[Tim Wilson]

[David Lawrence] “Whitelist the sites you want to support, and the rest can go pound sand. “

I hope you’re whitelisting us! ????

For the record, the only thing we do with cookies is allow you to set your site preferences. We don’t set any other cookies of our own, do no other tracking, and share data with nobody.

????????

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[greg janza] “frustration because of the requirement that the viewer select the imagery focus.”

It’s the difference between what McLuhan called “hot” and “cold” media, and what others since have called “lean forward” and “lean back”.

TV is the ultimate “cold” or “lean back” medium, even more than movies I think. Sit back and watch. Veg out.

Games are the ultimate in hot or lean forward media, which is where I think VR storytelling works great. Game controllers are vastly more nuanced than mice in my hand or me swiveling my head — but I think you’re right, Greg, that there’s a fundamental disconnect in what most people want from a NYT video most of the time, which is “tell me something” and NOT “make me do something.”

Heck, most of the time I resent videos on websites. I HATE podcasts. I can read a whole lot faster than any a’ y’all can talk, so shut up and let me read. I’ll cover more ground in less time, and then I’ll get on with my day.

The other shoe dropped recently when the NYT got more specific that the original impetus behind their VR initiative was a sponsorship from Samsung to create a 360 video a day. Not that they were coy about it in November 2016. Quite the contrary, they beat the drum about it pretty loudly. NYT taps Samsung to launch immersive 360-degree video journalism project. …but I bet that that slipped by most folks.

The thing about 360 is that it wasn’t aimed at the headset crowd. The NYT had done that the year before, when they partnered with Google to give out a million Google Cardboard viewers. Mine is still wrapped in cellophane. ???????? But 360 today is being pushed through Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and many other platforms as something to fiddle around with headset-free…assuming you want to fiddle around at all.

Just last week, Digiday did a very informative debrief, What The New York Times learned from its 360-degree video project.

The installments for the Samsung-sponsored project, called The Daily 360, were shot across 57 countries, with the help of over 200 different Times journalists. [My emphasis — and this should tell you something about the general level of sophistication of the project. Are there 200 experts in 360 video in the world, much less at the Times?]

So what was the biggest takeaway? People wanted to go to specific places.

[NYT executive director of virtual reality Marcelle] Hopkins and her team have approached the program as an opportunity to put people in extraordinary positions: outside Wrigley Field the moment the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series in 108 years, inside a NASA installation designed to mimic a Mars colony, in the ghost towns that surround the Fukushima power plant that melted down six years ago.

While some of the locations were packed with energy and action, Hopkins said that just being in a place is enough. “It doesn’t even need to be a dynamic place,” she said.

Hopkins added that real estate videos performed very well. Virtually every 360-degree video the Times published about a place to live proved “wildly popular”….

To David Lawrence’s earlier point, VR (again, as distinct from 360) can work as a unique medium when you’re engaging with people who are showing up to take place in a storytelling experience.

This was something that Alejandro González Iñárritu was going for with Carne Y Arena (Flesh and Sand) at Cannes last spring, and why people so completely freaked out when they saw it. It wasn’t presented as a film per se (and the press was specifically instructed not to describe it as a film), but as an installation. Yeah, you put on goggles and there was a video playing, but you also took off your shoes, and entered a space to experience first-hand what it’s like to attempt a border crossing.

Indiewire’s Anne Thompson was pretty skeptical going in, but she gives away her conclusion in the headline: Why Alejandro González Iñárritu is the Director Who Finally Got VR Right

As I got my magic-hour bearings in the scrubby desert with mountains in the distance, people began to appear in the bushes, making noises of discomfort and pain, and as it got dark, they cowered and screamed as a helicopter deafeningly lands — the ground vibrating — and border patrol agents bark orders and threaten, pointing guns, ordering them to “get down!” It’s noisy, scary chaos, as cops pull people out of hiding, wrestle them into submission, and drag them away.

