Tim Wilson
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COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Martin,
Thanks for writing!
It was no biggie — our system saw your most recent post go up twice, which throws a flag.
Maybe your browser registered your post button twice or something like that, so we took a quick glance to see that the multiple post wasn’t from some spambot who was on your way to make the same post to ALL the forums, and unmoderated your account again. It took a little longer than usual because the flag was thrown between the time zones for our global moderation team.
We apologize for the delay! We definitely recognize you as a member in good standing, but we do need some automated monitoring systems in place to help us keep pace with everything going on behind the scenes.
Please let us know if you see any other issues, or if there’s anything else we can do for you!
Regards,
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Michael Gissing] “I contend though that if you truly want to work at the “speed of imagination”, you need a dedicated control surface.”
For grading, absolutely. It’s insanity to think otherwise.
For editing, though, I’d encourage you to sit with an experienced Avid operator (editor or assistant), and tell me that they’re not moving at something resembling the speed of imagination by keeping their hands on the keyboard. Many of the features that have kept people using Avid through the years, say, trimming, come down to adding the suffix “that you can use without taking your hands off the keys.”
[Steve Connor] “Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth in parts of the Avid Community ☺”
Some of you old-timers will recall that among my previous jobs before coming to Creative COW was as a Senior Product Marketing Manager in the Media Composer family. My last NAB there was 2006, where I rolled out the first software-only Media Composer, among other goodies.
I went on many customer visit where we showed them some pie-in-the-sky stuff that looked and acted as modern as anything you can imagine. One of the fellas working on that stuff indeed left to become a manager at FCP who then managed FCPX for many years before his retirement….and the most common reaction was, “WOW! I LOVE IT! Implement any of it in the shipping product and I’ll murder you in your sleep and burn down your house with your corpse in it.”
Technically, I only heard that one once, but it was understood to be the feeling underlying the more polite responses as well. My heart continues to go out to anyone trying to drag new features into that community….
….ALTHOUGH, that said…I think that the stereotype of Avid being crusty and old is just that. There certainly are those, but the growth in that community is being driven by young editors, make no mistake about it. Students are coming out of school knowing it, fangs dripping with enthusiasm to make their mark in the industry — and because they’re well-versed in other software too, and ways of working that aren’t rooted in film, they’ve been making their demands more insistent.
Frankly, if you look around the COW, there’s no older, crankier forum than this one (I say with no small fondness, being both older and crankier than two-thirds of you), and few forums more packed with young people than the Avid forum.
And yeah, many of them are the assistant editors who are doing the heaviest lifting with things like multi-application interoperation, media management, and creation of deliverables. Workspaces that accomodate those operations, which may not involve whatever you’re calling timelines these days, are no less integral to the ecosystem of what we call editing than the editing itself, make a HUGE difference in the pleasantness of using those applications.
Which is to say, what’s firmly attaching these youngsters to Media Composer is the opposite of inertia. It’s that Avid is the only application that’s extensible enough to not only do what they need it to do, but to also get the rest of the interface out of the way AND allow them to work on teams that in practice are scaling into hundreds and even thousands, combining local and remote infrastructures, etc etc etc.
[Oliver Peters] “At the enterprise level, large broadcast users can set up restricted workspaces by task. For example, a very streamlined view with limited permissions for the user, like a logger, producer, reporter, or assistant editor. All set up via a central profile control panel by a sys admin. Log in as the editor and you may see the full toolset, but log in as a reporter and you are only exposed to a subset. This is something that places like NBC or large university film labs are quite interested in.”
This is the same dynamic viewed from the top. Avid’s stickiness isn’t that major networks and film schools are afraid of change. It’s that they ARE changing, they need to change FASTER, and Avid is keeping up with those changes in ways that no other company is even attempting.
Which largely has nothing to do with what most folks here are doing, sure. You can call it a niche if you want, but it’s a niche that represents a staggering number of jobs. Not just the 500 narrative series in the US, but corporate work, military, large-scale education — this isn’t just about a couple of dozen geezers working in LA County. It’s the people with the biggest pile of jobs, and the biggest pile of money, and other vendors just aren’t in the game.
