[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “So future proofing in this sense, is more like legacy dragging. “

VERY well said. I’ve never heard it expressed like this, but it’s perfect.

[Jeremy Garchow] “….including the the new legacy a recent purchase inevitably represents.”

The most fundamental shift in the past decade, certainly the most representative state of the current decade, is the shift away from new computers. This entire industry, both hardware and software, used to be driven by new computers every 12-18 months. In the early days of the COW, I’d say very nearly 100% of the folks here were swapping in at least one new box or laptop, or both, every single upgrade cycle.

Now, it’s not uncommon to skip multiple upgrade cycles, all of which are coming much farther apart. Can you imagine trying to run a cutting edge business with even a 5 year old box in 2002? Yet the number of 2011, and even 2008, computers that are out there doing the heaviest of heavy lifting is quite remarkable to me.

I think we’re all still figuring out what it means to live in a world where we’re buying stuff so much less often. ???? Heck, even Apple is running into (relatively little, but still measurable) trouble because people are even skipping upgrade cycles on phones. I don’t think it has anything to do with the economy, but more of a recognition that the stuff we have works pretty well, and moving to new platforms/devices/operating systems without NEEDING to causes more problems than it solves.

Don’t have a problem that needs solving? Want to avoid new problems? Easy. Don’t buy new stuff. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Here’s the danger in promoting that concept.”

I’m not promoting the concept. That IS the concept. ????

[Oliver Peters] “Considering your “shared” export as any sort of “master” is a recipe for disaster.”

But the concept of “master” and “sharing” don’t have anything to do with each other. This is yet vector another along which “Share” and “Export” are actually the opposite of each other. A master is something you hang onto. “Share” is by its nature ephemeral. Instagram Stories last 24 hours. A video on Snapchat vanishes after it’s been seen.

Note again that I’m not just talking about kids on phones. Huge money is going into these platforms from companies whose money you’d be happy to take, and very likely are. Among the folks producing original content are A+E Networks, Discovery, ESPN, NBCUniversal and Turner (owner of CNN, TBS and TNT). WSJ reports that Fox and CBS are sniffing around because the numbers are insane.

NBC does a twice-daily newscast for Snapchat in vertical orientation that’s getting 29 million viewers. So sez NBC, so you can take that for what it’s worth, and having invested $500 million in Snapchat’s IPO, they have a stake in promoting the platform for its own sake….but it’s not like 29 million people are watching NBC Nightly News. It’s the top-rated newscast on broadcast, and pulling in 7 million, give or take. Those folks are more thoroughly monetized for now for sure, but there’s a there there, even for grown-up, mainstream media creation.

It does raise a question, though. To what extent does NBC archive their 2-5 minute Snapchat news elements that disappear after viewing? I mean, ALL newscasts are ephemeral, right? Except to the extent that they’re not. Nobody has bigger archives than news organizations.

So you’re right that especially for producers like the ones who frequent these forums, social platforms represent a gray area, and in fact best practices are still going to include real live archiving. YouTube is not the best place for archiving.

[Oliver Peters] “these forums are littered with threads by panicked users who can’t access their project file any longer, because it is corrupt, or a version has been updated, or a plug-in is now missing”

And you left out, “The original application won’t launch on the new OS that all my machines are running.”

’twas ever thus, though, from the dawn of the nonlinear age. How often did you or your clients have to go back to the VIDEOTAPE master, redigitize the section that needed changing, rebuild in the NLE, then insert edit back to tape. Not because anyone involved was less than thorough on the backup, but because of some weird thing that was entirely outside anyone’s control.

This is why people who NEED access to old stuff are doing a combination of freezing machines in legacy states AND updating projects with each new version. You need BOTH approaches if you’re going to be truly ready for anything.

But sure, I agree that people who count on YouTube as the only place that their finished project lives are asking for trouble.

