[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Netflix does have a better browsing experience though.”

Ah, but Roku has the best search experience!

Load up all your favorite apps, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, the TV-network-specific apps (CBS All Access, HBO Go, Disney, etc etc), your favorite niche stuff (Documentary Depot? TED? Sure, why not?), et. al., and Roku searches over 100 of them all at once, listing price, whether subscription is required, all kinds of stuff.

Crazy amount of control, too. For just one example, you can set an alert for when a specific title becomes available for free, when something new from your favorite actor or director becomes available, all kinds of stuff. It really is insane.

This is obviously not unlike the Microsoft game console universal search, but really, truly souped up, and rapidly expanding. The feature rolled out in early 2016 with just a handful of channels, and jumped from 50 to over 100 a few months back.

Here are more details. It’s from the Roku blog, which they’re assuming you’re reading in order to keep up with the rapidity and breadth of the updates. This isn’t even the most impressive or best-illustrated description. Just the latest.

I’m skipping over stuff like streaming 4K/60fps/HDR for under $100 (and yes, it looks stunning) because I’m only talking about search for the moment…but this is another example of where folks who are focused primarily on what Apple is up to are not just years behind what’s happening in the rest of the world, but years behind ????, for no good reason. There’s nothing about this that any Apple user will find difficult or disorientingly foreign….except for the whole notion of tech that’s open, innovative, and sparks constant discovery. Hey, THOSE were the days, amirite? ????

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Brinder,

We’d love you to post your tutorials! It’s easy, too.

Just go to blogs.creativecow.net, and click to create your own blog. Then for the entry, simply post your YouTube embed code (we recommend movies at 720px wide), add any text that you’d like (perhaps copied from your YouTube page), and away you go!

Let us know if you need any help.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “ps – you are on the wrong forum – you should be on the RAID forum.”

Nahhh, he asked it here, it got answered here, it’s all good. ????

[Tim Wilson]

I’m going to take the liberty of embedding the video here. VERY cool stuff!

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[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “Ship Shape TV in Florida buys their own time. They have a specialty show on Yacht’s, and they buy the time on Fox Sports, and feature the sponsor.”

That’s how we built our video production business in the Florida Keys. We bought the half-hour block from the station, and got individual sponsors to pick up an incremental part of our tab. We and the station also split the ad spots — the station took half of them, and we could sell the other half at retail (only to have the station try to undercut us by selling at rates we weren’t allowed to match)…

…but it still turned out to be a great thing. We put together 5 shows over an 8 year span — usually at least 2 in production at the same time, but briefly, FOUR at once (don’t do that LOL) — with hundreds of episodes. This model absolutely works. It’s faster than Kickstarter, plus you don’t have to come up with prizes.

The trick is that you can never stop hustling. But you like to hustle, right? ????

I honestly do HIGHLY recommend this model, and wish more people would pursue it. Great fun.

Hey, here’s a production story of mine from one such show: “Before I forget – don’t wear any underwear!”

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Terry] ” it’s usual position of honor right beside the photos of Tom Jones and Ed Asner…”

Wait, you have pictures of Ed Asner and Tom Jones? Because you’ve worked with them, or just because they’re awesome?

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[Tim Wilson]

[Dave LaRonde] “For station promos going to social media, the Home Office mandates SQUARE video. 720×720. Furthermore, we’ve been told to assume that users won’t be listening to the audio. We’re reduced to thinking like DW Griffith in the silent movie era.”

Exactly. Vertical is rapidly expanding, and increasingly becoming the default, but for now, the major platforms for video – Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat – default to square, and muted. It’s one reason that Premiere has been really highlighting the OPEN captioning/subtitling features in recent releases. If you have a message that requires words in addition to pictures, write ’em out.

Advertisers are among the first folks figuring out that vertical (and square) video is not only not a problem, it’s a SOLUTION. When presented with widescreen content, fewer than a third of device users actually rotate their devices. As a result, they rarely even both watching the widescreen content — which now, on an unrotated device, isn’t widescreen at all! It’s tiny, cramped, and the producers look like idiots because they failed to create content for the screen it’s being viewed on.

Even accounting for the people who DO rotate their phones (again, less than a third of them), vertical video is NINE TIMES more likely to be watched all the way through to the end. Why? Because even if you DO rotate your phone to watch the video, it’s not how the phone was designed to be held for long. Phones are meant to be held vertically because of how our hands are shaped.

So stop turning your phone sideways! You’re holding it wrong. ????????????

And that 9x engagement for vertical video stat is from 2015. I bet it’s even higher now, especially since FBook, Snapchat and Instagram are that much bigger now….

Also worth noting: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat as the deluxe platforms for video? Those apps are vertical. Look at the best-selling apps. The ones on top are almost all vertical, almost all of the time, and most of the biggest, ONLY vertical. Not even a horizontal option.

[Dave LaRonde] “The only holdouts seem to be those in the motion picture industry. Imagine going to the movies and walking in to see a 1 : 2.35 vertical screen.”

