2020’s list is too short, and I invite you Spotifiers to check it out. It’s all women, not because I set out to create a playlist of the best new albums from women, but because women and women-led bands are pretty much the only ones getting it done for my money. I know that I haven’t heard every album I need to hear from 2019 yet, so this list may yet get a little longer, but this is pretty solid for now: Twitch, Cream, Trouble

Here’s the same playlist on YouTube, which includes some genuinely terrific music videos, which we can talk about another time. Twitch, Spit, Cream, Trouble

And ALL joking aside, Florence provided the title track to my best of 2018 list, and indeed, that was the first year that my best-of list was all women. Hunger.

Every year, there’s a song that makes me say, “Okay, time to start building the list”, and this year, it was the latest from GHUM, with a woman from Spain on lead vocals, one from Brazil on bass, and lead guitarist and drummer from London.

From The Guardian: The London-based post-punk quartet step out of Joy Division’s shadow with raw, thrilling affairs of the heart

This particular track is a little more explicitly retro than I usually look for (I don’t need retro — I was there the first time), but you could do worse than evoking a faster, harder Joy Division. Not a proper video, alas, but a tasty single to tide you over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vckW9PToOg

I’m also insane for this BBC performance clip of theirs from last summer. If you think modern rock sucks, and you’re talking about dudes, you’re right. Contemporary music dudes largely suck. These women are SLAYING.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2BY6SSguTk

PS. I was being oblique in my first post on this thread, but Aindreas was in fact talking about Brexit. He’d emailed me before I even saw his posts, and we spoke back and forth about it for a while before I made my way here and saw these posts.

We don’t typically allow political posts in the COW, but this one was so oblique that I opted to let it stand. I mean, is it really a political post if nobody knows it’s a political post? LOL

[Tim Wilson]

This is about….Brexit? ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “from the very beginning, Avid designed a file and database structure that turned out to be conducive to collaboration. Whether this was out of necessity, foresight, or dumb luck is unknown. (Maybe some early Avid folks will see this thread and chime in.)”

I can tell you that it wasn’t dumb luck. I only worked at Avid from 2003 to 2006, but when I was working at Boris FX before that, I worked with Avid folks a LOT, and have certainly carried on many conversations along these very lines with my former Avid colleagues in the years since I’ve left.

Every product, even terrible ones LOL, start with the question, “Who is this for?” Avid knew from the beginning that they weren’t aiming for the whole wide world with Film Composer, the product’s original name. They were aiming for offline film, knowing that visual effects, finishing, and audio post and more would follow after picture lock. After all of that was in hand, negatives would need to be cut. So everything about the product was designed to work in THAT environment, sharing information in lots of different directions.

This makes it sound way too simple though. Think about the simplest film production back in the late 80s when all this was happening — sure, one shooter, one editor, but there’s still going to be a couple of sound people (sound editors, sound mixers, music composers), the title house, and the negative cut. At minimum, a dozen people are going to need bullet-proof interop. In practice, for a picture of any size, it might need to scale up to HUNDREDS of people who needed to know lots and lots of information about lots and lots of things. For a VFX-heavy contemporary thing, THOUSANDS of people, but still, yeah, even for a mid-size picture in the late 80s, early 90s, no major VFX, we’re still talking about scores of people.

This meant two very, very basic things. One, without a massively scaling database whose reliability stayed the same no matter how big it got, there was no product that could answer those needs at all. More simply, no database, no products, no company.

Two, Avid had to develop massive communications channels between lots and lots of companies, some of whom were competing with Avid, and most of whom were competing against each other, because there was no such thing as a project that could be completed in one manufacturer’s ecosystem. The databases had to scale virtually infinitely in the horizontal direction, across companies and previously otherwise isolated silo workflows, as well scaling vertically in complexity.

