[Tim Wilson]

VERY nice! Thanks for sharing, Tom!

Terrific bit of writing from our old friend Peter Wiggins, but I have to tell you, speaking these days as a mere spectator to the game, I absolutely love what Sam Mestman is up to at LumaForge. As a member of a very small team trying to punch above our weight myself, I especially appreciate their dexterity and force of will. ???? I haven’t had a chance to check in with Sam yet this year, but I’m willing to bet that he and Noah are going to have some fun things for us to talk about at NAB again this year.

I’ll circle back later with some actual conversation about the provocative stuff raised here, but thanks again for pointing it out, Tom!

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Whatever you fill in there carries an opportunity cost; reaching any one of those goals requires lots of dedicated time at the exclusion of something else.”

That’s why picking 1 and sticking with it is the right call. There are plenty of reasons to pick one or another, which is why editing programs do indeed pick one or another, but unless the explicit goal of the class is “learn every major button in every major NLE”, it’s a colossal waste of time to even launch a second one, much less try to teach it. Launching a third would be catastrophic. It would be the OPPOSITE of learning editing. It would grind the learning of editing to a halt.

NLEs come and go, so, honestly, the less time spent thinking about them, talking about them, evaluating them, the better. The one thing that history should have taught us this far is that our favorite NLE may not have been invented yet.

More important, contemporary notions of NLEs and editing are steps in a historical process that’s very much in motion. Much-loved boxes of FCP are sitting on shelves above much-loved Steenbecks, while the notion of a box of software has itself become a relic. There’s just no point in getting wrapped around the axle of massive teaching time devoted to this stuff in an EDITING class because they could ALL be made irrelevant by the thing that’s coming sooner than can be imagined.

Besides, the NLE is the easy part. It’s just buttons. Any reasonably-well motivated primate can figure out which buttons to push in short order.

The editing part of editing is harder, and stays relevant for much longer. THAT’s where teaching resources should be applied.

Before going all-in on the contrary view that it’d be better to present as many options and let the students decide for themselves, just for grins, try to find an editing program at any level that invests much energy in multiple NLEs. I’ve worked with scores of schools over the years, and I’ve yet to come across one. That’s not to say they don’t exist. It’s to say that most of the ones worth their salt don’t waste time on this.

It’s fine that WE do, though. What else are we gonna do with our days? ????

But we shouldn’t let our own amusement with this suggest that it’s in any way useful. I’d imagine that a thorough overview of the plusses and minuses of every major system would leave most kids thinking, “Wow, editing SUCKS.”

Which would be a shame, because they’d likely not have spent more than a few minutes editing, compared to months spent on monkey work. EXACTLY the kind of thing we need schools NOT doing to kids.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “For instance, the Fincher team has made heavy use of After Effects in the editorial process. They also dealt with high-res, overscanned footage in an interesting manner. Plus a LOT was stabilized, because Fincher wants perfect camera moves. The Focus/WTF team made greater use of native camera media than is common on nearly any other film.”

Exactly. When you read stories that put those specifics in context, you see why it would have been insane for either team to have made any other choice than the ones they did.

And as you note, Oliver, even when introductions are made to us by PR people representing the software companies, you still shape the story by the WORK. Not all filmmakers are super in tune with tools, and indeed, some of them really don’t care…but I do enjoy hearing from people who are thinking things through, whether it’s their NLEs, location management, casting choices, whatever.

This year’s festival season is off to a crazy start, and I’m actually having a hard time tracking stories right now, but two things have really, really stood out.

One is that Premiere Pro is on the rise. I know that Sundance and SXSW aren’t the world, and that, say, “documentaries in competition at Sundance” is a narrow slice of the world (45 documentary features screened out of 1701 submissions), but still, reading something like “68% of films entered in the US Documentary Competition used Premiere Pro CC as the primary NLE” feels big.

Even bigger: “42% of projects relied on Premiere Pro CC as the primary NLE – a 90% increase from 2016!“ Again noting that 113 feature films selected out of 4068 is by definition not statistically significant….but wowza, nearly double year on year, within a market segment that absolutely IS significant….well, all of a sudden, Premiere nearly doubling its footprint at Sundance feels significant indeed.

I’m still gonna wanna hear more about why, but it suggests that there are non-random reasons at work here. Not that this

My other takeaway as a reader these days is that ALEXA is queen of more than you might think. IndieWire asked everyone at Sundance what they used, and while not everyone replied, the overwhelming majority replied Alexa. Damn near all of them, actually.

Among other things, it speaks to the wisdom of ARRI’s position that by aiming ALEXA at the rental market they could make a better camera that’s ALSO more accessible to a wider range of filmmakers. Certainly I’d bet that people who shot with ALEXA spent less to rent their cameras than almost anyone who bought a camera.