I agree on movie theaters, but those aren’t the only places one might watch a movie. This is from a vertical film festival being held in a cathedral. A horizontal screen would have been positively sinful. ????

This is obviously a special case, but certainly a nifty way to underscore the value of matching content and context.

In fact, seeing how much advertising energy is building around vertical orientation, and looking at people like NBC and Discover creating original Snapchat programming in vertical, I’m willing to guess that we’re going to be seeing at least square trailers soon. I don’t think medium-vertical trailers (say, 3:4 rather than a full 9:16) are that far off either.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “I’m pretty sure I hate you now.”

There are so many reasons that people hate me — this is my favorite yet. LOL

A picture from Paul’s tour photographer JM Kim that ran in the LA Times – horizontal, but the fisheye required to get both Paul and the audience in the picture opened a wide gulf between us that wasn’t there. Except when he sat down to play the piano toward the back of the stage, he was mostly directly in front of me, 6-7 away. I’m the second from the left of the frame, with my arm resting on the rail.

I still think that the vertical video does a better job of capturing the scene, but having a professional document it, with a flash photo no less, is still more than I’d hoped for. It’s a big pic, so click if you care, or not, as you see fit.

[Mark Suszko] “I think the Beeb isn’t really so much a fan of vertical, as it is just making allowances due to the huge number of poor photographers supplying content. “

That’s the part that I disagree with a million percent. LOL The allowance is for the “wrong” way that people hold their phones and tablets, except that “holding it wrong” is irrelevant. If almost all of your audience, almost all the time, is holding the screen vertically, it’s your JOB to shoot vertically.

The thing is, I don’t think it’s AT ALL an accident that watching video on Facebook and Instagram is skyrocketing, and in the case of FB, arguably past YouTube: vertical (if also sometimes square) is the CORRECT aspect ratio for devices. VERTICAL is NATIVE.

Again acknowledging that this isn’t true at all for long form programming. Even as long as a music video. Horizontal ftw. You turn device horizontal….unless you don’t. (“You” rhetorically that is.) Have you noticed how many people around you don’t turn their devices? Not unlike the number of people who preferred to stretch the SD content on their HD sets by default, rather than zoom. I want a full screen AND crawls, onscreen bugs, scores, etc.

But the BBC app is meant to provide a VERTICALLY scrolling list of short clips. Watch one short clip. Want to watch another? Here ya go. Vertical video after vertical video.

Not that they’ll all be vertical any time soon. But the horizontal ones will look wrong, because they ARE wrong.

[Mark Suszko] ” I went on to say, the 4 by 3 shot could be comped into a larger 16 by 9 in various clever and creative ways during post, based on the intent of the producer and editor using the footage, but I didn’t see a value in raw 16:9 for compositions that were in effect vertical portraits. “

You make it sound like this was a while ago, and that you might have lost the argument. Am I jumping to conclusions? Wouldn’t be the first time of course, but I’d love to know how the conversation went, and what the outcome was for both shooting and post.

My own thinking nowadays would be to go Tom’s route: biggest sensor I could find, shoot to protect multiple aspect ratios…including, yes, vertical. You’re right, Mark, interviews are fundamentally vertical-to-square. We usually make them widescreen by adding a lot of empty space to “balance” the actual content….but what happened with the project you’re talking about here?

And I said this a bunch of posts ago, but it’s worth repeating here: I’m not saying that anyone should feel any differently than they do, except to the extent that I think it’s an error to reject vertical video on principle, even when it’s containerized in a 16:9 frame. For devices, it’s native, and to be preferred in very nearly every circumstance, which is why the mobile videographer is NOT holding it wrong. That’s how devices are meant to be held, regardless of suitability in the eyes of those as old as we are. LOL

But also to a point that Ned made upthread, we really do need to be thinking about this as the amount of vertical video skyrockets — or we could just accept the scaled / blurred / dimmed solution that YouTube defaults to. People understand what it means, and most people don’t even notice that anything is “wrong”. Since, of course, it’s not wrong. It’s just vertical. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Robin S. Kurz] “Exactly! *mic-drop*”

I take back everything I said.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Rooney] “To call it any kind of standard really is a stretch.”

We’ll take that for granted. LOL Thanks for your help in any case. 😀

[Michael Gissing] “If interchange is possible only via a new variant of fcpxml (currently in its 6th iteration) then it breaks all interchange.”

Exactly the reason Apple should be out of the XML business. The less they touch, the better.

Thank the Godz (at least in their 1966-1973 iteration; pictured below) that QuickTime is less important over time. It was a running, not very funny joke that every time Apple used to update QuickTime, it would break FCP. Same for iTunes for that matter. New iTunes = busted FCP.

Not to overly pick on Apple. Many of the issues I describe here are endemic to many, if not most, host application developers. But this is a thread about FCPX features or the lack thereof, and my whole-hearted support for Apple developing less, and actively nourishing a third-party ecosystem to do more.

