Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
-
[Andrew Kimery] “Maybe when I’m 55 I’ll be like, “Well this sucks… it was way better in my day..” No idea. Much of the work I have done though wouldn’t have been possible 15yrs ago so I can’t really be mad at disruptive forces when those same disruptive forces have been such a big part of my career.”
Having just turned 55, I too have gotten where I’ve gotten through constant disruption.
As has Bob, a few years older.
And really, the COW is only here because of disruption. The guys in their 50s and even 60s who were here 20 years ago when it started — believe me, these guys have lived through more change than you can imagine. They’re still around because, like you, they thrive on relentless chaos.
That’s not at all Bob’s point.
“It’s not the tools it’s the creativity” also misses the point. His example of the senior editor underscores that. He was anything but a tool jockey. That guy HAD the creativity.
The thing is, for the first 15+ years of the disruption — I’m saying from the introduction of Film Composer in 1992 past the crest of the HD transition, say, 2007-2008 — DV notwithstanding, there was still a sense during that whole time that the future still offered the opportunity of growing your business. Moving up.
Nowadays, that’s not necessarily the case.
To put it another way, Bob’s point is NOT “Everything was better when I was younger.” I’ve known Bob for coming up on 20 years now, and I’ve never heard a nostalgic peep from him, ever.
His point is exactly the opposite. “I’ve had a great ride, but what the fjjk do I do with the next 15-20 years of my career? Does my business actually have another 15-20 years in the tank? It sure doesn’t look like it from here.”
Again, this is not a matter of being a dinosaur, being nostalgic, being unwilling to adapt.
The matter is: 20 years ago, it was very easy to imagine another 20 years of growth for anyone willing to adapt.
Now, it’s harder to imagine what it will take to keep adapting to 20 years of THIS. This is different.
Nothing I’ve read here suggests that he’s much off the mark.
Or am *I* off the mark? Wouldn’t be the first time. LOL
PS. Dad’s in town, so I’m having the opportunity to re-observe this. He’s 77, working harder than ever, and is hoping to maybe slow down by 80. Bob is quite right to be thinking about HIS job 20 years from now, because in his late 70s, he’s probably still going to need one.
-
[Craig Seeman] “I can’t help that one possible reason he left Apple was that he really didn’t have the influence he felt he deserved for his creations.”
Me, I doubt it. He was surely used to Steve’s caprice by then. That’s explicitly one of the things you sign up for when you work at any kind of closeness to him. Randy actually got off easy.
I knew (and know) a lot of people who worked (and work) there, and the general sentiment was “I pray he never learns my name.”
My theory is that he ran out of challenges. Or conversely, that he tired of them. LOL
That is, he changed the world at Adobe with Premiere. He changed the world again at Macromedia with Final Cut. Regardless what it was for USERS, FCP at Apple was just a bunch of iterations, none of which were particularly significant or challenging FOR HIM.
X on the other hand, THAT’s how Randy has run. I don’t iterate. I blow up paradigms and make something new. And after X, what’s next? At Apple, the answer is, “Nothing.” From here, a bunch of iterations that have crystal-clearly not been the most satisfying parts of his career.
Of course, after changing our world three times, he’s more than earned a break. Focus on his woodworking, or finally getting around to learning German. That kind of thing.
[Craig Seeman] “It’s possible that he might mean that FCPX would be a stepping stone to more expensive hardware purchases”
That I STRONGLY doubt. The one theme running through his career has been liberation from hardware. Not that third party stuff hasn’t been worthwhile of course. Premiere got on the PROFESSIONAL radar once it had meaningful integration with Radius, Targa, Media 100, and Matrox, whose Digisuite remained one of the most compelling NLE platforms until FCP turned the corner into HD….driven largely by third party hardware.
For that matter, the only way that Macromedia was able to show real-time performance in their early demos was using Targa cards on Windows, because no Macs supported that kind of bandwidth. So none of the Mac demos had a single thing in real time.
But that wasn’t Randy’s interest. His interest was sticking the landing on combining editing with compositing — ie, breaking down the wall between the world of editing and the world of compositing. And he absolutely did, even if that aspect of FCP’s prowess fairly quickly dropped out of the message.
(Except for me at Boris. LOL I spent 150 days a year on the road showing FCP’s compositing prowess.)