Business model aside, most of them talked about the look…and this is begging the question, is it just that ALEXA users are more likely to respond to surveys? We also have no access to the information about the 3900 films that didn’t make the cut. Is there something about the “look” of Alexa and what the Sundance staff thinks “looks” like “a Sundance movie” that makes non-Alexa movies less likely to make the cut?

Because you can say all day long that tools don’t matter, but when you hear people talk about WHY they choose, you realize that it’s not true.

That is to say, yes, you can make lots of good things with lots of good tools, so I want to hear why this one for this project. No review can do that. Good project profiles can.

Not that any of this is an answer to your original question, Oliver, as much as it is an agreement with the question. ???? Other than Adobe calling “Adobe Premiere Pro the official editing tool at Sundance 2017”, and documenting the claim pretty thoroughly if also in broad strokes, it’s been awhile since anybody out there has stuck the landing with one of these more specific stories.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “This place can be a bit like the Hyde Park speakers corner – or maybe more like the scene of the Eminem rap battle in 8 mile. Most folks just lurk because it’s safer that way? “

Maybe in this particular forum, but we’ve got over 100 of ’em. We’ve also got over 300,000 active members and hundreds of posts going up every day. Do ALL of the millions of people who pass through the COW every month post? Of course not, but a very few experiences from people who come to a forum with Debate in the title who don’t actually care to debate anything combined with the absence of data isn’t a strong foundation

[Brett Sherman] “Personally I’d love to know about the production workflow of AJ+ or Attn: or any of the other Facebook media creators. Those could also be interesting reads, but I’ve never seen one on Creative Cow. “

I couldn’t agree more. This is one reason I pushed back so hard on the vertical video haters — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, et al are a huge part of what “our” industry is actually creating. Certainly the places where audiences are, even more than movies and TV.

I, am, alas, sorely bandwidth-constrained these days with operational stuff, which is why I haven’t been posting much, and writing even less, but no kidding, Brett. I absolutely agree with you.

Thanks,

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I know everyone here by and large likes to poo-poo the use of NLE brands in feature film editing. “

Unless they want to crow about it when X is the one being used. ????I say as someone who wrote one such crowing article about X myself. ????

(btw, we haven’t talked about this around here, but what Ficarra, Requa, Fogelman et al are pulling off week after week on This Is Us is beyond cinematic, approaching the realm of the miraculous. I don’t care if they never make another movie again as long as they keep doing this.)

The thread asks about movies, but what about European news organizations? Are stories about the success of X at a European broadcaster irrelevant to everyone who’s not doing news for a European network?

I’m being rhetorical here, at least to the extent that it seems blazingly obvious to me that the answer is OF COURSE these stories matter. I want MORE of them, even though I’ll never do that kind of work in those kinds of places. Aside from my general curiosity about how EVERYONE does EVERYTHING, stories like these ESPECIALLY matter for the people who DON’T need persuading. They, we, need encouragement. Inspiration.

You cheer for your “team”, whether or not you personally are playing the game, because of how it makes you feel about yourself.

That is, to ME anyway, the magic of the Cold Mountain Moment. It wasn’t aspirational in the sense of “someday I hope to be a pro” as much as “someday I hope to be able to stop defending my choice of software as being fully capable of any professional task I set it to, and have it simply accepted as such.” Or even more broadly, a settling in of the community with itself, feeling ratified in making a gamble on a company with no experience whatsoever in this field, buying tools from a company with a genuinely poor track record developing such tools themselves (Macromind MediaMaker, anyone?) who fortunately had brought in a team from yet another company, to find that, a few years and a few more key purchases later, hey, whaddya know? This thing’s a genuine winner.

We’ve all picked enough losers along the way (MACROMIND MEDIAMAKER, ANYONE?) that picking a winner is FUN. The Cold Mountain moment didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know, but it’s still nice to hear.

With all the concomitant benefits that accrue from having professional heavyweights lending THEIR voices to ensuring that the software will be developed in ways that benefit professionals like them, like me, like US. Because even though we’re not doing the same thing, we still have this shared blood bond, that our livelihoods depend on this thing being up to the task.

I’m going to step aside from the bizarre argument that’s about to make my head explode, that only companies bent on failure, if not suicide, would be so foolish as to focus on professional customers long enough to note that we admittedly debated the meaning of the Cold Mountain Moment even at that time — even without a proper debate forum in place!! How did we manage?!?! — but it’s beyond debate that something changed at that point.

I would have hoped that one thing that would have changed by now is that we could let go the fiction that stories like this don’t matter. Stories like this matter, because tool choices matter. They’re not all equally up to every task. Vastly more important than feature sets, not every user’s personality is equally well-adapted to the conceptual models of every development team.