Now imagine trying to create an interop infrastructure that spanned film labs, film cameras, sound recording devices, sound editors, music, graphics, visual effects, negative cutting, and all the layers of management around them — with ZERO help from OS-level resources. This was before QuickTime. There were no OS-level resources for playing audio or video files. There was no industry-wide audio or video formats at all. No industry-wide metadata wrappers for these kinds of files.

In practice, nearly all of these problems were solved less by computer coding (although there was plenty of that) than by spreadsheets. This equals that. So it all ultimately feeds databases.

The 1995 merger between Avid and Digidesign, makers of Pro Tools, had a business component — we’ll take a bigger slice of the movie production pie if we control the leading tools for cutting pictures and cutting sound — but I assure you that there was a massive interop component. Both companies realized that were times when either the picture editing team or the sound editing team would say to the other , “But I need YOU to develop THIS for ME, NOW, even if it doesn’t matter to YOU, even if it will cause problems for your teams trying to meet the needs of your actual customers” — and there needed to be somebody at the top saying, “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Do it.”

Somewhere in here, along comes video. The desktop video revolution was well underway at Radius, Adobe, Media 100, and others, but none of that had anything to do with Avid. They weren’t trying to revolutionize the WORLD. They were focused on a very specific community, with very specific needs.

Well, again, in practice, the early nonlinear days of video production with regards to episodic TV shows in particular was basically the same as film production. Most shows were still being shot on film, even in front of a live studio audience. The basic problems became more complex because of things like multicam — oops, wait, which turns out to be NO PROBLEM AT ALL when viewed as a DATABASE issue. Each camera is just a stream. “We know how to play streams. How many you want?” That’s why Avid had multicam so early, and so robustly. THIS community needed it.

There was also never an issue with Avid multicam and mixed formats. I don’t know that anybody has yet done multicam as robustly as Avid had on the first day. I remember the first time we threw HD sources into the same multicam group as SD sources, different sizes for all of ’em. It just worked.

That was actually the conversation, too. “Q: What do you think will happen if we try this?” “A: (Shrug.) Should just work. We’ll engineer something if we need to, though.” And it DID just work! Because as far as the application was concerned, it was a database problem. “Tell me where you want the streams. Tell me the output size. I don’t need to recalculate on the fly, because IT’S ALL IN THE DATABASE.”

I could go on like this, but I’ll add an example in broadcast. Think about election results, or a batting average or QB rating that’s changing over the course of a game. There’s not a human in the broadcast truck doing that math, and typing it into the broadcast graphics system. Those graphics are reading databases from someplace far, far away, and building pretty pictures on the fly.

And as anybody can tell you who goes to the Avid booth at NAB, there’s a huge portion of it devoted to breathtaking graphics, virtual sets, and all kinds of stuff for news and sports — really truly sci fi stuff that you should absolutely NOT miss, just because it’s neato to look at — and it’s alllll being driven by databases. You want humans to be ABLE to touch these things, but if a human NEEDS to touch it after the templates are set, then no sale.

Swinging back to shared storage for a sec: I was at Avid when they launched the first ISIS (Infinitely Scalable Intelligent Storage) shared storage system — wisely renamed NEXIS not a minute too soon. LOL (ISIS was still just a goddess and a rockin’ Dylan tune back in the early aughts.) The first iteration was 128TB, which was crazy huge at the time — nobody else had anything even vaguely this large for video production — and the first question from the audience at launch was, “When can we have more?” It got a huge laugh, but a bunch of hands went up as people said, “I’d like more” “I NEED more” and so on.

And it wasn’t just the size, it was the engineering that went into it. Triple redundant everything, but also a metadata controller that could scale up virtually infinitely — ie, the ability to reliably handle a DATABASE whose scale might approach infinity.

So I said to the VP of Post, wow, this is clearly a hit. People really want this. Why are we not selling it to people like Visa? They need massive storage with infinitely scaling databases. He said, “Yeah, but the databases are doing the exact opposite thing.