[Michael Gissing] ” AAF, OMF AES-31, EDL etc. These standards may be legacy but they are still in use and a part of established workflows. “

The key to interop has been unchanged since Hippocrates: “First, do no harm.” Even if it’s not your standard, don’t break it. Needless to say, this is all too rarely the case, and not just for Apple. Jay-z Louise, how often does a render blow out something as basic as timecode? Way too often, in every host, when it should happen NEVER.

So to be honest, the last thing ANY developer should have to worry about is keeping up with EDL or OMF support or whatever — unless the host developer (Apple or anyone else) decides to get out of the way and neither support it nor try to replace it. That remains to me the best possible scenario.

[Michael Gissing] “Every time a new version of OS or NLE software comes out there can be a lag getting new bugs ironed out.”

That’s MORE true for host developers than third parties. BY FAR. Why? Because you know how many people at the host developer have time to give a crap as the main part of their job? FAR FEWER than at the third party!!!

See also my previous example of Apple Legacy breaking FCP Legacy with every new QT and iTunes release. Really, the only thing that anybody needs to know about FCPX is that this doesn’t happen anymore. Sold! LOL

(Or does it and I’ve just missed those posts? In which case, just add it to the list of things I’m wrong about.)

In fairness to host developers, you can’t just be throwing out releases willy-nilly, not even patch updates. For one, you have to create an installer and test the ever-loving shit out of it, which is insanely more work than you think.

I thought I had a pretty good idea of what this meant from being involved in release engineering at a plug-in developer, but when I got to Avid, holy cow, I had NO IDEA what was involved in developing a host-app installer. Beyond engineering, release engineering, and QA, the simplest of patches reverberates up and down every part of the company: documentation, sales, the web team, marketing, legal, on and on.

All of which implies that “not breaking third party plug-ins” is a priority, which, guess what.

OR [host developer name here] could just skip the whole megillah, let the third-party do the thing, and if there’s a problem, the third-party is responsible for cleaning up…which they routinely do, often within hours of a bug report….which typically have more to do with something the host developer broke without even noticing, because host developers inevitably lack the development or QA resources to track all this.

Codecs really are a bigger deal than any kind of vfx. Think about how many codecs you’ve been waiting around for hosts to support over the years. It’s insane. All any host would have to do to fix this is open the door and say, “Anybody out there got a better renderer than ours? Raise your hand.”

That’s one thing 3D developers get right for sure. Rendering is a function that CAN be farmed out, and IS farmed out. If FCPX would just hand off the rendering of camera codecs, you’d never have to wait again, EVER. The day you could buy a camera, you could use the codec.

Why not? Because host developers insist on standing in the way. It’s been proven for generations (software-ly speaking) that other people can produce higher quality renders than the best hosts — LET THEM.

ProRes is sort of a workaround of course, as was Avid DNxHD when it was released four years earlier. But they’re both still bound by things like frame size, frame rate, definitions of what a frame MEANS, all that kind of thing, and annoying for files recorded in formats that ProRes doesn’t support yet. Yet.

So the core function as defined today is, “We’re the only ones who can render. You’ll have to wait for us to support it, but our QA team is so small and so narrowly focused, that we may get to it, and we may not. And if you find a bug that we missed, you’ll have to wait xxxx months before you can get the fix…even though the third-party camera or plug-in developer fixed it for us in 24 hours.”

The core function as I’d LIKE to define it is “build hooks for render engines” — which is well-established engineering — and offer options for third-party codec management. Let the codec be 100% supported the day the camera is released, not because Apple has had to take their off the ball and rush out a new release to support the six maniacs who need that codec on Day One, but because the manufacturer has kept their eye on the ball, been test-rendering all along, and knows that their codec is render-ready on Day One.

Look, you may think codecs are a terrible example because ProRes has been handed down by The Godz (1966-1973 incarnation) and needs no improvement, and it is the duty of all mortals to bow down to The Godz (which I actually kind of agree with, vis a vis The Godz themselves anyway)…

….but the point is, I want every host developer asking themselves, every time, what’s the LEAST we can do ourselves? What’s the MOST we can do to support our third-party partners who are doing better work in these areas than we ever will?

Interop is a great example. How many DAWs in various configs do you reckon Apple has laying around for testing? The number is likely in the neighborhood of the number of people on the FCPX team who use DAWs enough to know what life-saving interop looks like.

No offense intended. Merely speculating. Nevertheless, Apple’s never going to do as good a job as X2Pro or AATranslator or any other third party. Their time is better spent doing almost anything else.

[Michael Gissing] “I know the people behind AATranslator are constantly chasing such variables”

Of course they are, but that’s life as a third-party developer. When I was at Boris, we supported 24 different host applications, and every one of them had different architectures, in some cases wildly so. I know Boris has added more hosts since then.

The thing is, you know how many people at [host developer name here] are keeping up with this kind of thing as their one and only job? Your guess is as good as mine, but it ain’t many. Maybe none.

Which is why Michael, Simon Ubsdell, Boris, the X2Pro folks, and all of the many third-party developers who stand in the breach to meet needs that are no less life-and-death to me just because they’re life and death only to me, are GODZ.

Which is why they should all wear their hair and dress exactly like The Godz. That would be awesome.