[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “how often do companies gut an app and rebuild it? Apple did it with FCP7 to FCP X, but they have a side business selling hardware to help make ends meet. “

No, they did from FCP FIVE to FCPX.

Feel free to go back through the COW archives to satisfy yourself on this, but I’m telling ya that the last time that FCP users came out of NAB super happy was in 2005, when Apple added multicam.

Coming home from 2007, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative, largely because nobody could figure out what to make out of ProRes just yet. People recognized that it was basically DNxHD, but four years after Avid it, where it didn’t seem to make all that much sense, either.

(Color was introduced, which turned out to be a bigger deal looking back…until it wasn’t…but it was hardly greeted with hosannas on any wide scale, and certainly not much for FCP.)

It wasn’t until people got their hands on AJA Io that ProRes started to become real through the rest of 2007…nothing much from FCP itself…and in 2008, no Apple booth of course, and once again, no real FCP news.

Lather, rinse, repeat in 2009 and 2010.

Please note that none of this is my opinion. It’s right there in the archive.

Lots of amazing camera stuff from those NABs, new storage, DaVinci Resolve in 2010, etc etc, lots of positive energy coming out of the show — but the record is unambiguous. Other than some excitement that AJA whipped up for hardware encoding that others picked up…there were years and years where FCP partisans came back from NAB somewhere between disappointed and angry.

Apart from that 2007 bump, pretty much every year since 2005, which was of course hosanna in the highest.

In retrospect, it’s not that Apple wasn’t doing anything major with FCP from 2005 to 2011. It’s that they were doing something SO major that they couldn’t do it AND keep up the pretense that the future was going to proceed along the same path.

I think you, Andrew, and Aindreas and Walter and others are exactly right, that Adobe’s dust-covered “Open While Under Construction” sign is also the sign that they’re committed to a path that’s neither discontinuous nor held captive to old architecture.

It’s ballsy as hell, and I couldn’t agree more that there’s no way they could realistically pull it off if they had to “market” the idea of “Open While Under Construction” to get discrete upgrade dollars. You really need a predictable revenue stream in order to undertake long-term infrastructure reconstruction on this scale.

Given that Apple’s construction project took something like 6 years, with an outcome that took another couple years of maturity before it as seen as a major step forward by a major part of their previously most enthusiastic enthusiasts, I’d say for Adobe is well ahead of the pace. The very least it’s realistic to say is “so far so good,” even if for any individual user it may not yet be good enough.

[Tim Wilson]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I half think of Maschwitz like the Jamie Oliver of colour correction- he really opposes ornate practice but he’s awfully stringent on good processes.”

Full marks for a spot-on simile that doesn’t involve a car.

[Tim Wilson]

I’m actually going to do a separate post about plug-ins.

We’ve gotten press releases from GenArts (Sapphire), Boris (both the Boris plugs and Mocha), and Red Giant, that all their stuff is good to go.

No reason for people not to continue posting here of course, but a separate thread will be easier to track….

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “I will wear my “Smoke is changing everything” t-shirt from NAB 2012 ironically tomorrow in honor of this post.”

And I’ll wear my Macromedia Final Cut t-shirt. We’ll be twins! LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Jim Wiseman] “To tell you the truth, it is the simplicity of the interface that I really like.”

The phrase that many of us used at the time was “Media 100’s greatest feature is its lack of features,” and it wasn’t at all facetious. That approach obviously works better for some jobs than others, but it was entirely intentional on Media 100’s part, and heartily embraced by customers (including me). The happy contrast with more “powerful” ie, more complicated, cluttered applications was made every day in forums like this one.

This actually connects to another thread just started here, where Stu Maschowitz pokes at the irony of the freedom that comes from fewer features vs. the burden of having more features. I almost didn’t add that summary, because I’d much rather have folks talking about on that actual thread…

…but my point for this discussion is to emphasize that Media 100’s — let’s call it — streamlined approach was invigorating. Software that doesn’t force you to bend to its will. A rarity then, perhaps rarer now.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Apple has fully embraced the subscription model with Apple Music”

And they were years late doing so. So late that it was worth $3 billion to buy Beats to accelerate the process.