[Oliver Peters] “There’s a lot more going on than just the UI refresh. It’s also the first iteration of an ongoing overhaul project that will continue to play out over the year.”
There are ways in which that’s the least interesting thing about this release. Maybe THE least interesting thing, except to the extent that it’s customizable. And you rightly point out, Oliver, that it’s critical to understand that the customizing can be done at at admin level for the dozens or hundreds of machines that might be in play, and especially in educational settings, each of which might have multiple users who need unique settings. Managing this on a machine-by-machine basis is impossible.
And as you also rightly point out, the interface that’s most usable for you may be unusable for me. So the bullet point is the one you identified, that it can look like many, many different things, and that is admittedly cool.
But the “ongoing project overhaul” is HUGE, and it’s another place that Avid is pressing their advantage. I mean, we’ve been hearing yapping about ACES (the Academy Color Encoding System) since NAB 2015 (or NAB 2014 if you were paying attention, but the 1.0 spec was Dec ’14), and Avid is the first NLE to support it — and in up to 16K, no less.
Until now, it’s mostly been for finishing, so applications like Resolve, Scratch, Nuke, Baselight, et al cared, but this is another sign of Avid moving away from Media Composer’s heritage, and become tied directly into the heart of the delivery system.
Not for the editor necessarily. Maybe that’s an assistant editor, or some job whose description hasn’t quite been written. But it’s another aspect of stickiness through functional extensibility.
You may say, yeah, but I’m not making movies that care about that kind of thing. If they want to get onto Netflix, they do. Here’s last year’s workflow diagram, from a pretty hilarious blog about the movies that Netflix engineers are making in-house to test these workflows themselves.
Here’s the link to the article itself, which really is a highly entertaining read. You’ve surely already noticed that the EDL is being generated by Premiere Pro, and there’s probably never going to be a need for them to use anything else for their in-house test shorts. It was 6 years before they even attempted making these shorts be actual stories.
The point is that Avid is officially not content to stop at the EDL part of the process. They don’t want ANY technological limitation be the reason they stop. Maybe you want to switch to another application — fine. Hence the emphasis on the increased range of deliverability options.
Yeah yeah yeah, none of this may STILL apply to you. Maybe you’re going to be the guy who hands off the cut list and washes your hands of the workflow. That’s fine. I don’t know about you, but I’m more than ready to have fewer components to my own job. LOL But Avid’s days of stopping at the cut list and washing their hands of the rest of the workflow? Gone. They want it all.
The remarkable thing is that they’re already responsible for 90% of what’s not just on TV as we used to define it, but on streaming, too. Avid’s not only keeping up with the workflows necessary to be part of mainstream streaming — they’re making moves to move ahead.
It’s been especially interesting to see what Avid editors are talking about on social media. One guy posted that the thing that most excited him is small thumbnail views in bins. This is similar to our old friend Scott Simmons’ perspective that the most exciting feature in the new Adobe release is copying and pasting audio parameters. It’s not always the mountain that stops forward motion. Sometimes it’s the pebble in the shoe.
So I was struck by the reply from another old friend, Alan Edward Bell, a frequent COW contributor before he jumped to the blockbuster league with The Amazing Spider-Man, followed in quick succession by the final 3 Hunger Games pictures and then some.
He’s definitely back to the sort of middle-aged big-time movie editing dude that I was just saying isn’t necessarily the key target for Avid anymore, but I think he’s got it right, that this is an exciting release, and especially exciting to think about in terms of first steps for what’s next.
But it ain’t just about the UI.
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Help an old, out of touch brother out here. ????
In olden times, I could always count on a thread about a new Apple release to provide all sorts of insights into what kind of work people are doing, what they need and want from Apple, and a whole lot of things that go far beyond the specs.
Some of the relative quietude of such threads in recent years is that the adrenaline here has gone way down, which I think is generally a good thing.
But I wonder if there’s something larger going on, and that’s where I need your help.
There’s no question that the Trash Can and its timing sent some previous “Mac or Die” folks to the door. Maybe not for their entire computing profile, but it made them realize that they can live a happy life without Apple coming through for them, and all it took was adding a Windows (or something else) machine or two into the mix.
