[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “FCP never got a facelift, but that’s probably because by the time the facelift was needed they knew they were going to start from scratch anyway so why bother?”

Exactly. I think they already HAD gotten started, in work that was bearing fruit in iMovie first, simply because iMovie didn’t have any baggage to carry.

I think this also underscores that flipping the switch to a more modern FCP 8 had been off the table for many, many years.

[Andrew Kimery] “hought about bringing up Ron Brinkmann’s post as a case-in-point, but every time I have it’s turned into a firestorm. ;)”

I’m hopeful that a gentle soul such as yourself just now agreeing with me on his relevance might prevent people from teeing off on an a-hole like me bringing it up. LOL

[Andrew Kimery] “I think Shake’s implementation of Optical Flow and SmoothCam were probably the two most well know. How many ‘smaller’ things found their way into Motion I have no idea.”

Simon is right, though, that Motion had those already.

My predecessor at Boris FX, Dion Scoppettuolo, left to run the team at Autodesk that worked on what became Motion after Apple bought it, and where he continued to manage it for several years.

When I was still “just” a customer of Boris, Dion was already working on implementing (and getting my meager input as a beta tester) motion tracking, stabilization, and optical flow features that were well nigh unto completion by the time Dion left and I arrived. Those, and the fundamentally particle-based nature of Motion were very exciting to him, at least when he showed it to me…although his demo might have been skewed by the interest he knew *I* had in tracking, stabilization, and optical flows, all passions of mine, for sure.

That’s not to say that Nothing Real’s math wasn’t swapped in after the acquisition to make Motion work faster or better or optimized in some other way. Maybe it was. Maybe we’re all right. 🙂

BTW, Motion is the product that became the MOST Apple-like of anything that Apple ever bought imo. I think that reflected a seriousness of development intent that I just never saw with FCP…but most definitely DID see with the decidedly home-grown iMovie. So it was never a surprise to me to see Apple’s first home-grown *PRO* NLE look more like both iMovie AND Motion than the gently tweaked Macromedia-developed look of FCP.

Although lord knows that the formerly-Adobe, Ubillos-led team that Macromedia brought in to develop Keygrip, which evolved into Final Cut sure made something that was pretty damn un-Macromedia-like in the scheme of things. Can you imagine if Macromedia’s NLE was some kind of outgrowth of Director????

Although if you (like me) bought version 1 of Macromind (their original name) MediaMaker, then you know that the reality is even worse than you imagined. LOL So there are in fact limits to the shade I throw on the relative lack of nurturing Apple showed to FCP. LOL It could so, so, so have been worse.

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “After Apple took the IP from Shake that it wanted, and the potential market didn’t seem much broader than the existing market, is when Apple probably decided that it was Done with Shake.”

You know what always mystified me: exactly what IP did Apple take?

They were certainly unambiguous that this was the intent. I just looked up the original press release:

“Apple has acquired Nothing Real, a developer of high-performance software for professional visual effects and post-production based in Venice Beach, California. Apple plans to use Nothing Real’s technology in future versions of its products.”

What I mostly heard at the time was that Steve bought it to solve some internal problems for Pixar. THAT makes sense to me. At the time, he was still calling Pixar his “day job,” and it was apparently short money. A multiple of earnings when the earnings were that little?

As is the case with a lot of the acquisitions he did in those days (remember Chalice? Prismo Graphics?), I suspect it was as much about buying the people as anything else. It wasn’t unusual for people to immediately be shifted off the products they founded into other parts of the company.

But is there a PRODUCT that bears the marks of Shake? Certainly not on the UI side. Image processing? I just don’t know.

My guess about selling the product on Macs is that Steve saw it as low-hanging fruit. It was fairly easy to port, people in that market were already using Macs, so why the hell not? Remember, as an inducement to convert from Linux, he offered to double your number of licenses for free.

For that matter, I think selling Final Cut was low-hanging fruit. Remember that his original intent had been to buy a consumer-level product to run on iMacs, and only pursued Final Cut when Adobe declined to license Premiere’s tech. (It has been said that Apple tried to buy Premiere, but I’m pretty sure the pitch was strictly to license tech.)

That’s also why I’ve always felt that Apple didn’t go very far in making Final Cut very Apple-like. It was in some ways the least Apple-like product they ever shipped. Other than some colored dots for minimize/maximize/close windows, the actual interface didn’t change substantially at all.

But hey, Apple was only too happy to take the money. $2 billion in FCP/FCS software sales alone over 12 years was pretty easy pickin’s.

