[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “…but they are focusing on the product itself and the end users.”

To wit:

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “For someone spending a lot of time coloring in Resolve the Micro is probably the better value. “

DEFINITELY the better value.

I know this sounds naughty, but when you run your fingers across those balls, there’s no question. None. Tangent is “nice”. DaVinci’s balls feel smmmmooooooooth.

????????????

Kidding aside, there’s simply no comparison. Plus the functionality. It’s not just providing a physical interface for three onscreen color wheels, which Tangent and others do just fine. It’s that DaVinci hardware+software was always developed as ONE THING. This isn’t ADDING a panel. It’s RESTORING the MISSING HALF OF THE INTERFACE.

THAT’s one reason why Blackmagic has put on at least 2 massive pre-NAB events (who knows if that’s all?), and will STILL have the largest booth at the show. Nobody who touches these panels is going to hesitate to pull the trigger. Especially considering how inexpensive the software is to start with (even at $1000), it’s going to be a no-brainer for thousands of people, I have no doubt whatsoever.

I also think it’s going to create NEW customers, because so much of the special goodness of DaVinci is tied to the parts of the interface that are BEST accessed through the panel. They’re too easy to miss when they’re buried in menus, but when they’re right at the tips of your fingers? Magic.

I really do hope you get to take one for a spin. I think you won’t have any problems finding new excuses to use it. ????

[Tim Wilson]

John has also posted excerpts along the way, including an AMAZING retelling of the origin’s of Apple’s acquisition of Keygrip in Steve Jobs’ thwarted efforts to license Adobe Premiere!

Jobs had new consumer Macs in development that would use Firewire I/O for the first time. He knew that the technology would make for a paradigm shift in desktop editing so he decided to ship a video editing application with the new computers.

Jobs approached Adobe Systems, and asked them to create a consumer version of Premiere that Apple could bundle with the unreleased Mac code-named Kihei. With Apple’s future still uncertain, and Premiere sales growing on the Wintel platform, Adobe said no.

Feel free to insert your own punchline about the relative merits of 1997-vintage Premiere for pros vs. consumers here.

Steve then turned his attention to building the app in-house with alumni from NeXT when the the Macromedia opportunity came along the following year. That story also had a number of twists along the way, not least of which is that a large part of its development team worked in Windows — which is indeed the platform I saw Final Cut demoed on at NAB 1998, in a word-of-mouth-only basement corner behind some pipe-and-curtain walls. Final Cut was dual-platform, they assured us, but being demoed on Windows because there were no Macs powerful enough to support its full performance. ???? Specifically, the show-stopper, real time dissolves. ????

And indeed, my beta disk for Final Cut (yes, I still have it) ran on WINDOWS (listed first) as well as Mac.*

I do also have my Macromedia Final Cut t-shirt, which I’ve never posted a picture of before. I’ll post it after I take a picture of it on my next good hair day, I promise.

Buck spoke with many of the principals at length along the way for his book, and has some great stories about their hesitancy to come to Apple, which had by no means established that it could even stay in business. (Indeed, 5 years later, Apple stock was still in the single digits.)

Final Cut’s product manager, Tim Myers recalls: We were pretty unsure about whether a move to Apple at that time was going to be a good thing or a bad thing. It certainly wasn’t in its second wave of success, far from it and it was very questionable whether they were going to be able to pull it off. And a lot of us were thinking if Apple is struggling just selling computers right now why would they want to support and sell an editing product?

Much more here, and of course in the books, which I also highly recommend….but certainly one aspect of revisionist history is that acquiring Final Cut had ANYTHING to do with Avid, when in fact it had NOTHING to do with Avid and selling high-end Macs, and much more to do with Apple’s failed attempt to coax Adobe into developing a consumer edition of Premiere to help sell iMacs!

THAT thread of the story does indeed bear its fruit as Randy invested so much effort into iMovie, and the extent to which FCPX is in fact not too far off iMovie Pro in the sense of fulfilling the vision Steve had of video editing on the Mac from the beginning, and why I think Steve was so gleeful about slamming a shovel into the head of the zombieware that FCP Legacy had become the second he possibly could.

