[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “[James Ewart] “But she told me she was more curious about FCPX than she had been about 7 or Premiere because it was so different which I thought was interesting.”

I can completely understand that. If you are a good MC editor and have no business reason to shift to FCP 7 in the past or PPro now, then you’ll stick with Avid. The paradigm is close enough that neither of these NLEs offers the typical Avid editor any real benefit. FCP X, OTOH, makes enough changes to how people work, that it peaks the curiosity. I can certainly attest to that on my end.”

I was about to say “I hate to say I told you so,” because I LOVE saying “I told you so,” but in fact, I said this in 2011, from the beginning. The hype about Avid editors converting to FCP, some notably exceptions notwithstanding, was mostly hype. There wasn’t a compelling artistic or workflow advantage for switching, which is why, in the markets Avid has been strongest in, there wasn’t a wholesale shift. There just wasn’t. If it COULD have moved the needle in Avid’s strongholds, it WOULD have.

I’m not saying X is going to flip the switch that 7 couldn’t, but I HAVE been saying that it has a far better shot. The difference between 7 and MC was barely worth talking about…but “hey, what’s that you’re working on? That’s FCPX? NOW you have my attention.”

Needless to say, I have no numbers to back this up. I don’t know that we ever will. But here we are 4 years into Apple’s stated 10 year plan for FCPX (assuming that the 10 year plan started upon launch, rather than upon the commencement of major development), and we just now have our first high-profile project.

So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe X is going to make even less impact in Avid’s strongholds than 7 did…but I still think that X is gonna take a much bigger bite than 7 was ever going to be able to, just because it provides some compelling scenarios that 7 never did.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] ” it took a lot of “yarrrrrggs!” to convince both the studio and the editing public.”

You’re exactly right, illustrating to me exactly where this metaphor falls completely apart for me. The filmmakers are all “Woo-hoo! We’re pirates! We chose X to piss people off!” or whatever, but you know what? Pirates used the same boats the navies did, maybe just better tuned to the task. But the reason they were able to run from navies is because their ships were state of the art, and every bit as expensive.

Not only were they no less pirates for those ships, those ships are all that enabled them to BE pirates. That, and pirate-y attitudes and, uhm, workflows. The pirate part is who’s ON the ship…but no fancy ship, no pirates.

That’s why Alexa and Pablo have ZERO to do with whether or not these guys were pirates. I’m 100% on board with acknowledging them as pirates (see what I did there?), but expecting them to have used cheap cameras or cheap DI to maintain pirate cred is the OPPOSITE of what a pirate would do in this situation. Can’t be running on the high seas with DV.

I know I’m belaboring a metaphor…but maybe THAT’s what we should rename the forum. FCPX or Not: Belaboring Metaphors.

I do think this is an important one, though, and it speaks to the fundamental nature of a revolution like this, which necessarily includes absolutely state of the art tools. The point of the Focus with X story is to establish that X absolutely IS state of the art.

I mean, they’re no less pirate-y for using Technocranes or a video village, either.

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] ” iMovie works just fine.

NLE’s just ain’t special and they’re not premium.”

I have long, long maintained that iMovie was feet and frames support shy of being the ideal film editing tool. It’s all that many filmmakers need.

There was only one big defection of A Famous Film Editor when I worked at Avid, so the question was raised, what’s your workflow that Apple is better suited for. The answer was that they played through all the footage, and wrote down favorite takes with a PENCIL on a piece of paper (gotta allow for changes), and then the editor assembled the cut, writing down THOSE values, and handed the piece of paper to the negative cutter.

It turns out that all those damn editing features in Avid were getting in the way of pleasurable scrolling and writing stuff down by hand, so they opted for an NLE with fewer features.

I jest not at all. Which is when I said they should be working in iMovie. I agree, Simon, for many workflows, there’s simply nothing premium.

HOWEVER, there was a time when this wasn’t the case. It goes back 20 years or so, a time I know you recall, and was related to things like sync (by NO means a given), reliability (ditto), and quality of hardware (which included not just image quality, but also…sync and reliability). All products were by no means created equal.

This is where I personally believe that Media 100 was ultimately more revolutionary than Avid, because it really did democratize video production, for the low, low price of $30,000.

And that $30,000 included a PREMIUM for 2 streams of real-time DVE…during edit, not output. You still had to render that.

You also payed a premium for Avid’s film support, which nobody came close to…until Cinema Tools, which Apple soon bought.