Which is why my reaction to X when I first saw it was, “Ah, THIS is what Steve wanted all along. THIS looks like Apple.”

Or to be more precise, when I saw iMovie, I said, “Ah, THIS is what he wanted all along.” I do continue to suspect that it’s not that Apple doesn’t care about pros — a ridiculous contention, imo — but that, the superlative commitment of the pro development team notwithstanding, as a COMPANY, Apple still considers pros low hanging fruit.

This is ENTIRELY borne out by Nothing Real founder/Shake developer Ron Brinkmann. We actually talked about this at the time, but when X was first launched, he publicly made some observations about Shake that he hadn’t made at the time (what with not wanting to have his family murdered while he watched).

(My emphasis added.)

After the acquisition I remember sitting in a roomful of Hollywood VFX pros where Steve told everybody point-blank that we/Apple were going to focus on giving them powerful tools that were far more cost-effective than what they were accustomed to… but that the relationship between them and Apple wasn’t going to be something where they’d be driving product direction anymore. Didn’t go over particularly well, incidentally, but I don’t think that concerned Steve overmuch… 🙂

Nothing particularly controversial about that, I hope — but I can imagine the shock at the time for a bunch of VFX pros who’d relied on Shake to be told that their needs would no longer be the ones driving development, when in fact their original love for Shake was driven precisely be the product absolutely being tailored to meet their needs.

And in fairness, why would any constituency pleased by a product that meets their needs in a stellar and comprehensive fashion NOT be pleased to hear that those needs would no longer be driving development?

Ron continues,

And back then the same questions were being asked as now – “Doesn’t Apple care about the professional market?”

In a word, no. Not really. Not enough to focus on it as a primary business.

Again, nothing controversial here. Ron does indeed qualify his “not really” by emphasizing that pros weren’t driving Apple’s PRIMARY business, and surely nobody here disagrees.

As he observes, my emphasis added,

Before Apple bought Shake, customer feedback drove about 90% of the features we’d put into the product. But that’s not how Apple rolls – for them a high end customers are high-bandwidth in terms of the attention they require relative to the revenue they return.

I hope that nobody here will argue that we as pro users are not a pain in Apple’s ass at least occasionally. LOL

Not meaning to go too far down this rabbit hole, I do think his observation about all this in the context of his experience developing Shake, and then selling it, is very interesting, and worth a read. Five years later, still pretty relevant…if admittedly most interesting to ME as filling in the historical record. Here ya go.

Which still leaves my question — do any of you know where Shake’s tech wound up in the Apple ecosystem?

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “If it was an inferior tool and cost wasn’t relevant then why the increase in usage (especially on very high profile projects)?”

Some people liked it better. That’s reason enough.

But as you also observe (and which I hadn’t really noticed)…

[Andrew Kimery] “Going by the list of movies on FCPs Wikipedia page (which is incomplete) a big chunk of them (possibly the majority, I didn’t count) were done by either Murch, the Coens, Kirk Baxter/Angus Wall (Fincher’s guys) or were films released by FOX (either 20th Century or Fox Searchlight)”

Exactly what I was saying. A tiny niche within a tiny niche.

Even the 2009 ACE report that had FCP at 19% was actually DOWN from the year before, and is based on a group-wide project profile whose total of network TV, cable, and direct to video combined was over 50%.

I’m willing to bet that the number for features-only was well, well below 19%. Heck, that entire list at Wikipedia is less than 20% of the features in 2009 alone (400-ish if memory serves).

That’s alllllll I’m saying. A tiny niche within a tiny niche. The notion of FCP as inexorably stampeding through Hollywood on an ever-upward path just doesn’t appear to be borne out by the numbers, and I think the reasons why have less to do with FCP or Avid PER SE, and more to do with the differences between them not being enough to motivate a switch on any wide scale within this tiny niche.

I understand why you’re pushing back. This is freakishly, uncharacteristically on topic for me, for an unprecedented number of posts. LOL

So I’ve probably said it enough. Anyone and everyone else is free to have the last word, and indeed any of the subsequent ones between now and then. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “Yes, been editing on PPro today, look at this unusable mess “

Don’t blame that mess on Premiere, you slovenly bastard. And tuck in your shirt. LOL

I’m not sure exactly when “customizability” became such a dirty word. Maybe because Apple de-prioritized it, which by default made anyone who wanted to re-prioritize it somehow anti-Apple? Or somehow operating contrary to the spirit of FCPX, as if you can’t like X AND want at least FCP-level degrees of customizability?