Then again, you could say the same thing about any online repository, for anything. Surely you know folks who figured that WordPress is the only backup for their writing that they needed, only to discover some bizarre corruption or inability to get at their accounts. If only they’d saved Word files to their own computers! And, uhm, Dropbox, and probably a couple of other places.

THAT aspect of what you’re talking about has nothing to do with misunderstanding the relative values of permanence and ephemerality of Export and Share.

Nor does it change the fundamental workflow differences of the two. Ideally, the thing you have in front of you when you click the Share button is in fact your master file, but that’s never going to be the case every time for everyone. It certainly doesn’t make a robust “Share” feature set any less critical for some people to have, even if other folks will never need it, and might indeed encounter nightmares if they implement “Share” workflows where they should be using “Export” workflows.

Ain’t none ‘a this either-or, though. That’s my point, and indeed the point that Apple, Adobe, and Bill have been making all along. “Professional” media production doesn’t mean just one thing anymore. It’d be a lot easier to talk about and develop for if it only meant 10 things, and we could agree on what those 10 things are, but it could now mean almost anything. It has to. Not because I’m promoting such notions. Because that’s just how it is.

And yeah, this is yet another area where new platforms don’t obviate old best practices, but when Robert Burns wrote “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain / For promis’d joy”, he could just as easily have been speaking of Export, mastering, and archiving as Share. ????

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Petronilla,

Can you please explain your problem a little more? What were you trying to do? What happened instead?

We’ll try to help!

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Neil Goodman] “the only exporting we do is same as source – then someone else takes it from there.”

Yes, exactly. This is EXPORT. Once the Exporting is complete, a new process begins. That file may move or be copied, but in any case, something’s gonna happen to it. It’s an INTERIM step. LOTS of things are going to happen after that.

But with Share, the goal is to be done, done, DONE, with the movie I’ve exported resting safe and sound on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, AND Snapchat, complete with hashtags and other relevant stuff.

I mention that because this is in fact part of the Share feature set in Premiere Pro. This is kind of an Adobe thing, where there are features built into Photoshop for doctors and geologists — well, there’s a huge class of people whose final destination for their videos isn’t TV or film, but online platforms who might in fact have bigger audiences.

(F’rinstance, I’m pals with a fashion vlogger. She shoots with pro cameras and lighting in an actual studio with a full crew, and her YouTube channel has 11 million subscribers. That’s more than the NFL, Marvel Comics, or HBO, so I’ll ask YOU: how many people subscribe to YOUR work?)

So the “Share” feature set is a mini-encoder hub if you will, where each platform might have different rules for hashtags (the number of hashtags, which work on which platform, the fact that you NEED to use spaces on Tumblr, SHOULD on YouTube, but CAN’T on Instagram), ideal aspect ratios, and much more.

Additionally, Premiere Pro’s Share feature set includes built-in analytics, so that you can see how many SHARES you’re getting for each of the videos you’ve SHARED.

I’m not suggesting that Apple is dropping the ball by failing to have this extensive a feature set. Nor am I suggesting that Premiere Pro is any way less capable as a feature film or television editing environment because it has robust social media sharing.

But I AM saying that many of the people who Share for a living might never get around to exporting!

And indeed, to Neil’s point, most people who Export will never, ever, ever, ever, ever Share.

They are not even vaguely the same. They are almost exactly the opposite in every meaningful away.

And I’m definitely saying that Apple would be remiss if they failed to recognize this. Well, lo and behold, they DO recognize this. You can decide for yourself if either or both of their Export and Share feature sets are robust enough for you, but no amount of robustness in one can make up for deficiencies in the other. Any workarounds are excruciating at best, which is why, as developers understand the world they’re sending their products out into, they’re accommodating the realities on the ground.

It’s also no big deal that Apple is behind on this. They’ve been behind on almost everything, and it tends to work out for them just fine.

But if it looks to anyone that Apple is running needlessly ahead into yet another avenue of irrelevance for “professional” production, I’ll suggest that this is a measure of how much further behind you are than you thought. ????????

