[Tim Wilson]

I’m not at all sure that Chinese domestic sales factor into this at all. I suppose for some things, but for example, Apple will tell you that their business in China is very little compared to almost anywhere else on earth. Not that Apple’s stuff is cheap mind you. Just cheaper than they could make it anywhere else.

The same was true when I was at Avid, not just for the expensive stuff, but for the consumer electronics stuff that was like 99 bucks. Nary a one sold in China. M Audio speakers same deal, they cost nothing, were actually quite high quality, and never sold any in China.

I don’t know how often this is the case in China, but it’s also not uncommon elsewhere for goods manufactured in that country to not be available for sale in that country at all.

(This works in weird ways in every market of course. For example, you can buy raw almonds in America, just not ones grown here. American growers export gazillions of tons of raw almonds to Europe, but all the raw almonds in the US are from Europe. Don’t ask me to try to explain that again.)

It also makes sense to me that Chinese brands of consumer electronics in particular are much cheaper than brands that are based in Japan Korea etc. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see the “buy Chinese” movement even stronger than than the “buy American” movement in the US.

By the way if you are an electronics nerd, or a phone nerd in particular, take a look at the Chinese phones making their way into European and US markets. I’m genuinely impressed. Very creative thinking in evidence, I suppose to counter what they know is a market position well behind the rest of the world. And yes, insane bang for the buck.

My theory with Blackmagic is that Grant’s goal is to burn the industry down to the ground. LOL In a good way. LOL

He has said many times that one of the things that made him want to get into this business as a manufacturer is his experience as a customer, that all this stuff costs too much. If your business model is to make a whole lot less money than you could if you charged more, it can apparently be done. Anybody else could do it if they wanted to, right? LOL

Which still doesn’t explain how they can make so many different things, so well, update them so quickly, and show signs of acceleration, not slowing down.

How’s the exchange rate for the Australian dollar affecting the amphetamine trade? Or are they able to produce that domestically? LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Jim Wiseman] “I got nailed for quite innocently using the word “f***ball” a few days ago. “

This particular F word has become the spammiest of spam words in the 20 year history of our online community, perhaps by an order of magnitude over previous winners.

Think about how many ads you see for fantasy sports.

Then add the number of you antiestablishment hipsters and skinfkints, hipster or nay, who want to watch the nfl without paying for cable, satellite, or for a full season online subscription.

Then add college bowl games.

Then add the hundreds of f***ball leagues in the nearly 200 nations and independent territories whose citizens frequent Creative COW…

…multiplied by the number malfeasants looking for a new excuse to pry away your credit card, and, even more often, your very identity.

And where better to prey than among a bunch of cranky old bastards likely to have credit cards, and who’d clearly rather have arguments than relations — surmised by myself by the spam for male enhancement having nearly altogether vanished from our servers — and lo and behold, a site with the demography and global reach of ours is among the most high-value targets for f***ball spam anywhere on the Internet.

So, yes, with sports spam having exploded beyond imagining, we have deployed a vast yet nimble array of countermeasures that have been quite effective in catching thousands of incursions daily.

(I don’t often talk about the scale of the COW’s hoofprint, but in the process of serving 30TB of data daily, plus mailing opt-in subscriptions for newsletters, threads, etc. to over 300,000 members, the door is open wide and long enough for a meaningful amount of detritus to require our attention.)

The last line of defense is for a member of our team to apply their own balls of eyes to the handful of f***ball-related posts that make their way through our defenses.

While we certainly apologize for any inconvenience, I assure you that any less diligence on our part would be far more annoying than our current approach.

Albeit perhaps less annoying than another explainy post from me.

Yr pal,
Timmy

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] ” if the editing in Resolve eventually gets good enough it could displace Avid from the inside. Grant Petty’s trojan horse! ;)”

As an NLE, the sky’s the limit. But the NLE part is the lowest bar to pass. I know YOU get this, but that’s something I see come up in conversation here almost NEVER (except on this and the Avid Why Not threads).

“Avid” isn’t an NLE. It’s not just “The Avid.” It’s The Force. “An energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”

ISIS isn’t storage, and Avid Everywhere isn’t “the cloud.” They’re extensions of The Force.

So yeah, as an NLE, Avid has a lot NOT to recommend about itself. As an NLE, I think Premiere is still in front by a neck for most people, and a length or more behind for X lovers. Avid isn’t even on the track as an NLE…

…but for somebody with many seats, many TB, many episodes, many deadlines, only The Avid offers The Force.