*Also not much discussed anymore is how close Final Cut came to being absorbed as the front end for what became Media 100’s Windows-only 844/x.

This notion was incredibly frustrating to those of us in the Mac-only Media 100 community, who’d have preferred M100 to be keeping their eye on the ball for 100% of their current customer base, and buying this software Keygrip that we’d been hearing about for their MAC front end.

M100’s perspective was that their current Mac front end was just dandy (and in some ways, certainly was — there’s something about its simplicity that has yet to be replicated in as satisfying a way by anyone) — but the company wanted to a) show off their hardware technology on machines more powerful than Apple was willing to make, and b) hedge their bets against Apple going under altogether.

The irony of course being that what finally sent Media 100 into the wilderness to wander before Boris Yamnitsky brought it home was the mad rush of Media 100’s Mac customer base virtually 100% into Final Cut Pro! THAT was the migration that fueled its growth, NOT a migration from Avid that never happened in any broad way. It only took a few years for the Media 100 user base to BECOME the FCP customer base, which is why the supposed “Cold Mountain moment” was irrelevant for anyone but a handful of pundits — a million Media 100 customers had already made the move, and the rest of the heart of FCP’s base had never for an instant considered Avid (nor for that matter Media 100) as an option. Their roots were sunk directly into FCP from the beginning.

But I gotta tell ya, we were biting our nails following along with the rumors of a bidding war between Apple to run it as their software on Mac (of course) vs. Media 100 to run it on Windows…while we were half-praying for a miracle and hoping that somehow it would wind up as the new Media 100 on Mac….which, again, in practice, it pretty much did.

====

Edit 1: You can buy John’s book on all the usual ebook platforms, but go for the iPad versions. John told me that he’s done a lot of “beauty” work there that other platforms don’t really support. (I believe him: I’m a hardcore Kindle guy, but man o man, Amazon’s typesetting is AWFUL, and of course my Kindle Paperwhite doesn’t do pix at all.)

Also, John updates these all the time, so your purchase will only grow in value. ????

====

Edit 2: Stand by for our EXCLUSIVE excerpts from Timeline Analog 4: 1989-1991 for the origins of Premiere as Reel Time, and Timeline Analog 5: 1991-1996, including never-before-published interviews detailing the earliest days of Premiere’s transition from postage-stamp proof-of-concept to actual broadcast video editing. You’re going to be FLOORED by what you read.

While you’re waiting, you should just go ahead and download these two volumes, though. At $2.99 each, a bargain. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Gabe Strong] “I kept my 2009 Mac Pro around because……
well because it was paid for, it would still run FCP 7……and because it was paid for. No
subscription or anything on it ☺ But I DID move over to the PC for editing mostly.”

Yeah, but that’s fundamentally different than saying, “You know what, it’s clear to me after the last several generations of hardware that Apple’s priorities and my priorities are irreconcilable. I no longer find Macs to be delivering the performance, scalability, or compatibility I require.”

You never said that. You said FCPX sux, oh wait now Adobe sux worse, oh wait, FCPX is pretty good now. LOL Sorry, not meaning to diminish your pain, just playing — but that’s about it, right? Apple’s development or non-development of Macs wasn’t the prime mover in any of your decisions. Your story has played out EXACTLY the same way for people who simply also used Macs when they were checking out Avid, Resolve, Smoke, and whatever else they were checking out.

I still stand by my contention that once people CHOOSE to leave MAC because of Apple painting a clear picture of a likely future of increasing divergence of priorities, they’re less likely to come back.

But I certainly appreciate you adding more and more dimensions to my fundamental argument that anybody using the phrase “locked in” is rhetorically overreaching. NOBODY Is locked in, and even the concept of “locked out” is grossly overstated compared to the reality that most people actually live in. Makes for dandy rhetoric, though, that’s for sure.

Rhetoric of course being the second-most frequent output from cows ???? with number one being, ironically, number two. ???? (I will be sure to restate my request for the poop emoji to the forum management!)

And kidding aside, I want to be clear that I’m acknowledging the truth of everything you’re saying, Gabe. I’m 100% with you on this.