Which, as always, may have nothing to do with whether or not they’re meeting YOUR needs or not. But the market NEEDS BOTH Share and Export, and they’re gonna need a lot more from both feature sets, from every developer, and they need it yesterday.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “So, unless you created a booth with mainly third party partner-vendors, then an Apple-only booth would probably be pretty small. Certainly no larger than Adobe’s. The result might be counter-productive, since people would criticize if they had a booth but it wasn’t grandiose.
“

Funny you should mention that. I worked Apple’s booth in 2003, my last year at Boris FX. The overwhelming majority of the booth was third parties in fact. My little pod was right next door to Avid, who introduced Media Composer Adrenaline there. There was storage, cameras, IO devices, all kinds of stuff.

People mostly hated it. Some were furious. A couple of them threatened violence. LOL I can summarize it as “If I wanted to learn about [this or that], I’d go to [this or that] booth. I’m in the Apple booth because I only want to hear about Apple.”

And yes, people were annoyed that there were no iPods or accessories for sale in the NAB booth.

Oliver, I heard this all day, every day. Even my pals from around the world who dropped by the Apple booth specifically to see me admitted that they didn’t really care that AJA or Blackmagic were in the Apple booth, because after they said hello me, they were going to those booths anyway. As pretty much everyone in this forum has observed in this forum at one time or another, we haven’t been Apple’s core audience for a long time.

The energy from the booth was actually being driven by the booth NEXT to the booth. We don’t talk about this much anymore, but the actual, literal stampede from main entrance into the South Hall was NOT to the Apple booth per se, but to get a seat in Steve Martin and Abba Shapiro’s official Apple classes across the aisle.

I mean, if Apple really wanted to blow the roof off the joint, they could skip their own booth with their own gear, skip the partners, and bring back Steve and Abba doing hands-on tips and tricks on the floor with the newest iMacs.

Because otherwise, I feel like what the majority of people who’d actually go to an Apple booth would want is in fact pretty much what they get in the Apple Store. The first year Apple did a billion dollars at the Apple Stores? 2006. Their last year for a booth at NAB? 2007.

And look, if we’re being honest, the flipside of the accessibility of NAB is that the level of discourse at the booths had already been dropping for years. By 2003, I was spending nearly all of my time explaining what a plug-in does, and why I wasn’t insulting Apple with the suggestion that there’s something important that Final Cut couldn’t do on its own….”because if it was REALLY important, Apple would be doing it, so you should just shut your face and get out of Apple’s booth.”

I can also anecdotally observe that the level of discourse being directed at Apple product managers was similar in both level of user experience and tone. ????It appeared to be no more pleasant an experience for them than it was for me.

Nor for that matter do I want to exempt ourselves from that. A number of very high-profile feature film editors used to be quite active here, but stepped away when their days became consumed by people tracking down their personal contact information to berate them for using Media Composer instead of FCP. Oops.

In another post on this thread, I decried barriers to access, but I gotta tell ya, if you want to separate signal from noise at a trade show, barriers can help. ???? If you’ve gone to the trouble to track down an FCPWORKS session, you’re probably closer to the signal end of the spectrum. Any one of those sessions is miles and miles more productive than an entire day in Apple’s old booth, I assure you.

That’s why I think that Apple’s presence at NAB is actually pretty well calibrated. You can find Apple if you want to, and if you need somebody to explain to the ontology of plug-ins, you can find plenty of folks to help you out with that throughout the South Hall. They’ll probably sell you a charger for your phone, too.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Personally, I’d bet on the clock winding down over the next 4 years.”

I’m surprised to hear you say that! Why do you think so?

To me, even if all they do for X for the next four years is decide what’s up with the wheels, and make a few tweaks for format support, color space, and OS, running on iMacs and notebooks running Thunderbolt 4+ or whatever, I don’t see any reason why their industry footprint would need to change much at all.