Just wondering aloud, not making any statements, but the idea of anybody saying, “No thanks, I have all the options I need” for almost ANYTHING is incomprehensible to me.

But I’m a slob, no doubt about it. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “[Tim Wilson] “And these productions had the documentation to prove it in the Cold Mountain book! I continue to maintain that book may have done more to keep Avid locked into these ACE-esque workflows than anything Avid did. ”

It might have been a reason FCP Legend didn’t have more inroads into Hollywood features before Apple pulled the plug, but it doesn’t seem like it scared people off en masse from using it. “

That’s why I keep making this distinction in every single post I make on this topic. The topic is ACE-esque editing, and ONLY ACE-esque editing.

That’s also why I agree with you that FCP’s price WAS a prime mover for the masses (including the COW, which, 300,000 members and 1.7 monthly visitors notwithstanding is still NOT the masses), and the book HELPED FCP’s adoption OUTSIDE this one tiny slice of the market that ACE represents.

[Andrew Kimery] “And I’d assume the Hollywood Feature water cooler talk about FCP and Cold Mountain had already come and gone by the time the book came out and let the rest of the world in on the Adventures in Film Cutting thad had transpired.”

People were talking about it, yes, and certainly the Murch-ness of it was a big deal, since Murch had won an Oscar for his work on The English Patient using Media Composer, the first time that anyone using ANY NLE had won an editing Oscar.

There was also some schadenfreude in this set when he was only nominated for Cold Mountain but didn’t win. LOL

But it was just watercooler talk. The Book didn’t just fire up the conversation in a new way, it added specificity. Because for feature editing, the questions were never just about bins and trimming and what goes on inside the four walls of the software.

And the tale told in The Book nailed shut the notion of whether FCP was equal to Avid (not quite) or superior (absolutely NOT) as the engine driving workflow.

Again acknowledging that the rest of the world drew the OPPOSITE conclusion, but the rest of the world hadn’t been looking to Avid as a viable solution, EVER. LOL

This is why I pointed out that the first wave of pro adoption of Media 100 guys, who’d made a hobby of pissing on Avid for years. LOL They largely never took Avid seriously. I sure didn’t. No finish quality output from Media Composer? No hesitation: no sale.

(Frankly, the cost I paid for my Media 100, $35,000 for the not-quite-top of the line, was pretty dang close to the cost of an entry level Media Composer. It was the differing intent of the products that merited no more than a sideways glance at MC on my way to the M100 cash register.)

For the heart of the Media 100 community already having flocked to FCP, The Book was a confirmation that Avid had outstayed its relevance.

I’m contrasting this with ACE’s version of Hollywood because Avid had not only NOT outstayed its relevance — it’s still relevant.

It’s not that FCP never existed in these circles. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a single Avid facility among the hundreds I visited that didn’t have at least 1 system with FCP on it.

But the majority of them also had The Book, and were very clear that it cemented their feeling that while FCP was appealing on a number of levels, and had some uses especially for client-facing online houses who needed a way to convert FCP offlines, it was simply not practical for THEM as the heart of a feature workflow.

This includes the feature-style workflows still in place on many Hollywood TV shows — which is by no means all of them, which is why FCP made a much bigger dent there, especially in B-M and Pie Town style unscripted shows, ESPN (which adopted it first), and scripted cable productions (notably Leverage) that were free to isolate themselves from Hollywood infrastructures.

Keeping in mind again that I personally was an early enough adopter of Final Cut that I ran it ON WINDOWS. LOL I’m not AT ALL talking about how ANY of this mattered outside “Hollywood.”

Hey, I haven’t posted this in a while, so here it is again, my FC disk that say Windows right there. What’s that? Windows is listed FIRST? Yes it is.

So, again, inside ACE-ish “Hollywood: the reasons why FCP did not meaningfully move the needle are wrapped up in the idea that it didn’t relieve the pains that those folks did indeed (and do) have with Avid, it didn’t provide major new workflow opportunities, and it lacked core feature sets.

Contrast this with X. I don’t see much evidence yet that it relieves many pains, but it most definitely DOES provide compelling new workflow opportunities (as I’ve noted that I feel Premiere also does), and thanks to people like Sam Mestman at FCPWORKS, Ronny Courtens, and a galaxy of third parties, X’s feature set is expanding further, faster, than FCP did.

