[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “Great. Now a software can make words in a human voice and make jump cuts invisible. What could go wrong?”

Well, in fairness, the loudest two bits of applause were for the most magical parts of the demo, but the THIRD loudest bit of applause was for the statement that Adobe’s next goal was to give the audio track a “fingerprint” to indicate beyond any doubt that the track had been edited…but yeah, that’s pretty far down in the weeds. It’s easy to imagine scenarios where it wouldn’t matter how many times the footage had been debunked as tampered with, that the damage would already be done.

Fortunately I can count on all of you to refuse to be sucked down into this ethical maelstrom in the first place. Avoiding reshoots is one thing. This scenario is another….although it made me think, what would Eli Cross do with this? ????

(I’d forgotten until I pulled this up that The Stunt Man had played exclusively in General Cinema theaters!)

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[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “ScriptSync is amazing for unscripted/documentary work as well (honestly I think it’s probably more of a boon for that than for scripted, but that’s just my opinion)”

Avid’s opinion too. ? At least when they rolled it out under that name.

Indeed, one of my last major tasks at Avid before I left to come to Creative COW was the Avid Interplay rollout at NAB 2006, which VERY prominently featured ScriptSync, and our ONLY demos were of unscripted TV. The story being that these are the kinds of projects where you have the most stuff to sort through, and it’s the least organized. We demo’d the heck out of that feature, and the response was HUGE.

That said….

[Brett Sherman] “I’m talking about text data integrated into the clip itself. So no matter where you are in the clip, it knows what is being said. “

I’m completely with you on this Brett.

At the risk of setting off a firestorm of controversy for saying anything nice about Adobe, did you see their demo at Adobe MAX of VoCo? It’s a technology demo, not a product demo, and as presented here, a feature applied to audio only — but it’s pretty close to what you’re talking about.

They play a clip, and it creates text in a little box under the waveform. To edit the speech, instead of digging into the waveform, it shows simply cutting and pasting the TEXT, in real time. It’s off the hook.

The next thing would ONLY apply to audio-only…at least as demo’d…and that’s a case where the narration was missing a couple of words, so they just TYPED THEM ON SCREEN, and VoCo SYNTHESIZED THEM based on what it had learned about the speaker’s manner of speaking. The demo is very clear that it takes a good bit of speech being entered into the system to provide enough reference material to pull that off (20 minutes for now)….but it’s so completely magical that their next text is to make it easily detectable at the file level.

That is, it’s not detectable AT ALL at the auditory level, but there HAS to be an indelible watermark of some sort to establish that the clip has in fact been tampered with, to prevent chicanery if some baddie tries to make it sound like somebody said something that they didn’t.

Check out the first 5 minutes of this clip, and I promise you’ll be blown away that there’s somebody out there who’s thinking this far ahead, even if for audio only. For now. ?

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[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “Took me a very long time to realize we often weren’t debating any sort of objective “facts” at all. We were debating emotional reactions to change. And those feelings were every bit as real and central to the discussions as how anything actually functioned. “

I’ve said two things in this forum from the very beginning, that a) Apple’s rollout of X was flawless and 100 years from now will still be studied in MBA programs as the RIGHT way to do these things, and b) that ALL decisions about NLEs are made the same way that ALL decisions are, by emotional forces that are frequently unexamined.

You may never come around to the first one, but I’m glad you’ve come around to the second. ?

No kidding, I’ve said this in DOZENS of posts. The context that I’ve most often brought it up in is that some people are VERY quick to ascribe emotional reasons for NOT adopting X — fear, set in their ways, unwillingness to change, Luddite, etc etc etc — but never acknowledge their OWN emotional reasons FOR adopting X.

Here’s an example from March 2015:

It’s easy to deny the INTERNAL forces — personal preferences, emotional comfort, spiritual values, philosophical inclinations, you name it — behind making or not making change. Until we bring that into the conversation and keep it there, we’re leaving out what I think is MORE than half of the dynamic that drives choices.

Even if one isn’t willing to go as far down the Freudian road as I am (MOST choices about MOST things are driven by pre-rational unconscious forces that we pretend are rational because of our fear of confronting the truth about ourselves), I think it’s the definition of insanity to leave out the primacy of preference. We choose things because we LIKE ’em, for reasons, again, that are far less rational than we think.

Which is GOOD. It’s HUMAN. It’s one of the most distinctively human impulses of all, at the very core of the concept of consciousness.