So, by and large, nearly all features (sync, picture quality, film support, real time, etc) that WERE premium are indeed NOW commoditized. Any additional premiums for hardware support and performance boost are very close to commoditization courtesy AJA and Blackmagic.

There are still premiums, though. Among them: paid priority, 24-hour access to software support. Because one of the things that Avid customers expect from software support is an immediate answer to a phone call, with virtually no time on hold, 24 hours a day. For THAT, you pay a premium.

But again agreeing with you, none of this is inherent in the software. But it is a premium feature, and does answer your original question about expectations.

The same goes for hardware, btw. I know people who’ve gotten parts for their HP workstations FedEx’d to the LITERAL jungles of the Amazon. Certainly anybody in the US gets next-business-day replacement for any part you can imagine. Bullet hole through your laptop screen? Shorted motherboard from the blood pouring from the bullet that had passed through you on the way to your screen? No problem. We’ll have somebody on your porch the next morning.

For the same price as Apple Care. And Apple customers have been trained to have low expectations for replacement time for anything that can’t be handled at the mall, and no expectations whatever for replacement due to water, blood, or bullet damage. But few HP customers would tolerate this. So they pay a premium.

A premium service — paid yes, but no more than one would pay for distinctly non-premium service from Apple.

A different question than software, to be sure. But you’re right, people’s expectation is to pay less and less for software – if not a couple of hundred bucks to own, a couple of dozen bucks to subscribe and bill to the client.

I do think that Apple has done more than anyone to lower expectations for direct support, though, albeit with enough apparent satisfaction with the original product that most FCP/X users are more than willing to tolerate it.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “For the record, the Arri D-20 (2005) predates the RED One (2007).”

Yes, and D-20 is the quintessential old guard camera. Exactly the kind of camera you’d expect ARRI to produce, exactly the kind of camera that Red could plow under the ground in short order. And did.

I don’t think it’s fair to expect cameras to flip the bird. Which is the camera that did that? Red. Still flipping the bird. Yes, and innovating, with much innovating ahead of it. No disrespect intended. Fincher has been using them to fantastic effect.

(But, uhm, who else? Surely someone, but I can’t think who.)

So I AM making the observation that ARRI flipped the bird to other camera makers with Alexa. Maybe not flipping the bird as much as “throwing down,” an image I’ve always loved. Completely upended the entire approach to customers, including the relationship of camera makers to NLE developers. On the camera front, they forced even the “little guys” to meet them on ground that ARRI defined.

(Although ARRI DID keep the model of RENTAL. That’s why most Alexa customers don’t care what the sale price is. The client rents, not buys, and the client foots the rental bill, not the DP…and the client leases Alexa because it’s cheaper than buying a similarly capable camera. Including Red.)

Maybe it’s because of the difference in our ages — I’m old enough to be your father, so get off my lawn — but I don’t think that disruption requires a middle finger. Which middle finger did Apple flip when they introduced iPhone? None of them.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, until BMD and now AJA, even the “flip your middle finger” smaller cameras all sat in the old guard space — “We pick OUR footage format to cheat in favor of our own imagers. Working with it is YOUR problem.”

I’m conceding that on the whole, cameras don’t lend themselves to flipping the bird. But my point is that there are still baseline requirements for making big-time, big-budget pictures.

The point of X on Focus is NOT that “we can make a guerilla-style run and gun feature with X.” The point of X on Focus is that we can do exactly what we need to do in order for X to be at the heart of big-budget blockbuster filmmaking. And for that, you need grown-up, get off my lawn, images.

After all, Cold Mountain was shot on film. And for that matter, it wasn’t the first feature cut with FCP. Who remembers Roger Avary’s Rules of Attraction? Cut on FCP a full year before Cold Mountain, but it didn’t move the needle. No feature shot on DV was EVER going to move the needle.

For that matter, Apple enthusiast Steven Soderbergh shot Full Frontal on DV at the same time Avary was shooting Rules of Attraction…and DP Soderbergh never asked Director/Producer Soderbergh to shoot DV again. DV was nominally revolutionary, but not in any way practical except for non-mainstream uses.

And the most revolutionary aspects of Cold Mountain and Focus is that they’re mainstream. Big stars, big budgets, large format theaters, the whole thang.

