[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Except that GPS is not human readable unless you mean only the clock signal. Then there is no correlation to frames – only fractions of seconds.”

And for Jeremy’s example, it assumes that the GPS-based “faux” timecode-substitute is preserved through rendering. You’re not dealing directly with sources. It’s going to take some work for manufacturers to recognize GPS as metadata that needs to be preserved, OR to create NEW renders that ALSO include GPS data.

I don’t know about you, but my computer isn’t tied to GPS in any way I’m aware of….and unless the GPS in my computer that I don’t know about is polling on a MUCH more frequent basis than my computer’s clock is polling the atomic servers, there’s still no way to account for drift.

(AFAIK, the location-based services in my computer are tied to my IP address, and you only need to look at where various websites think you’re logged in to see how very nearly useless this is.)

Talk about a kludge!!! Timecode works not because it’s archaic, but because it WORKS. EVERYONE knows how to deal with, because it WORKS. No satellites, no new development effort, and no turning yourself inside out for a function as basic as repurposing a previous edit.

Ironically, the further down this route we go, the less elegantly Apple-like it becomes, and the more like a clueless Microsoft approach that makes every possible wrong assumption about how things work. LOL I say as someone working more frequently on Windows than not.

Simplicity is a virtue. Time is linear, even if editing is not. It’s not that I NEED time to work the same it always has. It’s that time DOES work the way it always has, which is why workflows around it are currently so stable. There are not only no advantages to moving to GPS for post, there are only disadvantages, even on a timeline that refutes the idea of time or its own nature as a timeline. The SOURCES rely on time, and no amount of kludging can change that….

….and no amount of insistence on modernity for its own sake or new-fangled satellites can change the fact that it’s a kludge at the far end of the spectrum of inelegance and difficulty the further down the post pipeline you move.

[Tim Wilson]

Let’s try something different, Jeff. Go to the Test Posts forum, and make a simple post. It’s gotta have at least a little something in the subject and message fields, but the word “Testing” is fine.

Then see if there’s an edit link below the message text after you post it. If not, do me a favor and take a screenshot so I can try to see what’s going on.

So sorry about the problems, but hopefully we can get to the bottom of this for you….

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “Feel free to contact any of the people on that list, to see how “crappy” ThunderShare is.”

I just took a look at that list, and I’m flabbergasted. Here’s the direct link in case anyone misses it. Clients Using our SAN

I did find myself thinking, “When Inland Empire Health in Rancho Cucamonga says ‘Jump’ you better ask ‘How high'” LOL but no kidding, over 300 names on that list, from Walter Biscardi and the University of GA in Atlanta, to Disney and EA in Orlando, to India, Uruguay, Thailand, Panama, Google and CBS…very impressive!

You’re an even busier beaver than I knew. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I see no clocks in typical appliances and modern automobiles that run accurately. “

Right, because they’re not constantly polling the network. They only check in periodically. For example, in my computer, it’s once every 22 hours.

I don’t see any evidence that my car ever checks the network, even though many, many pf my car’s systems are connected to networks (GPS, mfr-installed satellite internet for built-in internal wifi, and mfr-installed satellite radio among them).

In the interim, they use internal clocks, which may or may not be consistent.

I can only guess at how often cameras ask networks what time itis, but even if you manually reset the time of day every time you set white balance, who the hell white balances anymore? LOL Kidding aside, unless the source is continuously calibrated, audio drift is quite likely, and quite well documented.

Audio drift is notorious even on timecoded sources that aren’t connected to house sync. Pluraleyes has a whole set of features just to address this single aspect of reality.

At the risk of invoking the tired “Apple doesn’t develop feature sets with professional workflows in mind” trope, the fact is that all of these issues were addressed a long time ago, with rock solid, well-developed feature sets.

Tossing out the careful management of timecoded sources because you want a more flexible way of editing them is the very definition of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “24fps made sense because film was expensive, studios were cheap and 24fps was the slowest they could get away with. For a host of technical and aesthetic reasons I hope you aren’t suggesting that all cameras shoot at just 24fps.”