Continuing from that post, I said that “we can’t have a MEANINGFUL conversation if we attribute negative values to people who choose differently for INTERNAL reasons” without being honest about our OWN internal reasons that have nothing to do with rationality, and everything to do with feelings.

Indeed, I spoke about this as at least as far back as May 2012, when the combination of X and the lack of a new Mac Pro led to a number of formerly VERY high-profile FCP and Mac advocates to not only leave FCP, but leave the Mac altogether. They often found this profoundly EMOTIONALLY painful, because of the deep PERSONAL connection that they’d felt for Apple, the PERSONAL affinity they had for The Apple Way.

The context of the thread is that people were talking about “hurt feelings” as if that was noise, and that rational discourse was “signal” — but I pointed out that feelings were signal, and the pretense to rationality was creating noise!

See, I don’t think that “hurt” is noise. I think it’s part of what has become one of the many NEW signals here: trying to figure out which way the big ball is going to bounce. As others have noted, feelings have ALWAYS factored into this. Dramatically changing feelings about the company people FELT most strongly about? Signal. It WILL affect the future of the industry and the people in it. It already has.

And frankly, losing faith in Apple, even if for emotional reasons, becomes a rational consideration. Dig:

You have a finite amount of time and money. You take a piece of yellow legal paper (IT HAS TO BE YELLOW OR IT DOESN’T COUNT), draw a line down the middle, make a list on each side, and “I just don’t like those f*ckers anymore” HAS to factor in. It would be IRrational to give money to people you don’t like or trust.

Again, this was May 2012, with many, many similar observations over the years.

I’ll end with one more, from a year and a half ago, where I argued that personality type had as much to do with speedy adoption (or not) of X as anything else. There are two innately human impulses, migration and settlement. Some people favor movement — ie, innovation, often for its own sake – whereas other people prefer settlement, ie, the expertise that only comes from years, maybe even decades of pursuit of a toolset.

Is there anything wrong with expertise? No. Is there anything wrong with adapting to innovation? No, which means that both positions are also right. Just not right for everyone.

But the overwhelming tendency in this forum HAD been (but isn’t now) the accusation that people were avoiding X because of some personal deficiency.

One of the ways I see this is in the implication that people are being “held back” for psychological reasons as well as cognitive ones — or more often, to the EXCLUSION of rational reasons. You know what? It can often be the case. I don’t think most of us have begun to reckon with the fact that what seems like our most discretionary choices — career, where we live, our life partners — could possibly among the ones most driven by pre-rational forces.

It’s no big deal, though. Not even worth pursuing. The fact that they ARE driven by unexamined internal dynamics is why most of the time, most of these choices work for most of us.

But it grinds any reasonable discussion to a halt to fail to acknowledge that there are equally compelling psychological reasons for adopting X that have little to do with rational ones. Which is also okay. If it works for you, who cares why?

It only matters to the extent that those forces are invoked in discussions like these, and the belief that only the OTHER guy is subject to them. The internal components that latch on to innovation as a higher good are every bit as real as the drive to attain the deepest possible expertise.

Enough already. My point being that I’m delighted that you’ve come around to a perspective I’ve waved the flag for since the earliest days of this forum. ????

I’ll make another post that features me once again waving the screen for touchscreens. ? They work for phones and tablets, and they work for computers — not for every task, or every kind of input, but they do offer efficiencies that nothing else does. It’s okay to have more than one way to do things. The only problem with The Magic Emoji Bar is that it doesn’t go far enough.

But if it didn’t do emojis at all, THAT’s what I’d be complaining about. ?

Okay, so maybe I’ve said enough about THAT for now, too. ?

(btw, an overdue thanks to Noah Kadner for encouraging me to finally get around to adding emojis to the forums. ?I do love me some emojis. These aren’t the greatest ever, but they’re the standardized ones that work about the same on every desktop and mobile platform….)

[Tim Wilson]

[Tony West] ” Them thinking they know better than you and not caring at all, are two different things I would say.”

Quite so, and poorly stated on my part. They most definitely DO care, which is one reason they so quickly responded to what I am officially naming The Connector Disconnect with their recent rollouts by lowering prices. They CARE that people were upset.

And as I noted, I believe that this is a hallmark of Tim C’s management style….but you’re right about the distinction, and you’re right that I muddled it.

[Tony West] ” I just think they will be a player in the field of editing for a long time.”

I’m positive they will be. Just not necessarily with X. While it obviously built on FCP, I think it’s also not accurate to say that it’s NOT a different product.

Likewise, Apple is still a key player in computing even though they killed the platform with the biggest market share they ever achieved, and likely ever will in Apple II. THAT’s what I meant when I said that popularity has never driven their strategies. Yes, they’ll kill something unprofitable, but they’ve killed profitable things too!

[Tony West] “At the end of the day, neither you or I have a crystal ball. We are just guessing. I made my guess and you yours. We will have to wait and see who comes closest : )”

While we generally agree that Apple will still be in the game for the foreseeable future, my record on predicting Apple is horrible! I’ve always been WAY too enthusiastic.

My biggest howler was my adamant assertion in 2011 and 2012 that Apple SURELY sold AT LEAST 10 million copies of FCPX within the first few months of release, and quite likely many more, since of course Apple would never settle for selling “only” 10 million of anything. Here’s one example among many threads where I said that, from 2012.

Frankly, I doubt that it’s as little as 10 million, but I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. It’s certainly closer to the kinds of number Apple looks for from software — but even there, still short of Apple-like numbers for anything.

I also said that if I were in charge and discovered that as FEW as 10 million copies were sold in the first year, I’d fire everyone in the marketing department.

Oops. Turns out that it took them THREE years to sell ONE million. ?

But what does it mean for X’s future if my predictions are consistently too rosy? ???

[Tim Wilson]

[Tony West] “It’s going to come down to how many people are using the program”

Dude, you did NOT just say that Apple will keep something around just because it’s popular. In THIS forum. ?

The fact is that Apple is built on killing popular products. To name one early example, the Apple II had 50% market share when Apple started sidelining it for Mac, with, explicitly no intent to have a market share to ever approach it again.

The fact that Shake was a niche of a niche wasn’t the issue. Steve bought it because he needed it for Pixar, and the price was trivial relative to its value. He rolled the tech into other products, and put the people on other projects. Classic Steve. He did that all the time, often putting people onto projects that had nothing to do with their old roles, just because he felt it was a better fit.

I still think that his primary management style was somewhere on the spectrum between sociopath and psychopath (I say in all sincerity as a former clinician and current inhabitant of that very spectrum myself), but that was pretty slick.

And Steve’s most adamant point was that listening to customers is always the wrong call. Always. He aggressively mocked his competitors for their customer focus, and said it was responsible for everything that was wrong with those products. lived by that code, and demonstrated it time after time. As he put it in Forbes in 2008, customers can’t see around the corners ahead, so they can’t possibly know the right things to ask for.

Tim Cook is a nicer man, and I think a better CEO in every way that matters, but that heritage is still built into the company. That attitude is going to be driving development for as long as Jony Ive is anywhere near the tiller.

That’s why Oliver’s point remains the salient one for me. We barely know what it would look like for Apple to keep an application alive for more than 10 years, because they’ve only barely ever done it before. Yeah, FCPX is technically FCP, but Motion is more zombieware than not, so whether or not Apple will say anything about reaching the end of X until after the fact, what’s the basis in Apple’s actual history for not having a firm belief that there IS an end?

I don’t think that’s a cause for panic. In retrospect, exactly as I predicted would happen, the panic over X dissipated, and people either adopted it or didn’t. The same’ll be true next time too.

But whatever Apple’s gonna do, it’s not going to be driven by popularity. It’ll be driven by what Apple wants the future to be for Apple, not its customers. Customers will either come along or they won’t. It’s hard to argue that this strategy hasn’t worked out pretty well for Apple and the customers who decided to stick around.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “[Jeremy Garchow] “The new solutions are ‘inelegant’ because they don’t have an automatic connection to older technology, including Apple tech. So in order of them to be ‘connectually’ elegant (and still feel new), they need to have everything that your old computer has, plus anything new.””

I hope you don’t include me in that characterization. I’m the one who keeps encouraging companies to burn backward compatibility to the ground. ?

No, the Apple non-solutions are inelegant because the two newest flagship devices can’t connect to each other with a cable included in either box, and there’s currently no way for two of the three newest devices to connect AT ALL.

This will of course be solved in due time, but the whole point of “we’re one company and we control the entire ecosystem” implies a commitment on Apple’s part to make sure that their newest stuff DOES work together.

Of course, it’s worth noting that Apple hasn’t suggested anything of the sort. There’s a reason why there’s never been a commercial with a Mac and an iDevice in them at the same time.

There’s a meaningful overlap between the intended audiences, but if you imagine them as a Venn diagram, the largest part of the iDevice audience does NOT coincide with the Mac audience. Associating them too closely would be a disaster, which is why Apple launched them at separate events. Apple isn’t willing to gamble the largest source of its income against its smallest customer base, nor should they.

But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect Apple to have made sure that the three hardware products (phone, buds, mbp) they introduce in the same fortnight would include interconnectivity in the box, if not also in the store at launch.

I don’t think that this is especially controversial. It’s certainly well within the mainstream of the response from Apple’s paying customers. It’s why Apple responded so quickly with unprecedented price reductions across their “suite” of adapters, of which I’ll wager that many of the most popular will be for connecting new devices to new devices. The sale doesn’t appear to have been part of the rollout at all, but a tacit acknowledgement by Apple that they tripped over their own ottoman.

Because if they HAD rolled out the sale at the same time as the products, AND included a yet-to-be-created adapter to connect two of their three newest products as part of that sale (can’t; doesn’t exist), that would have been almost as elegant as including a cable or adapter that would have connected the two most expensive ones in the box of at least one of ’em.

Almost. ?

But it again acknowledges that the unified Apple ecosystem is something of a myth. (Again not dinging Apple for this. They’ve never claimed it that I can recall.) Not enough iDevice users are using Macs, and I bet you a real pony that not enough Mac users are using iDevices* (or at least projected to buy new ones) to make this even vaguely justifiable financially, even if it would have offered more satisfying optics,

*That is, to try to restate an earlier point more clearly, of COURSE there’s an overlap in the customer bases, but even a cursory look at the numbers makes obvious that plenty of Mac folks are using Androids, and plenty of Windows folks have iDevices. It’s folly to treat them as the same market, which is why Apple doesn’t.

Still doesn’t change that they missed the chance to sync up their newest devices and connectors, and had to retreat into price cuts for accessories after getting publicly called on it.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “So what capability have I lost, and how many ports am I missing?”

Nobody said (or at least I didn’t say) that any ports were missing. No SD card is a big deal, though. Insurmountable? Of course not. I already posted a picture of a gorgeous adapter that was introduced in January when Apple dropped SD out of the Air.

No USB is kind of a drag, because of the millions of USB thumb drives I’ve been using over the years. Insurmountable? Of course not.

It becomes a bigger drag because the only wired connection on the cameras I currently own is….you guessed it…USB. Have I lost capability because I need a micro-USB to USB-C cable? No. But I’ve had to add a cable that I didn’t want to add, for no good reason.

If they kept the 3.5mm jack because audio pros need it, it’s not too big a stretch to imagine that they might have considered what photography pros need. But even more than video, photography pros have been upset with Apple for a while now.

The exasperating thing is just the extent to which Apple appears to not know what’s going on at Apple. So, they held the FCPX release to sync with the MBP? Fine. Great idea.

But did they not notice that the new iPhone was on the calendar for the same timeframe, and there’s no way to “natively” connect them without another cable or adapter? Well, I’m sure they did, but I guess they assume that pros don’t connect their phones to their computers, or that pros already have a pile of adapters on hand because of the pile of adapters it takes to use a Mac in the real world.

Actually, that latter is probably true. I’d imagine lots of people have USB C to Lightning cables already. But it certainly exposes the limitations of the Dream of A Single Cable for at least another generation of iPhones.

The other thing that struck me is, what was the biggest news out of the iPhone launch? No 3.5mm jack, right? I get that Apple might not have foreseen this, although I can’t imagine how they’d have missed it. But related to that, they announced the nifty AirBuds, right? (Okay, okay, Lightning EarPods, TERRIBLE name).

There’s currently no way to connect them to the new MBP. None. The current Lightning to 3.5mm adapter is misgendered for this setting. We’d need a female Lightning to 3.5mm audio plug or USB-C adapter, which doesn’t exist. Nbd, since pros don’t listen to music while they work, and if they do, they use the archaic but apparently intrinsically pro 3.5 mm jack.

NONE OF THIS IS HUGE. Please don’t accuse me of accusing Apple of cheating customers because of an uncharacteristically out-of-sync release. It’s just that. Nothing more, but in fact, also nothing less. This was not a great rollout.

(Unlike the FCPX rollout, which was FANTASTIC. ?)

You know what’s funny to me? If Microsoft had rolled out multiple new products in a short timeframe that were this far out of sync, presenting this range of conflicting messaging, Mac users would be laughing their asses off about the ineptitude of Microsoft, this is why we use Macs, etc etc etc.

Again, no big deal. We won’t be talking about any of this next year, any more than we talk about no optical drives in laptops anymore. But especially in the context of this thread, which started with the idea that Apple HAD to do things this way….when in fact that’s simply not true, it’s TOTALLY true that Apple didn’t HAVE to trip up.

They’re in charge of all the products. They could just as easily have made sure that the new iPhone could connect to the new MacBook Pro with the cables in the boxes, and at least had a connector for the new AirBuds in the store.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “For a flagship machine that comes with a price hike it’s pretty a ‘meh’ package, IMO.”

Exactly. I have no idea how I said that it seemed like a bad idea to me to remove the SD slot could become interpreted as saying that Apple is cheating its customers.

[Andrew Kimery] “Just saw that Apple has applied some hefty price cuts to the all the USB-C dongles they sell as well as the 4k and 5k LG monitors they announced along side the new MBP.”

The monitor cuts are nice. The dongle cuts are essential. Not that their engineering choices on the MBP are on the same order as their decision to ship the iPhone 4 with what they knew to be a faulty antenna (their reasoning: nobody uses an iPhone for phone calls) and needing to issue $1.5 billion worth of free cases/bumpers to forestall a recall….

….but I do think it reflects an awareness that the overwhelming reaction to the MBP is “To make this work with other Apple products, I have to buy WHAT?”

Because that really is the thing for me. Apple makes their choices for whatever reasons, that’s life — but this time it feels like they didn’t even look at their own product line before making these choices, or didn’t care about things like some of the connectors necessary to make these Apple products fit together aren’t even on the market yet. Did they think we wouldn’t notice?

That’s not cheating. It’s just….weak.

[Tim Wilson]

[Douglas K. Dempsey] “Apple, unlike Microsoft, is not soon going to make a full touch-screen MBP or iMac.”

Or HP, or Dell, or Lenovo for desktop all-in-ones, who’ve had them with screens up to 27 inches for a couple of years now. The list of laptop makers who’ve been doing this for a couple of years is much longer of course.

Microsoft has done something special with this release, no doubt about it, but make no mistake: this isn’t bizarrely future-facing bleeding edge tech. It’s absolutely mainstream, and has been for a while, for both consumers (choose from among a dozen touchscreen models at your local Walmart or Best Buy) and pros.

[Tim Wilson]

[Joe Marler] “What’s “cumbersome” is current camera wireless transfer techniques. By contrast an SD card slot in an expensive Pro laptop is “useful”.”

This is classic Apple-think to me. When they get things right, it’s because they think big. When they get things wrong, it’s because they think small.

It’s conceivable to me that not one person there has ever tried to transfer even as few as1000 pictures with a couple of movies off an SD card. To THEM, that probably sounds insanely high. To ME, it sounds like a moderately busy weekend, and I don’t even do this for a living.

The “thinking small” part is that wireless transfer is designed for doing a couple of pictures at a time to a phone so you can post to Instagram, or to a laptop or tablet so that you can do whatever — real Photoshop, put into a story, post to a company website, etc.

For all I know, the guys in charge maybe just HEARD about that, saw a demo, and said, that’s great. Problem solved….without seeing that welp, actually, it’s kind of a PITA for even a couple of pictures, but for anything big, it’s nowhere near ready to replace an SD card just from a workflow standpoint, much less talking about speed.

I’ve never been an Apple doesn’t love pros guy, and frankly, keeping the 3.5mm headphone jack on the MBP shows that they DO get pros LOL — at least some pros, for some things…but this apparently random dropping of features and interfaces is the kind of thing that drives people nuts…

….including yes, even some X’s most enthusiastically outspoken proponents NOW, who had to wait for 3rd parties to fill in the features Apple dropped.

Which, noting again, I personally called a feature, not a bug. I want Apple dropping MORE features, and MORE third parties to have opportunities…

…but with physical interfaces, this just becomes another THING to carry. Unlike some of the other adapters you’ll need for the new MBP, at least the SD card-USB C adapter actually exists, and looks pretty badass:

But really, that makes a solid half-dozen adapters, cables, etc. that most pros will have to carry.

Of course, one thing that Apple knows about pros. They carry BAGS. Just throw one more thing in the bag, right? No big deal. Problem solved.