[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “A few grand every few years on replacing a whole Mac is well worth it.”

While I’m no longer on the Mac train, I absolutely never understood this part of the objection. I bought gazillions of Macs over the years, and other than adding extra RAM and bigger hard drives to every NEW computer I bought (rather than pay Apple to ship me the max’d out configurations), using this upgradeability as a substitute for buying new computers never crossed my mind. I WANTED the new stuff, because of all the subsystems that aren’t easily upgradeable.

One way I know that I’m pretty close to the COW mainstream on this is the lament that Apple is taking too long to deliver new computers. I remember when most folks here were buying new computers every year, then every other year. Who the hell cares about being able to modularly upgrade a 5 year old spine? Forget modules, man. Give me something meaningfully new, give it to me a lot more often, and take my money.

I remember years ago being flabbergasted by how much better each new generation of computers was than the one I’d just bought. I remember repeating Dave Barry’s joke that they should have a dumpster outside the door of the computer store that you could dump the computer into on your way to the car. No point in even bringing it home because it was already obsolete. ????

Well, of course, not anymore. While it’s certainly true that Apple’s inability to make a compelling case for some of you to leave behind an EIGHT year old computer is a testament to the soundness of that 2009 model, it also speaks to Apple’s inability to create unambiguous improvements anymore. It seems like every new release of everything (except maybe the iMac) comes with plenty of prominent reasons to say, “Whoops, another missed opportunity.”

That used to definitely NOT be the case. It’s easy to see in the archives for our first decade here at the COW — every new computer from Apple used to be an automatic purchase, even when they were coming a lot more quickly.

So that’s my dream scenario. Not modules. Unambiguously compelling new models a lot more often.

Of course, this thread subject contains part of the reason why I haven’t been on the Apple train for years. They’ve got a long way to go just to catch up with well-established technologies and form factors. Mac folks may not care, or may argue vigorously that they don’t want 4K touchscreens or wider aspect ratios, or brighter screens, or any of the many other things that represent the state of the art. I do.

Apple used to. It’s why I built my business on Macs for over 20 years. It’s also now why I can’t ever imagine using one again. I’ll be as happy as anyone else if they surprise me by just catching up, much less pulling ahead again….but I’ll be surprised to be surprised, too. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “[Scott Witthaus] “Perhaps he and Tim can have one final “Who Can Write the Longest Post” battle for all the marbles? ;-)”

I can only assume subtractive edits would be banned…”

My point was that I personally only made subtractive edits.

And u ppl have no idea how long my posts are before I post them. ???? I cut way, way more than I post. Easily a 5:1 ratio, and probably more.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “From what I have seen, there are editors who approach the timeline with extreme caution and who seemingly won’t venture there unless fully armed with everything they can muster.”

Thinking about this from a developer’s perspective, Avid’s historical position has been, most things that can happen on the timeline are bad, and must be prevented. ????

To put it more positively, the timeline is sacred. ANYTHING that happens there, whether sculpting or bricklaying (and I think Avid has tended to prefer the latter), HAS to happen with intent. This led to a modal approach that I know has come in for grief from software purists, but it has its roots in the editing process itself: the concept of picture lock. Not just at the end of the process (okay, now we export a cut list and send it off to the negative house), but in the sense of, “Now that this piece is in place, nothing shall move it until I take steps to allow it to be moved.”

Hence the universal frustration of every editor coming from another NLE to sit at an Avid for the first time, click around on the timeline, yet nothing being selected. That’s the point. No random clicks creating unexpected results. Nothing becoming accidentally unsynced or unrendered. (These obviously being less of a big deal NOW, but 20 years ago, I assure you, A Very Big Deal Indeed.)

Instead, you had to enter a mode that allowed you to select things on the timeline, then choose a tool that actually allowed you to do so.

This speaks to a larger set of assumptions that have everything to do with Avid’s team-oriented approach to everything. The assumption is that many people will be touching assets in various forms of completion, and the one thing that must be protected above all others is the sanctity of the timeline, ie, The Edit itself. It’s an intentionally rigid construction.

It’s a gross oversimplification to place this at one end of a spectrum that has the magnetic timeline at the other end of the spectrum — an enchanted meadow of infinite flexibility, also a gross oversimplification. As I’ve noted, they have more in common with each other than not, including a single product manager responsible for the origination (or at least the management of the implementation) of both. They certainly share a preference for doing the “work” of the edit before you get to the timeline.