The absences of monthly subscriptions had undermined the fundamental soundness of their music business. (See what I did there?) They NEEDED to add subscription model or watch their music business fall further and further away from relevance.

I’m not sure that some people get how far behind Spotify iTunes had fallen, and how much that decline was accelerating. If Apple wanted to stay in the music business, they HAD to make this move.

iTunes sales aren’t dead any more than CDs are dead — but the death spiral has been underway for a long time. Apple’s not in the “riding the death spiral” business.

[Oliver Peters] ” Apple could also seriously add movies into the model.”

Yes. They’ve saddled up on Spotify. Netflix is next.

Why “next,” even though Netflix decimated Apple’s iTunes movie and TV sales before Spotify torpedoed iTunes music sales?

(I don’t know if folks have fully appreciated that Spotify passed iTunes. The Beats purchase was IMPERATIVE unless Apple get this to the finish line more quickly than was happening.)

The issue has historically been that the movie and TV studio side of the same conglomerates with music labels HATE Apple. They phrase I heard many times is “We’re not going to let ourselves get iTuned again.” Apple TV could have taken off years ago if studios hadn’t been burned so badly on the music side.

So maybe “fear” is a better word…but I think “hate” counts. I do think that the hate was more directed at Jobs personally, which is why it’s not at all surprising to me that Tim Cook is growing Apple dramatically more quickly than Steve ever could have. You know that Apple’s sales have doubled and profits tripled with Tim at the helm, right? The sharpest uptick in Apple history. He’s a better business man AND a nicer guy….and nice guys can in fact win.

To get Apple Music across the finish line, though, the OTHER need Apple had wasn’t technological, but personal. Yeah, Tim Cook was a step in the right direction away from Jobs, but it took Jimmy Iovine at Beats (producer for Springsteen and Stevie Nicks, head of the most influential and profitable record label of his era) to assuage the fears of studios who’d been burned by Apple once and had no interest in another round.

That’s going to be one of the logjams for Apple’s take on Netflix. Tim Cook MIGHT be the guy whose relationship with the studios is enough to make them let Apple off the mat…because really, Netflix and even Redbox have been as much an insurance policy for studios against letting themselves get backed into a corner by Apple again. If potential profit was enough to overcome that combination of fear and hatred, it would have happened already. The creation of and “Apple-flix” model may in fact need a Jimmy Iovine.

This is definitely another area where Apple is years behind, and they will either adopt or forever surrender to accelerating, irrevocable irrelevance ….which just doesn’t sound likely.

[Oliver Peters] “rather than applications.”

Their software model appears to have become the exact opposite of all this. Buy once for next to nothing, and get every upgrade free for….well, for at least for the next four years and counting. I don’t see any sign that they’re going to ask for a single upgrade payment, much less monthly payments.

For software.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] ” “None of the classic reasons…..are valid anymore…..”

and

[David Roth Weiss] Take that advice from Walter (and Jeremy) with some degree of caution. There are still many good reasons….”

A caged deathmatch: None vs. Many!

They’ve made the case for None. What’s your case for Many?

(Note that I’m not one of the combatants in this caged deathmatch. Just a mullet with a credit card who can’t wait to watch the PPV carnage.)

[Tim Wilson]

We’ve been at this, what? Most of 20 years? (The WWUG was founded in June 1995! I started in 96.) This may be the first time I’ve disagreed with you. LOL But ever so gently and respectfully, I do.

[Nick Griffin] “But it doesn’t seem to be an informed roll of the dice. Where are the guidance counselors and college advisers who should be discussing reality with these young innocents? “

I talk about this a lot in my commencement address, but, spoiler alert, I think this is a FANTASTIC time to be getting into POST.