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] ” I have never heard real data on the real business damage not showing up did to the company.”

I’m going to have to tread lightly here, because I worked at Avid right before I came to Creative COW, and my role in Avid’s NAB was, let’s say non-trivial. Calling me the public face of Avid’s NAB at that time is by no means stretching the point, but I was just one of over 400 people who attended the show for Avid in those years, to say nothing of the massive teams in marketing, engineering, support, and others who were on-call 24 hours while remaining at HQ, on the east coast, and at offices around the world. My NABs at 10 days felt long enough, but plenty of other folks were there for as much as a full month before AND after the show.

And I’m only scratching the surface in my description. The commitment in company resources for two-thirds of the year was staggering. I was pretty far down the food chain, but I sat in my first meeting to evaluate carpet swatches and mockups for the following year’s NAB booth in September, which meant that there were people narrowing the choices down in August.

The decisions to drop out of NAB, and then to return, were made after I left, but people were very candid with me as a former insider. I won’t get too specific about THEIR observations, but I’m adding theirs to my own as I offer some broad strokes.

— The case made AGAINST attending NAB was, “Look, most of our key customers can’t come to the show, because they’re cutting TV for May sweeps or the early summer blockbusters.” It had already been the case that C-level execs were gone from NAB by the end of Monday, in order to spend the rest of the week in LA.

So the thought was, we’re already doing road shows. Let’s double down on those, go more places, stay longer, meet more customers. We’ll spend less money, draw down fewer company resources (the engineering effort going into NAB was more vast than you can imagine), and the net net will be more people seeing our stuff up close and personal, without the chaos, and nobody will be driving themselves crazy. Everybody wins!

— This is MY OWN observation, but that was always a hopelessly post-centered vision, and anybody who thinks of Avid as post-centered is missing the big picture. You know who still does NAB in a big way? Actual BROADCASTERS. And if look at the shape of Avid at NAB these days, it’s overwhelmingly broadcast.

— It also missed a huge shift in NAB, driven almost entirely by the FCP community, but extended through others, which is that the shift in NAB’s economic base from the North Hall to the South Hall reflected the extent to which NAB became less and less an equipment sales show — which at one time, it almost exclusively was — and increasingly a show that was — let’s be blunt — an excuse for people to get together.

Official user groups, yes, but also industry organizations (Hollywood Professional Association, Blue Collar Post Collective, Association of Independent Commercial Producers, gazillion others), ad hoc meetups (the community that developed around the #postchat Twitter chat for example).

Then there was the rise of NAB as an education destination. The Broadcast Education Association STARTS their meeting during the Wednesday of NAB, and goes through the following weekend. We’re familiar with the Postproduction Workshop (where many of you teach, as well as attend), but there are a dozen conferences of varying sizes and interests.

— And every one of those groups included among them Avid users who were infuriated that Avid wasn’t there. Perhaps they weren’t elite enough to merit a site visit, or from a place with no road show coming anywhere near. They were in Las Vegas RIGHT NOW dammit, ready to talk to their favorite vendor. Who wasn’t there.

— So it wasn’t SALES that drove Avid back to NAB, because NAB isn’t a sales show for many companies outside the North Hall anymore. It was RELATIONSHIPS. Relationships with partners (yes in the North Hall, but also many others), and relationships with customers, none of whom were going to pay Avid a dime more or less than they were going to anyway. There was no incremental business to be done, but there ARE things in the RELATIONSHIP that need to happen, and happen best in person.

— I mentioned earlier that you miss the most important part of the Avid story if you look only at post. Broadcast is only half of that. The other half is the customer event. That thing ain’t cheap. Over 1000 people came in from all over the world for that thing last year, and you know what? A lot of them wound up NOT STAYING FOR THE NAB SHOW.

NAB still works as a great excuse to get a big group of people in one place, and for a lot of people, it’s cheaper and easier to get to Vegas than it is to get across their own state (or, say, from Long Island to New Jersey — the number of companies who think of Newark as a regional destination of any consequence is both hilarious and pathetic). But the reason to make the trip for those folks is to see Avid.