But when I hear “dangerous forest” and “enchanted meadow”, I think of something ancient — some combination of history and myth, which exactly characterizes not just FCP Legend but the relatively more recent legacy of FCPX. Media Composer’s roots can seem positively prehistoric that way, too. ????

But those are indeed its roots. Sync is sacred. Cuts are sacred. Placement on the timeline is sacred. None of this may be altered without honoring the forces that have bound them there.

[Tim Wilson]

[Roei Tzoref] “no offence, but you need to buy the plugin, any other advice given here on how to “hack” the protection of the plugin is bad service to this community. “

Correct answer. ????????

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW
????

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “You can’t. The company runs on the price of the stock. You just can’t do that.”

The only way you can do it is if you get out of the market. It can be done. Companies do it every day.

That really is my point. Other problems that you allude to — and that I know exist, and was one of the guys on the front lines hearing about them if you’ll recall ???? — are much more easily surmountable if Avid isn’t also having to also carry the burden of the market’s expectations.

[Scott Witthaus] “It’s rosy to say that it’s all about customer engagement, but it’s not, It’s about ROI for the investors.”

Exactly my point. If you sell stock as a publicly held company, the stockholders are both your true boss and your biggest customer. The dynamic changes when all you have to do is deliver products to ACTUAL customers. Ask SAM. Ask Grant.

The problem I see is that the public doesn’t really understand what Avid is doing. Heck, we’re not the public, and with obvious exceptions like you, I don’t get the impression that most folks here see past the NLE wars.

[Scott Witthaus] “[Tim Wilson] “having made more from investing than”

Excellent! Avid was one?”

Nononono. LOL I had a few shares, but I took a bath. Bought at $49, peaked at $66, but like I said, I sold it at $13. I could have kept holding it, but even though it was just a few shares, I was ready to shift it to something that would make me money. I believe in the company (obviously), but I prefer my money to make money for me.

I really do feel strongly about diversification, and it was only because I was so excited by what was happening at Avid that I broke my rule about never investing in a sector I work in. One of my frustrations about stock in general (I’m all about funds) is that during my 3 years there, sales AND profit more than doubled….but the stock halved.

Why? I have no idea. The market was “sure” something was amiss, and if they keep saying it long enough, it becomes true. To me, a company whose sales, profit, and margin are all increasing seems like they should be a good investment, right? Well, the only reason it wasn’t is because a bunch of oligarchs kept insisting it wasn’t, until they were finally right. The wisdom of the market for ya.

And this isn’t just Avid. Almost ANY individual company, it seems to be the rule these days to have huge gaps between my old-school grasp of fundamentals and high performing stocks. I buy funds to blunt the impact of any small group of these maniacs across the largest possible pool of maniacs. I don’t trust any of them as far as I can throw them, but fellas, thanks for all the fish. ????

But otherwise, within this industry, I can’t really say anything much about stocks, because I honestly don’t watch too closely. Tying 100% of my current income AND 100% of my future income to the same narrow set of market forces just doesn’t appeal to me. The world’s an interesting place, and I like paying attention to a wider swath of it now and again.

(btw, I don’t mean to suggest that I’m the wizard here. All of our best investments have come from my wife. That she chose me casts some shade on her credibility, I know, but the numbers are the numbers.)

[Scott Witthaus] “If you talk to some of those members, this too is not as rosy as it seems. “

Oh but I do, and I agree. Believe me, folks who are unhappy with Avid have always made a beeline to me. ???? To this very day. Of COURSE Avid needs to do some stuff better. Everyone needs to do better.

*I* need to do better. I’d give myself a B- for how well I’m managing the COW. This is life in the service business. It’s hard, even for the best of the best.

(Did I just call myself the best of the best? I haven’t decided yet. ????)

My point was simply, ANY company would have walked through Avid’s NAB customer convention — Apple included — and said, “Yep, I’d be okay if my customers were at this balance of satisfaction and engagement.” They might want more and better, as I’m sure Avid did and does, but this to me was one of the biggest stories of the show, and of 2017 in general. This idea that Avid is close to the abyss because of the stock price isn’t a full enough picture.

And to the point that Oliver and I have been making about the broader part of Avid in the context of the ENTIRETY of professional media production — sports, news, storage, scalable services, audio post, live sound, etc. — it’s hard to find a cylinder they’re not firing on, or a group of customers anywhere, again including Apple, that’s more engaged across the board. They’re getting this right.