Geezers may recall that the night before Apple unveiled FCP, Steve spiked the idea of FCP running on 3rd party hardware. That was never his intent, which is why all of the early ads had a DV camera attached to a laptop via FireWire. No hardware, no high-end Mac, no monitors, no I/O. Software-only.
FCP certainly became extensible, but any 3rd party developer can tell you that Apple rarely made them a priority. You could certainly ask anyone who worked at the large number of 3rd parties that Steve helped put out of the game.
There were along the way a couple of ads that showed Mac Pros, but Apple typically kept messaging around Mac Pros and FCP entirely separate.
To this day, there’s not a single mention of a Mac Pro on the FCPX page. (Which is harder to find than you think. Try navigating there some time.) LOTS AND LOTS of talk about pro features. LOTS of talk. I hope that we’ve at least put that part of the debate to bed.
But I’d love it if folks followed Apple’s lead and put the debate about Apple wanting to sell expensive equipment to bed. It’s simply never been the case. It’s been opportunistic, but never part of the core message.
To wit. The only picture of a 3rd party device on the FCP page: ARRI Alexa. Woo-hoo! The perfect camera to make the case that Apple is going for the heart of film and broadcast. (RED has fallen entirely to the fringe of course.)
So, what’s the context for Alexa? A LAPTOP.
The same as it ever was. Stick the landing with the messaging again and again and again, for 16 years: FCP on a laptop.
Finally, as I wrap this as-ever too long post, it’s worth remembering why Steve bought FCP from Macromedia in the first place. He wanted consumer software to include on every new shiny colored bubble iMac…and tried to buy Premiere from Adobe first.
Adobe wisely passed on what I’m sure was a low-ball offer anyway LOL but THAT’s what turned Steve’s attention to Randy. He obviously found more than he was looking for with FCP, and was more than happy to take advantage of it…but you can tell what a low priority it was for him in that it never became especially Mac-y. There was nothing about it that wouldn’t have worked just fine on Windows, as FCP had from the beginning.
iMovie was something new. And there’s a reason why Randy was on that product. It was something new. It was Mac-only by design, and looked and acted in a way that it only could have on Mac. It was something new in a way that FCP **at Apple** simply was not FOR RANDY.
Again, AT APPLE, the near future of FCP was nothing but iterations. Yawn. Randy jumped off that to iMovie. So call that “Changing the World 3.0,” after Premiere and Final Cut AT MACROMEDIA.
While FCPX is NOT, and was never, iMovie Pro — I honestly don’t know how that ever entered the debate — it DID offer an extension of the work he’d begun with iMovie, to create a fundamentally new paradigm…but clearly building on the TECHNOLOGY he’d helped build for iMovie…hence I am willing to concede that FCPX is more like “Changing the World 3.5.”
If he is in fact looking for “Changing the World 4.0,” it ain’t gonna be at Apple.
Oh wait, HERE’s where I’m going to end my too-long post: with the observation that Randy’s language about “aspirational editing” EXACTLY lines up with Steve’s original vision of editing on an iMac, and the earliest advertising around laptops. He ALWAYS wanted to offer the maximum experience of FCP and X on the lowest-end hardware possible.
You can also see THAT in that the only meaningful 3rd party hardware supported was I/O. Red Rocket obviously had some performance implications, but the BIG thing was simply enabling the footage to work at all. And now, no need for it, because Apple is continuing to address the goals that it ALWAYS had: look ma, no hardware!
Again acknowledging that FOR USERS, hardware was part of the story. But for APPLE, it simply wasn’t, and isn’t.
Randy Ubillos, aspirational editing independent of ANY hardware: game, set, match.
-
Here, or there? You should be clear to post here. Let me know if you have any problems.
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
Hey, we’ve got an Avid forum right here that’ll take care of anything that needs taking care of.
Spread the word!
-
Hey man, we have an Avid forum right here that’ll take care of anything that needs taking care of.
Spread the word!
-
[Oliver Peters] “In screening the result, we both felt the cropping was very noticeable.”
Noticeable to you and the client who know what the full frame looks like? Or noticeable to an undiscriminating member of the audience? I can’t imagine that a typical viewer would care.
They might notice if it dropped below 16:9, but really, would they care?
And if they did, I guarantee that a typical audience member would prefer no pillars, even if they’re masked by the curtains. They’re used to seeing wider aspect ratios, so losing the top and bottom is vastly preferable.