[Tim Wilson]

[Gabe Strong] “Funny thing was, when I went back to Apple…..I found
out that they had done a lot to FCP X. It was actually getting pretty good. And since then,
they have done even more. I’m plenty happy with my decision and I know plenty of other
people, like me, who left FCP for Adobe after the FCP X introduction……only to run from
the ‘rental payment’ of Adobe right back to FCP X. “

Yes, absolutely the case! This is EXACTLY what I was talking about when I said that nobody is locked into anything. Believe me, there’s no place where this movement is documented more thoroughly than here at Creative COW!

The people I was referring to Apple never getting back are the people who left the Mac platform for Windows. Although you’re right, I probably rhetorically overreached there (WHO? MEEEEEEEEE?????). ????

But I certainly don’t feel locked out of buying a Mac. I just can’t imagine a scenario where Apple would release something compelling to me anymore. If they do, I’ll buy it. My prediction is that it won’t happen, but that’d be one of the few predictions I’ve made in this forum that came to pass, so we’ll see. ????????????

There are plenty of other folks like me re: leaving MAC, and THOSE folks are ones I’ve not seen come back yet…but again, who knows? Maybe the next Mac Pros will be shaped like BB-8 and follow you around the office and make adorable noises. Who wouldn’t want that? ????

But yeah, commitment to software is soft. People switch allllll the time, which is why I think talking about locking people into anything is an overreach at best, too.

It’s also worth underscoring again that a lot fewer people use just one than used to be the case. It’s not at all uncommon for folks to use more than one, ON PURPOSE, because truth be told, they’re all pretty good at something, if not most things, at this point. Manufacturers get this, which is why all the ones who aren’t Apple are actively talking about how well their stuff works with everything else.

[Gabe Strong] “Which is why Resolve will be a force to be reckoned with, once they figure out how to
actually have decent performance, without requiring a GPU that could fly a jumbo jet with it’s fan.
“

I don’t have any comments on the performance or requirements, but among the predictions I’ve gotten wrong is that Resolve would be an NLE player. I think Resolve definitely IS a player, for a lot more reasons than price. As I’ve noted many times, I’m a long time gone from actual NLE’ing myself, but the new Resolve Mini control surface would be a slam-dunk for me. The easy integration of truly robust color grading with editing was always my holy grail, and I think Blackmagic is going to gain a BUNCH of new customers with an affordable control surface that really lights that up.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “I those folks can hope that it works better for them than most of the “royalty” based services in the history of the creative arts.
Where the VAST majority of content creators historically saw royalty checks measured in pennies. “

[Scott Witthaus] “Just throw your crap up there and see what happens? Is anyone curating the imagery?”

Some people see the glass half full, some see it as half empty, and some folks see it as some combination of evil, incompetent, greedy, or worthless. ????????????

Jeez louise, it’s stock media. People have been selling stock media for decades. This isn’t some stealth attack on artistic integrity invented by Adobe. Go look at Fotolia. Go look at Behance. They’ve been around for years. Adobe has owned them for years. Millions of people using them. FOR YEARS.

The new part is that they’re putting this right in the Creative Cloud applications.

And yes, Scott, it’s curated. I forgive you for not reading my article ???? but I talk about it there. And again, the communities feeding this have been around for a long time. Curation abounds.

Any of the good enough for you to want to use? You decide. Me, I’ve never been to ANY stock agency where ALL of it was to my liking. I’ve never been to one where MOST of it was to my liking. So my guess is that 99% of it won’t be to your liking, and that even if it’s to your liking, you’ll be lucky to find more than a couple of pieces that fit your needs. Isn’t that ALWAYS the way? With ANY stock media? Or stock music? Or what to watch on TV? ????

That’s why I like options. More options are always better than fewer options.

Apparently not everyone agrees. More curators are better than more choices? Seriously?

[Bill Davis] “In a system that essentially enables a million “stock video houses” – how will any one of them beat the odds and make any serious money?”

From an artist’s point of view, Adobe is paying better than almost anyone else, 33%, and higher if your stuff is exclusive to them. iStock or Pond5 won’t make you that deal. Is that enough? Maybe, maybe not, but “more than pretty much anyone else” is pretty good.