The missing ingredient in fulfilling my prognostication for X’s potential uptake in Hollywood is anybody besides Ficarra and Requa agreeing with me yet. LOL A notable gap, to be sure. LOL

And if I once again miss the mark, it will be for the same reason that FCP ultimately did: not enough perceived relief of current pain to ameliorate the potential pain of transition.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Viability is certainly in the eye of the beholder,”

You’re pushing AE as hard as anyone I know right now, Walter, so as a practical matter of doing what YOU need it to do, how do you see the landscape?

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] ” but a lot can be forgiven when you can could get around 10 seats of FCP for the cost of a single seat for Avid.
“

Not for movie and TV productions, which rented systems, and wrote the entire cost off as an expense. In practice, the price was virtually nothing.

Still the case, btw. Same for cameras. Nobody in Hollywood cares how much an Alexa costs to buy, because they don’t buy Alexas. They rent them. Hollywood has been built on renting damn near everything for 75 years, and the cost of renting a handful of Avids and Unity really is trivial in the cost of a movie.

And don’t forget, ownership has costs. You have to store stuff, and you have to depreciate it against…what? How many productions last as long as a typical depreciation schedule? Owning computers, software, cameras — none of that makes any sense for an ACE-esque production, or for the studios managing bunches of them. Production to production workflows are so unique (if that makes sense to say, but the phrase used in this end of production is “snowflake workflows”) that buying the gear to accommodate even a couple of them just isn’t practical.

Now, FCP’s price and cheap hardware independence did indeed drive FCP’s early success among another segment of the market –THIS one, which had previously been dominated by Media 100. Virtually ALL of FCP’s early growth was at M100‘s expense.

Not talking about DV over FireWire, which was all Apple, and originally, frankly, not at all this end of the market — but the explosive growth in FCP among the first wave of adopters represented in the COW, using hardware from people like Aurora and Pinnacle even before AJA and BMD — they were virtually all Media 100 guys who paid less for an FCP/SDI system all-in than they paid for a single year of a paid support contract.

We actually had a front row seat for this here at Creative COW. We’ve been around over 20 years — not just predating FCP…and Google, and WordPress and Facebook, Steve Jobs’ return to Apple, Mac clones, etc…but we went online the same month Yahoo did. Just a couple of months after the introduction of Netscape Navigator. (Yes, we predate Microsoft Internet Explorer.) The first incarnation of the site even had Media 100 in its actual name (Media 100 Worldwide Users Group, aka The WWUG), and we watched Media 100 people like the site’s founder, and me, and a bunch of folks here, sit on the sidelines, just watching FCP until there were robust SDI solutions, and THEN came the wave.

So for THEM, which is to say, US, the price of FCP and 3rd-party hardware moved the needle. For the kinds of ACE-like movie and TV productions I’m talking about in this thread, not in the least. And the idea of stopping renting in order to buy was insanity.

(Now, FCP’s support for cheap HD-SDI when Avid didn’t have a Mac HD Symphony, that’s another story. Offline on Media Composer, online on FCP, sure — but that didn’t ultimately affect Avid’s revenue, because those users weren’t typically getting rid of their Avids, and Mac Symphony Nitris was a HUGE success on its release in — I’d have to look it up, 2007? Something like that. But the uptake was driven largely by dealers, who then rented those systems to productions. Again, the rental price to productions was trivial, and unlike purchasing a cheaper alternative, a straight write-off.)

The other profound advantage that came with renting Avid systems that Apple never offered was a huge, Hollywood-focused service infrastructure, both within Avid and in its vast dealer network. Not to say that Apple didn’t care about pros — I knew and respected the hell out of Apple’s Hollywood-facing folks — but there was no similar dealer network for FCP, and to the extent that those dealers did exist, they tended not to have Hollywood bona fides. And yes, some Avid dealers also started renting FCP systems to productions that wanted them — but FCP started with nowhere near the feature set it needed, and Apple itself didn’t place the resources into Hollywood and Pinewood’s lap that Avid did.

(I mention Pinewood, because one of the most remarkable things to me about visiting Avid’s European HQ: it was ON THE LOT at Pinewood. Just past the shops where they built the sets. People in costumes walking around — oh look! There’s Harry Potter! There’s James Bond! And yes, I saw them both on trips there. Bunches of others. Avid engineers took golf carts from their office to movie sets when support was called for. Hollywood is more spread out, but Avid has a good-sized office, and a handful of even more heavily-staffed dealers, all through Burbank and Studio City, a short drive to other studios in LA proper.