Haven’t you guys seen this with your less sophisticated relatives? (I’d say parents, but mine are in their late 70s and high-level technologists who know more about stuff like than most of us ever will. They HATE when people use “parents” to mean “bumpkins.”)
Like me, you’re surely the ones who set up new TVs (and computers and microwaves and every other damn thing) for the rest of your extended family. Man, they SCREAM when I set up a picture with pillars. I can’t live with myself if I let it stretch, so I zoom, and everybody’s happy.
[Oliver Peters] ” sort of like safe title issues in broadcast.”
Are there actually graphics that’d get lost if you cropped top and bottom?
Subtitles are one thing, but even there, I think that makes it MORE likely that you could get away with zooming the SHOT as long as the subtitles aren’t zoomed. As long as the titles are sharp, THAT’s where their eye will spend most of the shot, and they won’t notice a zoom that YOU might notice because you know what the shot “really” looks like.
I put “really” in quotes, because what’s “real” is ultimately irrelevant for the audience, who’ll only notice if it’s pillared enough that the picture drops much below 16:9…because that they WILL notice I think.
Which still begs the first question. Have you shown it to civilians?
-
[Pete Hickerson] “A world without string is chaos.”
Except I don’t think that that’s true at all, and I wonder if, in practice, you do either.
One of the most compelling parts of FCP back in the day, certainly virtually the ONLY one that mattered for its professional adoption, was the extent to which it’s extensible through parties that have nothing to do with Apple. And in some cases Apple was actively undermining.
I think of SDI through Aurora, Cinewave, AJA, and Blackmagic. I think of HD over any I/O rather than FireWire. Today, it’s GPU.
For 10 years before Macromedia developed Final Cut for both Mac and Windows, storage ruled. Apple’s run at storage was only passingly successful, so they dropped it.
Which is why I think that the FCPX-Mac connection is overstated. As many others on the thread have pointed out, even the speed advantage that kicked us off simply vanishes when you assess tasks that different than the ones FCPX is optimized for.
Otherwise, we’re moving right back to the closed model that FCP so compellingly blew up. To the extent that Steve tried to tie up these very strings, I think that Tim Cook has aggressively been working to cut at the same time FCPX takes advantage of them. Apple has never been more open to third parties in every part of their product strategy, including iOS. They want to run the table, which they can’t do if they pursue stringing people up as their highest priority.
In any case, the number of us here who can live without Apple assigning meaningful resources to third parties approaches zero. The number of us who actually LIVE without them is LESS than zero.
-
[Aindreas Gallagher] ” it’s just that lots of people disregard it as poorly designed software – and those people are just as smart as you!
simples!”
You know, I think it may be simpler than that. They just don’t LIKE it. I think there’s room for that.
Spoiler alert: a simile that’s not a car simile! I don’t like eggs. I can tolerate them if you bury them under a pile of tortillas, guacamole, enchilada sauce, beans, salsa, guacamole, and sour cream — but that particular pile of food is better without the eggs…and I understand eggs completely. I’m not afraid of them. I just don’t LIKE them.
And before Sam I Am pipes up, yes, I’ve had them green with ham, but 60 years later, I get to say, “I just don’t LIKE them.”
Four years later here, I STILL don’t think adequate shrift is given to “it looks neato for you, I acknowledge what you’re saying, but it doesn’t work for me.”
Or, “There are no needs in my present NLE that X addresses, so I don’t feel it’s worth the effort to build that much new muscle memory. Yes, it’s doable — I obviously learned how to do it with THIS one, and the amount of change I’ve put myself through for 30 years is unimaginable to many of you — but I don’t feel the need THIS time.”
Or, “I just don’t like it.”
While this is by no means the case for every one of its proponents, I distressingly often still catch a whiff of disapproval for any of these very legitimate reasons.
One of the ways I see this is in the implication that people are being “held back” for psychological reasons as well as cognitive ones — or more often, to the EXCLUSION of rational reasons. You know what? It can often be the case. I don’t think most of us have begun to reckon with the fact that what seems like our most discretionary choices — career, where we live, our life partners — could possibly among the ones most driven by pre-rational forces.
It’s no big deal, though. Not even worth pursuing. The fact that they ARE driven by unexamined internal dynamics is why most of the time, most of these choices work for most of us.