But I feel like that question is rhetorical, surely. Everyone here has benefitted by sneaking in under the standards and pricing of somebody before us. ???? We are the people that our predecessors lamented were coming, and they were right.

Bill, you’re dedicating your career to empowering people to create. Some of those people are going to beat somebody here out of a job real soon. Some of them are going to make it harder for you to keep YOUR job when they post their tips to YouTube for free, so even a $5 subscription will seem like too much.

Heck, you think we haven’t seen people learn how to build communities at Creative COW and go start their own elsewhere? Sure we have, and it’s going to keep happening.

That’s life on the wheel of karma. You stay ahead by doing stuff that’s WORTH the price, and you ride the ride as far as it’ll take you. You trust that making things better for the people who need help right this second will in the long run make things better for EVERYONE.

Be honest. If Apple offered you a chance to sell XinTwo from directly inside FCP, for a royalty as good or better as the going rate, would you take them up on it? Or would you feel like the whole thing was a threat to your ability to make serious money because so many other people would have the same shot?

Or would you see it as a golden new opportunity to reach directly out to potential customers, exactly when and where they most needed your product?

I think that’s an easy question, so easy that I’m afraid that you’ll take the question as an insult when I don’t mean it as one.

But this does make another compare/contrast in the context that Oliver first brought up a week ago to start this thread. (Was it only a week? ????????????) Adobe’s approach to panels: willing to sacrifice the pinnacle of beauty, unity, and integration in favor of extensibility, partnership, and community.

Apple’s approach: well…. ???? Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, no third parties are pretty enough, and customers aren’t to be trusted. Certainly not trusted enough to sell their stuff from inside our four perfect walls. ????

Hey, no harm intended. This is just me goofing around on a Friday night in my bathrobe, waiting for The Vampire Diaries series finale to begin…but I’m not buying that an established stock media business, paying better than usual rates, that people have been accessing via web browsers for years, is somehow suddenly sinister because it’s available inside a Creative Cloud application.

Adobe Stock, like ALL stock media, was a good opportunity before you heard about this. It’s a better opportunity now.

What people do with that opportunity? Well, to borrow a phrase from a much wiser man, time has been telling, and so far, it’s a pretty good tale.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “And the ‘they’ll keep raising prices’ trope.”

Oh I guarantee that the price will go up, but yeah, people who painted that horror story picture are simply wrong, and always will be. Prices are not infinitely plastic. Even in a world where Autodesk is charging (AND GETTING) $150/mo for Maya and Max, and charging (AND GETTING) $500 for Flame, those are prices for THOSE products, in THOSE markets, and represent massive shifts in value

But it underscores how ridiculous the “locked” trope is. Adobe KNOWS this. NOBODY is locked in.

[Oliver Peters] “All you have to do is activate a 1-month subscription and make the change. Or export XMLs of your vital sequences and move to a different NLE. “

Exactly. AND PEOPLE DO THIS. They do it all the time, and Adobe is watching this. They’ve given themselves the world’s largest data set on how shallow people’s commitment to them is. Heck, they fueled the first wave of conversions to CC on just that — people’s readiness to bail on a commitment that those folks were certain was bone-deep and for forever.

The whole point of this forum is that people CAN change NLEs, they DO change NLEs, and that no vendor can lock in any customer. Piss us off, and we’re gone for-EVER.

[Oliver Peters] “And Macs seem to many to be synonymous with NLEs, but that’s ONLY because of the original popularity of Avid and Media 100 systems. “

That’s a very “Mac guy” perspective. ???? I’ve worked for a couple of cross-platform developers, and I can tell you that, without even getting into the MAGIX (formerly Sony) Vegas guys who hate Macs far more than any Mac guy has ever hated Windows, and I was very briefly responsible for the Windows-only Pinnacle Liquid when I was at Avid, and I can tell you that there are a BUNCH of Premiere and Avid guys who wouldn’t touch a Mac for money.