Making the irony that, for maximum revolutionary bang for the NLE, the rest of the project has to flip the fewest birds possible. Or else the use of the NLE is part of the entire story of “this picture doesn’t really matter for changing the game.” That is, you have to PLAY the game to CHANGE the game.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Oops. As always, Tim Wilson said it better.”

Longer, anyway. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “though if one is brutally honest, one would have to ask whether AVID products have ever really been premium other than in their frequently eye-watering pricing.”

On the contrary, I think the one thing established is that Avid products ARE premium products. Ask most of Hollywood. As price conscious as they are, Avid’s prices are rarely discussed as needing addressing.

(BECAUSE THEY LEASE AVIDS, NEVER BUY THEM.)

I think you’re absolutely right that, ironically, Avid’s primary conflict has been trying to chase lower prices rather than embracing their premium-ness.

I’ll give you my favorite example. For 3 years, I sat next to the product manager for Avid DS. I think it was the best VALUE in the company, even though it was the highest PRICED in the company ($145,000 with storage, iirc). And what was he bombarded with, all day every day? Lamentations that it was priced TOO LOW.

“Our clients read trade magazines,” they said. “We’re having to cut our rates so far below our Flint and Flame rates that we’re risking the health of our business.”

(A note to the DS diehards who will hate Avid with a hatred that can be seen from outer space until the end of time because of EOL’ing DS: Avid primarily acknowledged that its time had passed. There was a time when you needed the most powerful hardware acceleration available to run 2K. We used to use SINGLE STREAM realtime 2K PLAYBACK– just playback, not even editing, and just one stream — and people were shouting from the audience that this was impossible. They insisted on coming up to the stage after the demo to see if we were playing any tricks.

Now, 6K from a laptop is child’s play.

DS’s color grading? Obliterated by Resolve. Node-based compositing? Obliterated by Nuke, Scratch, and yes, Resolve. No control surface kept it out of the running in EU in particular, where, wait for it, RESOLVE was king. Because of the control surface.

So there was not one single area where DS could keep up — not because Avid didn’t care. My product manager colleague was the most diligent, customer-focused PM I’ve ever met. The issue is that no “do-it-all” product can survive the onslaught of specialist companies and products who eat it from every direction.

Which is why there are no longer any meaningful “do-it-all” products. Even though A-desk comes close, there’s still a whole range of “do-an-awful-lot” products. Evolution is at work. The small mammals have won.)

ANYWAY…Avid’s issues include chasing lower-end markets with products like Liquid, Pinnacle Studio, Xpress, Xpress Pro and others — all of which were major sucks of time and money, and distractions from Avid’s core competencies: premium products for upscale customers.

As one VP put it to me in casual conversation, “Avid’s business model doesn’t support moving lots of inexpensive units. We can only prosper by moving fewer, more expensive units.”

True, which is how Avid’s most prosperous days were built around $20,000 hardware running Media Composer. FCP with AJA and BMD should have been eating Avid’s lunch, but the opposite was true. Introducing a software-only Media Composer at $4995 should have been a disaster, but it wasn’t. It was successful beyond anyone’s imaginings.

(Including mine. I argued vigorously for launching at $2995. My immediate bosses argued for $999. Wrong. $4995 both supported the premium message that Avid’s customers WANT Avid to maintain, while scooping up a lot more money.)

Things started to run off the rails with the combination of a nine-figure purchase of a company whose non-premium products they had to sell off for fractions of a penny on the dollar, and trying to sell lots of lower-priced units.

Their future is stabilizing by going back to their long suit: selling software for more than the competition (thanks Apple!) and LEASING — only now, going direct to the customer, rather than forcing a lease through a VAR who could only make money on a lease that included computers and storage. This still works for Hollywood, but software-only was the only pitch that would work for customers.

re: public support, I think Avid erred a bit by trying to build a strong support community on their own site — HUGE success; an unabashed home run — to the exclusion of their support elsewhere. I don’t think they reckoned on how thoroughly this would marginalize them. They’re certainly addressing this with more more aggressive user group support (again, thanks Apple for making Apple UGs so open to this that they’re ASKING for Avid presos) and much more wide-ranging PR stories….partly enabled by having so many new stories to tell. Thanks Apple! LOL

I’m going to skip the part where paid direct support is still a key revenue source for Avid, a tale too complex to explore in a post as long as this. 🙂

I heartily agree with you on Modo, Simon. Like Adobe, among a handful of companies who is producing exceptional work on every possible platform, aggressively reaching out on every possible platform. I think BMD is doing exemplary work too, including at the COW, where BMD folks have been second only to Adobe, albeit necessarily limited by a much smaller team.

