[Tim Wilson]

[David Mathis] “Walter wrote a couple of very nice articles about editing in Resolve that are worth reading.

https://library.creativecow.net/biscardi_walter/DaVinci-Resolve-12-5/1“

And here’s part 2.

https://library.creativecow.net/biscardi_walter/DaVinci-Resolve-12-5_P2/1

Walter has given my part 3, and I should have it posted tomorrow. Just as you’d hope from any trilogy, the finale is worth the wait. 🙂

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Darren Roark] “Agreed, but calculating the raw parts minus the GPUs the ‘dollars to donuts’ profit margin is huge.
“

I just looked it up: 69%. Compare that to 40%-ish company wide and it’s clear who’s carrying the freight, which is why declining iPhone sales dropped Apple’s stock value by $40 billion in a single day.

I’m not sure that counting margins against list prices is fair. Somebody’s paying Apple for the iPhone you got “for free,” but I’m paying $7/month as thanks for my long standing VZW account — going back to roughly 1987, before the name Verizon even existed!!!! — so the whole of it ain’t coming directly out of my pocket. Not even close.

(This is why I have no interest in changing carriers, btw. On top of the best coverage, when I ask for something, they JUMP, even though it’s just 2 phones on the account, and we’re by no means massive data users or anything. I think once you get your 25 year pin and are staring hard at the 30 year pin, they’ve already bled you pretty well dry. LOL)

Anyway, Apple is reporting these as gross margins, which they are, so that’s all good — my point being that there might be a bigger gap between gross and net than they’re letting on to anyone who’s not sitting in front of a spreadsheet.

Whereas I am sitting under a bedsheet. LOL Big difference.

But the fact is that even gross margin is down. Check this chart from the Fool, who a) I don’t trust as far as I can throw, and b) is insanely on bullish on Apple even after posting this chart:

Apple’s not in trouble or anything like it, but pretty much everything is down, except for a $6 billion first year for Apple Watch. (Not bad for a first year, not bad.)

Here’s what’s crazy: it costs $81 to build an Apple Watch, and the entry level model goes for $349…for a profit margin of….drumroll please….SEVENTY SEVEN PERCENT.

But wait! There’s more! The average Apple Watch sale is north of $500! So $81 into $500, and we get….brumpumpump….EIGHTY FOUR PERCENT!!!!

Dude. 84% is in the neighborhood of like, movie concession stand soda pop. That’s INSANE.

So, yeah, $6 billion is a nice start…but a little better than $5 billion is NET PROFIT. Dollahs in the pocket.

This is well on its way to becoming the success I predicted it would be. I feel obliged to mention this because it happens so rarely. LOL

But it’s sobering that iPhone at 69% and the watch at 80%+/- isn’t enough to pull company-wide margins over 40%.

Well, “sobering” is relative. Most companies would do, uhm, even worse things than they’re already doing for a 40% margin.

BTW, how’s Sammy doing? Samsung’s clocking 39% gross margins with a business that includes a much more diverse product line. Hardly the slam-dunk for Apple typically proclaimed, especially with the new Galaxy phones up YoY, exceeding projections for both sales and profits. They’re in no danger of passing Apple, but still.

Any guesses the gross margin over there at Alphabet? Bueller? Bueller?

22%.

TWENTY TWO PERCENT.

Which is why I hate Wall Street, and refuse to invest in individual stocks. U ppl are kvetching because Apple didn’t meet ur expectations? Boo-pooping-hoo. Go back to counting your billions and stop picking on those poor babies at AAPL.

That’s why I’m not trying to spread my risk with mutual funds. I’m trying to insulate myself from jackasses to the extent I can. And it’s not easy, I assure you.

Of course, one could have been holding Adobe where all the kvetching hasn’t pumped the brakes any at all, trading about a buck under its all-time high. A kvetch-proof stock? Hmmm, tempting, tempting, but I’d still be betting head to head against idiots with knives out. No thanks. LOL

Say, what’s Adobe’s gross profit margin? 85%.

Well alrighty then. LOL You could say, “Well hey, oranges to AAPL. Adobe is software only,” and you’d be right…but with a profit margin that looks more like Facebook (also 85%) than the GOOG’s mommy and daddy at 22%, that there looks like WATERMELONS to oranges, three of ’em right in a row across the middle of the dial.

ANYWAY….I think it’s very easy to overstate Apple’s margin-heaviness…but even at “ONLY” 40%, it’s so weak that it should be dropping 9% in a day and down over 30% from its 52 week high? Srsly?

You know what’d fix this molto pronto? Thunderbolt 3. LOL All AAPL’s troubles would vanish in a poof of butterflies and rainbows.

[Tim Wilson]

[Keith Koby] “There were other things, but I’d bore this group with those details.”

I’m begging you, please bore us. LOL

I love hearing people’s impressions of the usual suspects, who are the usual suspects for good reasons….but I’m also always looking for the UN-usual suspects.

For example, like Bill, I’m impressed with Lumaforge’s Jellyfish (which btw works with ANY NLE, not just X, and is pretty compelling for most small shops from where I sit)…but I hadn’t heard of Symply at all.

The thing is, a meadowful of people come to the COW for storage info. Our storage forums are among our most viewed, if not our chattiest. This being a chattier forum, I want to encourage the widest possible range of insights. Nobody could see everything, except maybe the all-seeing Zelin. LOL

Thanks for what you’ve given us so far — and thanks to everyone else! I’m loving this thread!!! — but no kidding, please sir, may I have some more?

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I just don’t see these as the way most of us will do productions for many years, if ever.”

As much as I tend to hype, I’m not feeling much VR, but I’m VERY much feeling 360. It’s already moving into the kinds of mainstream where very many of you are working — news at the New York Times, red carpet events, Coachella, YouTube, etc. I think perhaps most immediately as things like DVD extras and their streaming equivalents — that is, not MOVIES, but things that allow you look around sets and stages. All the way around behind the scenes if you will.

Videoblocks is also already monetizing 360 stock, and I KNOW there are a lot of stock shooters among us.

I’ll save the rest for an essay I’m working on, including why I’m less bullish on VR than 360, but I think it will be PART (but no more than a part) of what more folks are doing than they might think, sooner than they might think.

[Oliver Peters] “it also struck me that Avid is delusional, because some within the company seem to think Avid storage can live on its own without the customer wanting to also invest in Media Composer”

Surely this was NAB jiggery-pokery, right?

Bill’s understandable impression notwithstanding, there’s simply no question in my mind that Adobe is the current big dog at NAB, and if you want to swing for the fences, there’s no point in delivering a solution that doesn’t include Adobe compatibility.

Not that there’s anything wrong with bases-clearing doubles for FCPX-only solutions, but no kidding, anybody playing to win is taking Adobe alllll the way into account.

Because my experience inside Avid was that they knew that Media Composer is the ONLY reason why anybody buys Avid storage. They just also know intimately that the days of shops with Avid-only approaches are long gone, if they ever existed.

(I’m not sure they ever did, but I’m CERTAIN they’re hella rare anymore.)

You can see this yourself if you suggest to anyone there that they “admit that MC is done” and just become a storage and services company. Uhm, MC is NOT done — as Herb observed, the Avid booth was as packed as any on the floor — and it’s the beating heart of any of their workgroup based storage solutions.

That said, if anybody there DOES believe that a non-MC customer will even glance twice at NEXIS, I agree: delusional.

Here’s my observation as a geezer. There was a time when NAB attendance was rare. Initially, the only people who went were actual broadcasters. Then the first wave of “cheap” NLEs that were in fact well into 5 figures led to people going to NAB to check out robust video storage, and emerging digital solutions, including DigiBeta and SDI.

Even into the turn of the century, the majority of FCP folks were folks relying on SDI solutions, including Cinewave.

This made sense. Travel to Vegas was hard. Freebie tickets were not widely available. There were very few rooms available at discounted rates.

It’s only been since 2002-ish, 2003-ish has become a mainstream thing, as tickets to Vegas have gotten dirt cheap, discounts are everywhere, and nobody in their right mind is buying tickets for it. Any stereotypical YouTube vlogger with an attitude can to get to NAB and back, staying at real places and eating real food, for the price of a couple of GoPros.

As a result, EVERYONE’s messaging has trended downmarket from the niches they were in 15, 18, 20 years ago. As deplorable as many here find subscriptions to be, it makes the barrier to entry less than $100, instead of $1000, or a bottom of the line $20,000 MC as recently as 10 years ago.

(This is the 10th anniversary of MC Soft! Which I was privileged enough to introduce on the NAB stage myself.)

I don’t think that this has turned NAB into an extension of the Supermeet…but it kinda has. And even the first Supermeet (which I was at — and the year BEFORE that, I was encouraging Michael Horton to do it, when he didn’t believe that NAB was “an FCP show”) understood itself to be not 100% mainstream. And it wasn’t.

And now it is.

I don’t think this is by any means a bad thing. I was certainly one of the people exerting “downward” pressure on NAB 20 years ago. But I do think the overwhelming success of this leads to a distortion of messaging (you’re right, Oliver: pitching NEXIS as a specifically PPro solution is nonsense), and an unhealthy obsession with shiny.

Which is one of the most revolutionary things of all about this year to me: bucking the trend toward “innovation” and focusing instead on “growth.”

More of this, please. 🙂

I’m definitely learning more about things I missed, so please keep those observations and opinions coming, y’all!

[Tim Wilson]

I put “disruptive” in quotes because I don’t know that we’ve actually seen a “disruptive” camera in the precise nature of the word.

As the owner of the first 2 RED cameras off the line notes, RED most explicitly does NOT fit the bill. Superlative analysis here: The RED Camera Was Not A Disruptive Innovation.

