[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “Perhaps you should have made the boundaries of discussion clearer when you made the original post :)”

Well, I’d like to hope that people would watch a video before commenting on it…and the comment on the actual video….but the distinction between debate and kvetching may apparently be too nuanced. ????

IT’S NOT MEANT TO BE LITERAL….but as a simile, Stockholm Syndrome is perfectly apt. More than the question whether your commitment to Apple is not only greater than Apple’s commitment to you — which for most people, isn’t really a question anymore — it’s raising the question of whether your commitment to Apple might be at the detriment to your long-term best interests.

It’s a much more nuanced question than “Does Apple care about pros” , which was always tired. The more relevant question, and the one that Michael explores in a very interesting way is, does Apple’s long-term vision for Apple make it likely that they’ll deliver the products and services that I need to fulfill my own long-term vision for MY company….or might Apple’s well-acknowledged (even by its fans) strategy of NOT pursuing the highest-end performance or expandability, with computers that are iterated very slowly, force limitations on our growth that we would not otherwise impose?

It’s not an anti-Apple position, nor does it even a little bit imply that Apple doesn’t care about pros. For that matter, Apple has only a smart part to play in the workflows that Panavision or Hollywood-style production at large touch on. But all of those other folks are going pedal to the metal to expand in every direction — storage, throughput, cameras, grading, monitoring, software for other parts of the production, etc etc.

But Apple’s role is typically an important one, especially in Hollywood, historically the most Apple of towns, but increasingly less so, for exactly some of the reasons Michael lays out, and that Greg touches on his his post here. Not “ANTI” Apple, but, “Hmmm, if Apple gave me the solution I needed, I’d be happy to pay for it…but they haven’t, so I’m moving on.” That was certainly my own story.

Michael raises the stakes because he’s in a leadership position that carries considerable responsibility not just for Panavision, but for every production that Panavision touches, in Hollywood and beyond, and he has to look many years down the road. These are exactly the kind of questions he NEEDS to be asking….

…even if you don’t. ????

Certainly the Hollywood/Panavision angle skews the conversation, but that’s pretty much the definition of high-profile. ???? There are very few people of his stature willing to think out loud in front of a room full of people ready to pounce…plus, say, the internet…..so I think that actually discussing what he’s saying might be especially productive.

We as a forum mini-community are actually pretty good at thinking about this stuff and discussing it with each other, so I’d like to give it a try again here.

????

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Andrew,

I’m not sure that this is the best forum for this question. Can you tell me more about the software you’re using to create the files? Are you using some kind of playback or presentation software on the outbound side?

Maybe somebody here will indeed be able to help, but my first reaction is that I’d like to know more information first!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for posting those, Simon! I’ve got one more to add to the mix, in the COW’s tutorial library, where you’ll find quite a few more of Simon’s juicy goodness. ????

Blackmagic Design Fusion Expressions & Macros

In this one, I happen to combine two of Simon’s Expressions tutorials, including one of the ones in the post above, with lots more to follow.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “Looks like the Redshark team thought Resolve 14 was the standout from NAB”

Me too!

Quite a few other folks as well, including the venerable, pioneering, and all-around awesome Marco Solorio at One River Media, who was raving about it on his Instagram account. They were such passionate and eloquent posts that I wound up screencapping them and retweeting from the COW’s official account.

You can click to open them in a larger window to read them, but I also pasted the text below. Keep in mind that this is social media stuff typed into his phone from the show floor, and not his typical level of finesse, but you’ll definitely get a feel for how excited he is. I’ll have my own lengthy write-up later, but for now, I’ll also add a comment or two.

Say hello to our future audio post-production solution! ???? For YEARS I’ve been begging the audio gods for a solution that would finally do away with our ProTools limitations and problems (which includes our large 40-channel ProControl mixing console) and FINALLY the answer has been RESOLVED.

YES, PUN INTENDED.

Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve now fully incorporates the EXTENSIVE Fairlight DAW solution right within Resolve. Everything from mono to 22.2 surround and a slew of countless other powerful features (1000 real-time tracks with EXTREMELY low latency, anyone?). My excitement for this is unparalleled (including the fact that it’s COMPLETELY MODULAR both vertically and horizontally). [ed note: emphasis added]

As some of you know, my audio background stretches back to the 80’s and 90’s, where I got my professional start in the industry, as a chief engineer in a couple of Bay Area recording studios and to this day maintain a solid audio foundation in our workflows. I absolutely CANNOT WAIT to start using this once it’s finally available for release (they’re still adding features and making it ready for prime time).

I still have a lot more to see at NAB in the next few days, but this, THIS is currently my top pick of the show. I spent 90% of day 1 at the Blackmagic booth and Fairlight is partially to blame, LOL! So excited! Expect an extensive article write-up in the coming weeks!

Take note of things like up to 22.2 surround and 1000 real-time tracks. This is serious, serious stuff.