You’re right to not let me imply that that’s the whole picture, or even the only important part of the picture. But it’s a non-trivial part of it, and has far more to do with what to expect as a customer or potential customer of one of the company’s products or services than the stock price does.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “You may feel survey-driven advancement is plenty to develop the tools of the future.

I just don’t – based largely on the way all these tools have developed over the past 30 years.”

You’re positing this, as Apple does, as an either/or. Sorry, Bill, that’s nonsense. Companies can do both. Avid does both, as do many other companies.

I assume you believe that such a thing is possible, yes? Or would it actively bother you if Apple were to allow its customers to select a group of customers who’d work with Apple to implement some specific user-based suggestions? And if Apple were to publish the results of customer requests, and hold themselves to implementing them?

Do you think that would create an environment somehow inimical to industry-shaking innovation? “Thanks for asking, Apple, but my input will only grind your development to a halt, or send it down blind alleys. Better not to ask any of us. Keep doing what you’re doing. I’d rather just be surprised.”

I’ve certainly witnessed a couple of cycles of this myself. One example I can tell you about was the development of Avid DNxHD, the predecessor to ProRes. That didn’t come from the minds of customers. That came from Avid, . I sat in rooms where Avid’s then-CTO made pitches to studio execs, watching them scratch their heads until the lightbulb came on.

I was merely the monkey who went on the road to show it to people. What is it? An intermediate codec? We already have that. I want uncompressed! Extra steps I don’t need. On and on. People didn’t want it. I SOLD it to them. It finally caught on, and when it did, it became huge.

You know what also became huge? DNxHD 36 in particular — far lower res than it had ever occurred to Avid to make available, but because the codec is so robust, it still looks fantastic. That was a customer-driven resolution that’s arguably the most popular format for post, even if it’s not typically part of the acquisition equation.

I’m not meaning to oversell my insider-ness. Like I said, my role on the team was “monkey”. And as hard as I worked to sell this workflow, it STILL took Apple a few years to sell the all-but identical (and for workflow, EXACTLY identical) DNxHD after its first arrival 4 years later.

I’m asking, though, because I’m curious. Are you seriously saying that you don’t think Apple can both hold itself accountable to a handful of customer feature requests and still innovate?

Because ironically enough, I think that the launch of FCPX shows that Apple can easily do both if they wanted to. A huge part of what I think made the launch of FCPX flawless — and for the record, I believe that I am the one and only person here to say it was FLAWLESS in every single particular; you’ve certainly fought me on this every time I’ve brought it up — is that they KNEW they launched it before it was ready for the same kinds of professional production that FCP Legacy customers expected, SAID that it was missing key features, and gave a roadmap for when those key features would arrive.

See? Accountability. It can be done.

At the same time, I absolutely believe companies have a responsibility to act in their own longer term interests, even when it provides short-term disasters for customers. Apple has certainly built itself by burning its own customer base to the ground repeatedly, and they’ve proven that it works. I think that X was probably the least painful for Apple in their history.

But I’m genuinely curious if you’re telling me that you’d rather not have Apple take advice from a customer-selected group of advisors who were bringing Apple a list similar to the one that the CPUG network puts together, and having Apple publicly respond with their take on the requests with a prioritized plan for addressing them. Is that so objectionable to you?

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I wasn’t talking about company health. I think Tim did a great job of explaining those issues. I was talking about the presence of the use of the applications. As editors, we focus on Media Composer, but I bet Pro Tools is pretty widely used in your market, too. And what about the TV news departments in your market? Newscutter or something else?”

We in this space have largely slept on Avid’s dominance in the newsrooms, which is not unlike their dominance in TV and film production, except on a global basis, rather than just inside a couple of cities.

Likewise sports. What Avid is doing there is absolutely insane. Even if you just watch sports, and aren’t in that field, you should take a look. They’re really way out front of what’s possible.

And for THESE folks (news and sports), Media Central is a thing. An actual thing. For Media Composer, not necessarily a thing. ☺

[Oliver Peters] “[Scott Witthaus] ” Quantel, now private, can afford, and even revel, in being really really niche”

Well, to be clear, Quantel is owned by the same venture capital group that picked up Snell. SAM (Snell Advanced Media) is the new blend of both companies combined at the direction of the venture capita group, not by the management of one company or the other. An arranged marriage, if you will.
“

And to be clear, SAM are not just reveling in being really, really niche. They’re growing the business 20% a year. There’s not a company on earth who wouldn’t kill for that.

