[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “I bet Adobe would have been first in line for that sale. ;-)”

Ironically enough, Apple had tried to license Premiere tech (not buying Premiere itself, as has often been reported) as a consumer app to be included on the shiny new bubble(gum) iMacs. Adobe declined, so Apple went shopping for this thing they’d heard about from the guy who originally developed Premiere, now working at Macromedia.

It turns out that flipping Macromedia Final Cut into Apple Final Cut Pro was pretty easy work, so I don’t think it’s any accident that Randy Ubillos spent most of his heavy lifting at Apple working on iMovie. That was the product Steve had first been looking for, which is why I also think that X was the first pro-focused NLE that Steve was really excited by. Not because it’s iMovie Pro (an old joke that I don’t think is true), but because it’s actually Mac-like, which FCP never was imo.

Which certainly would have made it easier on anyone who was looking to adapt it to their own look and feel. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Apple continuing to sell FCP Legend for a few months after the launch of X wouldn’t have harmed the uptick of X, and that’s all that people basically wanted“

I don’t think that that last point is true at all, for a bunch of reasons.

Chief among them is that it’s still available today. Here it is on Amazon, $669 with Prime shipping. You can have it Saturday (on Memorial Day weekend no less!) with free shipping. If you can wait a couple of extra days for it used, you can get it for about half that.

So at the very least, let’s end the myth that it’s no longer available, because it is. Thirteen boxes in stock at this one link alone.

Let’s say that it was actually gone forever. (Let me emphasize again: NOT TRUE.)

People had 3 months to see what X was about, based on a rare, incredibly widely distributed NAB presentation from Apple themselves. There was wall-to-wall coverage here in the COW, including this very forum (which sprung into being DURING the NAB presentation as the conversation overwhelmed the original FCP forum). Calling it well-discussed on the internet at large is a colossal understatement.

As a result, there was no doubt whatsoever that this was coming. For three months, anybody who wanted to squirrel away a few boxes of Final Cut Studio for their fallout shelters beside the jerky and powdered milk could easily have done so.

Apple never made any suggestion that there would be parallel development between X and Legacy. None. NO suggestion that ANYTHING resembling Legend even a little would ever see the light of day again. Anybody who failed to act in those three months has only themselves to blame.

(But honestly, is somebody arguing that there was some urgent need to buy boxes for seats that hadn’t existed in April 2011? Maybe here and there, but the evidence that this can’t possibly be true on any wide scale is that fact that Legend remains relatively abundant at a discount, rather than rare at a premium.)

The fact that Apple briefly relented rather than dump the leftover boxes in a landfill doesn’t change that. Three months warning. That’s plenty of time for anyone who’s not cruising for a fight.

And let’s be honest. It’s clear that, mixed in with plenty of well-earned good-faith consternation, there were also scazillions of people who were just looking to vent, and were happy to point their quivering outrage wherever they could.

Perhaps so busy quivering in their outrage that they failed to notice that, five years later, they can have a box of Legend on their doorstep with free two-day shipping.

Now then….

….to my point about it being impossible to sustain two divergent development paths with one set of resources, and the folly of assigning two sets of resources to competing goals, knowing in advance which of them will win and which will lose, I note that Sony ONLY sold Vegas, the equivalent of FCP Legend. They’re KEEPING Catalyst, the equivalent of FCPX, for themselves.

Which raises an interesting what if. What if Apple had done like Sony: kept the shiny new thing (FCPX), and sold the neglected old thing (FCP) to somebody else?

Who might they have sold it to? What might it have become? Discuss. 🙂

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last day or two. I’ve called FCP 7 zombie-ware on many occasions (still shuffling along, but with neither heartbeat nor breath), and will do again on many more. I truly believe that Apple bestowed a mercy upon both FCP and its ever-awaiting fans by putting a shovel in the zombie’s head and ending the charade.

But I’ve never let my enthusiasm for X or my enthusiastic support for Apple’s perfectly executed launch take away my belief that SOMEBODY could have been developing FCP Legend since some point soon after 2007 and far into the future from now. Just not Apple.

The fact is that Vegas itself had taken on some of the traits of zombieware. Just last month, someone in the COW’s Vegas forum started a “Sony Vegas RIP” thread, saying that it was time for Vegas users to come to terms with the fact that this thing was in fact dead.