Yes, the persistence of vision, or any thought that any filmmaker originally found 24fps aesthetically pleasing is off base.

One may have subsequently fallen in love with 24fps in the intervening 75 years, but Thomas Edison for one was adamant that 46fps was the right number. He couldn’t get a studio to pay for it, but there was nothing sacred about 24. On the contrary, that choice was made for explicitly anti-artistic reasons, and was simply the most that early filmmakers could extract consent for.

Again acknowledging that subsequent generations may have found it appealing, I hate it with film. The name “flicks” was applied to movies because of, yes, the flickering. I’m doing better with digital, but I found film projected at 24fps to be as physically nauseating as some people find 3D.

iPhones and the GoPro Hero 3 certainly don’t feel wedded to 24fps. GoPro goes up to 120fps at 720, and iPhone can do 120fps at 1080, and 240fps at 720. HEVC (High Efficiency Video Encoding) already supports 300 fps at up to 8K, and first showed it at NAB 2013.

This may seem trivial or peripheral, but as it’s now my turn to tease an upcoming story. We’ve got a workflow story in the research stages for a Big Four US network that uses 22 different kinds of cameras per episode. Not 22 cameras. 22 KINDS of cameras, with more than one of quite a few of them, and they don’t all shoot the same frame rate, and all audio is second source, no scratch audio for sync, so no PluralEyes. Timecode is a MAJOR issue.

That may sound hideously primitive, but your opinion or mine about the suitability of their workflow to modern production is irrelevant to THEM. What they use now works. What you propose wouldn’t.

I know that your feeling is that well, god bless ’em, nobody’s making them use FCPX, but the point is that virtually every regular poster here DOES use X on a regular basis, and they DO have similar needs, and they’d like Apple to meet those needs, since indeed, Apple once did.

And it’s also not like anyone is insisting that Apple do it the same way they used to. The whole thread on roles-based mixing underscores the extent to which the most frequent posters here HAVE embraced Apple’s new paradigms. Their goal is simply for Apple to cover the bases that are demonstrably still at the core of workflows for vast swaths of the professional production landscape who’d rather be using X than not.

[Tim Wilson]

[Brett Sherman] “Of course Simon’s original post was a bit sardonic.”

I don’t think of sardonic as an attack either 🙂 but I was thinking more broadly, about a tendency toward “I don’t need it, so you probably don’t either,” or the feeling that feature requests only come from misunderstandings and generally holding it wrong.

[Tim Wilson]

Replying to several posts at once:

[Oliver Peters] “DNA on MC – what a joke! “The power of 40 Pentiums!” A very dubious claim. The scary part is those “marketeers” at Avid are still employed there.”

As far as I can tell — and I have NO INSIDE INFORMATION ON THIS, as the specifics predate me — but speaking strictly as another opinionated a-hole on the internet, it LOOKS to me that the only “acceleration” was a hardware DV compressor-decompressor. Not really solving a huge problem. LOL

On D|S, and later Symphony, though, Nitris hardware acceleration appeared to be real….although you probably know more about than I do.

That’s all ima say about that though. LOL

[Oliver Peters] “Sure, post houses arguing for protectionism.”

Well, I’d put it a little more empathetically — their business model was based on $600 rooms, not $100 rooms, and the industry was changing faster than the depreciation schedule — but that’s all ima say about that too. LOL

[Andrew Kimery] “iMovie ’08 changed the visual style to what we see in iMovie, and X, today and it also went over like a lead balloon because it was barebones compared to iMovie ’06. The reaction was so negative that Apple made iMovie ’06 a free download for anyone that purchased iMovie ’08. Over the next two versions iMovie mostly regained all the features that iMovie 06 had.”