Also note that the 1000 rt tracks are with the support of a $6000 accelerator card (may sound like a lot to a video person, but trust me, in audio world, this is fantastic news, at a classically BMD-disruptive price), but Grant Petty says that a “typical” computer should be able to hand 60 tracks in real time with no problem.

Of course, not everyone needs that much audio power, but it’s “free” with Resolve, which now costs $295, and does vastly more for free now than it did before, so even the FREE version is a major “price reduction”! ????

Honestly, if the story was just “Blackmagic Design releases a software-only Fairlight for free, or $295 for the full version, supporting 60 tracks in real time, with an optional acceleration card and a completely modular, expandable control surface” — THAT would be the biggest story at NAB in any year since….well, since Blackmagic did something like this with DaVinci.

Note again that Marco mentions the “COMPLETELY MODULAR” (his all caps) board. To me, the second biggest story at NAB happened before NAB, also with Blackmagic and the introduction of the Resolve Mini Panel. The flypack and rackmount crowd is going nuts for Mini, but for me, this hits the sweet spot between exposing the full range of Resolve’s power for editing, with a control surface at a size and cost that an editor can relate to.

That is, even if they couldn’t afford the $29,995 Resolve Advanced Panel, most of the colorists I know feel its priced about right for what it does and how it feels. This has always been the cruiser class….but there’s no way in hell that I’d consider it. But the much smaller Mini Panel for $995? The absolutely most no-brainer product I’ve seen in ages.

So if Grant comes up with a compelling price on a board that I can right-size according to my own needs, I think that that lights the fuse on something big.

This is starting to get into my stuff rather than Marco’s, but I do want to note that there’s no precedent for this story, the (apparently so far) elegant integration of a massive new toolset, while dramatically boosting performance (no bloat here fellas, not at these speeds), and demolishing the price…. although the DaVinci acquisition and dropping the price of Teranex from $70,000 to $1395 while adding features and formats and reducing the size were quite the prequels! Still, this is way, way past those imo.

Back to Marco a couple of days later:

With NAB 2017 officially complete, I can officially and undeniably confirm that Blackmagic Design’s integration of Fairlight into DaVinci Resolve is, by far, my top pick of the show. Nothing else even came close in terms of wow factor for me.

As a longtime sound/mix engineer (with our own mixing/recording studio services), this is a MAJOR deal for us. We’ve been extremely upset with Avid’s legacy user support for 2-3 years now and ultimately cut our ties with ProTools about a half year ago (after being a professional ProTools users for about 20 years). With Fairlight being a solid DAW solution for decades now and Blackmagic embracing their “magic” into the synergy, nothing but positive results are abound (think DaVinci Resolve acquisition part 2).

I was able to really dig into the hardware and talk to the Fairlight engineers about everything and the excitement from both sides was huge. Expect an upcoming article from me highlighting some of the advancements involved, which should be released next week. Let the good times roll and a HUGE congratulations to Blackmagic and Fairlight for their accomplishment… in less than 6 months time no less!!!!

That Grant pulled this off basically in the span from the week before IBC in September to now is INSANITY. It HAS to be black magic. ???? Again, there’s no precedent for the scale of this work, OR the pace of it.

Now, I’m personally not going to turn off the timeclock until we actually cross the finish line, but 2017 is a major turnaround for Blackmagic at NAB: damn near everything but this is shipping now. They certainly get full marks for having the beta ready to download before the show opened. So when Grant says “coming soon” THIS year, it’s easy to believe that it’s true. Heck, look at all the great stuff shipping BEFORE the show, like the URSA Mini Pro (another of my NAB picks, btw).

I think Marco represents one of BMD’s big opportunities, which is to get the attention of unhappy Pro Tools customers. I hope we’re past the time of talking about Pro Tools killers — they don’t exist, and it’s not going to happen, for the same reason Media Composer is rock solid in its core markets: the people who love it LOVE IT — but Pro Tools is VERY ripe for a disruption that Avid was, which is to see a huge growth in the size of the pie, with an ever-decreasing slice for PT. There are in fact people who are ready to jump on a sweet deal. A compelling mixing board option could make this a slam dunk for a lot of those folks.

I do suspect that creating new Fairlight fans will be a vastly more fruitful market than PT defectors. Although who knows? Blackmagic may snake over a few PT guys who’ve been exasperated by trying to work with Media Composer, and will put down the $295 for Fairlight with a nifty modules for video editing and finishing!

I’ve got some more video-centric thoughts about this later, but there were a lot of folks picking this as their big story of the show, but they were all trying to sound objective. ???? Fooey on that. Marco was the one guy on social media I saw jumping up and down about this as much as I was, so I was very happy to see it.

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “That’s right – my first version of Premiere was 4.x, and that was in 95 or 96… I think.”

You’re quite right, sloppy language on my part. The first dual-platform version was indeed Premiere 4, in December 1994.