“At Visa, they have lots of little files. Each individual transaction is tiny, and Visa needs to fly through billions of ’em as fast at they can. Their database is optimized for lots of little files, the faster the better.

“Our database,” he says, “is optimized for fewer numbers of huge files, the smallest of which are many orders of magnitude larger than a Visa record, and they have to be delivered predictably, at the same pace. Too fast or too slow are both unacceptable. A smaller number of massive files, with the dimension of specifically-paced speed.”

We talked about this in more detail than is relevant here (say it ain’t so!) — but he concluded, “That’s why nothing about what we’re doing with infinitely scalable storage is applicable to anyone outside the world of media production. The databases just won’t line up.”

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. EVERYTHING about Avid’s development, from long before the first product shipped, was ENTIRELY built on the rock-bottom understanding that there is no company, and there are no products, without a wall-to-wall, top-to-bottom, infinitely scalable information infrastructure, one that’s specifically tuned to media production.

This also gets to some of the reasons why you can’t use SPEED specs as the primary vector for choosing video storage. Maximum burst speed is irrelevant if you can’t do the right thing with regards to pacing. That’s why the storage that’s optimized for live playout to air — doesn’t need random access or multiple points of exit, but DOES need bulletproof delivery of one stream through one pipe — is different from editing storage that needs to go in multiple directions with tons of random access, and so on.

Nobody who’s doing anything at a high level is trying to do EVERYTHING at a high level. Some stuff, they’re not trying to do at all. That’s how you get to be at a high level.

I haven’t even gotten into the specific toolsets for the USE of Avid’s products, but they’re developed with the same focus, always asking, “Who is this for?”

One of my favorites (developed by our friend Michael Phillips) is the quarter-frame slip. That means nothing unless you’re working with three-perf film — that is, three perforations per frame. The audio is synced FRAME accurate, but where IN the frame is it synced? It could be synced to any one of four places (the ones on either side of the the three perfs), no more, but no less. So you might need to shift every piece of video in the reel by a quarter frame to sync up precisely.

And the cool thing is that, because the database is robust, do it on one clip, and every clip in the reel now has that offset added to it at whatever number of quarter-frames you’ve incremented, whether or not it’s in your bin. When you do grab it later, it’s ready to go. Slick!

Obviously, if you’re not doing two-system recording, or working with film prints, you’ll never touch this feature. But there was a stretch of time where nearly EVERYBODY who used an Avid, whether for movies, TV, spots, or whatever — touched this feature. It’s the kind of thing that builds generational loyalty, because editors see THOUSANDS of these little, tiny, bizarre features that say, “We know who you are. You are our only audience.”

(You know, a couple of those features have escaped into the wild. Multicam, Bin-locking….another was what came to be known as script-based editing. I have stories about these that I’ll save for another day.)

Anyway, I mentioned earlier that even terrible product managers ask the question, “Who is this FOR?” The good ones also ask, “Who is this NOT for?”

There’s a boatload of features that Avid didn’t chase, sometimes to the infuriation of part of their customer base, because they fell into the category of, “Yeah, a valid market, a MASSIVE market, but that’s not who we’re developing for.” You HAVE to answer BOTH questions if you’re going to last. Who is it for, and who is not for.

Apple isn’t in the business of creating its own obstacles. They’ve done it sometimes, just like every company does, but Apple does it less often than most. That’s why they’re Apple. They don’t chase the newest features, and they definitely never want the most features. They want the ones that meet the needs of who their stuff is FOR, and they leave a lot of money and opportunity on the table by rigorously refusing to develop anything for people who their stuff is NOT for.

So I don’t have much to add to what people have already said about that on this thread. Apple has only showed a small if still meaningful interest in film-oriented workflows over the years (certainly the purchase of Cinema Tools is a good example) and shared workflows in general (during Xserve and FCP Server, yes, but the demise of those says all that it needs to), and barely any interest at all in anything that scales (to borrow a phrase) “to infinity and beyond”. No disrespect. It is what it is. Third parties are making a lot of cool things possible, and that’s gonna be the story for, well, maybe for forever.