Hey, wait a minute: a sweeping interface change, stripping out features and causing widespread discontent, even market chaos, until those features came back a couple of years later??? Where have I heard THAT before? LOL

Or should I say, where have I heard that SINCE? LOL

[Andrew Kimery] “Was Motion an existing product at Autodesk Tim, or was it a prototype in a lab when Apple got its hands on it? Since Apple didn’t release Motion until 2004 that seems like enough time for them to take cherry pick the parts they wanted from the different acquisitions and roll them into a new product.”

My eye was no longer on this particular ball, and of course a lot of it was happening behind closed doors…but my fuzzy recollection is that the Autodesk component of what became Motion was still a lab-only product at the time.

You’re right, a couple of years would have provided ample time for Apple to roll their own product from their flurry of purchases at the time, which, again, Apple was clearly motivated to do.

This mightily contrasts with Final Cut, which, yes, was still in the lab when Apple bought it, but only barely. It was VERY well developed, and close enough to the finish line that Apple could clean out all that Windows crap LOL and still ship it a year later.

Impressive in itself for sure, but I think it reflects the extent to which Apple didn’t really really REALLY take the time to make it as Apple-y as they could have with more time….which they clearly didn’t see the value of before the end of its life, for whatever reasons.

No disrespect intended. Worked out pretty well I s’pose. LOL Just trying to track the breadcrumbs backwards.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “out here in the real world what I see is a proliferation of different workflows that are getting continually more complex and varied … not less.”

I would have hoped that at this point in the evolution of X, and of this forum, that we could agree that a feature request by a mostly-happy, well-informed, professional customer could be understood as NOT an attack.

It gets back to my problem with people not taking posts at face value, and why I’ve been so adamant that people NEED to do this, and not try to impute some hidden, inevitably darker motive. It’s a fgking request, man. I’m not even seeing any of these requests expressed as demands. Nobody is talking about taking pitchforks and torches to storm Apple’s keep. Nobody is talking about leaving X over any of these, or all of them combined.

Nobody’s talking about anybody’s mom. LOL

What has me flummoxed, though, is that somebody on this thread suggested that we avoid HYPE. WHAT? Whose bright idea was THAT? LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “In my recollection, DS was already close to EOL by the time these things came along. “

Some of them, yes, but by no means all. It was the cumulative effect. And certainly by the time the EOL came to pass, I don’t see how anyone, anywhere, no matter how much they loved D|S, could say with a straight face that it still had a place anywhere but in their hearts. Certainly not in the market, and imo it wasn’t Avid’s fault.

You know what else accumulated? EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD. LOL

I know you remember this, Oliver, but in the 2004-ish timeframe, the show-stopping D|S demo was a single track of 2K DPX files, with one layer of primary color correction, playing a full 30 seconds in real time. LOL It was the Martin Scorsese Amex commercial, remember?

People got so lathered up that there was NO WAY a system that cost “so little” could do this that they were actually yelling out during the demo “Prove it!!!”, so part of the demo evolved to include actually lifting out one single one of the files. LOL “See? It’s not a self-contained media container or movie. It’s FILES!!!”

And people STILL came up to the stage afterward, not just to check the files, but to check the storage, to make sure that we weren’t doing some switcho-changeo with playing the demo off tape….

…which I know you remember happened quite regularly back in the day, Oliver, and not on Avid, since of course RT performance was not really part of the MC pitch 25 years ago.

By the time of its EOL, was there ANY system that COULDN’T play a single layer of HD files with one primary color correction for 30 seconds without a hiccup? Hell, most of ’em could do it on a laptop.

[Oliver Peters] “When Avid first introduced the HD version of DS, they were pushing the $400K mark for a turnkey system. “

Yes, but this was considered disruptive enough to be causing pain to its customers. Especially in the DNA era, the system cost less than similarly featured products from Autodesk, and their clients knew it, so the houses were being forced to CHARGE less. This turned ugly fast, because their monetization plan was based on a rate they could no longer get away with charging.