Begging the question: is Adobe the only big company swinging for the support fences? Or is this increasingly becoming the domain of smaller vendors?

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “Arri has been in the motion picture camera business since the early 1900s. If that doesn’t qualify as old guard, I don’t know what would. ;)”

For film cameras, obviously, but hey, Apple has been around since 1976. In tech years, that’s ancient. Certainly longer than Adobe, Avid, Pro Tools, Autodesk, and virtually any company here but the Japanese camera makers among us.

Microsoft is only 1 year older than Apple. HP workstations didn’t come along until the 80s. Olllllld guard.

The point about Alexa NOT being in the old guard is that she was the first digital camera to record to ProRes. At Alexa’s launch, she ONLY recorded to ProRes. Not the case anymore of course, but still. Hardly the behavior of the old guard.

Old guard thinking is sticking to RAW and proprietary formats, and trying to strong-arm manufacturers into supporting it. How many camera companies have done this over the years? Until Alexa, damn near all of them.

New guard thinking is to let customers dictate your corporate strategies — which both Blackmagic and AJA (who of course pioneered hardware encoding to ProRes) learned from Alexa very, very well indeed.

Alexa remains critical to messaging about FCP/FCPX workflows because roughly 90% of episodic shooting is on Alexa, and while I don’t have specific numbers, she dominates feature shooting as well. Not walking hand in hand with Alexa means marginalization, full stop.

NOT because Alexa is old guard, but because she combines the benefits of old guard commitment to imaging, with cutting edge adoption of and adaptation to what customers are actually doing, and want they want to do going forward.

Hence the “late” introduction of Alexa five years AFTER Red, but leaving it in the dust. Red is still trying to force old guard, workaround-laden workflows, and Alexa is way, way ahead of the game.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “(Posted from my Surface Pro 3.)”

Do you really have a Surface 3? LOL That’s awesome. I want one so bad I can taste it. I have in fact tasted one. It tasted kind of…purple. They nearly made me buy it.

Look, I’m an extreme case, but I live on my laptop. I need a bigger keyboard, I need more RAM, and I like a big screen. Fifteen inches hits my sweet spot…but I also LOVE a touch screen, so any Mac laptop is immediately out. Including this new one.

That said, I have an iPad, and I think anyone who says THAT’s a laptop replacement is on crack. What I meant to say is, “Your mileage may vary.” I do think a Surface is (or appears to be) vastly superior, and much closer to the mark.

But I’ve tried smaller things. Not just the iPad, but a Kindle (which I much prefer), a Chromebook (fun, but impractical imo), and a 13-inch laptop, and whenever I use one for long, I’m sorry I didn’t just grab my 15-incher. If I want a device, I go for my Note.

(I can’t count the number of Mac people who scoffed at my ridiculous huge phone with 1920×1080 resolution, then immediately got an iPhone of roughly the same size and resolution as soon as it was humanly possible, then BRAGGED to me that they have an awesome new big phone. Yes, I know you like it. I’ve been telling you for two years that you would.)

So, my summary of Surface based solely on clicking around on it in the store, then licking it: I can live with the screen size, but too little RAM and keyboard that feels to small seeeeeem to be deal breaker.

I’d still love to hear how you’re using your Surface and how you feel about it.

[Tim Wilson]

No NAB for me, but kids, I have to tell ya, make plans to meet Kevin. It won’t just be one of the highlights of your show. If you’re anything like me, the relationship you build with him will be a highlight of your career.

[Tim Wilson]

FOR THE RECORD, I said repeatedly that this is a real product, with a real audience, and Apple has been missing out on its share of a $20 billion market — before Apple gets in and makes it a much bigger market.

People have been buying these for YEARS (they were introduced in 2011, and have been a meaningfully-sized product line for other people since 2013), but as usual, if Apple doesn’t do it, it doesn’t exist. When Apple does it, it’s a must-have.

Just not for most of you.

Yet. 🙂

I’m jumping up and down about this because of how rarely I’m right. LOL And not that I’m the only one right about this. For example, Tim Cook is right about this. So take it from your ol’ buddies Tim, there’s a major new sector that Apple’s about to dominate, and another new vector of rewriting the rules of engagement — since, after all, Apple is in the engagement business. Buckle up.