Nothing about what Adobe is doing with the Productions or Adobe for Teams strikes me as fundamentally incompatible from a structural point of view….although, I’ll be honest, looking at the Catalina warnings thread, it appears that Apple is doing some things with permissions in particular that might in fact make some of these kinds of distributed databases not work in practice. Or if they could work, only with Catalina clients, which suggests that it’ll be mighty easy to break down the road. That’s just not Apple’s game.

I think one reason that they don’t have to chase people outside their targets is the realization that, once they hit YOUR target, there may be nothing to make you budge. Jeremy’s quote along those lines resonates — paraphrasing, “I’d love to have this kind of collaboration, but no way that the lack of it will make me jump to something else.” Something like that, and certainly plenty of other folks have said similar things.

I think Apple is relying on that dynamic to continue to give them the air cover to NOT pursue a lot of things that THIS market would like to see….but I think we’ve all pretty well wrapped our heads around the concept that some parts of our lives are fully outside of a lot people’s targets. LOL

That said, I’m curious to hear more from X-ers about the kinds of collaborative tools you’d like to see from Apple, what you’d do with them that’s different than what you’re doing now, and if really, truly, any of it would make any difference to you in any ultimate sense, whether they show up or not.

Anyhoo, I’m readin’ more than writin’ these days, even if it looks like I’ve tried to make up for all of it in just one post. LOL I’ll try to be around a little more often, and maybe make some of the posts a little shorter.

SOME of the posts, a LITTLE shorter.

Peace,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “who cares what I think”

I do! I do!

[Jeremy Garchow] “Apple hasn’t made it easy, Nvidia hasn’t made it easy.”

This really does feel like about the right take to me. It’s reductive and not especially informative to try to pin more of the blame on one or the other, and for a lot of people in the heart of the “video” part of video production, it doesn’t much matter.

In the bigger picture, I’d always rather see everyone get along. I have a computer, I want to put stuff in it, it should be doable, especially if the stuff I want to use is otherwise industry-standard and generally considered best of class.

[Jeremy Garchow] “There were so many barefeats tests back in the day with all these really expensive GPUs that weren’t doing a ton more than much less expensive (and less powerful) GPUs for most work.”

I think that’s true for an awful lot of people in an awful lot of circumstances. I remember when ICE cards were the thing that everyone had to have for rendering in After Effects. They really were everywhere. I asked my then-boss Boris why he wasn’t more excited about optimizing Boris FX plug-ins for ICE. He replied, “Hardware can goose performance in the short run, but in the long run, software is always faster.” He predicted that he’d never be able to recover the revenue he invested in optimizing for even this very popular platform before CPU and OS advances made it obsolete. He was right of course.

But as you note, Jeremy, that’s a world where ray tracing and enterprise-class VFX aren’t really a factor. It’s irrelevant for Apple to provide support for multiple NVIDIA GPUs strung together, because the host software that runs such configurations tends not to be written for Macs anyway. Apple hasn’t chased every potential customer for 25 years or more.

I’d still rather see a world where they’re working with more partners rather than fewer, but I’m used to not getting much of what I want. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

Outstanding! And thanks for the link to your post, too! We really do get that image (and video) uploads are part of the way that our Answer COWs like you do your thing.

More good things to follow. ☺

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Whoops, sorry I missed your message earlier, Graham!

The photo upload mechanism is working again. It’s the little camera icon between the cow and floppy disk icons. You can also use it to upload animated gifs.

More soon,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Simon: Of course I knew you’d make it all about guitars!

(Grrr, “quote” script busted again. I’ll report it to the IT whizzes.)