That’s also to say nothing of the many sectors using NLEs — govt, corporate, broadcast, etc. — where Macs have been 2nd-class citizens, often for reasons that are 100% because Macs are just not well-suited for some of the tasks being performed there, Apple refused to implement industry-standard protocols, etc. Changing more under Tim Cook (whose success is largely based on reversing every major Jobsian approach to everything but Jony Ive), but still true.

I hate to sound all insider-y, but in fact Adobe, Avid, Boris and other companies I’ve worked for and with have never publicized their platform splits so I won’t share the numbers, but I think most Mac guys would be gobsmacked by how small a global footprint Mac has in NLEs. I think they’d tell me I was simply mistaken.

Or they’d gloat that no WONDER those NLEs suck on Macs, and OF COURSE the only company that can do anything right with a Mac-based NLE is Apple. I’ll let them have the last word on THAT. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “somehow paint things like Adobe Stock in a negative light, ‘See, I *told* you Adobe would find a way to raise prices’ even though rolling out an optional service like that, which anyone can use, means Adobe can increase revenue w/o having to raise CC prices. “

I added emphasis to your Adobe Stock observation because I think people are missing the biggest deal about Adobe Stock: YOU CAN SELL YOUR STUFF FROM INSIDE CREATIVE CLOUD.

I wrote about this at length last September when it was introduced at IBC, and it’s clearly worth repeating here: Adobe Stock Contributor Portal Allows Creators To Sell Their Stock Media Directly Inside Creative Cloud Applications

Please read this. It’s STAGGERING what Adobe is up to with this.

Not just Getty or Corbis or Reuters or these other giants. It’s understandable that Adobe would tout these early wins to establish that there’s a “there” to Adobe Stock that makes it useful in a wide variety of contexts that weren’t possible before, but in context, to ME, the biggest news is that YOU can sell YOUR stuff. And you can upload it from INSIDE THE APPS. My article above includes screen shots. It’s easy.

This is a big f*cking deal. You’re working in Premiere, tweaking your amazing new 360VR drone footage with Mocha VR, thinking, “I’ve never seen a piece of stock video this hot” and CLICK. POST IT FOR SALE. I’m not aware of this ever having been done before.

THAT’s why Adobe has been working so hard on a visual search engine inside Creative Cloud — to help community members monetize assets. Yes of course of course to take their slice. OF COURSE. OF COURSE. But unless MILLIONS of people just like you and me are getting OUR slice, the thing falls flat.

THAT’s ALSO why Adobe bought Fotolia, a community of photographers selling their media. I don’t know how many millions of members they have now — but it was 2 million in 2008, which is the last number I saw floating around, and surely many times more than that now. The only way Adobe can monetize that purchase (an $800 million CASH deal) is if Fotolia’s MEMBERS are monetizing their photos in a way that compels them to keep doing business through Fotolia!

So you can very rightly think of Adobe Stock as Adobe’s efforts to fund not just Creative Cloud in general, but to very specifically enable them to pay off their own investment in the business of MILLIONS of photographers.

Adobe did a similar thing with their purchase of Behance, a community site for design, typography, and the like. There were roughly a million members at the time, selling After Effects templates, artwork, fonts, etc. They also have a portfolio display technology powering websites from tiny blogs all the way up to the Smithsonian and thousands of others.

The way to monetize the acquisition of a creative community is to enable those community contributors to monetize their work in new ways.

Behance’s CEO Scott Belsky wrote a nifty answer at Quora when asked why Adobe would be interested in acquiring Behance, and why Behance would be interested in letting it happen. It’s quite beautiful, so ima just paste it here.

The community aspect of Behance is critical to understand. Indeed, TechCrunch is among the many sites who saw this as a straight social media play all the way back in 2012, as noted in the headline, Adobe Acquires Social Portfolio Platform Behance To Power Its Creative Cloud Community Features. VERY cool reading. Check it out.

Money quote: “Creative Cloud already offers creative professionals the tools, services, syncing, storage and private sharing features they need, but the addition of Behance will now also bring public sharing and communications features to it.”

Behance’s Belsky says it even better: Creation should be inherently collaborative – and must evolve more frequently than typical software upgrade cycles. If the tools we use to create are connected with how we showcase and discover creative work, we can help usher in a new era of idea exchange and collaborative creation.