I think that they’re potentially illuminative for Avid because Avid too is really, really niche! Editing, not niche. Hollywood (and Hollywood-like editing) is a niche. Sports is a niche. News is a niche. Pro audio is a niche. But even a combination of a LOT of niches may not necessarily scale up far enough for traditional metrics to play out in a way that broader markets expect.

[Scott Witthaus] “They certainly have a loyal following but with the stock price at near historic lows, one can’t say all is rosy in Avid-land”

Exactly my point. Take stock out of the picture. NOW what’s wrong with Avid? Nothing that can’t be fixed.

Every company has issues related to customer satisfaction, pace of development, competition, etc etc etc — and on every front, the majority of their customers feel the company is moving in the right direction.

Including on the issue of customer engagement! I mean, to Bill’s point about Apples and Oranges — here’s a fundamental difference between the Supermeet and the Avid customer CONVENTION — because that’s really what it was. Avid is hosting advisory boards with customer-selected representatives from every major market the company serves. They’re publicly taking input on feature requests, publishing the results, and holding themselves accountable for future outcomes. Apple sure ain’t. That’s not about money. That’s about how the company values customer input or doesn’t.

When I see a company that’s being THAT accountable, pushing ahead in key markets with compelling new offerings, and a customer base that’s energized, using any metric you care to come up with, THAT’s something you can build a BUSINESS on.

One’s ability to jump through the flaming hoops of oligarchy to appease the quarterly bloodlust of the market? Irrelevant to the ability to build a business on engaged customers. There’s no need to play that game.

But hey, what do I know? Nothing. I sold my Avid stock when it was at $13. It had been the one exception to my diversification strategy of never investing in a sector I work in, so I don’t have any skin in the game. And it would please me no end if the money truck backed up to the door of my friends there should the stock go back up to where I bought it at $49. ????

But I’m a fan of the industry, and I see the benefits that have come to people like SAM and Blackmagic who refuse to play. And even though when everything else is said and done, I may end my careers (this is my sixth I think) having made more from investing than I did from my jobs, I’m also happy when people say, “Enough. The market is not the boss of me. We can do better than this.”

Avid’s customers are saying that Avid is doing better than the market says. Better to spend your time pleasing the people who are happy with you doing what you love than chasing the people who say you aren’t good enough for them for reasons that aren’t actually important to you.

It’s the same advice I’d give my kids for their lives if I had kids who cared about my advice. ????

Besides, if we were choosing NLEs by stock performance, we’d all be using Premiere Pro. It’s a fine NLE, but that’s a terrible reason to choose it.

[Tim Wilson]

[Tony West] “[Tim Wilson] “If you’re “editing in the Browser” (or in Bins), you’re simply not going to be making the kind of frame-accurate and value-laden edits that I am making every single time with this method. ”

This statement is saying, if you are not editing this way you are not a Frame-accurate editor. Or, in other words your doing it wrong.
“

A) To be precise, you’re quoting me quoting Simon, and I wouldn’t actually have said it that way, and B) it’s not saying that at all.

[Tony West] “How would you find that clip, since you never bothered to organize anything in the bin or browser.”

Who said that? I said I never organized FIRST. Did you think that when I deleted something from the timeline that I threw it away? Deleted the footage from my drives? No, of course not. When I deleted it from the timeline, I put it where everybody throws things away: the bin. ????

Part of what we’re getting into here is job roles. My jobs ALWAYS started with my shoot. I had every project two-thirds edited in my head before I shook the interviewee’s hand and got back in my car to go start the edit, which really quite often did turn around just that quickly.

So not only did I label each tape, I marked what was on it. Shocking! I know!

Then when I digitized, each roll of tape had its own name. Again, shocking! I know!

Then I’d take that tape, put the whole thing on the timeline in one piece, and carve out the pieces I wanted. Anything that looked good went in a bin called….wait for it…B-roll….and anything else went in a bin called Unused. But in fact, most of my B-roll was SHOT as B-roll, literally as its own roll, so it was already in the bin as a reel. The reel just happened to be named B-roll.

One particularly complicated project was with a pair of scientists who were placing bands on sooty terns in the Dry Tortugas islands. I mic’d them both and let them work, with them talking to me and each other the whole time.