That said, I’m floored by the Lytro. The idea of being able to set focus and shutter in post, extract keying data from depth maps, etc., strikes me as a staggering amount of science, backed by the most extensive optics innovations in years. It’s currently the size of a compact car, to accommodate the giant brain behind the system, so obviously only useful for a handful of applications (I’d think more or less limited to soundstages)….but I can’t imagine that the future of filmmaking isn’t visible in this.

Of course, as Shawn notes, 4:2:2 10-bit should have been “the future” a long time ago.

ALSO of course, I’m wrong about a lot of things, and the future is consistently at the top of the list of where I miss the mark….but that ain’t gonna stop me! LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Good software architecture should permit new innovation without excluding continuity from the past.”

This is something Microsoft sticks the landing on, as well as anybody in any software sector, and better than most. They publish a very long-sighted road map, have long public betas, include dates for when products will be discontinuing development, and at which later subsequent date Msft will discontinue support. Typically 2-3 years after EOL, but depending on product line, can go further.

That’s not to say that you’ll like their stuff any more as a result, or that they’re free of other issues. But everything I’ve ever heard anybody say about the way they wish Apple would behave, Microsoft is actually doing in spades.

But really, anybody who crawls in bed with Apple has to expect unpleasant surprises on a regular basis. Apple doesn’t even bother to say “But this has never happened to me before!” because everyone knows it happens all the damn time. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “But isn’t it odd that unlike the past two years, there really hasn’t been any big “breakout” announcements like the stuff BlackMagic has done in recent years past.

I don’t recall getting a big “top of mind” message take away from Sony, Canon, RED, or any of the other big camera players, “

fwiw, please note that I’ve added a new thread on this very topic, and I’d love to see this part of the discussion continued there: NAB 2016: What is standing the test of time? (The 1 Week Edition)

Although far be it from me to suggest that a thread stay on topic. LOL What does that even MEAN anymore? LOL

But I’m feeling lonely and bad about myself over there, and I need you to give me a reason to live. LOL

thx,
tw

[Tim Wilson]

Longtime COW Mathieu Marano also provided on-the-spot NAB podcast coverage that he’s just posted at his COW blog, NAB 2016: KeyFlow Pro, affordable asset management.

[Tim Wilson]

Dropbox has become the standard for pretty much everyone we deal with too, from the smallest PR shops to companies in the Top 20 of the Fortune 500.

Most of them aren’t even sending email attachments anymore, even though email clients can easily handle them these days. I get multiple Dropbox connections every day.

Not that I’m pimping for them. I’m just observing that they’ve become not only more ubiquitous than any sending service has ever been, but now in our world, at least as ubiquitous as email attachments. Maybe moreso.

I’ll also observe, though, that we were at one time YouSendIt users, and actually created a COW-branded alternative that we knew was bulletproof, called COW2COW. Not intended as a big-time public service, but something to get around many of YouSendIt’s limitations, including size. Once Dropbox came along, we quietly unplugged both COW2COW and our YouSendIt accounts….but not before smelling something fishy with Hightail. I’d never have said for sure that something bad was going to happen, but a pretty nifty little service sure got annoying fast.

Sorry to hear it for your sake, though.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I should point out that the folks working on “Deadpool” were working on precisely that sort of thing. Complex timelines with effects and high-res media. They burned through 8-10 MPs. GPUs apparently melted. Meanwhile the “WTF” and “Hail Caesar” crews had no such issues….Airflow seems to be the culprit.”

I think processing is the culprit. 🙂

That is, when I wrote in my in my Whisky Tango Foxtrot article that WTF had 1200 VFX shots vs. “only” 1500 in Deadpool, I acknowledged that these were not at all similar. The shots in WTF, and I’m assuming Caesar, were mostly roto, paint, and the like.

Not a trivial amount of human work, especially at the scale of 1200 shots…but as far as processing, yeah, pretty trivial. Might barely have touched the GPU, if at all.

Whereas Deadpool was CG-heavy. The processing power was enormous, with GPUs maxed out for long stretches. Decidedly non-trivial. LOL

Pretty much every single person reading this knows better than I do, but my guess is that there aren’t that many editing tasks that are dramatically sped up by GPUs, right?

But to Joe’s point about speccing out max iron, a Mac Pro tops out a 128 gigs of RAM and 12 cores. An HP Z840 tops out at 44 cores and 1 TERABYTE of RAM. You can, uhm, do more stuff with that, but if your work isn’t that hungry for processing power or doing math in its head, save your money — because we are talking about a lot of money.

My point earlier was just that Apple used to want to be the machine that power-hungry artists went for — at least rhetorically. I can’t imagine that Apple had any illusions about the usefulness of a 1999 G4 for 3D heavy lifting, but it was at least part of the message. The message was, Macs were so powerful they were literally dangerous.

Now, not.