I’m tellin’ ya, man, all day every day, people were calling, BEGGING Avid to raise the price. I listened to ’em…and they were the exact opposite of the calls I was getting about MC pricing. LOL

The pleas to raise D|S’s price eventually evaporated of course, but there genuinely had been a significant swath of its customer base not at all happy to see the prices for it keep dropping.

[Oliver Peters] “So offline on your old SD MC, then ingest HD and conform in FCP. “

Yes, I mentioned this dynamic in an earlier post. I saw this a LOT. It definitely accelerated with Final Touch, and lit up even more with Color. But I feel like that came much more at Symphony’s expense than D|S’s.

And to an earlier point in the thread, very little of that displaced MC from creative editorial per se. MC still has the lion’s share, and if the 2009 ACE survey is to be believed, MC marketshare was slightly UP even before FCP EOL.

The FCP/Color online scheme caused pain for Avid’s ability to add satellite products into those houses, though, to be sure.

That said, the Mac Symphony Nitris was a very successful launch…which, on the flip side, did nothing to displace the cozy home that FCP (and Color) had set up in finishing. 🙂

It’s like cameras. They all got cheaper, except for the ones that got more expensive. LOL

And cheap, hardware-independent finishing systems came along at EXACTLY the same time that proprietary hardware systems like Pablo, Baselight, mistika, and the top of the line Resolve all blossomed.

The story of this industry in the past 7-10 years has to account for BOTH dynamics, or it ain’t the full story.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “It’s sound commercial sense not to be wasting time with niche products like Shake …

But as someone who, like most in the VFX community, really, really liked working with Shake, it’s a sadness to me that it was killed.”

I talked a lot about this at the time that Avid EOL’d D|S. Some especially adamant D|S fans (of which there were understandably plenty) took this as a sign of Avid’s intent to kill it from Day 1, which is nonsense. Avid certainly developed the UI more than Apple did FCP’s….

…although who knows? Maybe Apple’s intent for Final Cut was always to kill that form of it? There was simply no incentive NOT to monetize it in the meantime???? Okay, a bit extreme even for me, but not entirely devoid of evidence. LOL

But no, I sat next to the D|S product manager for 3 years, Matt Allard, one of the most customer-focused product professionals it has ever been my pleasure to know. He was driven.

Here’s what came along in very, very short order, though, in no particular order:

— A Blackmagic’d Resolve, which was surely the nail in the coffin. And tbh, the D|S killer was the high-end version. D|S’ers had long lamented the lack of a robust control surface, which was something of a deal-killer in Europe in fact…then along comes a stupefyingly low price for the best control surface WITH better-than-ever software?

— eyeon fusion (bought by BMD well after DS’s demise of course, but a pain for quite some time)

— Scratch

— Pablo

— GPU-juiced After Effects, while still not as slippery-smooth as some would like, and obviously non-nodal, still, After Effects has taken bigger and bigger bites out of EVERYONE, from Chyron on down. I think AE was the end of the road for Deko in this exact timeframe, for example.

— mistika

— Baselight

— Mac-based Nitris hardware Symphony — less that Avid de-prioritized D|S in Symphony’s favor than that a lot of Symphony guys who’d moved to D|S because they needed its power now had it back in Symphony where they always wanted it….

— AND A LITTLE THING CALLED NUKE.

That’s just off the top of my head for the last handful of years, but DAY-YUM. D|S was getting eaten by cheaper products, more expensive but focused products, and products in every single niche represented in its vast feature set.

Maybe some theoretically more nimble company than Avid could have sustained it longer…but that’s a hell of a theory, even for me. LOL I was a believer, and I swear that Avid was too (heck, the FREE version of D|S was freaking amazing), but there’s only so many piranhas anyone can fight off.

Now, compare that to Apple and Shake: the product getting eaten from every side, yes, with the difference being that Shake was NOT Apple’s top of the line product, was NOT its most heavily-powered product, NOT the finale of every post product lineup demo — duuuuude, it’s amazing Shake stuck around in product form for as long as it did.

And inevitable that D|S had to go. It died an honorable death, though. LOL