Not because I vastly prefer guitars to clarinets or know much more about them, but because I DO know about guitarists. There are very active forums for guitarists that I sometimes find myself passing through for the pictures more than anything else, but I’ve always been struck by how fiercely argumentative they are.

What made me think about this is a too-frequently falsehood repeated in the Debates forum as if it were true, that the people in the COW forum who have the temerity to engage in any sort of debate (it’s there in the forum title, lad: if you don’t want to debate, you shouldn’t be there) are whackadoodles of a sort not found in any other area of artistry.

One such poster posited that surely nobody in the world of GUITARS or ART debates technique and the specificity of tools in the way that people in the COW’s debates forum do. Quite right: those people debate much, much more fiercely, and especially in the world of art, some of these debates have gone on literally for centuries.

Interestingly enough, one area of those debates in the art world involving how Vermeer could possibly have created art that was literally impossible to create at the time, yet literally WAS possible because he actually did it, made its way into the COW when I wrote about the documentary, Tim’s Vermeer. The “Tim” is Tim Jenison, who invented the NewTek Video Toaster among many other things, who set out to recreate one of Vermeer’s paintings.

It’s an amazing documentary, but even more than that, Tim is a wild man who attacked the problem with a ferocity I can’t even imagine. The painting had a harpsichord in it, so he taught himself to build THAT EXACT HARPSICHORD, scouring the planet for an artist who could show him the pattern painted on it. I could go on and on, but it’s one of my favorite interviews ever. He’s a fantastic storyteller, and goes deep into artistic passion, software development, and the nature of creativity.

The Toaster And Tim’s Vermeer

But the comments, have mercy, they get super intense into the details of the art history debate, pulling up various camps of critics on multiple sides of this. I’m delighted to have any excuse to discuss David Hockney in the COW, but boy howdy were tempers flaring.

Not that we need to debate the validity of artistic debates, because I think that those were well-established not just centuries, but millenia ago. But I think a lot about how artists tick, including myself. I’m no Vermeer, no Tim Jenison, but I think of my creativity at the heart of my identity, and have come to understand that creative drive as part of my broader psycho-spiritual superstructure, so to speak. My creativity IS me, so it makes no sense to think about creative processes and decision making apart from the context of my own needs, desires, and my general approach to life and the world. Trying to abstract these discussions from internal dynamics and establish some kind of “truth” — like trying to create an “objective” project that will test render speed, or to count keystrokes to “prove” the “superior” efficiency of one NLE or the other: those ultimately have NOTHING to do with actual utility, and whether one or the other or a combination of them is a good fit for the way my mind works, and what my soul needs for comfort. LOL

I think of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in this context, which the author was quick to note will teach you nothing about Zen and even less about motorcycles, apart from the notion that “paying attention to the details” reverberates in many different directions, not least of which are concepts like practice, repetition, finesse, the drive to improve performance, etc.

All of which is to say that part of learning how to learn includes learning some about oneself. It’s hard to navigate much in life without knowing your own internal landscape.

Hey, and thanks for that Hans Zimmer/Cubase link! What a fanastic ride! I’d actually come across something similar (albeit a bit more product-focused) for Jeff Wayne using Avid’s Sibelius software on the live production of The War of the Worlds. Old prog nerds like me and presumably some of you will remember Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds very fondly as a two-record set from 1978 featuring Justin Lodge (The Moody Blues), David Essex (“Rock On”), and Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy), along with Richard Burton narrating.

I couldn’t imagine a more analog project, so I was fascinated to see how he used Sibelius to re-score the project for a combination of live and virtual instruments (with many of the live musicians PLAYING virtual instruments), with sizes of the ensemble scaling up and down depending on the venue. None of the old dualities hold, and certainly no thought that old dogs are less inclined to learn new tricks. St. Walter of Murch should have been enough to disabuse anyone of such a notion, but Jeff here, much like Hans with Cubase, goes much, much farther than I would have imagined.

https://www.avid.com/customer-stories/war-of-the-worlds