The helicopter landings are deafening and terrifying. One woman lies moaning in the sand with an injured foot, another is trying to help her; the cops eventually stand her up. Several sequences are separated by weird disintegrating flashes. One cop turned and looked at me, which was unnerving. (Up close, the faces are clearly digital.)

I could wander the terrain at will — I stuck my hand through some of the bodies, but learned afterward that you must shove your head into a body to see its pulsing heart — so it helps to be a bolder, more experienced videogame player. Others who have experienced the piece have had guns pointed at them. ….

According to Iñárritu, every viewer behaves differently. Some stay locked in position, others stay behind the cops, others hang back with the immigrants (as I did), and some hide behind a bush, or drop down obediently when ordered.

In this sense, in addition to Thompson’s notation of an affinity for gaming, it has far more in common with a visitor’s center multimedia presentation at a national park or something….and indeed, after the VR experience of Carne Y Arena, the viewer was taken to a museum installation-like setting with oral histories and other artifacts.

I’m summarizing what was a huge discussion that occupied a good 3 or 4 months of the year, but last month, the Academy announced that they were giving the presentation a special award “in recognition of a visionary and powerful experience in storytelling,” the first such award since one was given to Toy Story in 1996.

Look, I have no doubt that some of this self-congratulatory leftism that the Academy specializes in when it’s not celebrating reactionary fossilization in equal measure, but there’s something afoot here, and it’s real. It’s also currently running at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art if you want to see it for yourself….

…but none of this changes the fact that you as the viewer are now responsible for doing the heavy lifting. Here’s Iñárritu from Indiewire again.

“As filmmakers, none of the grammar tools apply. A film is about frame, the length of a take, the juxtaposition of edited images. A film without a frame is to film as a car without tires. It’s not a car anymore. It’s a leap forward. With cinema, that little hole you see through, I give you 20% as director and you figure out the other 80%. That’s the dialectic [my emphasis].”

Does that sound fun to you? Not to me, man. But I don’t like games for the same reason. “I said TELL me a story, dammit.” ????

But it does sound like a challenge, and challenges generally interest me…so I’m generally interested in this, even if the specifics have thus far left me cold more often than not.

Although let’s not skip past Iñárritu saying that a film without a frame is a car without tires. Wasn’t kinda the point of Birdman to take away the frame? That was sort of 360-degree filmmaking with the director doing all the driving, right?

Talk about leaving me cold, though. I didn’t enjoy that at all. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it more vertiginous than virtuosic, aside from the fact that we nerds had a pretty good idea where the seams were anyway. It felt overly fussily staged, and I was never sure of the extent to which the filmmakers were in on the off-kilter retro feel that it evoked. It would have felt retro if Neil Simon had done this in the 50s.

That’s the thing with stuff that tries too hard to get to the future ahead of schedule. Nothing looks more retro than something that aims for “futuristic”.

The dialectic for developers is that visual storytelling (since “filmmaking” per se may be well beside the point) will move forward with or without the developer’s help. The question is, do you want to help your customers who are moving faster than you, or do you want them to keep having to work around you?

Apple has famously traditionally chosen the latter course, so it’s nice to hear them at least moving their lips in a manner that suggests that they’re nominally interested in doing better…although Tim Dashwood’s professionalism notwithstanding (and I’ve been writing glowingly about him in the COW since he was “only” doing 3D video tools), it’s not at all apparent that Apple’s real bet won’t be paying off primarily in AR (augmented reality) tools for iPhone.

Maybe one of YOU will be working on the viral AR experience to succeed Pokemon Go, driving AR from a story engine rather than a game engine….if such a thing is even possible. We don’t know yet. We’ll be much more likely to find out much more quickly once we’re not forcing visual storytellers to be the ones to construct the tools themselves. People started doing a lot more hammering when they could buy hammers instead of making “hammer building” as a prerequisite skill to acquire before you can start actually using the hammer.

And of course the other dimension of the dialectic is what we mean by “customer-driven” in the first place. As much as one set of customers wants to work in an environment that understands the work they’re doing, they want speed, stability, and all the boring stuff too.