I think some of the same dynamic was afoot at Sony as Apple. Sony had shifted resources to Catalyst, but the framework of Vegas was such that it could keep going for a long time without further development — but rather than take Apple’s course, they chose to sell it somebody who CAN breathe new life into it, and fulfill its still untapped potential.

So I think in addition to Sony shifting resources, there was some thought of well, let’s let the new guys invest in it, since we’re not going to be around to monetize any efforts of our own. This kind of purchase doesn’t happen overnight, and it honestly would have made no sense whatever for Sony to do work that could never be paid for, since they were never gonna be selling that product themselves.

Apple knew this about FCP Legend of course. No point in developing it if you can’t pay for that development with sales, since they knew that they were never going to sell that product again.

And indeed, one of the hazards of funding development via sales is that you can ONLY pay for development in arrears. This makes forward-facing development impossible.

Contrast this with subscription-funded development, which is all about funding forward-looking development TODAY. Subscription-funded development HAS to be forward-facing to justify its own value over the life of each and every subscription. That’s the theory, and both Adobe and Avid have amply demonstrated that it works exactly that way in each of their variations on the theme.

Anyway, I do think that the parallels and contrasts between Apple and Sony are interesting on this front.

I mentioned in another post on this thread that it has been exciting for me to see the industry’s most fervent fan base regain its fervor over just the past couple of days. I really, truly hope they see this effort bear the fruit they anticipate when the new version of Vegas launches in September.

I also think a lot of the developers on the MAGIX team, some of whom have been working on Vegas since the Sonic Foundry days, are chomping at the bit to do the work they’d been wanting to do for a very long time. I’m happy for them too. I’ve known some of those guys since my days at Boris FX around the turn of the century, and enjoyed developing the first major third-party plug-in for Vegas with them.

In any case, for a bunch of armchair yakkers like us, this is going to be a fun summer as we watch all this unfold.

[Tim Wilson]

[Graham Bernard] “Off we go again.
“

I’m already having fun. It’s a real pleasure to see the most enthusiastic user community on the planet get enthusiastic again.

I can’t wait to see what’s coming!

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “There very same question could have been asked of FCP X until some brave and smart people including yourself bucked popular wisdom and made it happen.”

fwiw, Vegas has typically been one of our very top forums at the COW. The only reason it has dropped out of the top 3 is because of increased traffic in Resolve, Premiere Pro, After Effects and this here forum.

Quite a bit of the work using Vegas is taking place at a level very similar to non-broadcast work edited with other products here, but yes, like FCPX, the feature set is ample for just about any kind of work. More than a few of Vegas’s long suits aren’t natively available in most NLEs, including robust scripting, motion tracking and more.

I’ll also add that I’ve never seen a more passionate user base than Vegas. Not FCP, not FCPX, not After Effects — nobody can hold a candle to those folks.

[Walter Soyka] “But I do think “Why should I switch to Vegas?” would make an interesting question.
“

Of course, a number of high-profile Vegas users (including our own John Rofrano) have migrated from Vegas to FCPX. 🙂

To a point I’ve made many times over the years, Sony’s attention has been divided with trying to develop both Vegas and Catalyst, and Vegas has paid the price. That MAGIX has bought Vegas and NOT bought Catalyst (which will stay at Sony) has already pumped up the enthusiasm in that community beyond anything I’ve seen in years. I’ve already been seeing a number of profoundly disheartened users remind themselves of what they’ve loved for years, with great hope for what’s to come.

And when’s the last time you could characterize an entire user base as energized and hopeful? Maybe Resolve? Maybe, but not like this. It’s gonna be fun to see what comes to pass.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mathieu Ghekiere] “In 2009 they had Final Cut Studio 3, which included FCP 7, and this were only pretty minor feature improvements (although they were welcome), where everyone was kind of disappointed and looking out to what was going to come next.”

You are actually agreeing with me. People were disappointed in 2009 because development had largely stopped after 2007. 2009 was merely a maintenance release. Apple’s priorities had already shifted.

My point about 2007 is that the boldest headline feature was Pro Res. It was an odd duck. Released four years AFTER Avid had introduced DNxHD, based on the very same technology, with the very same intent. Pro Res didn’t take off until support for hardware encoding from companies like AJA was widely available…at which point Pro Res was understood to be one of FCP’s most important features yet…

…but go back and look through the Creative COW archive. There was widespread disappointment for Apple’s 2007 release as well. This is in strong contrast to every year before then, when enthusiasm was quite high.

Again, even if we disagree that Apple’s last major EDITING feature was multicam in 2005, we completely agree that Apple was coasting after 2007, leading to only a minor update in 2009.

It turns out that they were working very hard indeed on their 2011 release. Ironically, it’s most like the 2007 release. Initial disappointment gave way to an understanding that FCPX was a much more compelling release than it first appeared.

Noting again that I was among the handful of people who was IMMEDIATELY enthralled by X. I just happen to be honest that it was no more than a handful of us. 🙂

And in fairness to those initially disappointed, it took awhile for Apple to deliver the much-awaited features that made it a compelling replacement.

[Tim Wilson]

[Noah Kadner] “I never understood why Sony was in the NLE business in the first place”

They’ve been in it a lot longer than you might remember. (Although maybe you do!) At the high end, editing was part of their SONAPS ingest-editing-playout-nearline-archive end-to-end broadcast TV production system. A Grass Valley-ish sort of enterprise, optimized around XDCAM. The editing component was XPRI. Remember that bag of dripping goo?

At the low end, remember Circuit City? Back in the 90s, there was a huge burst of people trying to scoop up the nascent home digital video business with boxes of $99 software for Windows. When I say “people” I mean companies that should have known better, like Sony and Pinnacle. LOL

This kicked up a couple of notches with DV, which removed pesky I/O issues. This was a smarter play for Sony than a lot of others, because of their camera business. Needless to say, as with XPRI and XDCAM, Sony was getting a slice of DV licensing and selling Sony DV cameras, and later HDV cameras, so editing software that was optimized for those Sony formats (including yeah, XDCAM) was a synergistic play that reinforced the value of the platform for capture, editing, and distribution/archiving via DVD.

At the low end, this wasn’t a joke. There was real money here. I don’t know about Vegas, but I know that Pinnacle Studio had 10 million customers. TEN MILLION! At $100/box, plus an upgrade or two along the way, it was well over a billion dollars gross across the life of that product. And talk about low-hanging fruit! It was built on just a few gleanings from high-end products whose tech was just as easily applicable to the low end.

But even Pinnacle Studio was too high-falutin’. Sony Screenblast Movie Studio was positioned against Windows Movie Maker and Ulead VideoStudio. Believe it or not, I recently stumbled across a review of this swath of the market, and while specifically nodding to the power of Pinnacle Studio, they also pointed out that it wasn’t included in the review because you really needed some more experience to take advantage of it. Take a look if you dare.

It turns out that the Screenblast tech was licensed from Sonic Foundry. Their audio stuff in particular was amazing. The price/performance for Sound Forge was off the charts, and ACID was a wall-to-wall blast. Sony had a whale of a time staying afloat vs. Adobe and Apple (and to a MUCH lesser extent, Avid…although in fact Sound Forge had the most compelling Pro Tools-like feature set out there), sold for seriously short money to Sony ($18 million!!!) who saw an opportunity to fill in the gap between Screenblast and XPRI. With audio and DVD tools up and down the line, they had an end-to-end solution in every price range and in virtually every market.

Vegas offered a lot of other features that were useful much higher up the product line than we typically talk about around here. Easy support for high-end formats, scriptability that made it right at home inside high-end environments, 3D DVE and compositing toolsets that tied into broadcast CG, etc. Frankly, not unlike FCPX or (dare I say it) FCP Legend. Looks like one thing, but can do lots of ’em.

Certainly played well against Pinnacle’s Liquid product line for sure, and helped Sony keep a straight face in the lower end of the broadcast market for a lot more years than you’d think. And both Sony and Liquid were doing vastly more business in other parts of the world than the US, so the value proposition for them was hidden from the plain view of American and far-western European eyes.

So the acquisition of Sonic Foundry was an actual strategy, tied to a strategy being executed across the entire company.

Any number of moderately well-educated chimps can tell you that there was a countdown clock attached to this strategy, but I think every one of said chimps would have said that the clock would have run out a long time before it actually has. It turns out that there’s actual money in the consumer electronics market, and the consumer software adjacent to it. Who knew?

Perhaps a longer answer than the question warrants, but I know you expect nothing less from me.

FWIW, our friend John Rofrano had posted this in the COW’s Vegas forum last night. He was one of the true giants in those circles, but transitioned his own work onto FCPX a while back. Hopefully he’ll weigh in with some insights that will outweigh mine. 🙂

[Shawn Miller] “I wonder if Resolve played any role in Sony’s decision to get out of the NLE business.”

Probably not, because even at a price of $0, the markets were different.

I’m going to say that the biggest bite was taken by FCPX. You can see it in the product that was in the process of supplanting Vegas, Sony Catalyst. Their strategy was identical to the one suggested here many times: send out the new thing in its current state — amply usable, but feature incomplete — while leaving the Legacy product in place for people who need the “full” feature set of the “real” product.

The problem is that the “real” product’s customers kept hanging on, demanding development that was never going to happen, because Sony was investing its energies into the new thing. The outcome: Sony could NEVER EVER EVER make money with this strategy, because they were the vampire sucking their own blood. Eventually, there was no blood left.

Apple knew this from the beginning, so they never insulted their users by pretending that there was ANY future for FCP Legend. In fact, they did this in reverse, by essentially freezing development at 2007 or so, with no more than maintenance features after the introduction of Pro Res, which wasn’t exactly a feature…leaving the last major FEATURE development at FCP 5 and multicam.

So there was your glidepath: 4+ years of no more than maintenance development, while the new thing was about to emerge.

You can (and many of you do) argue that Apple could have extended its glidepath forward, but I continue to maintain that this strategy would have cratered Apple’s business for both products. Sony’s experience isn’t exactly proof, but it’s certainly a perfect case study that this strategy is unsustainable.

I don’t know what MAGIX is planning, but you already know what my advice to them would be. Pick one horse and ride it.

I like Catalyst a lot. Just as Vegas (and Screenblast) was first optimized for Sony DV, Catalyst has been optimized for consumer 4K+ (think Go Pro) and Sony RAW, and is stupidly powerful for the money. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it looks like FCPX…but it doesn’t look entirely un-X like, and any longtime Sonic Foundry user will tell you that Sony’s approach to tracks has been ahead of the game…even if some folks now consider tracks to be by definition behind the game.

But it’s wholly legit, and more than capable for building a business on for MAGIX…but only if they commit to it. Otherwise, they’re in for the same self-vampiring that killed the product line at Sony.

Or heck, maybe the thing was making a mint and Sony decided to get out of the mint business. But I’m guessing it was more like the problem of sucking their own blood until there was none left.

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “[Joe Marler] “Fortunately Adobe now sees the need for a built-in proxy mode and this will be added in a future version of Premiere.”

Future, as in the next upgrade due in a few weeks, not future as normally understood with Black Magic or Red delivery dates, or hoped for X features by users.”

This bears repeating, so I repeated it. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “So my question is: will we always still be using containers of one kind or another, alongside these metadata filtering options, or can you see a time when we might move over entirely to the metadata-driven model?”

“Entirely” is a strong word, but I think it’s the right word to use as a goal.

The issue in the longer run is what happens When Metadata Models Collide. We actually wrote about this way back in 2008, in an interview I did with David Stump, ASC, called Metadata and the Future of Filmmaking. Dave has been a cinematographer specializing in VFX over the years, and (at least as of 2008) the chair of the ASC Camera subcommittee and co-chair of the Metadata subcommittee.

He was also very active in developing metadata recorders for cameras, cranes, lenses, and other on-set systems. He won a SciTech Academy Award for his work on that.

He’s currently one of the big brains behind Lytro, which can be better understood in this context: the highest-grade sensors and optics coupled with a staggering amount of both data and metadata. That’s the reason why Lytro is currently the size of a small car: it takes more computational power than can be contained in even multiple desktop computers.

The question with metadata is what happens to it downstream. For example, it’s very nice that FCPX reads Finder-level tags, but does Motion? (Maybe it does. I’m just asking.) What happens to those Finder-level tags for two clips that are rendered together to form a third piece of media? I assume that the metadata of the original clips is decimated, and you wind up with a clip whose metadata is a tabula erasa — not just a BLANK slate, but a slate formerly full of information that was erased.

Think about something as simple as timecode. It wasn’t that long ago that NO applications preserved timecode for something as simple as a rendered color correction. The only reason that they do now is because Warriors for Metadata Integrity told developers that they WANT that metadata preserved.

The same is true for plug-ins. There are times when their renders overwrite metadata as simple as timecode.

But timecode isn’t always the most relevant metadatum. The fact is that every setting on a modern high-end camera generates a field of metadata that your CAMERA can read. HUNDREDS of fields, just for camera menu settings. But does FCPX read those? Does After Effects? Does Resolve? Where does all that metadata go? Most of it simply disappears.

The goal that Dave and others have been striving for is, if your application doesn’t care about that metadata, don’t destroy the metadata already written to the file.

That’s asking a lot, but on the other hand, not so much. It would be intolerable if applications overwrote file names, creation dates, and other typically high-level metadata. Why would we not expect applications not to overwrite fields that are none of their business? Just leave that stuff alone.

Then there’s the data collision issue that I mentioned. The same finder-level information might be written by multiple applications (including a camera) — so usually the last one in is the one whose metadata “wins,” even though you might have preferred that the original data remained unscathed. So you’d need some higher entity being aware of multiple sets of metadata, and asking you what you want to do when there are conflicts.

And what WOULD you want to do with conflicts? The default would probably be “Which one of these do you want to choose,” but what if you want to save both pieces of information, but only have a single field of metadata to fill?

Avid’s solution is the right one I think, which is to allow the creation of a vast array of custom metadata fields. They’re only readable within the context of Avid editing, but that’s where metadata wrangling comes in. The offline footage goes to Resolve, where good-sized bits of the metadata are overwritten, then back to Symphony, which depending on how workflow was set up, may or may not have access to the original metadata. Somebody has to KNOW in advance where they want the metadata stored in such a way that it’s available where it needs to be.

Dave’s article goes much further into the production side in particular, noting that the most critical metadata on set is frequently only recorded in the script supervisor’s handwritten notes. In 2008, that was kind of a dead end. Today, thanks to relentless advocation by people like Dave, some tablet based applications can capture handwritten notes, but they’re not all that widespread. Acres of mission-critical data and metadata is still captured by hand, and often goes no further than a notebook on a shelf.

This is why I say that “entirely” is a strong word. You may not need Resolve or After Effects to do anything with a script supervisor’s notes, or your camera’s lens settings — but it’d sure be nice if they didn’t destroy those fields if you’ve filled them in. But it’d sure be nice if this plethora of metadata being written by all these different sources had some meaningful way of talking to each other when you wanted them to too.

Even if you’re only nominally interested in this, you won’t find sharper insights into the technical side of filmmaking than Dave Stump shares in this interview. It was actually put together by longtime COW member Gary Adcock, an associate ASC member who’s another Warrior for Metadata Integrity who was able to join us for part of the interview. It’s one of my favorite things to have ever put together in my 10 years here, and I think you’ll really enjoy it too.

Metadata and the Future of Filmmaking

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “I can assure you that FCP X team members know what’s being discussed on sites like this one”

THERE ARE NO SITES LIKE THIS ONE BILL

lol

One reason why: this is the one where Simon Ubsdell, Charlie Austin, and the rest of you lot are sharpening each other’s swords.

And specifically, on this occasion, Simon’s remarkable video tutorial above, prepared to move this particular conversation in its ever more helpful direction.

So, with thanks to Charlie for inviting to Simon to explore an earlier thread in more depth, I took the opportunity to spin the video into its own independent existence, and I invite you to share it:

Simon Ubsdell’s FCPX Workflow Wizardry: One Smart Collection To Rule Them All

The first key to workflow wizardry is to exploit an application’s strengths. In exploring the nuances of FCPX, famed workflow wizard Simon Ubsdell opens up some of the secrets around one of its most uniquely powerful, but sorely underused tools: Smart Collections. This isn’t about replacing your existing project management (although it can). It’s about leveraging some of the ridiculously awesome power of the Smart Collection to make your work flow far more easily than you might have imagined.

Another aspect of Simon’s wizardry: this is something he quickly whipped together springing out of two very energetic conversations in Creative COW’s FCPX or Not: The Debate forum. The first is based on Charlie Austin’s presentation for FCPWORKS’ FCP Exchange, called Making the Switch to X: A Comparative Study.

As the conversation evolved, Simon more deeply explored the specific question, what might happen if you used one Library, one Event, one Smart Collection to organize everything? He continued to explore this on the new thread from whence this tutorial emerges, One Smart Collection to Rule Them All’>One Smart Collection to Rule Them All.

Take a look at this, then take a look at those, and prepare for your workflow to be transformed. Not unlike magic.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Woodhead] “Guess what I’m looking for is a Resolve plug-in. :)”

Hey, there’s one for Baselight that works pretty nicely inside Avid, Nuke, and FCP 7.

I have no idea what’s possible inside the constraints of X’s architecture, or whether there’d be a way for BMD to actually monetize this, but hey, can’t hurt to ask. This is a company where asking actually gets you somewhere. LOL