What I don’t recommend is the model you and I came up in. Get a degree, get some experience, start your own business doing everything. We’re still around, and many of us have a good 20 years left in the tank…but this ain’t the time to start doing THAT. After we’re gone, I can’t imagine that there’ll be more than a tiny handful of people following in our footsteps.

But for somebody who wants to EDIT, or somebody who wants to SHOOT, there have never been more options. I’d counsel anybody with drive to get into this business post-haste.

(SEE WHAT I DID THERE?)

But it would be working for The Man. Anybody who has an easily crushed entrepreneurial spirit really would be better off doing almost anything else. But a young creative person? Absolutely. Pedal to the metal. Flip the nitro. Go go go.

I’ll go ahead and give you the intro to my commencement address.

“Nothing about my experience is of any value to you. Nothing about my path to success will provide you any insight for your own future. The world I came up in is gone. For all the good it will do you in your own career, it might as well never have happened at all.

So why am I here? Because the one and only part of my experience with any value whatsoever is context.

And I’m here to tell you that there’s never been a better time to follow your passion into production and post. The context is, you have to also follow the jobs.”

Can’t wait to hear the rest, can you? LOL But that there’s my bottom line. There’s never been a better time to get into this industry…unless they want to do it the way you and I did, in which case they’re doomed. LOL

[Nick Griffin] “…pursue a degree in almost anything BUT journalism. Their argument was that, as long as she is a good writer, learning about other subjects that she can bring to a journalism career is far more valuable.”

I don’t have a problem with that advice. I have two degrees, and am not doing anything related to either. And I LOVED getting both of them, and do in fact use a lot of things I learned. Just not on purpose. LOL

But that’s not the same as telling her not to get into journalism I think.

Maybe in context that’s what they were saying, but to ME, the question isn’t whether you can get into journalism with a journalism degree. The answer is yes, of course you can, making the question not really worth asking.

What those guys are saying is, there’s nobody like me moving up the ranks. Of course not. Guys like us are fading away. What they SHOULD be saying is, the way I did it probably isn’t going to work for you. Which is true.

The question that implies is yeah, but how do I get there? The answer is NOT, “Study anything BUT journalism.” Not unless there’s a hiring manager somewhere saying, “Wow, I like everything about this young woman but her journalism degree. I HATE when people with journalism degrees apply for my journalism jobs.”

The larger question is, how narrow is the “journalism” target. If it’s “The Atlantic or bust,” sure, lotsa luck kid. But graduates of communication programs are working in lots of other areas. They just have to be willing to write for the joy of writing in something like PR or marketing, and save the journalism for their tumblr. I’d have to count to be sure, but I think the vast majority of PR people working with the COW have journalism/communications backgrounds.

Learning the details of an industry is child’s play. Knowing how to communicate can barely be taught at all. To the extent that it can, I’d vastly prefer somebody trained to write than somebody trained in my field but NOT trained to write.

You know what they’re ultimately telling her, though? “Get trained in writing AND get trained in lots of other fields. A liberal arts degree, kid. THAT’s what you want. Too much specialization will get in your way.”

To which I heartily agree.

[Nick Griffin] “I’ve seen multiple JDs over the years doing quite well in business because they are able to deal with levels of complexity that many others are not.”

Of course you have. I’m a firm believer in education, and for people our age, a law degree might have been a better bet than an MD.

But there’s no getting around that the employment rate for lawyers is dropping, salaries are dropping faster, and the number of LEGAL jobs that require law DEGREES isn’t just dropping. It’s PLUMMETING.

Seriously, over 43% of the legal profession no longer requires a law degree. Add to that the 11% of JDs who aren’t in ANY aspect of the law, and you’ve got LESS than a 50-50 shot at landing a job that requires a law degree! Only a 46% chance of landing a job that requires a law degree.

Less than 50-50! So how much is a law degree worth to TODAY’s graduate? A truckload less than even 10 years ago.