What I should have said was that it “originated as a Mac-only product”.

Thanks for catching that. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “And quite honestly, I think Apple saw any “Legacy fan-boys” they could win over as a bonus. I have always felt Apple wasn’t really looking at the veteran editor when it designed and released X (yes, a huge CF of a release) because it was too different. “

Bingo. This has been Apple’s MO all along of course. They not only didn’t expect to convert Apple II customers to Mac customers, they by and large didn’t. Apple II was outselling Mac by huge margins until the day they pulled the plug, and once they did, Apple did NOT see a rush of those customers over to Mac.

It can admittedly be a drag if you’re one of the legacy customers (not actually a pun, but I’ll take it) no longer being supported, but it’s worth noting that Adobe was even bolder in some ways when they took a formerly Mac-only product (Adobe Premiere) and made its next evolution Windows-only from 2001-2005 (Premiere Pro), saying that they’d be back when Apple permitted reasonable performance parity — lo and behold, it came to pass.

And once Apple gave some Legacy customers reason to consider alternatives in 2011, I didn’t hear one person here say, “No way I’d consider Adobe after they dropped Mac support before.” Nor should they have. Mac performance for video editing (It was ONLY Premiere Pro that was briefly Windows-only) is no longer unreasonably behind Windows, and there’s no question about Adobe’s forward-facing commitments.

I’m sure there are other examples out there, too. Sometimes the only way to get the new customers you need is to break the chain with the customers you’ve had. Some of those will catch up if they’re inclined, but if you believe in your future, you have to just go for it.

[Scott Witthaus] “You don’t have to look too far to realize that, by and large, editors don’t like big change.”

If that first observation was Bingo, this one’s Yahtzee! ????????????

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “I would be interested to know just how many haven’t switched to anything.”

That’s one of the key points here, that NONE of these seat numbers speak to market share — a concept that implies a zero sum. One pie. Well, most people have more than one NLE, so there’s more than one pie. ????

I’m going to also laud the return of Herr Professor Doktor Bieberkopf and recall my declaration from 6 years ago almost to the day, immediately after the presentation of X, and before it even started shipping, that it would have 10 million users before the end of the first year. ???? I can usually count on one of you to bring this up for me, to remind me of my unparalleled exuberance for X, so I thought I’d save you the trouble. I certainly banged the table about it often enough, so it’s easy to find several examples of these pronouncements in our archives.

I went further and said that if I were in charge of Apple, heads would roll if it failed to meet the 10 million mark by the end of its first year. I was certain that it would be huge.

Not that 2 million isn’t plenty huge. But it’s surely less huge than it sounds, in that a meaningful number of those “seats” are in fact not using it regularly.

At the same time, it doesn’t matter. Apple got paid the same amount whether I downloaded it for laughs, or one of you downloaded it for life. I don’t mean that to sound in any way cynical, or that Apple doesn’t care how people feel about X. They clearly do, which is why I’ve been its staunchest defender on this count from the very first possible moment.

But I do still think that how far X hasn’t spread is at least as interesting a story as how far it has, even if the latter is ultimately the more important story.

Lovely to see you, Franz. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Craig Seeman] “[Shawn Miller] “The audio and performance enhancements are insane!”

Now we know how they’re using their Fairlight acquisition.”

Yes to these! I’m blown away! And the drop to $299?!?! And the UPGRADE of the FREE edition to basically include everything except collaboration.

I’ve just posted the press release: https://news.creativecow.net/story/888317

Read carefully. Be sitting somewhere safe before you begin.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andy Neil] “man, I like prince and all, but something is fully screwy with the Creative Cow notifications. I’ve gotten no less than 12 email notifications of this article and thread.
“

Thanks for the heads up! I’ve only gotten one, as expected, but I’ll take a look at the alert mechanism to see if I see anything afoot.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

To Bob’s point about us being by no means unique, I could point you to my uncle (also named Bob as it happens) who runs an indie moving company that’s been just about undone by disreputable hacks on Craigslist and dudes standing around outside the U-haul office.

Really, that’s life running your own business in ANY field any more, plus or minus the dudes outside the U-haul office. DIY’ers, Craigslist, somebody willing to take the job for a loss, customers less willing to pay for quality, etc etc etc. Why hire a true cabinet maker when you get a new kitchen from IKEA installed for a quarter the price? Or do it yourself for a tenth?

While this may not work out as planned for any particular individual, it’s fortunate for our industry as a whole that the hundreds of folks (if there are even that many left) getting squeezed out of their own gigs are a drop in the bucket to the thousands of jobs opening up in-house at all kinds of companies and agencies, especially if people are willing (or able) to go to where jobs are.

Not that the road is coming to end for every indie shop not fortunate enough to be in Hollywood. Heck, there are even people like our man Todd who are having their best years ever in Alalalabamala. (I think that’s how you spell it.)