And I regularly saw planeloads of Boston-based Avid engineers and execs hopping on planes to do nothing but spend weeks in LA. I was even on a couple of such trips — mostly just trying to stay out of the way, mind you LOL, but I don’t think people outside the heart of Hollywood have any sense of the scale of the Avid-focused, and Avid-driven, support infrastructure.

Some of you wags might point out that, wow, maybe they could try building products that don’t need all that much support, and I’ll LOL right along with you….but it is what it is.)

So even if FCP had cost, I dunno, let’s say $395 at its introduction LOL, it wouldn’t have mattered. Avid’s price wasn’t causing pain for movie and TV studios, whereas FCP’s lack of service infrastructure, and the financial and logistical downsides of ownership, most definitely would have.

And these productions had the documentation to prove it in the Cold Mountain book! I continue to maintain that book may have done more to keep Avid locked into these ACE-esque workflows than anything Avid did.

Bunim-Murray and Pie Town, different story of course. Those guys went hard into FCP with hundreds of purchased seats, and interesting to me, both went back to Avid — enabled at least in part I think by software-only MC pricing, but I think also driven by fond remembrance of robust workflows and support infrastructures.

Again underscoring that by focusing on this one neck of the industry, with a narrow subset of potential workflows, we’re necessarily talking about something very different than the industry as a whole, where OF COURSE the price was a big part of the appeal of FCP.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Dude you mention a LOT of things in a LOT of posts which is why I was trying to narrow it down a bit. ;)”

Fair enough. LOL

[Andrew Kimery] “I think the hypothetical FCP 8 shoves Avid all the back on its heels and 9 sees the king slipping off the top of the hill. “

Not a chance from my view. None. I think FCP had gone as far as it worth going, which is why, after 2005, it didn’t really go anywhere, other than the addition of Pro Res in 2007 — admittedly a game changer for sure, but based on the exact same technology that Avid introduced with DNxHD FOUR YEARS EARLIER….and not really all that much of a game-changer until a couple of years later still when hardware from AJA and camera manufacturers enabled RT encoding.

(Note again that I personally am not pissing on FCP. But the record here in the FCP forums after every NAB is replete with disappointment after disappointment following most releases.)

That’s what I’m talking about when I say that nothing that Apple was doing with FCP was really addressing *that market.* They’d have kept playing catch-up, kept missing the mark, and not bringing anything to make anyone stop what they were doing and say, “Wait a minute here.”

Premiere has obviously done that, and yes, there’s certainly that extent to which Premiere is pretty dang close to what FCP 8 might have been….but I think what’s moved the needle there is a more compellingly-integrated After Effects as much as Premiere itself, maybe more.

My own experience when I worked at Avid, visiting hundreds of Avid facilities around the world, and speaking with thousands of editors, is that AE was easily on 80% of projects, maybe more (albeit not too too often being used by the editors themselves, this lot still tending to specialize).

Of course Premiere had to be capable of a lot in order to be worthwhile on the front end. This is the limitation that MANY folks have observed here for the Resolve editor-colorist workflow, that there’s not yet quite enough “there” there YET for many people to use Resolve as an editor, especially not when Resolve’s interop with other NLEs is pretty well-established.

But Premiere did indeed do the hard work to modernize in ways that simply weren’t worth Apple’s while relative to what Apple REALLY wanted to do, which was to stop playing everyone else’s game, blow it all up, and start over with the question, “What would we do if we didn’t HAVE to do anything to answer anyone’s agenda but our own?

“And Step 2, what kind of scaffolding do we need for third parties to do the rest?”

Which is what they did. Create a product that addressed their own priorities first, then in subsequent iterations, seeded an ever-greener meadow for third parties to shepherd the flock to FCPX when it was ready for them.

And I think it was the best move they could possibly have made. The sooner they acknowledged that FCP was zombieware — shuffling along, but not actually ALIVE for years — the better. It’s clear in retrospect that they knew this, which is why they released X with the paint still wet and TOLD us they were doing that. The new thing was too important to wait any longer.

Mayyyyyybe when the ScriptSync-style features are nailed down (and maybe they are now) and an MC-ISIS-style sharing experience is meaningfully advanced (not there yet from anything I’ve heard), but even to get to Legend’s 2009 marketshare is likely a couple of years away, and most of the growth will come at the expense of FCP, not MC.

imo, fwiw. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Cliff notes version of how you thought X could move the needle in ways FCP Legend did not? Like in terms of different workflows? In terms of eventual uptake at the ‘top of the pyramid’?”