I’m thinking that something of the same happened for the folks who stayed too, though. A realization that there’s no point in talking about what they want to see from Apple, because there’s no chance in Apple actually doing it. It’s like, all you need to do is say it out loud to make SURE that Apple never does it.
Along with that, though, is that realization I just mentioned that some folks might have had, that Apple’s stuff is good enough, because a) it just is, and/or b) it HAS to be, because anything else would necessitate some degree of having some non-Apple computers in one’s life, and that just ain’t gonna happen, no matter what Apple does or doesn’t do.
Because that’s certainly the flipside of this story. That instead of either buying Apple’s new thing OR going to Windows, a large number of you carried on with your “still good enough” five or eight or more year old machines. Maybe it’s that the juicy goodness of the software (including FCPX) and “the Apple experience” makes it inconceivable that changing platforms will ever become a consideration.
I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.
So what’s the story this time? Is this specific release just not enough to get either excited or upset about? Have we moved into a zen state of equilibrium, free from the pain of desire, fully embracing what IS as neither good nor bad, but simply IS.
Or what?
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[Michael Gissing] “The inertia and loyalty to Mac hardware is a bit perplexing to me especially as the trashcan was not a good solution.”
I don’t know that there’s any loyalty to Mac hardware per se, in the sense that people pushed back on it pretty hard. A lot of people kept much older boxes instead…which is loyaltly, but the exact opposite of inertia. They’re moving in exactly the opposite direction Apple wants them to, or are buying third party add-ons (say, Sonnet or BMD’s eGPUs) to muscle up solutions from Apple that aren’t cutting it for them.
The Hackintosh phenomenon was overstated I think, although there are folks here using ’em, for the exact reason that Apple’s hardware isn’t as compelling as off-the-shelf combinations you can put together yourself if you’re inclined. Why bother? Because the software is more compelling. It allows Apple to shoot itself and its customers in the foot (or the head, or somewhere exactly in between) again and again and again. The software is more compelling to them.
Apple’s adamant commitment to second-class (or worse) hardware was indeed exasperating to me, but what ultimately flipped me out of the ecosystem is what keeps other people just as firmly entrenched: the combination of hardware and software. I stopped finding it compelling or even vaguely worth the money, effort, or tradeoffs to live with old, underpowered tech when compared with the alternatives…but other people look at the alternatives and find exactly the opposite, that nothing out there is compelling as the Apple.
The only aspect of inertia comes from not looking, which I don’t think there’s as much of in this particular forum as some others. Nothing wrong with preferring what you prefer….which I know you agree with, of course, and am not arguing with you here, except to soften “inertia” a bit. But it heartens me to see people looking around and finding that it’s easier to leave than you think, and certainly easier than Apple would have you believe.
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Hi Bouke,
Send an email to press@ our domain, ideally with the news in the body of the email. Feel free to include a picture or two in web-appropriate formats and sizes (ie, please no 600 dpi TIFFs, etc).
If you’d prefer, you can attach the release, but please only in doc or docx format (no Pages or PDF files).
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Regards,
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-chief
Creative COW -
[Steve Bentley] “if you are going to block one brand, don’t you need to block them all pending review to be fair?”
Hi Steve,
It’s not about fairness or discrimination. It’s about using a semi-automated system (flagging posts for human review) to address years of abuse by one specific company. Not all of them. Just one.
After we’d removed and blocked spam posts by that company, they created a raft of phony accounts to try to sneak in as users. After we flagged their IP addresses, they started using accounts from other servers, and agents from around the world. This went on for years.
The flagging system that we use is the right compromise. If you search the COW archives, you’ll find plenty of posts from people like you, whom we know to be real humans, making honest recommendations. That’s because we’re not discriminating against the company. We welcome legit posts about their products, even though the company is among the worst offenders against our policies, or any standard of good corporate online behavior, in our 18 years history as the COW, 24 years if you go back to our first founding.
We certainly apologize for any delay in your post becoming public, but we have to do it that way because of how quickly Google absorbs our posts into their archive, usually within a few minutes. It wouldn’t do anybody any good, including our overall Google standings, to have an archive full of bot and spam posts, or be returning 404 errors to empty pages because we culled those posts later.