[Andrew Kimery] “I know Pie Town is using Resolve for grading. “

With a nod of respect to Lumetri and other vastly underrated in-NLE grading tools, EVERYBODY uses Resolve.

We have a whole series of tutorials here at Creative COW by Avid infrastructure whiz Scott Freeman SOLELY for the purpose of managing Media Composer/Symphony workflow with Resolve.

(If you’re using Resolve and MC, you NEED these tutorials. And be sure to keep up with Scott’s lifesaving COW blog.)

For that matter, I can’t imagine an Avid project that doesn’t include After Effects. I was in scores of Avid facilities and talked to thousands (yes, thousands) of Avid editors. Not more than a handful of editors touched After Effects THEMSELVES, but every PROJECT sure as shit did.

It’s worth remembering that Automatic Duck began when one Avid editor, Wes Plate, wanted a better way to roundtrip his Media Composer projects through After Effects. He couldn’t find one, so he built one, and named it Automatic Duck.

(Not that we at Creative COW can take any credit for the name, but we like the way Wes was thinking.)

The second iteration of Automatic Duck was to get MC projects roundtripped through FCP during that window where FCP was the HD online for MC SD offline.

Look, it’s the same thing with Pro Tools. It’s the same reason ISIS supports FCP, FCPX, Premiere, and anything else you can name. Nobody knows better than an Avid editor what Media Composer CAN’T do. There’s a LOT it can’t do, so extensibility has always been a bedrock principle.

That’s why when Apple substantially unplugged the core “hookability” of FCP when they released FCPX (hell, they killed “Send to Motion), there was an entire class of editors who said, “Welp, Apple has nothing to offer me anymore.”

It doesn’t MATTER what FCPX could do with skimming or whatever. The NLE is a tiny part of a much larger universe that Apple decided they didn’t want to be part of anymore.

Which is fine. And if you don’t need to be part of that universe either, also fine.

But for people who do, Apple intentionally made itself useless. To THEM. For THAT.

But it’s more than that, really. Avid’s growth isn’t just being driven by the defectors to FCP defecting back. It’s being driven by the staggering explosion of non-scripted TV on practically every channel. Did you know that there are something like two-dozen non-scripted shows on THE WEATHER CHANNEL?

Sure, if you need an NLE, there are a bunch of great choices, including, increasingly, Resolve. But if you need The Force, there’s only one right now.

HERE’s the Trojan Horse, though. Not Fusion per se, but eyeon’s workflow toolset (only included with the paid version). When Grant finds a way to connect managed databases and workflow management to Resolve, that’s going to leapfrog right over a whole bunch of limitations to the NLE itself.

In the meantime though, this is another characteristically long-winded explanation of something that I think I did a pretty good job explaining at much less length in a previous post. LOL Anybody who counts out Avid because they think MC is ugly or old or full of tracks or whatever — no disagreement here, and none from most MC editors.

BUT

… if you need The Force, then, if I may mix movies, “There can be only one.” Actually, there CAN be plenty of ’em. For now, though, only one that goes to a galaxy far, far away.

Which is why, if there’s a need for flexible, extensible, large-scale workflows for the next 20 years, The Avid will be around for the next 20 years too.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] ” Pie Town, who is also heavy into non-scripted TV

Yeah, they too are handling 10 series, currently delivering 400 episodes/year. Even though they too were heavy into FCP, when it came time to upgrade their systems this year, Avid was the slam dunk. Not just for the NLE, but for the ecosystem that we WAY too rarely talk about here: ISIS, Avid Everywhere, Avid MediaCentral, Pro Tools, etc etc etc. Apple never had that range of resources at its peak of extensibility, and certainly has far less now.

Some folks critical of Avid might say, “Hollywood has nothing to do with anything.” For Avid, Hollywood (and Hollywood-style workflows outside that one small neighborhood in northern Los Angeles) is EVERYTHING. If Avid is losing in Hollywood, they’re losing. Full stop. If Avid is gaining in Hollywood, they’re winning. Right now, they’re winning BIG.

Avid put together a press release with Pie Town that we posted here.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Ironically there are a number of big shops that used to be FCP “classic” strongholds, who are shifting to Media Composer/Isis set-ups.”

One of those was Bunim/Murray, among the first (THE first?) major broadcast producers to adopt FCP — currently 10 shows on 4 networks iirc.