But it grinds any reasonable discussion to a halt to fail to acknowledge that there are equally compelling psychological reasons for adopting X that have little to do with rational ones. Which is also okay. If it works for you, who cares why?
It only matters to the extent that those forces are invoked in discussions like these, and the belief that only the OTHER guy is subject to them. The internal components that latch on to innovation as a higher good are every bit as real as the drive to attain the deepest possible expertise.
To put it another way, the two deepest human impulses are migration and settlement — including migration TO a place to settle. Our species would long ago fallen into ecological irrelevance without both of those impulses constantly in full effect.
(Not that global ecosystems mightn’t have been just as happy had we failed at the task of maintaining relevance.)
So there’s my semi-annual rant on the topic out of the way for another six months, but I think it’s ultimately one of the most interesting angles on this that has yet to be discussed. What are the pre-rational dynamics that have driven me to X, just as surely as there are some that drive others away.
And to Aindreas’ point, the fact is that much of the time, it’s simpler than that. But if we’re going to talk about it, let’s talk about it. If not, let’s not.
-
[Bill Davis] “And if so, the talent pool may get pretty shallow for the producers of the future.”
Quite the opposite. I think that the talent pool will grow deeper, and its talent will vastly exceed anything you imagined possible. I think its happening right now.
And hardly any of them are finding jobs.
THAT’s the thing. Youngsters today are growing up with astounding tools, and while they may not have the same degree of experience, things like After Effects and video editing are their native languages. They don’t need to overcome the pre-digital transition bullshit that you and I (and the rest of you geezers) had to overcome.
I mean, we harass the kids (and their NLEs of choice) with “sk8tr boi” tags, but I look at kids that got their start at Creative COW like Andrew Kramer, who turned the industry on an entirely new axis by 22. At 23, he was doing titles for JJ Abrams Star Trek.
I look at (then) kids like John Daro, who taught himself After Effects from COW tutorials, and worked his way up to Senior DI Colorist at FotoKem running Pablo before he was 30.
I look at Kylee Peña Wall, who came out of school doing corporate videos for a tiny gypsy trucking recruiter, made her pilgrimmage to Biscardia and is now in Hollywood as the Workflow Supervisor for BOTH the highest-rated 18-49 drama on the nation’s most-watched network AND a Peabody Award-winning, Emmy-nominated, groundbreaking show on the CW.
DUDES, she’s managing TWO 22 EPISODE NETWORK TV SHOWS. Not as an editor. Dudes, she manages post supervisors AND production supervisors and she builds set to distribution workflows.
She’s not 29 yet.
I don’t think u ppl have any idea how much better these kids are today than any of us will EVER be before we go down to dust. They’re smarter, they’re more skilled, they’re more driven, and they are HOT.
And they’re underemployed.
That’s a problem for them. It’s not a problem for the talent pool. I don’t have any platitudes about “the best of them will find a way,” because it’s a lie we should be ashamed for still telling. But it’s true that some of them DO find a way, even if just as Capital District tokens plucked for the palace by President Snow .
But for the talent pool, no.
On the flip-side, a whole nother rant, the idea that are no jobs in this field is preposterous. The owner-operator-everything shops that many of us came up in, or are still in, those are inarguably going away. There may be 500 of us left.
But there’s so much new TV being produced that entire new channels are being created solely because there are too many new shows to fit on the original channel. Not that they’re as great as the shows that Kylee is running, but they’re real live TV. We’re just NOW starting to fulfill the promise of cable TV in the 90s, to have thousands of editors working on an exploding number of new channels and platforms (Amazon, Netflix, and beyond).
Sorry for the rant, but I don’t wanna hear NUTHIN about no dark future for anybody but ourselves, we dinosaurs, because the small mammals are already running us over, and their future is bursting with potential.
We just gotta figure out how to unburden them from college debt that’s 30 times what any of us had to deal with, and how to pay them enough that they can afford to rent someplace besides their old bedroom that their mom had already turned into a sewing room.
But again, that has nothing to do with any shallowness in the talent pool.
-
[Bernard Newnham] “I really do appreciate the ads on this site for their usefulness and the restraint in their use. Not a bra ad in sight.”
Thanks! You’re awesome!
While noting that the majority of humans might find bra ads useful, Bessie is still waiting for one with four cups.
We’ll otherwise stay committed to relevance and decorum, and above all, your privacy.
Thanks again,
Tim