As one of the few true futurists among us put it so wisely upthread, [David Lawrence] “Frankly, I’m more excited about the new version of FCPX finally having a rational color grading UI, lol ;)”

In fact, I’m about to post an interview with Boris Yamnitsky of Boris FX, where in speaking with his millions of customers as the company moved forward with Mocha VR, they observed that the overwhelming majority of their customers were already doing at least some work “on the side” in 360 and/or VR, but virtually none of them were doing the majority of their work in it.

This was most definitely NOT the case for 3D, Boris told me, where they saw few people doing it full time AND few people doing much with it on the side. That never broke out of its niche, whereas by definition VR/360 is already out of the niche — even if in its approaching universality among professional producers, it remains within a niche for each of them!

There’s still a lot to unpack here. The differences between 360, VR, and AR are profound. The venues in which one can present this stuff, the amount of work it’s reasonable to expect from viewers, the relative weight of narrative and “place”, and a million considerations equally spaced before and after the relative tiny amount of time spent EDITING this stuff.

The LA Times actually did a stellar job laying some of this out as they were deconstructing the response to Carne Y Arena at Cannes, Alejandro Iñárritu’s virtual reality project takes film to new frontiers — and questions I highly recommend the whole thing, but this is the money section.

Much of the Sturm und Drang at [Cannes] around digital technology has been centered on Netflix, which with two films in competition has provoked a backlash from French theater owners and plenty of headlines. But in a way, streaming services are not the real disrupters. They may upset theater owners, but they keep intact many of the film industry’s long-standing rules and players. Hollywood in the Netflix age is doing what it has always done, it is just delivering film differently [my emphasis].

VR, though, upends the game much more significantly, changing the very way stories are told and — since hardly every filmmaker is as game as Iñárritu and Lubezki — who will tell them too. That is far more anathema to the ideology of Cannes, which reveres cinema and its masters like few others. ‎This makes it all the more surprising that festival director Thierry Frémaux enthusiastically persuaded a skeptical Iñárritu to bring the piece here (at least as the filmmaker explained it), instead of the other way around.

If VR takes off as a storytelling medium, the idea of people gathering in plush theaters named after French artistic greats to watch two-hour slices of edited film could seem as quaint as the masses gathering for the latest Bizet debut.

In that regard, at least, Iñárritu and Chivo are ahead of the curve when they say that VR could soon become a much bigger part of film fans’ diet.

“I think it could be less than 10 years when kids look at a ‎movie on a [traditional] screen and say, ‘You used to watch things on that?’” Chivo said.

*cough*Bullspit*cough* ???? LAT kinda has it right in that while I think they’re rhetorically understating the impact of non-theatrical distribution, the fact is that kids watching movies and TV series on their devices isn’t going to go away in 10 years. It’s going to accelerate dramatically. We’re not only NOT near the end of it — I don’t think we’ve quite seen the beginning of it yet. The vast majority of Netflixxers have not canceled their cable subscriptions, any more than they’ve stopped going to the movies. We’re a long, long way from an either/or proposition for most people.

I remain a fetishist of the frame, and I have no doubt whatsoever that it’s partly an artifact of my age — but honestly, what’s the rise of Instagram and Snapchat if not the same thing? What’s in and not in the frame matters. And much to the consternation of most of you, the fetishization of the VERTICAL frame.

But especially as someone whose actual production career was largely consumed with documentary storytelling, I’m even more intrigued with the idea of VR and 360 liberated from the constraints of traditional narrative structure. And as someone who believes that reason is vastly overrated and frequently antithetical to film appreciation, I’m intrigued by the notion of a medium that self-consciously drives itself by evoking physical space and visceral empathy.

Maybe story stops being relevant at all. We’ll be applying the tools of filmmaking to something that isn’t a film, and storytelling tools to something that isn’t ultimately concerned with story.

Great ideas. I look forward to less annoying implementations. ???? ???? Not that I have any idea what those might look like either. ????