Their SVP of Post-Production, Mark Raudonis has been a COW member for over a dozen years, and posts here regularly on topics including this one.

Just 2 days ago on the https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/83735‘>Avid – Why Not? thread in this forum, Mark wrote:

[Mark Raudonis] “Why not? Better to ask, “WHY?”. The reasons that AVID is strong in Hollywood center around the few things that they do better than anyone else: Large, shared storage work groups. Large projects (features, reality TV) require many people all working on the same media simultaneously. None of the other players can match Avid’s mastery of this workflow.”

Mark also wrote an article about that very issue for us back in 2012:

Real World Editing: From Avid to FCP and Back Again

You can see it in the COW and in “the world,” and I’ve observed it myself. I also see this process accelerating as many of the longtime FCP 7 holdouts find themselves needing to upgrade their facilities. They look around and find that those few things that Avid excels at are exactly the things for which these folks need excellence.

I’m sure this doesn’t need repeating, but ima do it anyway: none of this says anything about what YOU should be using.

It’s simply to underscore my view that anybody counting out Avid needs to recheck their math.

[Tim Wilson]

Welcome Parag, and thank you for introducing yourself! We hope that you can find everything you need at Creative COW, and we look forward to seeing more of your posts soon!

Best regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “What if Randy left because there was no more for him to do?”

I think as far as Randy was concerned, that was EXACTLY the case. Not because of anything about X, but because of Randy.

There’s always been a cycle for his primary engagement, and it looks to be about 5 years long. He came to the end of that cycle working on X, and has moved on.

You can see the pattern from the beginning. He birthed Premiere, waited until it was weaned and walking, then moved to Final Cut.

Final Cut really didn’t change substantially after Apple bought it and made it Mac-only. It really didn’t change substantially, EVER, until it became X. In the meantime, Randy moved his primary focus off FCP roughly – what’s that you say? – five years along.

So while not meaning to diminish the role he DID take in Legend’s ongoing development, he did indeed shift focus to iMovie.

I have of course strongly objected to the idea of X as iMovie Pro from the very beginning, but somewhere in the iMovie development is where a new idea clearly began to bloom, reaching full flower in X.

There’s an obvious overlap in any case, which means that this may be the longest he’s stayed with any generally related set of projects. If anything, then, he left LATER than usual this time.

That said…

[Oliver Peters] ” If FCP X is basically in the form that we have now, is that good enough for the next 5 or 10 years?”

Five years, definitely. There are plenty of people still using Legend. Even the 2009 release hadn’t been substantially updated since…when? Reports from that forum suggest 2007 at BEST, and maybe not since 2005 with multicam. Codecs — including Pro Res, admittedly large-ish…but still — and really not much else.

So, for most people, the last structural, non-Pro Res revision of Legend was…2005. And that thing is a dog with fleas, full of bloated code, and a profoundly NOT Mac-like product experience. Maybe the ugliest thing Apple ever put their name on.

X is nimble, modern, and adorable. Ten years from now seems well within reach.

Which also begs the question — if X is on a ten year plan, what’s supposed to happen AFTER Year 10?

In the meantime, Legend has lasted as long as it has because, other than codecs, features are irrelevant.

I say this as a former product manager and corporate marketing weasel whose life was judged largely on features…but what I found people REALLY cared about was performance and efficiency.

I mean, Oliver, you presented an carefully considered, elegantly elucidated list of features that I think was on the money, and the conversation quickly turned to things like it runs or doesn’t run on my hardware, it’s fast or it isn’t, beach ball or no beach ball, etc etc — AND tracks/no tracks, easy to organize for maximum efficiency, etc.

Performance. Efficiency.

The flip side for my corporate life was, “You know what our customers want? Codecs, performance and stability,” which received the reply, “True, but you can’t SELL that and ONLY that.” Which is also true….and yet, apparently not.

As we enter Year 5 of the 10 Year Plan, though, it’s time to reckon that we’re MUCH more than halfway through the feature set rollout. The iterations in Legend were very much front loaded. Through version 3 happened really fast…and after that, happened really slow.

So if you say yes to Pro Res as a major feature, then I say okay, along with multicam, that makes two MAJOR features in the second half of Legend’s life.

Which shines another angle of light on Oliver’s question: if there are only 2 big ones left, what might they be?