Read that again. Connecting the tools we create to how we showcase, discover, and monetize work.

YES, Adobe will make money on this. BUT SO CAN YOU. And if you’re not, then Adobe can’t.

Think about it. By being able to upload your stuff DIRECTLY from within Creative Cloud applications, and for millions of people around the world to BUY your stuff DIRECTLY from within Creative Cloud applications, Creative Cloud could be the one piece of software on your computer actually making you money!

Pay for your subscription? Hell, you might be able to pay for your car. Maybe your house. Your student loan. Who knows what.

Needless to say, if you’re making your stuff with FCPX or Affinity or Resolve, you can just as easily upload it for sale through Creative Cloud (you just need an Adobe ID, NOT a CC subscription), and frankly, you’re insane to not be doing this. Why would you NOT want to sell your stuff from inside Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, et al????

And as I wrote last September during IBC, Adobe’s rates are VERY good. Also worth noting: your royalties go up as more people engage with you. I have no doubt that any number of you lot can capitalize on your sparkling personalities to move beaucoup units.

A final note for now: Fotolia is photos, Behance is graphics, mograph, type, web, et al. When Adobe purchased those communities, they immediately had lots of stock assets in those categories from MILLIONS of creators. Notably missing: video. Adobe has a LOT of work to do to get their video assets going at anything resembling the same kind of footprint — but just as they have MILLIONS of contributors for stock photos and graphics, they want MILLIONS of video contributors. They NEED MILLIONS of people selling video through Adobe Stock.

FINAL final note, to underscore the community aspect of all this: the person responsible for supporting the VIDEO community within Adobe Stock is a man like to think of as “one of our own”, Dennis Radeke, whose community bona fides are well-established. One of the most community-minded people I’ve ever met, and one of the small handfuls of most generous souls you’ll work with in this industry.

So what the fgjk are you waiting for? Put Adobe to work for you. Make those bastards pay YOU. ????????

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “FCP7/FCPX taught me that switching creative applications is easier than I ever thought. If you want to quit Premiere tomorrow, export XML and download Resolve (or buy FCPX and SendToX) today.”

That’s why the whole “locked out forever” trope has always seemed like a straw man. Philosophically offensive to you? Fine. Walk away, shake the dust from your sandals, and never look back. But the idea that anyone is locked into anything is nonsense.

The flip side of all of this, which we tacitly acknowledge, except too rarely in THIS context, is that it’s incredibly easy to walk away at any time, but Adobe has to keep you for four years and four months just to break even with what they’d have gotten from the old business model. It’s a risk that hasn’t always paid off by any means. They’re ENCOURAGING you to walk away by making it so easy.

For that matter, Apple used to be to ME the epitome of locking people in, because as a die-hard Apple-ite going back LONG before Macs it seemed inconceivable to me that any meaningful number of people would ever leave Mac for Windows. But in fact, FCPX was the first to kick open the door to not just switching NLEs, but switching platforms.

Thinking about this just now, I’m remembering how much I hated the Mac at first, because it seemed a deviation from EVERYTHING that originally made Apple great. I refused to get on the bandwagon for such an essentially anti-customer product, until eventually of course I did. But it’s not lost on me the irony that the Mac was the first major stumbling block in my love affair with Apple. Even more than FCPX, the trashcan was the straw that broke so many’s people Mac-loving backs, and I suspect that not one of those people will ever be back. After building my business a large swath of my career not just on Macs but on very specifically Mac ADVOCACY, I certainly can’t imagine anything that Apple could do to win me back.

Nobody’s locked into nuthin’.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “[Simon Ubsdell] “Call me crazy, but sometimes FCP X is just perfect for what I need to do. And sometimes it’s Premiere. And sometimes it’s Media Composer. And sometimes it’s Resolve. And so on. I guess I need therapy.”

I know one of your use cases for Resolve [link]. Where, roughly, do you draw the lines for the other apps?”

Walter, you have one of the broadest toolsets of anyone in these parts. Where do YOU draw the rough lines for which apps get used for which tasks?