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[Tim Wilson]

Hi Siddhant,

The short answer is “as quickly as we can.” Sometimes it can be seconds. Obviously sometimes longer, but we know that people are coming here for help, so we get things posted as quickly as we can.

For what it’s worth, your post in the AE Expressions forum went up in less than an hour. Your account is no longer moderated, so anything else you post after this should go up immediately. Please let us know if that’s ever not the case!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Charlie Austin] “Ronny saw the FB post and contacted the director. “

Ronny is the one guy in this business consistently getting this coverage right — which I don’t mean as faint praise. Having just unloaded in my last post on the overwhelming majority of people who in their enthusiasms about FCPX get the rest of the story colossally wrong, I want to celebrate what Ronny is doing, story after story. It’s darn near miraculous that he not only gets everything right, AND’s a good storyteller to boot.

Another masterpiece from the master.

[Tim Wilson]

Here too is Kylee Pena’s coverage at the COW blogs.

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for the kind words, Steve! I hope you put something extra in your tea before reading it all a second time.

[Steve Connor] “How about, to start with, we stop referring to track based editing as “the old way” ☺
“

I had included this suggestion in my much longer first draft. I say this both to state my agreement with you, and to note that, yes, what I posted is the short version. ????

[Tim Wilson]

I know that many of you agree with a lot of what I’m about to say. I supportively quote four of you in this thread, and I could have quoted a dozen of you.

But this is basically me trying to catch up on the past 6 months of not posting in one go, on every similar thread that I’ve missed along the way. ????

[Andy Field] “Everyone loves their NLE but it seems only FCP X users feel the need to defend their using it.”

I kind of get that part, because people really have spent a lot of time slagging X.

Some of the people making these kinds of presentations are unfortunately resistant to acknowledge that even Apple copped to X’s initial inability to support critical Legacy workflows, and in some cases would be not just postponing those workflows, but substantially abandoning them. People weren’t pulling this out of thin air. They were reacting to what Apple told them, and Apple was of course correct.

Note again please that I’m on the record as concurring entirely with Apple’s plan (perhaps the only person on the planet outside Apple to say so; I’m certainly the only one here I’ve ever seen) — but having said that, the people making and sharing presentations like this are right to insist that X has grown in ways that haven’t been acknowledged in some quarters.

On one hand, it’s lovely to see their enthusiasm (again, shared by me). They’ve found something that makes them happy, and they want to share that joy with people who they feel could be more joyful if only…..

However, it’s disingenuous to say that there’s not an evangelical component to many of these videos and articles as presented. They want to persuade the audience that this isn’t just one equally valid approach among many, but one that the audience should adopt. I know this, because they’re telling me again and again, by opening their presentations with the purported negatives of other approaches.

What stands out, though, is the stunning consistency with which they misstate how “editors” and “Other NLEs” “think” and “work”. Not just THAT they’re wrong, but HOW wrong they are, inevitably colors the reception of the rest of their presentations.

You’d hope that in entreating their audience to fundamentally reconsider the soundness of their own starting assumptions, that these fellas would do the same. Again acknowledging that many of the criticisms of X are no longer valid, if they ever were….

….but if addressing THOSE were the primary intent, then these Accounts Of The Light Bulb Going Off Pointing To A Better Way Thanks to FCPX, they would stick with THAT as sole the topic of their presentations. They wouldn’t waste a single second talking about how the less-good way is less good. They’d ONLY talk about the way that the better way is better.

Which makes me wonder — is perhaps their problem with tracks not intrinsic to track-based editing itself, but the fact that they never figured it out themselves? Or perhaps some disconnect between the way they wanted to work and the tasks best suited to track-based workflows? Maybe they were just holding it wrong. Because they’re sure as shootin’ explaining it wrong. Little of what they’re describing makes any sense at all. NO WONDER that X is working better for them!

Now before someone rushes in to defend the many editors who were at the peak of fluency of the right way to do tracks and who still prefer X, of course, such people exist. I just wish they were the ones making the bulk of these presentations.