My theory remains that it doesn’t matter. People will still use X for the same reasons they always have, without respect to whether a single new feature ever arrives.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “[Walter Soyka] “Consider applications like Illustrator (1987), Photoshop (1990), Flame (1992), and After Effects (1993). These are tools you can build a career with. Ae is the youngest of these, and at 22, it’s old enough to buy itself a beer back home in Seattle.”

Isn’t this more of a hindsight look though?”

History only works in hindsight, my friend. LOL

[Andrew Kimery] “If we tried to pick which programs would still be around in 2035 would it be anymore than just guessing?”

As the financial guys say, “Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.”

However, if we can’t learn from history, then we can’t learn from anything.

So what does history teach us?

Here’s an interesting game to play: whose applications are still vibrant 20+ years later?

We start with the ones Walter mentioned

• Illustrator
• Photoshop
• After Effects

I’ll add:

• Premiere (1991)
• Acrobat (1993)

To Flame, I’ll add

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “He compares about two years of Apple feature development with about two years of Adobe feature development, and notes that Adobe ships a lot more in the same amount of time.”

There’s “statement” and there’s “overstatement,” and I think you’ve separated the two quite nicely. 🙂

[Walter Soyka] “Has Apple met your expectations with the pace and focus of development? If Apple keeps that same pace over the next two years, will you still be happy?”

Something else you’ve pointed out before, Walter, that we’ve just entered into Year 5 of Apple’s self-described 10 year plan. I think it’s reasonable to say, well, THIS is the pace.

And I think UNreasonable to say that they’ll ever get faster. There’s certainly zero historical basis for saying that. It has quite simply never happened. Not with the OS, not with any of the many apps they’ve killed, and not with any of the ones they’ve created or radically transformed.

That is, Apple has proven that they keep delivering features after launch, but I also think that they’ve proven that those features come slowly…if at all…because they’ve also proven that there are features that they will, in fact, never deliver.

It’s like people have forgotten about the world of FCP pre-X. For years, the run-up to NAB was “here’s what I hope they introduce,” and the aftermath was very nearly always “wow, what a disappointment.” Seriously. It was the one absolutely reliable dynamic for all but one or two of the 10 NABs between its introduction and X’s. “What? No new version?” alternating with “What? That’s all there is? What the hell have you been working on if not the top one or two features we’ve been asking for for all these years?”

Not just in the COW, but across the industry. You can look it up.

I’d have to look THIS up, but the only REALLY happy post-NAB I can remember is after the introduction of multicam in 2005.

And it was 2005!!! Saying that FCP was the last NLE to introduce multicam is beyond an understatement. Why? Because Apple is SLOW. Has always been SLOW.

To MY earlier point about Apple fans being forgiving, I think that satisfaction with Apple’s pace is ultimately irrelevant.

How many customers did Apple lose because they were so ridiculously late with multicam? The same number they’ve lost over the years because of lack of transparency. Zero. And in the meantime, Apple, from what I hear, may (MAY) have picked up a customer or two because of some other features.

Just as Apple has indelibly and indubitably established their slow pace, Apple customers have indelibly and indubitably proven that, beyond the occasional, easily-ignored forum or blog post, Apple has no reason whatsoever to change anything about their pace, or their plans to deliver or not deliver ANYTHING.

So if there’s no downside for staying well off the pace of industry-wide NLE innovation, then there’s probably no upside for them developing more in keeping with the standard.

Which is why they’re going to stay slow.

It’s still worth trying to parse the difference between “slow” and “never.” To get specific about Walter’s observation that I quoted to begin this post all those years ago — it’s been over four years. OVER FOUR YEARS. At what point does it become reasonable for someone to say, “FCPX will never have Send to Motion.”

Maybe never. Apple has established a pace so slow that saying “never” might NEVER be reasonable. But it certainly seems reasonable to me for someone to say, “Four years? What the hell have you been working on if not one of the top couple of requests for all these years?”

And again, quite UNreasonable to think that Apple is going to change.

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “I think that we should all agree that the use of “nazis” “slavery” and “sexual predators” as metaphors make the author sound like a dick….”

We once had “nazi” in our filtered words list for that very reason. It’s basically the conversational nuclear option. You really can’t go anywhere from there except “Am not!” so, by definition, it’s noise, rather than signal. Thanks for the reminder.

[Herb Sevush] “And I say that as someone who has been as “dickish” as any.”

Likewise. 🙂 But while there’s a fine line between “dickish” and DICK, there is a line nonetheless.