Although one of the articles I read on this topic a few minutes ago says that the law profession never really recovered from the recession of 1991. LOL

So, getting back to the starting point of my commencement address: jaundiced old guys are terrible resources. LOL

In trying to de-jaundice myself by looking at actual numbers, and leaving aside any of the details I got wrong about the above: I feel pretty firmly about this. It’s impossible for me to imagine a better time to get into this field, and I’m a pretty imaginative guy.

Quantification to follow, right on the heels of my commencement address. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

Without commenting on the specifics of Full Sail — I’ve been there and been impressed as hell. Phenomenal facilities, the best of everything you can imagine. Did you know that they require painting and drawing before they let you touch a computer for art? Exactly what you’d HOPE for from a program that takes the ART of this field seriously. And from what I hear from our Orlando-based friend Bob Zelin, FS grads are taken very seriously indeed, at least in FS’s home town.

FS is also a long, long way from its reputation as a trade-school degree mill. They actually have 49 degree programs, including some graduate degree tracks.

However….

[Nick Griffin] “As to “Partially Put To Sea,” not being among the worst still does not forgive the pretense that there are lots of jobs in exciting fields if only one has the degree that they offer.”

This is no different than USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. Or Harvard Law School.

Remarkably, the unemployment rate for graduates from a 4-year undergrad program is only 10%! That’s pretty freaking fantastic. Law school grads are a percentage point less employed, 11%.

But the thing for lawyers is that only 63% of the jobs they find within 9 months of graduation require passing the bar, ie, ANYBODY could theoretically be hired for those jobs, no law degree required.

The larger issue for lawyers and others is finding a job that will cover their debt service. Did you know that student debt is the ONLY debt that can NOT be waived through bankruptcy proceedings? What we do to students in the US really is criminal.

I happen to know this number because I just looked it up — 84% of FS students graduate with debt. This is considerably higher than average, which hovers around 70% nationally. THAT part is BAD, plain and simple. It creates a drain on our economy that will exacerbate our slide down the economic standard of our peers — but it doesn’t speak at all to the lure of this industry, except to the extent that people are willing to roll the dice on their future on that scale.

And that’s the thing. These programs are driven by student demand, and not just at Full Sail. I had intimate experience with this at Avid. I saw first-hand that media programs were growing by leaps and bounds, often the fastest-growing programs in these colleges, virtually NONE of whom you’ve ever heard of. They aren’t beating the bushes for these kids. Those kids are beating down a path to THEM.

That kind of demand turns into new buildings, dorms, student activities, and all the other things that enrich the lives of colleges and universities. And when you pursue the support for your top programs, it leads to new fundraising opportunities — which is GOOD. This is how it’s SUPPOSED to work.

There are NO programs that promise anything less than a bright future. And the fact is, the future’s pretty bright for most graduates of most programs in any field. It’s hard to imagine that we’d live in a world where the success rate is much better than 9 out of 10.

So really, as we evaluate the current or future state of our industry, Full Sail has little to do with anything, imo, except to the extent that they burden students with debt at such a higher rate than normal…which is already high enough to pose a potentially insurmountable obstacle to our national economy’s future soundness.

Let’s beat Full Sail up for THAT.

But not for painting a bright future for our industry, which has in fact never been brighter. Which will be the topic of the commencement address I’m working on. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Craig Seeman] “WWDC is geared towards third party developers.”

Good observation! The “D” stands for DEVELOPERS. World wide DEVELOPERS conference.

Things got a little fuzzy when Apple first stopped going to MacWorld, and needed a platform for the equivalent of the keynotes Steve used to do there.

And indeed, some years, new hardware platforms ARE the big news for developers….but in general, expecting Apple to talk more about itself than about opportunities for its third-party partners isn’t really in keeping with the nature of the event.

Last year, for example, the big news was HealthKit (yes, for watches too), HandOff, QuickType, Family Sharing, a new look for Yosemite, and updates to iOS, Photos and Siri.

I didn’t remember any of this except for HealthKit. Did you? Here’s the rundown that I just now looked up.

So this one sounds pretty much exactly like what recent history would have suggested.