Dude, where have you been for the past 5 years? LOL I mentioned it in my post above, as well as my epic WTF article too.

FCP was, frankly, boring. LOL It didn’t ACTUALLY do much to solve the most meaningful issues that Media Composer users had in these top-of-pyramid feature film workflows, and didn’t offer compelling advantages of the sort that said, “Hey, this is really worth looking at.” It actually looked too much like MC, with some profound deficiencies.

(Speaking STRICTLY for these kinds of workflows, NOTHING MORE. After all, I was an early enough adopter of Final Cut that I still have MY WINDOWS DISK of it, and my Macromedia Final Cut t-shirt direct from HQ.)

The book on editing with Cold Mountain highlighted a lot of the aforementioned deficiencies I don’t need to recount here, and did more than anything else to cement Avid’s hold on that admittedly small slice of the market. Look it up: Avid’s revenue skyrocketed in the next few years after that, and it was virtually entirely based on Media Composer uptake, followed soon after by ISIS.

FCPX otoh offers some profound upsides that FCP never did. I think the reaction that Charlie reported — “Wait a minute, this looks really interesting, and vastly more capable than I thought” — is the same KIND of reaction that MC saw in the beginning. This is DIFFERENT. I see OPPORTUNITY here.

And now that Sam Mestman, Ronny Courtens, and other big brains are cracking the nut of Avid ScriptSync-type workflows for FCPX (I don’t think most people get what a big fgjking deal this is), and they’re working better than the previous wobbly attempts in the FCP era, X starts to look like an actual THING.

The next nut to crack is cracking as we speak, which is the KIND of shared storage experience that MC customers have come to rely on. Not just shared storage — that’s easy. The KIND of shared storage EXPERIENCE that apex Hollywood film workflows RELY on.

I was also struck by Charlie’s report that some in attendance felt misled by the anti-X hype they’d heard. In fairness to them, early reports of FCPX not being ready for highest-end feature workflows were 100% accurate. Apple acknowledged as much when they announced a roadmap for the first time in the company’s history. The fact that Apple is continuing to deliver on those promises is further confirmation that, in fact, it wasn’t ready FOR THOSE SPECIFIC WORKFLOWS upon launch.

Again, I’m just agreeing with Apple.

Which brings me to the concept of moving the needle. It really was dang near 10 years from Avid’s launch to critical mass. Given that FCPX hasn’t really REALLY reached maturity FOR THESE WORKFLOWS until quite recently, and that some critical workflow components are just now gelling, it’s not shocking to me that, so far, Ficarra and Requa are about it for major FEATURE FILMS of the sort that ACE members are looking at as the cream of the cream.

Emphasizing again, that’s all I was ever talking about when I’m talking about this. I have ALWAYS been positive on the potential of X, Apple’s commitment to it, etc. That doesn’t mean I won’t make a cheap joke at their expense now and again (this is one way you know I haven’t been possessed by a pod), and I’m emphatically high on Creative Cloud for VFX-intensive workflows, and resolute in my firmness that Avid remains the state of the art for some SPECIFIC shared workflow EXPERIENCES….

…but I’m not shocked to hear ACE skeptics seeing the CURRENT state of FCPX and saying, “Wow, I’ve been thinking about X all wrong.” Given the pace of MC adoption in the first place, though, we’re probably still talking about another 3-5 years before we see if X actually DOES go farther than FCP.

That is, my feelings about its POTENTIAL to go further than FCP doesn’t mean that it actually will. LOL And I do think that Avid at 75%-ish sets the field of play for everyone else.

I am admittedly a little surprised to hear that X tips are on the ACE home page — thanks again for pointing that out, Scott!!! — but I’m not AT ALL surprised that there are *X* tips. There were too few reasons to take FCP seriously FOR THESE WORKFLOWS, and too many reasons for X NOT to be taken seriously.

And Premiere should be too for VFX-intensive shows, including VFX in the Fincher-esque sense of reframing and grading every shot. And Avid will probably stay roughly at 75%+. 🙂

But I wanted to hear Charlie’s color commentary because I was interested to see if ACE is catching up with my prognostication for them, and indeed they are.

I was also looking forward to being right. It’s rare enough that I still relish it every single time. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Greg Ball] “We keep a burned-in time code window on the video until we receive payment.”

I just used a logo with our phone number below it, bug-style, but I absolutely adore this kind of approach.