[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Avid Connect had 1300 PAID attendees, who came in a couple of days early to be there. This number has been increasing each year for the 4 years that it’s been held. Compare this to the attendance at the various FCPworks sessions, which were free. I mean no offense, here, as these were good and valuable sessions. But the difference in numbers is striking. And Supermeets don’t count. They are circuses with people attending just for the show, whether they care about FCP or not.”

Agreed on all counts (since you were agreeing with me ????).

I’m a big fan of the FCPWORKS sessions, but you’re right, not comparable in scope, and the Supermeets haven’t been all-Apple for ages. Not only have Adobe and Blackmagic had huge roles, Blackmagic has given out the big prizes, and many of the headliners (say, Dody Dorn, ACE this year) have either not been associated with ANY particular NLE, or primarily use Avid. Last year’s headliners were Resolve, Rob Legato (who does a LOT of things not even vaguely related to editing, including Second Unit direction and miniatures, but he’s also been heavily on the road promoting Adobe Premiere Pro), and HP’s Jeff Wood.

It’s almost like, combine the FCPWORKS sessions with the Supermeets, have them go for the entire weekend before the show, and charge a lot more money. It could totally be done. I’d never want to say for a second that Avid has the ONLY engaged user base or anything like it.

But I’m saying that you can’t understand the fundamental landscape of the industry without taking into account how energized Avid’s customers are right now. They’re not just bullish. They’re stampeding, in a good way. Avid is getting the basics right, and customers are responding.

Wall Street isn’t, which is why I’m saying f*** ’em. All any business really needs to do is make more than it spends while offering products that their customers want. Everything else is a distraction. It’s hard to turn away from what looks like easy money, but Avid is among many companies learning that it’s harder than it looks. ????

Blackmagic (and again, to a lesser but growing extent, Quantel/SAM) has shown the advantages of focused intent, even if that focus can also be expressed as proliferating offerings. There’s unity of intent, all around image quality.

(This is a teensy sidebar, but can you imagine how much more annoying Grant’s life would be if he had to justify his profit margins to Wall Street? I bet Grant can ???? which he’s never going to go public. ???? I swear, pretty much every problem of Avid’s would go away if they’d just get out of the market. Other than the stock, they really don’t have any big problems, not in practice.)

[Richard Herd] “I keep hoping for a storage solution from Blackmagic.”

Nothing to do with image quality. ????

More broadly, Grant has said that he wants to solve Big Problems.

The first big one was an affordable way to get high quality video into a computer (Decklink). Then, how to manage that video around the facility (Grant being a TV and large post guy, leading to routers).

Then how to affordably improve the images (Resolve, Cintel, Teranex).

Then how to acquire even better images affordably (cameras).

Distribute both in-house and online (switchers, TV studio support, Web Presenter, duplicators, etc).

Bring top-tier DAW capabilities to video guys (Fairlight).`

BIG problems.

Cheap, reliable shared storage is a problem that’s already solved. What’s the breakthrough in sharability, affordability, or performance that Blackmagic could create that’s better than what, say, LumaForge or Avid NEXIS (or QNAP or G-Tech) is already doing? My guess is, nothing. The breakthroughs have broken through. Blackmagic has never been interested in putting a badge on something for the sake of owning every product in the pipeline.

The one exception is play-out servers, but it looks to me like Blackmagic will skip all that and focus on OTT. Good move.

Monitors are almost interesting to me for them. Blackmagic has obviously done some great stuff with monitoring and viewfinders…but a better, more affordable monitor than what LG or Dell is doing now (did you see their stuff at NAB, or the InfoComm announcements? Yowza!), or pushing out past Flanders, HP, et al? Add to this my guess that the move to iMac Pro is going to put a bit of a chill on that market, and I don’t see them going much further down this road than they already are.

I’ve got a whole riff on what I DO see from them that I’ll save for another time, but for now, that’s what I’d point people to. Grant’s vision of solving Big Problems. I don’t see any Big Problems regarding affordable, flexible shared storage that need solving.

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “[Oliver Peters] “There’s a Fortune magazine article (6/15 issue) coming out about Adobe. Apparently subscription numbers, income, and stock prices are all up”

Too bad that hasn’t worked for Avid. “

The big reason why is that adding subscription software to the mix wasn’t fundamentally transformative. The majority of Avid’s customers have been renting everything — not just the Avid software, but the computers, storage, monitors, the whole kit and kaboodle. It’s the Hollywood way, where you rent everything: cameras, lenses, lights, dollies, cranes, locations.

Yeah, this started changing a bit with Adrenaline in 2003, but even most of those got sold into the rental ecosystem, and I’d guess that dang near all of the software-only versions of Media Composer have been going to people who either rented or bought previous systems. And I personally met thousands of editors over my years there, and I could maybe fill a few tables of Texas Hold ‘Em with people who didn’t have service policies.

Avid’s move to “service contract or no upgrades” had FAR more to do with preventing another Sarbanes-Oxley bollixing (where they’d provided what THEY thought was a free upgrade, but the DOJ said no, you should have charged for it; now you get to restate a debit for what you SHOULD have charged against everyone who wasn’t under a service contract) than creating a new revenue stream.

The larger issue is that Adobe doesn’t have anything to teach Avid, because they’re not in the same business. In most practical ways, they’re not even in the same industry anymore.

The company most like Avid is actually Blackmagic, which was revealed more clearly than ever around NAB. During the show, Dan May was very plain that the company is now built around Resolve. Once you understand that, a whole lot of other things make sense, including Grant’s revelation that the reason they got into the camera business was to revolutionize the quality of images that you could affordably feed into Resolve!

All those other products, including the ones that predate Resolve (routers and such) are now presented as part of that orbit, even if people can and do buy that stuff without also buying Resolve. Resolve is nevertheless at the heart of it, even as the price becomes not just free, but they keep piling more stuff into it for the price.

The same dynamic is true at Avid, where software whose price approaches zeros is at the heart of an orbit of products might be selling without Media Composer, but unlike Blackmagic (who can sell cameras and routers to people who don’t use Resolve), there’s little about Avid’s product lineup that makes sense apart from other Avid products.

They’re obviously breaking away with NEXIS storage, explicitly messaging that it’s the best professional media production storage, regardless of platform or NLE. They’re also breaking away from this in news and sports, where I think theirs are by far the most compelling offerings in the industry. First down overlays for football broadcasts have nothing to do with editing.

Avid Audio with Pro Tools is different, with even fewer degrees of latitude. Ain’t nobody talking about free Pro Tools, and as much as I think Blackmagic’s Fairlight story is the biggest news in the industry since….well, since Resolve in 2009….I think we’re years away from seeing just how disruptive it ultimately is. Blackmagic is explicit: they’re not going after audio pros, but rather video guys who do audio, which is exactly the opposite direction of Pro Tools. Pro Tools, like Media Composer, like dang near everything else Avid does, is made for specialists.

A big answer to the question of how Grant gets away with doing what he does with Blackmagic is that he doesn’t have to answer to Wall Street, or any other global cabal of capitalist ruffians. He only has to make enough more than he spends to keep the wolves away from the door and have as much fun as he wants to have. His people are happy, his customers are happy, and the rest is nobody’s business but his. Good!

Quantel learned that lesson. They saw that they had plenty of juice left to run a business — as long as it wasn’t a publicly-traded business. So management bought the company back in 2000, and introduced iQ and Pablo in short order. The post-Snell acquisition rebranding as SAM has led to 20% YoY growth. They’re doing fine.

I think Avid is doing pretty much everything they need to be doing. Maybe the most surprising takeaway from NAB is that Avid may have the most robust, most engaged user base in our part of the industry. I’m not talking about comparing it to an iPhone event, even though it certainly compared favorably with WWDC. But within THIS industry? Seriously, did you pay attention to what was happening at the Avid Connect event? Probably not — pretty much, if you weren’t there, you probably didn’t need to — but I’ve never seen anything like it, in any industry, and I daresay none of you have either.

My point being that if they didn’t keep banging their head against the wall of quarterlies, Sarbox, and all the hoops they have to jump through to amuse the oligarchs who are running the world’s shadow governments, Avid could have as happy and robust a future as they wanted to. I’m thinking that they’re not even considering this, believing that they can have it all, and maybe they can…but I’d love to see them able to focus ALL their attention on just developing cool stuff (check) and engaging their customers (check), and be delivered from the rest of the mishegoss.

[Tim Wilson]

[David Lawrence] “Great new post on Oliver’s blog, deep diving into Simon’s recent Bricklayers and Sculptors thread. Thanks for posting Oliver, and thanks Simon for giving us an in-depth look at how you organize and edit.

https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2017/06/07/bricklayers-and-sculptors/“

And here is Simon’s own deep dive, Always Be Editing: Sculptors & Bricklayers Revisited

My favorite passage, which very much describes my own style of editing:

Let me be clear that I am working exclusively subtractively. A lot of people approach string-outs by successively adding selected clips from the Browser or Bins, but with this method all my clips are already on the timeline and I am taking away anything I don’t want. And by “removing” I mean performing Ripple Edits which reduce the overall length of my timeline.

(Some editors approach this subtractive method a different way, which is to shift the sections they don’t want onto a hidden track leaving gaps where it’s been removed. Although there’s a certain organisational elegance to this way of doing it, I believe it misses out on most of the key benefits of the method. You’re not getting the same instant feedback as to how much you are reducing the overall volume of source material and you are not reaping the huge benefits that flow from seeing one clip transition into another, which we’ll be looking at later.)

What is important for me about this process is that each edit is not a rough approximation but a very precise set of decisions about what I want to use. 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.

The point to grasp is that instead of “making bricks” for use later on, I am already editing in the strictest sense. I am focused on a timeline that is going to form the basis of the final edit. I am already thinking editorially (in the sense of creative timeline-based editing) and not wasting any time merely thinking organisationally.

It’s an elegant argument laid out with considerable context and nuance, so please don’t respond too quickly to the comment here without reading that — and by all means, feel free to comment directly on the article of course! — but that really does get to the heart of it to me.

I used to feel guilty that I wasn’t doing nonlinear editing the “right” way because I was eschewing so many of the NLE-specific media management tools I was offered. I’d tried to, but I found that it was taking me ridiculously longer to edit in an NLE vs. what I’d been spending on tape. By getting all of that back out of my way, I was finally liberated to focus on the EDIT.

I’ll leave this part of the conversation to the folks who are still editing for a living, but I’m really enjoying this.

A reminder as you read it that Simon explicitly said that he wasn’t talking about choices in NLEs, but choices in editing style.

Take a read, and dive back in, either there or here.

Always Be Editing: Sculptors & Bricklayers Revisited

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Maybe they use Adobe products at work and make tutorials for Adobe products in their free time? Maybe they make movies with their friends who use Adobe products so they do too in order to make collaboration easier? Maybe they chose it because that’s what the filmmakers they follow us? Maybe you could find actual hobbyists themselves and ask?”

No need to ask. Look around YouTube. There’s no shortage of hobbyists using Adobe CC. If anything, I’d say that the number has been increasing over the last few years. The tutorial data point is critical — the number of non-pros making Adobe tutorials has skyrocketed of late.

I say non-pros, because I think that a number of them are following a business model pioneered by Andrew Kramer here at Creative COW before he went into orbit as Video Copilot — skillful hobbyists who use their video tutorials as the springboard to what becomes a very good living. His skills (including his intelligence, drive, and personal charisma) are not replicable (even if the projects, minus the charisma and intelligence, are frequently copied), but the path he’s shown is true. Skills making Adobe YouTube tutorials CAN turn into a professional living, which we’ve not seen as broadly with other companies.

Indeed, nobody has been more engaged with that community than Adobe. That’s much of what their purchase of the Behance community was about, and why you can see Adobe’s footprint in, let’s call it pre-professional or para-professional video, extend far beyond YouTube to Facebook and (even moreso) Instagram. This is Adobe’s wheelhouse. They don’t have to do anything different to go after those folks. They’ve got them, and their reach is growing.

Besides, as you’ve pointed out before, Andrew, these prices have been set for YEARS: Resolve free since 2009, FCPX since 2011, CC since 2013, etc etc. It’s absolute nonsense to point to price sensitivity as a serious issue, and even more nonsense to call it out as more true for hobbyists. It’s simply not, and people saying that it is betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how pros work, how hobbyists work, recent history, and quite simply, the most basic YouTube search results. I have no idea how anybody can think that this is an issue based on anything other than their own vivid imaginations.

[Bob Zelin] “And these “toys” cost a lot more than $49.99. If you are serious about your hobby, you find the money to get your toys.”

Seriously! The idea that hobbyists are cheap is absolutely nonsense.

Bob, you and I discussed seeing this even in the 90s, when a “cheap” used Media 100 + drives + a “real” computer to run it on would start in the $20,000+ range ($50,000 new for what was then the “so cheap it can’t possibly be pro” kid in town) — PLENTY of hobbyists were doing this. Not much more than a handful of guitars and a used car.

Indeed, I was living on an island at the time, in a town of 7000 people in the middle of nowhere, and my neighbor’s kid was given the choice of a car, a boat, or a Media 100 for his 18th birthday, and he picked the Media 100. A teenager picking an NLE over a car or a boat? No-brainer for the dedicated hobbyist. Who presumably is also willing to forego sex. ????

Hobbyists certainly blew up by the turn of the decade with DV cameras, the pinnacle of which was the Panasonic DVX100 (which popularized 24p for the masses), introduced in 2002 for $4000. Also VERY popular, the Canon XL2, for $5000.

Back then, that was real money. ????

Speaking of which, I encourage anyone who wants to equate hobbyists and “cheap” to spend time with some hobbyist photographers. The money hobbyists are spending is staggering. Easily dwarfs what many pros here are spending on video gear.

Anyway, I’ve been as bad about this as anyone, but it would be kinda cool if we brought the conversation back around to this video, WHICH IS AWESOME, rather than bringing up the same things flying around on a half dozen other threads where they’d be perfectly ON topic.

So what’d y’all think of the VIDEO? ???? ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Up to real-time 8K on high-performance hardware.
“

8K HDR RAW no less, with the toolsets necessary for high-end VFX feature film workflows that we only rarely touch on in this forum, but are daily conversations in say, our Resolve forum. There’s really no difference at all between high-end and low-end editorial toolsets. None worth talking about. But for finishing and conform, HUGE differences, even though they’re not the kind of thing that shows up on spec sheets.

Plus the things that high-end pro vendors always provide, like 24-7 support, overnight parts replacement, etc etc.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “A video from our annual meeting this week, if you have about 90 minutes to kill ☺”

That’s Bob Zelin in the thumbnail, so the operative word is definitely “kill” — as in, he might kill you if you don’t watch! ????

Thanks for sharing this! I’ll check it out! Please don’t hurt me!

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Zimmermann] “I’m using FireFox 53.0.3 (32 bit). “

That’s what I have too, running Windows 7 and 10 on various machines, and they’re all working for me. Maybe check your Flash settings? Anyway, I’ll keep looking into this.

[Todd Zimmermann] “Is there a limit to the number lines available for a signature or am I doing something wrong to cause the new browser info not to show? “

Good question! I’ll look into this and let you know what I find….

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Zimmermann] “Right when you said they all work you, which I thought they would, I thought I’ll bet they’ll work in chrome which they do. That problem is solved. “

Chrome is the overwhelming favorite among our members and visitors (more than everyone else put together with room to spare, on both Mac and PC), but I’d still like to make sure that they’re working for everyone.

What were you using that wasn’t playing them?

I’m afraid I have no expertise in Vegas, though, or frankly, much of anything anymore. ???? You’ll have to leave that to the experts in the Vegas forum.

Good luck! And thanks again!

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Zimmermann] “do you experience the same thing I’m experiencing?”

Actually, no! They’re all working for me. I’ve tried a dozen or so, including the specific numbers 2 and 50, and all started playing right away.

So this is the part where I ask you about browser, platform, desktop or mobile, etc. related to your specific configuration.

We’ll get there!

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for the heads up, Todd! We’ll take a look….

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW