[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] ” I wish Adobe had spent more time on plugging the holes in Ppro rather than adding meaningless features for a market that doesn’t yet exist.”

One certainly hopes that it’s not an either/or, that Adobe has enough engineering resources to take this on…

…but in the scheme of things, the egg always comes first.

I think this is the 20th anniversary of the time I first saw HD at NAB. What a fgjking joke that was! Looked terrible, insanely inexpensive, no content, no distribution channel, NOTHING.

As late as the turn of the century, people were still adamant that it was a niche market. Certainly no way to deliver it over cable a couple of years AFTER the turn of the century. CAN’T BE DONE.

Until it could. And yes, ironically, rabbit ears still produce the best HD BY FAR, but it took a solid 15 years from “The Year of HD” at NAB to translate into genuinely widespread HD, which 20+ years later, is by no means ubiquitous. But is it “here”? Indubitably.

So the question isn’t, is it here YET? The question is, might there be a THERE there in 20 years? It seems ridiculous to bet against it.

Heck, by that standard, we’re only 6 years after “The Year of 3D” at NAB, in 2010. That means we’re at LEAST 10 years away from knowing what we’ve got, and probably more like 15.

One clue: the cost in manufacturing currently-capable 3D is virtually zero, so it’s basically included free with most 4K TVs, even if the manufacturer doesn’t mention it. So Gen 1 tech is commoditized, now it’s time to look at 3D 2.0. We have another 10 years to get there.

Throw in HDR, which as Mark Raudonis notes, is AT LEAST as compelling as HD, and I’d argue maybe moreso.

[David Lawrence] “VR is a highly personal experience that can’t be shared the way we share movies. I think it’s much more like reading a book.”

That’s the key.

I wasn’t being facetious when I invoked Viewmaster. *I* hold it in MY hands. When I’m done, I take it out of my hands, and put it in your hands.

The reason why I think it won’t work for narrative just yet is that it takes out the narrator! The whole point of narrative, editing, everything we do is look HERE.

The point of VR is, look AROUND.

And it’s compelling because I’M doing the looking, not you. I’m looking at what *I* want to see.

Now, there IS a way to combine narrative with audience-driven perspective, and as I noted, it’s called a video game. A “true” narrative is still gonna require some kind of UI overlay to tell me that I *can* look around, and that I’m not going to miss something important that my $20 million movie star is doing or saying behind me.

That’s the other problem. I’m SUPPOSED to be looking at specific people doing and saying specific things at specific times. It’s the OPPOSITE of self-guided narrative-lessness.

Where it starts to get interesting is in 2nd screen and supportive (aka “carry along”) content. The kind of thing that you watch on a fan site or an old school DVD extra.

Walk through this character’s house. Here’s what it’s like to do a stunt dive through a 4th floor window onto an inflatable blue cushion. Walk around the soundstage to see where we’ve placed the cameras and lights for this next scene.

VR makeup trailer for Walking Dead, anyone? VR trip to Andy Serkis’ mocap stage? In the recording studio with (insert the name of your favorite non-lame musician here).

THAT kind of thing gets super-duper compelling. I’d pay for some of that.

Here’s the thing. Even if you aren’t willing to spend $16 on Google cardboard (WHICH WORKS), no kidding, go to your favorite app store and look at the NYT VR app. See what’s there. It’s just a start, but a substantial one.

For one example, you may not want to stand in the middle of vigil in Paris, but think about the possibilities for extending the empathetic reach of humanity! I can LITERALLY stand with the people of Paris. I can LITERALLY walk with war orphans in Sudan and the Ukraine!

I think of empathy as the fundamental human characteristic, the basis of every relationship and every civilization. So I’m less excited by the idea of new kinds of narrative than I am by TRANSPORTATIONAL TRANSFORMATION.

That by GOING to a new PLACE, and connecting with immersive experiences beyond my own, I deepen my engagement with the entire human community.

Yeah, utopians are always wrong, always. And I’m definitely speaking from my roots as an activist documentarian, who believes that utopian visions are still the only ones worth being guided by.

(Documentarians who claim not to be activists are either lying to you, or lying to themselves. Avoid them at all costs. Dystopian documentarians are just boring, because they’re all saying the same thing.)

But I honestly believe that anything that adds more strands to the fabric of human experience is miraculous.

BTW, here’s a great story about the first VR editor at any publication, the VR editor at NYT, Jenna Pirog.

While Pirog is the only full-time staffer devoted to VR, she works with about 30 colleagues from the Times’ newsroom, video, marketing and graphics department to create the films that live on the NYT VR app.

Pirog sits in the magazine’s pitch meetings to figure out which stories could use a VR component, asking the question: “Where can we take them that will be surprising and informative?”

Holy crap! That sounds like actual news! Like maybe the only part of the NYT that still cares about that! LOL

All this said, feel free to ignore my stuff about the evolution of the human organism. What it CAN do is ultimately irrelevant to what it DOES do.

I do think, though, that the MEDIUM of VR is driven less by NARRATIVE than by TRANSPORTATION. I want this to PUT me somewhere, and I want it to turn me loose. Let me look around.

This still requires authorial intent at some level. Jenna Pirog knows what the story is…but the point isn’t for me to be guided by her view of what the story is. The point is to be put in PLACES, with PEOPLE, and let my own story be shaped by these other people.

So, coming full circle, it’s not the next horizon in narration to me. It’s the next horizon in documentary, in the most exalted AND most mundane senses of the word.

National Geographic has a VR film of an active volcano. Better than the chupacabra nonsense on their TV channel, for sure. Very enriching. The kind of stuff I wish they’d been doing all along.

But screw that. Put me on the stage with Madonna, STAT! Crowd surfing at Coachella, here I come! LOL

[Tim Wilson]

First, me too on everything Herb said. LOL Especially this:

[Herb Sevush] “Ppro has been changing constantly over the past 5 years and nobody is screaming yet. On the other hand AE users are very heavily invested in it’s form and will balk at any but evolutionary change.”

The example typically given is MC, but I completely agree: AE users are every bit as resistant to UI changes in particular.

[Craig Seeman] “Avid MC would be expanding even if slowly. “

There’s no data to suggest it’s not. Quite the contrary, there’s data to suggest that Avid is regaining customers that were previously lost to FCP, a story which our own Mark Raudonis can tell.

The larger problem with the story is that all the assumptions are wrong, and the few data he cites go in a different direction than his story.

To use one small example among several, he mentions Hail, Caesar! — yep, cut on Premiere, but the Coens had been using Final Cut Pro for years. Apple lost those customers, not Avid.

So let’s ask the question, what did APPLE do wrong that has allowed Adobe Premiere to gain a foothold so quickly?

Anybody here have any suggestions about what Apple might have done wrong? LOL

I say ironically of course, because I boldly predicted in this very forum that FCPX would increase Apple’s footprint 10x by the end of the first year. I am clearly an idiot. LOL But I felt that strongly about its potential, and it didn’t come close to coming to pass. It may not have increased ANYTHING.

In fact, when this dude cited “some” of the major features made with FCPX and Premiere — NO. He didn’t cite SOME. He cited damn near ALL of them.

AGAIN SPEAKING STRICTLY OF MAJOR HOLLYWOOD,

AGAIN SPEAKING STRICTLY OF MAJOR HOLLYWOOD,

ACE’s membership had shown Media Composer usage trending UP before the introduction of FCPX, which makes me sorry that they don’t do the gear summary anymore….but the usage of MC in MAJOR HOLLYWOOD had been running right around 90% for years.

So let’s see: last year there were 500-ish major studio and “major” indie releases — how many more than 50 non-MC features do you think there were? Really?

Where then is the evidence that Avid is slipping AT ALL?

Again noting that he’s talking about SHARE, not about DOLLARS. Any chimp knows why Avid’s DOLLARS are slipping: their core product dropped from $20,000 to $5000 in a 3 year span, then drops down to a thousand bucks a few years later. The number of video-professional-focused storage vendors is going UP, not down.

Back to the article itself….

Shane’s observation that Google searches are irrelevant is also dead on. When’s Apple’s peak? Spring of 2011. I WONDER WHY. How much of that Google traffic turned into money for Apple? It turns out, damn little.

Which suits Apple fine. That’s no longer the game they’re playing.

That chart doesn’t tell you ANYTHING about the exact nature of the searches (presumably a good number of them containing words I can’t repeat here), or how people felt about what they found.

Otherwise, we’d be looking at that chart and saying, Wow, Apple is the only company going down, and they’re going down A LOT.

I’m not going to jump the rails and use that same stupid graph to SUPPORT my view, but look at what it’s saying about MC over the past 10 years: damn near flat.

Which is EXACTLY what I’m saying. YES, the industry is experiencing explosive growth. We have a front row seat at the COW. I believe that we’ve done as much as anyone (and frankly, more than most) to facilitate it.

So it’s easy for it to LOOK like Avid is falling behind…something…and they clearly ARE falling behind…some things…but NONE of them are the ones this guy identifies in the article! He really did get almost every single thing wrong.

Oh wait a minute. Let’s check that chart again. Over the last 10 years, Adobe is WAY off their peak. Apple is WAY off THEIR peak. Avid is the ONLY company that’s at a higher level than in 2005!!!! Barely, but there’s no way you can draw a conclusion based on that chart that Avid’s overall interest has slipped the tiniest hair. It simply hasn’t. Not the tiniest hair.

Shoddy, shoddy analysis. Clearly not even looking at what he’s typing. A sad waste of electrons.

There’s also some bad business analysis there. I feel for my friends and family members who’ve been laid off. It’s excruciating. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But layoffs may NOT ONLY be a sign that the ship is sinking, but they CAN be a sign that the ship is righting itself. “You know what? Our business has changed. We don’t need as many people as we used to.”

Not that I’m saying that’s the case with Avid. I don’t know. But I don’t get the feeling that this guy does either. If he does know, he sure hasn’t put it in that article.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff around this topic, hence this forum, and hence me yapping on it when I’m not drowning in NAB stuff. (We’re going to send out a newsletter a bit later today collecting our NAB stories so far. We typically get 700 or so a year. I think we’ve got over 2000 already.)

I think the BIGGEST thing he’s missed is the extent to which Adobe has gotten things right. Yeah yeah subscription ransomware thievery customer disregard blah blah blah. Take your pick. Doesn’t matter. They’ve got more customers than ever, are making more money than ever, have products that keeps getting better on top of some of the industry’s most aggressive development….not to say that they don’t need to do better…but really, who doesn’t….

…and to underscore, I remain bullish both on Final Cut AND Avid too…

…which highlights the last of his problems that I’ll point out for now. He’s acting like it’s a zero sum game, that just because I’m using one particular NLE now, I’ll never ever ever use another again EVER.

Ficarra and Requa have mentioned in interviews that after WTF, their next project was a TV pilot cut on Avid. It reminded them of everything they don’t like about MC, and highlighted everything they love about X…and yet, MC made sense, so they used it.

And yes, I bet they’ll go back to X the first chance they get, but the COW is packed to the rafter with people using more than one NLE, while truly also being packed with people who’ll never budge off their current choice…which, uhm, wasn’t their current choice 6 or 7 years ago. LOL Or 2 years ago. LOL

My point being that it’s easy to treat a snapshot as indicative of The Big Picture, but it’s rarely true. And when the snapshot is as far out of focus as this one is, it’s NEVER true.

[Tim Wilson]

[Noah Kadner] “at the end of the day it’s still goggles”

We’re just chit-chatting here, but I’m waiting for the first self-appointed pundit no-it-all to say that they’re not interested until they can do it without glasses.

This really is something though. It’s not content that you can enjoy “just as well, or even better, in 2D.” It doesn’t exist in 2D.

I’m also not convinced that narrative is going to happen any time soon. We’ve just now gotten to the point of the first truly POV movie and it’s AWFUL.

Remember the whole idea of branching stories in interactive TV? Well, it’s real, it’s compelling, and it’s called a videogame.

The VR stuff that blows me away is like the New York Times VR app: stroll through the streets of New York, be in the middle of a Paris vigil, things that really take you somewhere.

For now, I’m thinking that VR is to Viewmaster as movies are to photos: same general idea, but in motion. And I’m up for a visit to the gardens at Versailles or diving a coral reef than I am a linear narrative.

I’m not the one to ask though. I still adore 3D, so I’ll refrain from trying to extrapolate outward from my enthusiasm.

YET.

lol

[Tim Wilson]

I know that this is obvious, but I don’t know if you’ve tried this two-step process: creating a filter for the creativecow.net domain, and if your email client permits, moving it to the place in the stack where it gets read first. (Some clients that’s the top of the list. Others it’s the bottom.) It tends to be the default that new filters are read first, but it’s worth checking.

fwiw, that’s what it took for me.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “In my opinion, this is more than just a dissolve. Yes, it’s a dissolve as technique (simplified as opacity transitions between two clips), but this plugin involves compositing techniques, as do many of Simon’s plugins.”

I wasn’t exaggerating when I said this might be the biggest innovation since the original optical dissolve. Dialing back the hyperbole the tiniest bit (what? WHY?), I’ll say it’s definitely the biggest innovation in the digital era.

Compositing is the key, and here’s why. Our old friend mixing pixels and pigments versus mixing light.

Light, “all on” = white.
Pigments & pixels, “all on” = black.

What’s going on behind the scenes in a digital dissolve is a grayscale alpha mask, so at 50-50, you have the images at their dimmest, viewed through an invisible, but now perceptible, 50% gray mask.

Compared to an optical film dissolve, EXPOSED by LIGHT, rather than HIDDEN by a pair of masks.

The addition of compositing modes (aka blend modes, or apply modes) allow you to add back in the brightness in ways that are customized for the relationship between the clips — to oversimplify, two bright clips have a different relationship to the light than two dark ones, or a transition between a dark clip and a bright one.

I think any spot producer, certainly any trailer producer, anyone working on bumpers, opens, title sequences, a good many folks working with graphics, ANY kind of high-impact editing, will find this a powerful toolset for adding a spectacular level of finesse with just a few quick clicks, without sacrificing extraordinary control.

That’s an awful lot of adjectives, but I honestly think that the artistic and technical implications of this are far-reaching enough that Simon and I have been chatting offline for a separate article about the art and science of dissolves over the years. I’ve already teased my primary starting point, but I’ll save Simon’s for the article. 🙂

This whole area is a feast for any visual nerd, as is this plug-in. Even for someone with no particular interest in raising their dissolve game, this is a delight for anyone who cares about imaging in general. Very much worth exploring for its own pleasures.

[Tim Wilson]

Well, I think we’ve finally managed to settle one debate around here. It can be done, and there are artistic, creative reasons for doing so.

Having developed, or been part of development teams for, a number of plug-ins over the years, this is one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. Elegant, practical, powerful, unique, and genuinely transformative.

There hasn’t been a substantive change to our basic visual vocabulary for transitioning between scenes in a very long time, and I think this has the potential to be the biggest since the optical dissolve.

No kidding. This is an insane amount of power, my children. Use it wisely.

Or not. It’s a plug-in. Go crazy. LOL

Another winner from Simon Ubsdell and Hawaiki — not that there was ever any debate about that.

[Tim Wilson]

[Glenn Grant] “There maybe more editors out there now, but there is even more content.
“

I saw a quote from the head of FX during the upfronts: there are 412 scripted series this season. He hasn’t been tracking unscripted, but he’s panicked about scripted because he feels like all this content is pushing quality shows off the air before they have a chance to draw an audience.

My immediate reactions:

— You’ve got some nerve, buddy, because you’re one of the guys who spearheaded the move of quality dramas further down the channel lineup.

— If you think shows are being yanked too quickly, stop fgjking yanking them so quickly.

— You can’t honestly expect me to take you seriously when you’re having to create new channels because you’re creating too much content for one channel to contain.

— You’re an idiot. LOL

Back in the 90s, when we said that cable would lead to more programming, it wasn’t happening. New cable channels mostly meant more places for reruns to air.

It’s happening now. Not necessarily the case that every editor who wants to find work will find it, of course, but the explosion of opportunity that we predicted 20 years ago is in fact coming to pass.

I encourage you to spend some time at NAB looking away from content creation tools, and spend some time looking at the content. You typically see more of it being talked about in panels and keynotes, but if you’re feeling dour about the industry’s prospects, I submit that it’s because you haven’t grasped the scope of what’s happening out there.

Goodness knows I want to see all of our vendor partners make a gazillion dollars from their spectacular offerings at the show, but you can get a sorely warped view of the world if all you do is spend time in the South Hall.

It’s a big ol’ world, and a big ol’ show. I hope more of you get to see more of it.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “[Joe Marler] ” Those would not be reliable for a camera but it shows in principle how straightforward the concept is.”