Actually, I don’t. I’d love for people to talk about what excites them, what drives them forward, without spending a single second on what they think is wrong with other alternatives.

The irony of this dynamic is that such presenters and their supporters so often paint themselves as a beleaguered tiny bastion under constant attack by The Industry…. or….something….when in fact X’s audience grew to the full size of Legacy and surpassed it, supposedly the mightiest force in mainstream editing of its era, in a fraction of the time, with the full backing of the richest corporation in human history.

Calling it the most goliath Goliath of all time doesn’t begin to do it justice, as it now approaches triple the size its founder left in his passing just a few years ago. This ain’t the Alamo. It’s the Citadel. The shiniest city on the highest-ever hill.

So why are the people making and sharing these presentations not accepting the fact that the industry has substantially said “Yes” to X? “Because there are still so many misconceptions” — fine. Address those. We’ll all be further ahead if we’re not spending so many cycles addressing these presenters’ misconceptions of a way that they’ve already rejected.

The saddest irony is that in demanding a kind of — what? acceptance? respect? validation?– that they have in fact already been granted by the world at large, they’re trying to enforce an orthodoxy more rigid than the one they’re putatively rejecting. Anyone pointing out that the people making these presentations “don’t get” the basics of track-based editing are in return being criticized for not getting X, when in fact the two have nothing to do with each other.

Not only do you not not need to understand one to understand the other, some here have suggested that the only insurmountable obstacle to understanding X is trying to carry forward what you previously learned about tracks. Which is fortunate for these presenters who’ve chosen X! These presentations so often really don’t appear to get track based editing in the least — again, not that they need to. They’ve chosen FCPX.

And apparently just in a nick of time! If what some of them describe is what they were actually doing while on the clock before, it’s a wonder they got anything done at all. I admire their previous fortitude, and am glad that the path ahead of them promises to be so much smoother.

Without trying to psychoanalyze any individual human, the part of me that did in fact train in psychoanalysis can’t help but detect the redolent aroma of passive-aggressive condescension in this approach to building up X on a foundation of dragging down Not X.

To rhetorically overstate a bit: “*I* am enlightened enough that, when shown the advantages of X, I was quick to adopt it. *You*, on the other hand, must first be persuaded that you are wrong to think that Not X is a good place to edit. Only after I show you just how wrong you are can you then see how X is better.”

Again, this may not substantially represent the view of any of the individuals making these presentations, but the dynamic is consistent. You know how you can tell when someone is excited about X for X’s sake, and that they have no stake in talking down anyone else’s choice? When that’s what they actually do. It’s unfortunately rare.

That’s why the most productive parts of these threads to ME are when people talk about what they do and why. Not when they rag on what somebody else is doing.

LISTENING to other people’s perspective from THEIR perspective, instead of me TELLING them what their perspective is, is the foundation of empathy. The fact that the first parts of these presentations, videos, articles, etc. are “telling” track-based editors things about themselves that they don’t recognize as even vaguely in the ballpark nukes any possibility of empathy, or any basic communication at all.

Beyond the condescension, this dynamic masks its own impediments to insight. “It’s only the OTHER guy who misunderstands something. It’s only the other guy failing to be rational. He’s the one frozen in his assumptions.” My own experience suggests that when a thought like this crosses my mind, it’s only my own calcification speaking. Your mileage may vary.

Look, maybe most people understand most things. Maybe even most people who prefer X understand tracks just fine. It’s a shame that they’re not doing more of these presentations, because right now, the largely compelling presentations of X itself are being undermined by how far they miss the mark on alllllll the rest.

I say this as someone who’s been called out for my enthusiasms for X as much as anyone here, and more than most — but for all that these presenters are calling for respect for X and its users that I’m the first to acknowledge that they don’t always get, there are precious few of them willing to just accept that it’s enough to talk about X’s advantages, and only X’s advantages, without staking any credibility on disrespect for other NLEs and their users.