I’m going to go the other way and say that reviews are the things that are damn near useless imo. I don’t care nearly as much about the names and locations of buttons as I do about whether the thing WORKS. That’s why the most useful approach is to hear about the WORK.

Like your old high school physics exams. Any moderately-motivated monkey can punch the buttons to come up with a usable answer. The only way I can know if you know what you’re talking about is if you SHOW YOUR WORK.

Or are people really saying that Ronny Courtens can stop bothering with these epic tales of the workflow warrior-poets building FCPX workflows through sheer force of will? That Oliver never needs to ask another editor or color grader about their software choices?

Of course not. That’s nonsense. I have absolutely no idea why anybody would even pretend that these stories aren’t at least interesting. That part’s opinion, and we can debate it, but as we step into the world of actual facts, rather than merely alternative ones, it’s quite easy to demonstrate how stories like this have moved the needle again and again, and not just in this industry.

On that level, it’s not even marketing. It’s our lives as social animals. We listen to stories about other people to learn about ourselves, to learn about what’s possible for ourselves to do and become. That’s exactly the stuff that you want companies to be doing. At least I do.

Yeah, I’ll glance at bullet pointed lists because I have some specific needs, but really, feature sets are closer to parity than not already. Give me something real. Tell me about the time you saved, the money you made, the pain you salved, the potential you embraced.

Uhm, not YOU, marketing weasel. I was speaking to my peer, the person who pays money to buy their tools, and is trying to build a life with them. THAT’s who I want talking to me. Doesn’t matter that it’s on behalf of some company or other. Rather than having to wade through intentionally anonymized marketing rap and scratch my head over whether this has anything to do with me or not, I can get there more quickly in a bylined article by a writer like Oliver or Ronny who I KNOW is legit, and the subjects of the articles are SHOWING THEIR WORK.

So to me, even though the stories are in the service of marketing, the fact that they’re transparent make them the stuff of life. I like life. I like stuff. I like stories like this.

So there are my questions for you. Is it only film stories that don’t count for anything, or is it broadcast stories too?

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “”Winners focus; losers spray.” This is a very old adage of business speak that I first heard cutting a PBS documentary 30 years ago.”

But it could also be argued that a company that makes two-thirds of its money from selling phones (not even counting its share of phone app sales and services) is “spraying” by bothering with editing software at all.

When you look at the range of what Apple is betting on, including solar farms, AI, headphones, watches, original TV programming, and cars, you could just as easily argue that there’s no company on the planet less focused, and more inclined to spray, than Apple — with the possible exception of Alphabet, who recently passed Apple in the race for world’s most capitalized company.

So, yeah, treating each product silo within its own four walls, okay, Apple is maybe pretty focused. Kind of. ???? But we did also recently have a thread about how — leaving the Genius Bar aside (that’s what I’m now calling the Touch Bar, because Apple are clearly geniuses for confining touch to a bar, rather than letting you smear your greasy mitts all over Apple’s gleaming screens) — Apple’s laptop lineup lacks the focus it did just a few years ago.

In fact, you could argue that focus CAN (not always, but CAN) result in MORE products. Isn’t that part of the friction that so many people here have expressed? That Apple’s reaching for wider circles of users with fewer products has resulted in less focus overall? Some Nike shoes HAVE to have cleats, and some have to NOT have cleats, or there’s no point in staying in the athletic shoe business.

For what its worth, Nike no longer makes most of its money from shoes, athletic or otherwise, any more than Apple makes most of its money from computers. Ironically, a 2015 article called “How Nike Makes Its Money” describes the company’s strategy as “Just Do Everything.” The biggest pile of their money comes from the crap you wear when you (don’t ever, ever, ever) go to the gym that isn’t shoes — consumer shorts, tank tops, sweats, etc.

Among athletic shoes, Chucks are pretty much the opposite of Air Jordans, but that sure didn’t stop Nike from buying Converse in 2003. Nike’s growing faster, but Converse is indeed growing too. Neither are growing as fast as good ol’ mesh tank tops. Turns out that the widening of the product line is what’s driving Nike’s growth.

Focus vs. spray, good stuff vs. crappy stuff — pretty slippery considerations over time.

[Tim Wilson]

[Robin S. Kurz] “????… only in America.”

Not at all true! We’ve been visited by people from 225 countries and territories in the past 30 days, and I assure you that many of them are vastly more concerned about this sort of thing than most people in the US are.

I say “most”, since of course Creative COW has been part of educational programs around the world since our first founding in 1995. We regularly get thanked for our diligence to ensure that we stay classroom-appropriate, and that inappropriate content is rare, and labeled. We’re grateful to all of you for keeping that in mind for regular forum posting, and VERY grateful that you’re making note of this on our behalf for external media that we ourselves have not reviewed for appropriateness.