So maybe I’d be looking at Scientist A’s hands banding a bird while Scientist B was talking, and maybe I didn’t actually want the picture at all. So I’d use markers — crazy, I know, why would anybody do that — and sometimes even, wait for it, name the subclip based on what was in the clip!!!!!

Of course in this case, the shape of the conversation dictated where the B-roll was, so some of the b-roll never left the timeline. I just moved it to another track, directly connected to the A-roll. The bin was literally for nothing but footage I’d decided wasn’t worth using. Anything useful was already on the timeline, so I never needed to hunt through bins for it.

This worked just fine for me, editing no less than 40 and as many as100 half-hour episodes of TV a year, each with 4-6 segments, many of which spanned multiple reels. This one bird story took an entire box of 30-minute tapes, which I intentionally limited myself to because the film guy in me still believes that it’s part of your job as a shooter-producer to also be editing on location.

Always be editing.

(By the way, I wrote a story about one such shoot a few years back that somehow bubbled back up online and has been making the rounds on Twitter this week. I’m actually pretty proud of the writing on the article — it’s a story that involved me wading in the Everglades with alligators swimming around, and why I wasn’t wearing any underwear — but you’ll quickly see what I mean when I say that I was shaping the stories while I was shooting. I bet that most of you can imagine exactly how you’d cut a story like this.

“Before I Forget, Don’t Wear Any Underwear”

But I’ll concede that some of my disregard for over-organizing came down to how organized my tapes were, and an exceptional memory. I can’t tell you my phone number without looking it up, and I frequently get lost driving myself home, but this shoot was over 20 years ago, and I can tell you that I had 75 minutes of raw footage and the final package came in at 11 minutes.)

Now in practice, at the end of my A story, I had to start thinking somewhat more bricklike. Okay, this thing is 7 and a half minutes, the cold open is 45 seconds, credits are 1:10, intros to the next 2 stories add up to 1:15, I’m up to 10:40, leaving me 15:20 to get to 26 minutes, in two more segments with 2 minutes of black separating them.

Story 2 I’d usually keep pretty loose, and let it try to tell me something about how long it needed to be, but by the time I got to Story 3, the length was no longer flexible. It had to be exactly one length (ie, whatever was left) and not one frame more or less — but I built it the same way. It was the #3 segment because it wasn’t as important, so I never had as much footage, so it was still easy to throw it all on the timeline, and carve, carve, carve until I had what I needed.

To repeat the old joke about how to sculpt David — start with a block of marble and carve away anything that doesn’t look like David — that’s how I preferred to edit. Start with everything together, and carve away anything that doesn’t look like the story.

This gets to a larger conversation about style, and that is, what’s my role?

If my role is to collaborate as part of a larger team, maybe my only job is what we tend to assign to the function of assistant editors: log, group, rough edits, everything focused in a bin. I can imagine many AEs going for months without touching a timeline. Their work is no less editing, but it’s one KIND of editing that never applied to me.

I wouldn’t have wanted an assistant editor even if I could have afforded one, because it would have forced me to start my edits by looking at what’s in bins and putting that stuff in the timeline, additively, rather than starting with EVERYTHING on the timeline, and editing subtractively.

This is also to underscore that people determined to make Simon out to be somehow casting shade on X when he insists that none of this is NLE-specific that, in fact, NONE OF THIS is NLE-specific. It’s just not.

I’m going to make a casual observation that Simon did not, though, and it’s not something I feel terribly strongly about…but despite my yet-to-be-surpassed or indeed, yet-to-be-equaled enthusiasm for X by ANYONE in this forum, the parts of X that many people seem most excited about are exactly the opposite of the way I want to be editing.

Me, personally. But that doesn’t make me like X any less — hence my unparalleled enthusiasm — because I know that I could use it to edit the way I wanted to. One big window (ALWAYS my preference, going back to the 70s when I first started), one timeline, bins only being used for depositing things I’m not using.

I know you’ll sputter that I’m missing all this great stuff about skimming or whatever, but that’s the opposite of what I want to do. It just is.

Ironically enough, this is one reason I rejected Media Composer back in the day. The much-vaunted trim tools notwithstanding, it all felt way too binny in its approach. What they call “media management” is so oriented around “bin management” that it was irrelevant to me and the way I wanted to work.