It’s stifling any possibility of peer-to-peer communication, because you’ve already tipped your hand that you don’t think I’m your peer. I’d have to be nuts to edit that OTHER way you’ve demonstrated– and on this, we agree. What I see described is the height of folly, which is why I never did it that way, and never observed anyone else doing it that way either.

Quoting Steve, who’s quoting Neil Goodman, who’s quoting Tony West, and I’m agreeing with all of ’em:

[Steve Connor] “That’s a great description of how it actually works instead of all the other mumbo jumbo. I would read your article.”

“I agree, parts of this argument are nonsensical. The tracked editing description in the original article was badly explained and has sadly detracted from what was on the whole one of the best descriptions of editing in FCPX I’ve read.”

Exactly. I’m simply suggesting from a marketing perspective, that it’s more productive not to make your opening gambit how clueless the other guy is. Keep that to yourself. ????

Instead, shine the brightest possible light on what’s making you happiest. Leave room for the possibility that you’re wrong about some of the basics about the rest, just like you’re asking me to be, and maybe we’ll both have room to grow.

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Thomas] “Apparently the main problem was not enough bandwidth in the system. The thought was that perhaps Pinnacle wasn’t completely forthcoming on the system’s development.”

I’ve heard that before. I wasn’t intimately connected with Liquid Blue, but there seemed to be bandwidth issues there too. I wish I knew more about this, but yours and your colleagues aren’t the only two examples I’ve come across.

Integrating tech is a lot harder than it sounds. Yet another reason I bow down in the general direction of Grant Petty whenever this comes up. You just don’t know how big a deal it is that he’s been able to do what he’s done, including getting some VERY hardcore non-Mac products to work great on Mac. Astounding.

Investigating other people’s storage pre-purchase is also harder than it sounds. Medea was a game-changing system that made a lot of people a lot of money back in the day, but by the time Avid got its hands on it, it was a dog with fleas. (I’m under the impression that a lot of the key developers had already gone to G-Tech? The details of this too were beyond me. This is definitely an area where many of you will know vastly more than I do.) It SEEMED like the right move for Avid looking for low-cost, high-volume, local RAID, but what a mess in practice.

I wish that part of the story were happier, but boy howdy, it sure wasn’t.

[Tim Wilson]

[greg janza] “What’s notable about your thoughts is that you add the comparison to Apple and from my perspective Avid and Apple are similar in at least one regard. Both companies had a dedicated and loyal video professional user base. But each company made strategic moves that ended up alienating a sizable percentage of that professional user base and I’d argue that as a result both companies have permanently lost a significant portion of those users.”

I agree completely.

In Apple’s case, I’m on the record of buying 100% into their logic. They didn’t want to split their focus, but instead chose to go all-in on a new direction, no looking back. They did this for the first time in 1984 with Macintosh, and in fact never recovered the market share that the Apple II had. As an Apple II customer since 1979, this cheesed me off, to say the least. ???? My then-girlfriend, now wife (since 1985, in fact) was the first person I knew to buy a Mac, in February 1984, but like me, she kept her II around for years to keep using the software that in some cases never did make its way to Mac.

That’s the price everyone pays for being a Mac customer. At some point, it’s YOUR turn to be burned. But the results are the results. When we started our video production company in 1990, there wasn’t a single second’s hesitation about which platform we’d build it on. We just went in assuming it was a matter of time until they hosed us again. System 7, anyone? ???? As bad as anything that any company has ever done to its customers. FAR worse than MS Vista, imo. And others after that. You roll with it, or you don’t.

I can say this as a then-outsider, but I found Avid’s approach with products like MC Express and Xpress DV to be infuriating. It’s like they were trying to piss you off into buying a Media Composer by keeping out critical workflow features. (You won’t let me use the most common MC keyboard shortcuts and resolutions?!?) Wrong. People just wound up pissed off. I’ve got pals who are former MCE users whose hatred for Avid can still be seen from outer space.

Hence my tremendous relief as a product manager to no longer need to explain to people what the hell Avid was thinking with this or that differentiation starting in the spring of 2006. You want MC Soft? Here’s MC Soft. Easy.

But Avid’s saving grace is similar to Apple’s: some people have found a home there that has allowed them to weather disruptions and continue to thrive. God bless them. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[andy patterson] “I think Liquid was purchased to help improve MC.”

Not in the least. Please re-read what I wrote. I was there. This was my job. That was not the case.

Your opinions about the relative value of MC vs. Liquid are completely valid because they reflect your experience, but objectively speaking, they also underscore the reasons why what you’re suggesting was impossible. The two products had completely divergent goals, technology bases, and customer bases. They had nothing whatsoever to do with each other. There was no competition — hence nothing was “killed” to “protect” something else — but also no complementarity.

[Note: I edited the above paragraph quite a while after I posted it, because I overstated my personal perspective as reflecting Avid’s corporate priorities. As it turns out, the two were not in fact always the same. ]

The area that interested me most was graphics integration. Avid had half a dozen graphics technologies it seemed like — Marquee (which came out of the Elastic Reality purchase and team, and vastly more power than was being tapped), the built-in titler, Deko (including the database stuff), the 3D technology coming out of Softimage (which was oriented toward characters, not objects and rigs like text requires….but I still felt was worth investigating because Deko lacked true 3D capabilities)….plus some very compelling technology (if I say so myself) licensed from Boris FX (basically, Boris RED rebadged as Avid FX), which I’d been the product manager for before coming to Avid….and I couldn’t find a single meaningful way to get even TWO of these talking to each other, much less all of them.

I want to emphasize that I have zero engineering skills. I’m speaking strictly from a product management perspective viewed through an end-user lens. But no, nothing like this was gonna happen. Engineers later confirmed my suspicions in vastly more dimensions than I’d considered. ????

So please believe me when I say that there was NO intent to somehow “use” Liquid to improve MC. It’s one thing to say that MC should have had some Liquid features, but in practice, even something as “simple” (but not actually simple at all) as Liquid’s hella GPU acceleration were irrelevant to the core workflow needs for the core MC audience in 2005.

Nothing about the two are related. The sooner you let go of this, the sooner the whole picture will come into view.

Not that it’s not fun to play compare-and-contrast. Of course it is. That’s some of why we’re here. But what you’re talking about as an end-user doesn’t factor into what actually happened.

[andy patterson] “Are you saying after Avid bought Pinnacle the Avid folks started doing the coding for Liquid in the USA? I thought the development team for Liquid was in Munich Germany. “

Liquid development stayed in Munich. The product management team was in Mountain View. I was product marketing at Avid HQ, which was then an hour outside the Boston area (Tewksbury to be exact), which is where Avid worldwide sales was based — but Liquid’s two sales managers were located in Chicago (Blue, with its heavy iron IO and storage) and Dallas (the rest of the Liquid line, including software-only and lighter-weight hardware.)

We all got along great. We got together now and again in various locales around the world (including for my counterpart in Mountain View and the lead developer in Munich, one night at my apartment in Boston), and we all knew how to use phones, too. The object of the game was to create the fewest possible obstacles to people continuing to do what they were doing, so not wasting time and money uprooting large teams. Keep doing what you’re doing, ppl. That part of it worked just fine.

[andy patterson] “I don’t think I ever seen you post about the Liquid software.”

You’ve only been here a fraction of the time that I’ve been here, and I’ve alas been pulled away and hardly posting in the past year when you’ve been most active. (I really do hope to get back to it.)

I was also posting here for many years before I started working here, going back to 1996 in our original incarnation. I’ve certainly written about my role working with Liquid at Avid before in many posts and a variety of articles in the COW library (as well as other aspects of my life with Avid and other companies in the industry), so I’m not sure what relevance that has to anything.

Of course you and I have very different ideas about relevance, but that’s fine too. It’s your forum. I just work here. ????????

Heaven knows I’m not recommending that anyone go back and read 20 years of my nonsense here. ???? I’m barely tolerable in the present tense, ideally in vastly smaller doses than I typically dole out.