I know that the long chain of decisions that led to a term being flagged may not seem obvious on your end of the exchange, which is why I’m happy to provide some insight here. There are only a couple of companies who are flagged, and it took a LOT for them to have earned it. These guys definitely did, and the severity of their misbehavior is such that there’s no amount of time that will pass to change their status with us.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to approve legitimate posts like yours as quickly as we can, with apologies again for the inevitable delays.
Regards,
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-chief
Creative COW -
Hi Hugh!
Check your email for a note from me.
Regards,
Tim Wilson
Creative COW -
Hi Steve,
I’m afraid that I don’t see any issues with your account. That’s supposed to be good news, but in this case, I understand that it might be frustrating!
We show the account opened in 2010 (thanks!!!!), and completely unmoderated and in good standing. Definitely not suspended or deactivated in any way.
Could there be an issue with an alternate email address or forgotten password? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding the issue. If the account that you used to make this post is the one you’ve had problems with, then I think we can assume that the issue has cleared itself up. If not, then I may need to do a little more digging.
Any more clues to offer me?
Regards,
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Oliver Peters] “That’s development pace squared.”
There’s no question that Blackmagic gets ALL the style points for degree of difficulty. Nobody has ever attempted to integrate as many pieces as they have, as quickly, OR as thoroughly. Seriously, Apple never even got FCPL to even look like it was made by Apple, much less integrated with all the apps they bought and killed that weren’t Motion, which they bought but never got very far integrating.
But to echo a point made upthread by a couple of folks, the fact that some of these are “catch-up, quality of life” features isn’t a negative. It’s the most positive possible outcome. For every single NLE, the overwhelming reaction to virtually every new product is, “Yeah, but what about this super-basic thing we’ve been waiting for that we still don’t have, where are the performance improvements, etc etc.”
I was hyper-aware of this as I transitioned out of full-time editing into full-time product management — and you might be amazed…or you may not be….by how few of us that’s EVER been the case for, to this very day. Stop building releases around bullet points for the brochure. You’ve done enough to help me climb mountains for a while, so pay more attention to helping me get the pebbles out of my shoe. THOSE are what’s slowing me down.
Most companies never get this, or barely get this, or pay it lip service while continuing to build up bullet points for the brochure. Blackmagic is putting the bulk of their development efforts EXACTLY where MOST people wish MOST companies would put the MOST effort — the day to day stuff.
I do like the look of Apple’s new release, with the first new feature set to get my attention in years, so I’m not bringing this up as a “Who Won Today’s Upgrade” conversation. (I’m never using the D word again.) The answer is, the company whose product I’m using. To hell with the rest. ????
But I had two overwhelming reactions to today’s festivities from Blackmagic.
1. This is a POINT TWO RELEASE? ARE YOU KIDDING ME????
and
2. I don’t care what this is. I need to buy a rack, then buy two of THESE things for my living room just because they look so g-d d-amn cool. (Wait, did I do that right? ????)
The new Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12G features 12G-SDI video input, HDMI output, analog and AES/EBU inputs, a powerful class D amplifier, dual subwoofers, extended range speakers, an LCD and precision meters that can display VU, PPM and Loudness ballistic scales. Where’s my ‘drool’ emoji?
As a general-purpose fan of this industry and its tech since the 60s, Blackmagic is one the companies that endlessly delights me with their own endless delight. I get the impression that Grant is having fun with all this, and now that I live on the sidelines instead of in the game, it’s sure fun to watch.
And yeah, looping Apple back in, plus frame.io, some cool stuff from AJA, and a solid handful of other announcements (Facilis, Roland, and WAVES come to mind, I’m sure there are more) — this is easily the best couple of days of releases in ages. Certainly more here than at NAB, imo.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “So does this mean that we can all agree, as adults”
It doesn’t matter what the end of that sentence is, and I think you know the answer. ???? In any case, a vendor providing detailed worfklow information for people who want it is always a good thing, and it’s nice to see Apple raising their game in this regard.
It’s funny, for the Extensions in particular, I’m kind of thinking of this release as a Throwback Thursday celebration of the days when Apple robustly and creatively partnering with third parties wasn’t news!
I don’t mean this as faint praise, or snark for its own sake. It’s snark in the service of HIGH praise. LOL