Yes, Apple is now doing something similar onsite. Adobe also built on the former Macromedia Flash community’s MAX event to do something similar onsite as well. Both of those companies are multiple exponents bigger than Avid, though, and are located in areas that have infrastructure for large-scale events that Avid — a long, long way from Boston — simply doesn’t. It’s cheaper and easier to host a large-scale event in Vegas, for both Avid and their customers.

So, Scott, on one hand, you’re right. MY OWN READ is that there wasn’t a big bag of money that Avid felt they were losing by skipping a booth. In those years, major deals were still being made in suites, just as Apple continues to.

But — again noting that this is MY take — the combination of Avid’s massive footprint in broadcast (and seriously, post folks have NO IDEA how huge Avid is broadcasting, including areas like sports graphics and virtual sets that make me wonder what people are smoking when they think of Apple as in any way competing with any meaningful part of Avid’s business — THEY’RE NOT….and to see some of the coolest technology in broadcast, you really do need to visit Avid’s booth, one of the shiniest things you’ll ever see in Vegas)….

….but vastly, vastly more important even than that, Avid is back at NAB because their customers insisted on it. Avid built on that energy to create a remarkable customer event beforehand for folks who only want to meet with Avid and get gone, but also have a dynamic, energetic booth for people coming to NAB to meet with their friends who are also coming to NAB, and DURING the show, want to ALSO meet with one of the companies that’s a big part of their orbit.

The idea is to get away from false either-or dichotomies, and embrace your customers where they WANT to meet you, the way they want to meet you, with the most options and fewest barriers.

I know that this is a controversial position, though, so blast away. ????

[Tim Wilson]

The easiest place to start is the Defense Video Imagery Distribution System. https://www.dvidshub.net/ (You can eventually get here from the Defense.gov site, which is actually one of the better federal websites, but this is the most straightforward of the various subportals.)

Greg, I know you know all this, but it’s always worth mentioning for the less-experienced folks who’ll find this thread later, that when talking about government public domain footage: yes, if tax dollars paid to acquire the footage, it’s available to you, but rights are still rights, including trademarks, copyrights, privacy, and more.

For example, military symbols, including uniforms, are trademarked, and there are very strict limitations on usage for such imagery. Commercials are out. The same holds true for individuals featured within clips. For news, documentary, etc., you’re likely fine. Anything that implies that the individual speaking, or even just generally visible onscreen, in any way endorses you or your work — not okay.

Those are a couple of broad considerations, but DVIDS has a nicely precise, easy to read discussion of this. https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright. They’re good reminders to everyone dealing with rights issues, ie, pretty much everyone, all the time.

Lots of great stuff in these archives, though, including high resolution clips. More people should be taking advantage of these resources. After all, you’re paying for them! ????????

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Mark,

This may possibly something architectural in our database, which I’m escalating to our IT team. We’re currently working overtime behind the scenes on a number of updates, so I don’t have an outline for you when you can expect a solution….but I truly can’t thank you enough for the thoroughness of your documentation of the issues you’ve been having. This will make a big difference in our ability to address it.

On the other hand, do note that a number of new classifieds have gone up in the period that this issue has been ongoing for you. I wish I had something else to suggest, but you’ve clearly identified something. I’m still scratching my head over what it is. Our IT wizards are all smarter than I am fortunately, and will hopefully be able to get to the bottom of this with your help.

Stand by for more information as soon as I have it!

Many thanks again!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Apologies for the delay replying!

I’m not sure what’s going on with our indexing, but we do indeed still have all of Aharon’s tutorials posted. Here’s a link: https://library.creativecow.net/search.php?q=aharon+rabinowitz&order=t&view=&cat=

Thanks for pointing this out, though! Anybody still using those older versions of After Effects will still find these very useful, and of course very entertaining.

Best

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW