[Tim Wilson]

Hi Bob,

Of course it is!

Also, if you want to drop me a note offline, I’ll try to contact him directly with the address we have on file. We never give out anyone’s address, but I’d be happy to let him know you’d like to get in touch. tim at creativecow dot net

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Me, too. However, let’s not forget that Adobe has also been doing essentially the same with Premiere Pro. Audio is largely from Audition, color correction (Lumetri) is totally SpeedGrade, and now the new title tool is using elements of Photoshop.
“

True! Buuuuuut…..Audition isn’t quite the scale of Fairlight, and it took Adobe longer than 5 months to integrate it. ???? And a little longer than that to integrate Photoshop as a title tool. ????

I’m totally with you on Lumetri, though. I do think it played a meaningful role on raising the game for grading using an NLE’s native toolset rather than an external application. Apple noticed, as did third parties who raised their own game for X as well. Actual GRADING toolsets, not just “color correction” are no longer “nice to haves”. They’re “must haves”.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “[Joe Marler] “I don’t see that, at least in TV news.”

Indeed, there are many areas where standards have plummeted to a pitiful low.”

When has TV news driven anything resembling aesthetics? It’s kind of the anti-aesthetic, and always has been. “Run and gun” comes from news, and points to the exact opposite of finesse. It’s never finished.

I do agree that that’s no excuse for not white balancing. You do THAT before you start running, and it ain’t that hard to do while you’re actually running, either. ????

But acknowledging the respect due to producers who DO care about production values under the gun, the fact that the worst of TV news is continuing to lower the bar of the lowest possible bar isn’t reflective of any trends in any other part of the industry. I mean, sports is done on the fly, and that stuff is looking amazing — sometimes through the application of technologies that we’d previously only seen in post.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “This is always going to come down to anecdotes, but in my world the standard of finishing expected by our clients keeps going up year on year.”

You’re correct on both counts, of course, which points to a third observation, that some anecdotes are very easy to extrapolate outward toward general applicability, and some are very easy to reject.

If finishing were finished, we’d be seeing fewer options for it, on every platform, in every context, and every pricepoint, when in fact the opposite is true. As I noted upthread, all of those are exploding.

As another example, you and I might swap anecdotes about how much we personally love disks, and how every one of our clients demands disk deliverables….but what does the market for DVD creation software look like? The question verges on rhetorical, because the answer verges on, “Market? What market?” Tools still exist, obviously, but it’s not a product category the way it was just a few years ago. Calling it a “niche” almost gives it too much credit. The market has spoken. Disks are done.

The market has spoken even more forcefully on finishing. This isn’t the decade of proliferating NLE options. It’s the decade of finishing going all the way mainstream, and expanding outward in every possible direction, at every price point, from free to Baselight. ???? Heritage providers of finishing solutions including Autodesk and SAM (formerly Quantel) doing well, a plethora of X plug-ins (to say nothing of expanding finishing toolsets in multi-host plugs like Boris FX Continuum, Sapphire, mocha)…

…PLUS the increasing finishing sophistication built in to hosts like Premiere Pro and X (Avid has always taken this seriously since Symphony, plus, well, Resolve, whose finishing capabilities are driving its adoption as an NLE, which is how Grant Petty tells us it’s most often being used.

[Joe Marler] “However the movie “Saved By Grace” was finished entirely in FCPX: https://www.fcp.co/final-cut-pro/articles/1830-hollywood-veteran-lance-bache...”

I love this story. Couldn’t possibly make a stronger case for the to which finishing is more critical than ever, “even” if it’s being done in FCPX.

(And I am genuinely mystified how anyone could equate the rise of FCPX with any kind of decline of finishing. Are we back to skateboard videos as the new benchmark of the reality? Go to YouTube and look up “Skateboard Video RED camera” and “Skateboard Phantom camera” and be prepared to be amazed by YEARS of 4K skateboard videos at up to 7000 frames per second that will blow your mind.)

The first thing to note is that Steve’s approach to imagery is impeccable. I’m delighted to be following Steve on Instagram, where even his goofing-around touristy stuff looks better than what some folks shoot for a living. ????

For Saved By Grace, he was shooting on two RED Dragons in 4K, ProRes 4444, with a “classical” film workflow that included dailies, sync sound, the whole shebang.

Here’s what he has to say about finishing in that article. I added some highlights in bold that Steve may wish to comment on, but I think he says it quite well here. He spent a lot of time on finishing inside FCPX, with a diverse handful of third party tools, plus a native toolset that has been driven by the demand for more and better finishing tools.

I worked probably 6 weeks finishing the edit in my home studio and then handed off the audio files for the mix. While the mix was being completed the Director and I began creating a look for the film and color grading.

Although I did export the final show to Resolve 12 for color timing we were not happy with what we were getting (not to mention all the crashes), and went back to Redcine to do most of the color. There were radical white balance problems between the 2 Dragons, and Redcine has a great white balance tool.

We didn’t go back to Resolve at all. Instead, we found the combination of RedcineX and Color Finale inside FCP X to be a fantastic combo. I did the first color pass using the Alchemy tool inside Redcine, which is great for creating a really nice and filmic first-pass contrast and look.

The problem with Alchemy is it is only available in the metadata in Redcine and it does not show up in any NLE. So once we approved the look in Redcine I would render 4K 4444 XQ ProRes files out and cut those in to the final reels in FCPX, on top of the Red raw files. From there I would use Color Finale for the final look, scoping everything along the way using the FCP X scopes which I feel are far and away the best software scopes in the industry.

We used CoreMelt SliceX with Color Finale to track power windows. It worked great and was such a pleasure to do inside FCP X. I also added some adjustment layers, using the Color Board for final tweaks.

Scopes! He used SCOPES!

Does this sound like somebody who thinks finishing is finished? NO. And while Resolve turned out to be a no-go for him (a true-as-it-needs-to-be anecdote that may note), he beautifully illustrates my point about the rich ecosystem for advanced finishing using plug-ins for X, and X’s own finishing toolset, working with Redcine, RedcineX, Color Finale, Alchemy, SliceX, AND FCPX. So, one editing toolset, seven finishing toolsets. THAT’s what I’m talking about.

On its own, yes, Steve’s story is “just another anecdote”, but one that clearly aligns with the overwhelming direction of the industry to more emphasis on finishing, not less.

This does not discount for one second, for one iota, the validity of a “finishing doesn’t matter anymore” for any individual producer. If it’s true for you, it’s as true as it needs to be.

But to attempt to extrapolate that into any industry-wide trend, even one that includes YouTube, replete with its Phantoms, REDs, Blackmagic Cinema Cameras, and 35mm DSLRs, is objectively, factually, demonstrably simply not true at all. The most characteristic characteristic of digital content creation in the 21st century’s second decade is exponentially expanding options for finishing, driven by real-world demand.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “The interesting thing with Resolve is this. Yes, one person can do it all with a single tool. However, a small shop can also set up 3 “hero” rooms optimized for different tasks – editing, grading with control surfaces, and mixing with a mixing surface. And the beauty is that it’s all using the same app – no need for project translation.
“

This story is absolutely astounding to me. That Grant Petty managed to update and mainstream a true alternative to Pro Tools and release it for $299….or zero, if you think of it as being thrown in for free with Resolve….I’m speechless. In any other year, the industry would be howling about a truly viable, robust standalone $299 alternative to Pro Tools, with what looks to be a considerably more affordable approach to control surfaces…but he just threw it into Resolve! And expanded the scope of what it can do for free!!!

I mean, I do love that his specific goal was to make high-end audio tools accessible to video editors rather than saddle up on Pro Tools per se, but still. What an amazing story.

I was the Senior Product Marketing Manager for Avid Xpress Studio back in 2004, and I saw firsthand how difficult it is to have THIS level of audio and video production share the same software real estate so to speak. Pro Tools has been part of Avid for over 20 years and it STILL hasn’t happened.

Your guess is as good as mine if this is even vaguely on the agenda at Apple, who bought emagic back in 2002. Not that Logic is attempting to do what PT and Fairlight are, but its significantly lesser relative ambition should have made it easier to integrate, but 15 years later, not so much.

That Grant could update, mainstream, AND INTEGRATE Fairlight and Resolve in a matter of months is entirely unprecedented — and he managed to blow performance through the roof AND the price through the floor!

When people say that not much of consequence happened at NAB, I’m floored. Well, I guess only if you don’t do anything with NLEs, color grading, or audio. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[David Lawrence] ” Finishing is changing, but it’s certainly not becoming less relevant, and won’t long as people continue to pay to see movies in a theater. Try grading a stereoscopic DCP for stereo projection on your laptop and you’ll quickly see what I mean. ???? That’s just one example.”

Finishing is becoming more relevant to every level of production, including corporate, local, whatever. For that matter, Apple are the ones who blew this wide open with Color in the first place. It was perhaps largely the realm of specialists before then, but absolutely not since.

Resolve is certainly doing its part to finish knocking down the walls (SEE WHAT I DID THERE) with apex-class tools available for anywhere from free to $299, and significantly extending the utility of control surfaces for as little as a few hundred bucks, up to a genuinely game changing box at all of $1000. Look at all the YouTubers shooting with Phantoms, REDs, and Blackmagic’s cinema cameras and tell me that $1000 is an elite price. It just isn’t — as indeed, FREE is not either. ????

I’ve also been enjoying watching Baselight and Mistika helping extend the market at the high end, too. They’re helping put an end to the fiction that heavy iron is passé — not in a world where you need heavy lifting it ain’t. Autodesk and SAM (formerly Quantel) are continuing to thrive as never before.

That’s not counting ever-more-powerful tools built into NLEs (eg Lumetri) and powerful FX plug offerings for X, including Color Finale ($99), Colorista ($199), and cineLook (formerly $99, now free if you join CGM).

I’d argue that top to bottom, there’s no ecosystem anywhere in our creative space that’s richer, more robust, more diverse or growing more quickly than finishing. Not even editing. Not even close.

[Tim Wilson]

Hello Ra,

I’m not sure what happened, but for some reason that post had been set to Read Only! With millions of posts, this happens sometimes.

I’ve flipped the switch back to the proper position, so you should be able to post on that thread now. Let me know if you have any problems, and I’ll take another look.

Thanks so much for the kind words about Creative COW, and thank you for contributing!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[greg janza] “the notion of pro res being a selling point to stay with Apple is kind of ridiculous.”

I think it more gets to the “captivity” of the Apple platform. There are people in this very forum who’ve expressed how open they’d be to considering no longer using Macs if there was an easy way to provide deliverables in the ProRes format that the client specifies as part of the contract. There are more options than Mac folks typically acknowledge, but none of them is easy as just having a Mac.

This is of course exactly how Apple intended it to work.

In that sense, it’s quite realistic indeed. It would be lovely world if we were the ones in charge of specifying what the client received as deliverables. ???? But that ain’t THIS world.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “The old mechanical instruments like that hold value – the electronic stuff – all a bunch of junk. “

I was going to say that the Roland 808 is an exception — arguably the sole instrument after the B3 to really change the world, and as revolutionary as any of them. Roland was so far ahead of their time that they chalked them up as a flop, and stopped selling them in 1983, just 3 years after their introduction. They were $1200 at the time, but one in decent condition will run you $5000 these days. Mint will run $35,000 or more.

Part of the reason for all this: transistors. It was an analog machine, and definitely had some ghosts in it that all-chip machines managed to banish. More reliable, but less soul.

From The Verge: How the Roland TR-808 revolutionized music

And the trailer for a fantastic documentary simply called 808.

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But going back to your first post in the thread, where you wrote:

[Bob Zelin] “So the better musicians are open, and EXCITED to see changes in how things work, and the old bags learn what they need to learn, and get angry and upset when changes are presented to them. “

I love that. Endless curiosity. That’s the ticket. Once you think you’ve seen, done, or learned everything important, you’re done.

[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “and I’d like to hope that if something is put forward for discussion then any element of it is up for discussion without having someone shout at you for discussing the “wrong” thing, especially on a forum that can wander OT as much as this one.”

Fair enough. I hope your reference to (me?) “shouting at you” is a simile and doesn’t reflect what you feel I was actually doing. I thought I was being uncharacteristically calm…but since I’m so rarely calm, I don’t know exactly what that’s like. ???? Apologies nonetheless.

And I do think that it’s always appropriate to consider the propriety of similes. We’ve actually turned THOSE discussions into some of our most productive. It turns out that FCPX is exactly like a car after all. ????

Doug is right that imagery related to terrorism shouldn’t be taken lightly. Some similes are inevitably going to chafe. I certainly breezed past that, and I shouldn’t have. My apologies for that too.

That said, “Stockholm Syndrome” has been used in relation to Apple customers for YEARS. The first reference I can find in a speedy search is from 2007, Do Apple Users Just Have Stockholm Syndrome, by Jacob Rosenberg. He’s the head of Infrastructure Engineering at Bloomberg, and asking the same kinds of questions that Michael is asking, for the same reasons, with 2 additional notes.

One, Rosenberg is quick to point out that he’s merely adapting David Habib’s formulation of Technology Vendor Stockholm Syndrome. David was an infrastructure guy at AOL, so he was speaking very VERY broadly, and didn’t mention Apple at all. So far as I can tell, Rosenberg was the first…

And my second note is to underscore that this was 10 years ago. Since then, the combination of “Apple” and “Stockholm Syndrome” has been used MANY MANY times.

The next major round of it was in a series of articles in 2009, started by a Strand Consulting think piece, picked up by 9to5Mac, and best summed up by ZDNet, Are iPhone Users Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

The point Strand made is that when Apple customers adamantly defend Apple’s tardiness to things like 3G (again, this was 2009), it slows down innovation across the entire industry. We’re all better off, says Strand, when we push Apple forward, rather than wholeheartedly embrace its limitations, and dismiss innovation elsewhere as irrelevant.

In 2011, an editorial in the Guardian with the headline The deification of Steve Jobs is Apple’s greatest marketing triumph to date picked apart the dynamics of public grief in the context of Steve’s passing, but also in the context of Jobs being revered in the vast swaths of tech that he helped destroy. But mostly in the context of how weird it was to talk about “love” in the context of tech at all.

Last month the New York Times ran an editorial entitled You Love Your iPhone. Literally. It argued that people respond similarly to images of the Apple logo and images of the Pope; iPhone users, the author stated, after performing tests on babies, literally loved their iPhones. I was shown this editorial by a PR. Even he was amazed that a company should get such coverage or, to give it its proper term, idiotic drooling. Again, this is odd, because the technology Jobs created is destroying newspapers. It makes me wonder if my trade has developed, en masse, Apple-themed Stockholm Syndrome. We love our murderer.

In 2014, Apple Gives Customers the Stockholm Syndrome (a particularly clumsy locution) was written from a developer’s perspective at WWDC that year, bringing up many of these same points in that specific context.

Then last year, IBS Intelligence came at it from the perspective of banking, Apple Pay, Stockholm Syndrome and Sinking Ships: The Future of Mobile Payments.

This isn’t even close to all of the examples. There are hundreds, but I chose a small handful to represent just a few of how many different angles from which people have been poking at this question for at least 10 years now. For better and worse, the combination of Apple users and Stockholm Syndrome has been mainstreamed in multiple industries and contexts for a very long time.

I’ve got some examples of this phenomenon, by whatever name, from the world of FCP in particular (more Legacy than X, actually) that I’ll save for the part of the thread where we talk about the points Michael raises. ????