I think this the gist of the whole thing. Conceptually it’s straightforward but in practice the time needs of our smart phones, computers, etc., aren’t the same as our time needs for our video cameras and audio recording devices so since the needs are different the solutions will be different as well.”

This is exactly why I keep coming back to the question, why are we talking about this for camera SYNC.

It’s a nifty idea as an IDEA, and GPS absolutely works for geotagging, and hey, why shouldn’t that be in high-end cameras too? I think that mfrs assume that, if you bought a Canon C500 or are renting an Alexa your shoots are at least organized enough to know where the hell you are when you shot this particular footage.

But there are currently NO devices that are frame accurate, and if it’s jam sync to time of day, welp, time of day is already well understood, metadata fields are already in place for every aspect of production and post, so no need to get metadata standards committees involved, no need to change manufacturing processes, no need for camera manufacturer standards committees to come up universal schemes for GPS polling timetables, and on and on and on.

[Andrew Kimery] “Just as an example of the level of accuracy needed, Tim Cook has said the Apple Watch is accurate down to 50ms yet if you are shooting at 60p you need constant accuracy of at least 16.666666666666667 milliseconds (1/60th of a second).”

Great example.

CONSTANT accuracy, at intervals non-trivially smaller than typically available today. And as Oliver points out elsewhere in the thread, unless every device in the sync matrix is polling GPS at exactly the same time, each device will be snapping itself out of sync every time.

It’s like the old principle that a stopped clock is right at least twice a day, but one whose time keeps shifting in relation to other devices means that none of them is EVER in reliable sync.

Hmmm….how could we make it so that every device polls the satellite at the same time? How about…an internal clock!!! Which, uhm, we could use to generate timecode. Which we already have, and we already do.

So we don’t need a manufacturer to figure out how to add a GPS radio, we don’t need them to figure out how to charge us for this, we don’t need to figure out how to keep multiple devices from different manufactures polling satellites simultaneously, etc etc etc.

I keep coming back to this, that adding GPS timekeeping creates problems that don’t currently exist, in trying to address a problem that doesn’t exist.

I entirely concede, it sure is fun to talk about…but I want to be clear, it goes into the same “straightforward in principle, not reliable in practice” bucket that so many other threads here do, including of course, plenty of threads of my own.

Which is to say, I’m not arguing against the concept of conceptual threads, but practical is practical, usable is usable, and right now, no protocols or devices exist that make this practical or usable.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “That my camera that cost orders of magnitude more than either device can’t as well just seems … stupid.
That’s all.”

Well, no argument there. LOL But that doesn’t make it less true. LOL

[Bill Davis] “(I don’t believe you will.)”

I don’t know why you’re not taking the word of people who are. We all work differently. Have we not at least established that much? Jeremy’s example is very much from the real world. It’s not imaginary.

And GPS isn’t better. It’s not just worse. It’s untenable, in any real or imagined world, unless your imagined world has GPS that works indoors, or a computer that does GPS at all.

Maybe some day all of this will come to pass. Until it does, the reports of the real-world experiences of other FCPX enthusiasts are as valid as yours. Your insistence that it isn’t isn’t moving the conversation, or the industry, forward imo.

Although hey, I might be as wrong about this as I am everything else. LOL Five years ago in April, even before it was released, I’m the one who insisted that FCPX adoption would be 10 times higher than FCP by the end of the first year, or, if it was me in charge, I’d fire everyone on the marketing team. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “They seem more complimentary than competing to me.
“

If in fact GPS is practical, and it’s simply not always. Heck, if your devices are polling at different times, they may FORCE themselves out of sync with other devices.

And how might you force them to sync simultaneously? With time of day.

There’s no getting around that this is an overlay of demonstrable occasional uselessness.

I don’t understand why we’re even talking about this. LOL It’s extra expense and complication, and will require a LOT more development to be practical on location…

…and still doesn’t properly address the everyday POST scenario of pulling an edit from somebody else’s edit, and how to update the sub-edit when the master changes. Your computer would need to rendering with GPS info to be useful for anyone downstream, which, indoors, is virtually impossible to do predictably.

FCPX should be doing this kind of thing in its sleep, managing iterations up and down stream. It’s exactly the kind of thing that a magnetic timeline SHOULD be doing…and the hardest, most complicated way to do it, with the least possible reliability, is GPS.

Actually, a sundial would be less useful, but that’s about it. LOL