I know that you were making a joke in passing, so I apologize for sounding as if I am scolding YOU. I am not at all! But this is one corner of a site with many millions of people passing through. We HAVE to think about these issues on a massive global scale, because that’s the scale we operate on.

The fact is that outside of a handful of northern European states, most of the world looks at the US as a coarsening element, if not even the largest source of the worst media influences. (In the context of this thread, music videos are at the top of the list for the worst of the worst of what the US has to offer the world.) Indeed, we have have been in touch with authorities working at the national level around the globe who spoken to us about this, and have whitelisted us for their countries only after reviewing our monitoring policies.

So far, the ONLY things that ANYONE has ever spoken to us about is nudity and language (ie, nobody has ever mentioned anything political needing monitoring, nor would we expect it to come up in conversation since we discourage all political discourse here anyway), so we deeply appreciate our members helping to assure that we remain in the good graces of the global community on those counts.

Again please note that I do not intend this to scold you, Robin, but to thank EVERYONE here for helping to make Creative COW by far the world’s most popular resource for the full range of media production. The entire community’s commitment to propriety for general audiences has been part of the reason this has been true for so many years, and we deeply appreciate it.

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief, General Manager
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

You should also post a FULL profile (emphasis on FULL; don’t forget your reel!) in the COW Services directory linked at the top of the page, and check the jobs section as well. There’s a lot of activity that passes through those places, and many positions are being filled there.

And hey, once you’ve gotten your profile at the COW filled out, don’t forget to do the same at Autodesk’s site! There aren’t a ton of listings there, but that’s no reason to leave it off your list. https://area.autodesk.com/jobs/

To underscore what Mark said, though, I know you know this, but it’s worth remembering that there are ways in which New York is among the smallest of small towns. You have to know people. Make sure that you’re plugged into every local resource, including user groups.

Start with the NY Flame User Group, which meets THIS THURSDAY at CineSys-Oceana on Eldridge. Been way WAY too long since I’ve been in New York, but I’m remembering it’s in Chinatown? Thereabouts anyway. A must-do for you, though, in any case. https://cinesysoceana.com/news/events/files/new-york-flame-group-jan26.html

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “[Ronny Courtens] “Allow me to put some things in the right perspective.”

Thanks for a very clear explanation.”

My thanks also, Ronny!

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “[Oliver Peters] ” you gotta wonder whether the post teams for such shows would be “encouraged” to use Apple hardware and specifically FCPX.”

If the check is big enough, the production company will make that happen.”

True, but that might also be a first. Apple has always been pretty ecumenical about such things. Tools for the task and all that. Pixar was for a long time pretty much an all-Avid editing house, even when Jobs was president of the company. I certainly never got the impression that Pixar were being encouraged to use Macs.

That was a dozen years ago or more, so things may have changed. Does one of you know?

Although I can add a tangential geezerly observation. I’ve mentioned that my father was one of Apple’s original operations guys. Steve hired him in 1979 first to run the Dallas-area manufacturing facility, then all of US manufacturing, then running sales, distribution, and the channel. He built Apple’s retail operation from the ground up, and later invented the Apple store. Clever dude.

Back in 1979, 1980, even after the introduction of the Mac in 1984, it’s not like there was Apple-based software for ANY of this. Dad used what was available, and when Steve saw an IBM PC on his desk, fired him on the spot. Dad started packing his office without raising a fuss, because Steve fired people on the spot all the time. He meant it, too…but in this case, came back later and said to my father, there’s really not ANYTHING that runs on an Apple that can do this? No Steve, there’s really not. You have a company to run, and I have operations to run, and we have better things to do with our time than bang our heads on this kind of thing. The expense to develop something in-house would be astronomical, the timeframe to drive external development is too long, and has none of this has anything to do with our real goals. How about I get back to work on THOSE?

And so it came to pass. Steve told my father to unpack his stuff and get back to work on his IBM to build Apple’s business.

I wouldn’t want to say that Steve carried that lesson forward to his experience when he returned to Apple years later, and rather than bug out on what kinds of computers or software Pixar was using, left those decisions in the hands of people who had much higher priorities…but hey, he might have.

And while Tim Cook is a different manager in pretty much every way — and a better manager in pretty much every way, imo — I don’t get the impression that there are a lot of areas where he’s more tightly wound than El Jobso was. Quite the contrary. I’d think that this is near the bottom of the list of considerations, if it’s on the list at all.

I do think that if there are Macs anywhere in the production mix, though, that ProRes would be a no-brainer for sure….