My feeling in general about this kind of “prep every piece before you start putting things together” — yes yes, to be finessed into place on the timeline — approach is that it creates another job for me, when I already had plenty. I’m already the shooter, producer, writer, color grader, sound designer, music editor, compositor, animator, editor, AND NOW I get to also be the ASSISTANT EDITOR? No thanks.

It’s lovely that X takes on so many of these assistant-ish burdens, but like I said, I explicitly rejected those roles for myself, so X streamlining a bunch of tasks that I never took on was never part of its appeal to me. Nor did I ever assume that I couldn’t configure FCPX to work primarily subtractively. This isn’t about NLE choices. It’s about editing style.

Which is to say, the central metaphor holds. Do you prefer to start your project by tagging, sorting, trimming, etc., and THEN starting putting those somewhat polished pieces onto a timeline for final finessing, OR, do you prefer to start with everything in one place in the timeline, carving away everything that you feel doesn’t belong?

Additive, or subtractive?

For me, subtractive, all the way, every day. But I certainly understand the appeal of editing additively, especially if you have assistants. To me, though, anything much more than naming the reels is an obstacle to my editing. An extreme position, perhaps, but surely you’re not surprised by that. ????

Always be editing!

[Tim Wilson]

There’s a pretty robust thread in the FCPX Debates forum. Apple WWDC

As I’ve noted here before, that forum has largely sucked up the general-interest conversations that used to happen in this one, entirely regardless of whether they have anything to do with FCPX or not. While the majority of that forum has at least some FCPX in the mix, I’d say that the number who do 100% of their editing in FCPX is roughly the same as the folks do something approaching zero percent of their editing in X. Very diverse bunch.

I do encourage you all to add that forum to your rounds at least once a week just to see if there’s anything of interest cooking. I think you’ll find that there frequently is.

In fact, the hottest thread right now is explicitly not oriented toward ANY particular NLE, but is about editing style, whether one’s own approach is more additive (bricklaying) or subtractive (sculpture). In fact, the conversation has split off into three separate threads. ???? Here’s the most recent. More Bricklayers and Sculptors from Oliver and Simon

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “There’s not much in that supply chain of shared storage that Grant could make more cheaply. The biggest chunk is drives, which he isn’t going to make. Everyone buys from about 4 options. After that it’s the chassis and server card, which numerous Asian manufacturers have already brought out at pretty low cost.
“

Agreed, but I want to also note that cheap isn’t the only problem he’s tried to solve, by any means. The sharing aspect is also something that’s considerably more difficult than the drives themselves, and that too has been solved by a number of companies. Integrated ones like Avid have actually figured out how to do this at a far more compelling price point than was previously imaginable while also scaling up vastly higher, and there are cheap software-only solutions that ride on top of the storage of your choice, plus everything in between. There’s hardly anyplace to even theoretically slot another solution into that ecosystem.

Again, that’s the exact opposite of what Grant has done. There were huge opportunities for video IO, especially at the pricepoint he established. Colorgrading was on the rise, with Apple clearly punching a hole in the pre-BMD Resolve ecosystem with Color, but Grant blew it up even bigger by solving a number of related problems, including control surfaces and an attention span on the developer’s part. ????

Cinema cameras were on the rise, but affordably only being driven by DSLRs before Canon went all-in on actual video-oriented products, which was by no means a given was ever going to happen before Grant threw down.

DAW obviously going boldly where nobody ever imagined, via Fairlight. It’s still stupefying to me that Grant did this. Anyone who hasn’t read Marco Solorio’s take on this needs to — and if you have, read it again. ???? This is MASSIVE.

We also haven’t yet seen the productized version of ATEM switchers with Ultimatte brains built in, but you know it’s coming as the broadcast story gets built out. Bob Zelin’s fantastic NAB review pointed to several other gaps in Blackmagic’s story (notably, lens control), and I’m excited to see those filling in….

…but nowhere in here do disks and sharing figure as industry-wide problems to be solved. In fact, I’d say that the extent to which it’s a buyer’s market with so many cheap but really, really good solutions is part of the reason why it’s so brutal to be in the storage business. You can have fun if you’re as nimble as LumaForge or as focused as Avid, but a mid-sized company swinging for the fences is exactly the wrong size, trying exactly the wrong thing, to be entering this market right now.

Needless to say, when Blackmagic releases their new shared storage — four seats free with four seats of Resolve for $995 — you can add it to the list of things I’m wrong about. ????