[Tim Wilson]

I’ve been thinking about this all week. Yes, this is what I do instead of give my full attention to my family. LOL

You know what bugs me about this? I’m an idiot. There’s no way I should know about this. I should only have heard this news after a a deal was made.

Think about any deal of any size in this space. Did you know DaVinci was for sale? Teranex? Did you know that Macromedia was up for selling Final Cut to Apple? Did you know that Imagineer was available if the fit was right? Go down the list. Big or small. How often do we EVER hear about stuff like this in advance? I can’t think of any examples at all.

That says a few things to me.

First, they couldn’t get the deal done through the usual methods. If they could have, they would have.

Regular channels include companies that specialize in this kind of deal for this market. I know the managing partners at MediaBridge Capital Advisers in particular (one was the CFO of Avid when I was there, the other I’ve crossed paths with many times over the years: he did the Boris-Media 100 deal, the $100 million+ sale of On2 to Google, etc), and I think they’re absolute aces.

There are others. If there was a deal to be made, couldn’t one of these specialists have made it?

The investment groups that the current owners outbid for TF just a few years ago surely told them to pound sand, right? Because I’m still not seeing enough upside for another group to see a sound investment here when they could be putting that money into Adobe and earning 20% a year, or buying another company that’s more seriously undervalued.

I’m not saying The Foundry is overvalued. Its current owners are an investment group, so any deal they pitch to another investment group would have to pass their own straight-face test first….but again, wouldn’t they have already made a deal if the could have?

I’m also noticing how often names like Adobe and Autodesk are coming up, and really, not a ton of others. Surely an investment group wanting $300 million for The Foundry would be frequenting the COW, right? LOL Don’t you think they approached Adobe, Autodesk, and a couple of other likely suspects first?

Heck, they probably approached Grant Petty, right?

Because this press release thing is the equivalent of Craigslist – just kinda throw it out there and see who nibbles. No sense of cultivation at all.

I wonder if part of the hitch is that a number of people who’d be interested had no idea of the scale of the thing. Did YOU know they had 250 people working there? Says so right on their website, and it never crossed my mind to look, but I can imagine that a number of people might have gotten the call, “Hey, we’re shopping The Foundry around, want to take a look?,” then heard the details and said, “What? You’re kidding. I can’t take on 250 people. And you want HOW much?”

Again, not saying that they’re not worth every penny, and that the next owner won’t make a bundle on it, but surely after such a big run-up in the past few years, this has to be a buy-and-hold deal….and with so few *obvious* potential buyers, who are the *actual* potential buyers…and if they’re realistic candidates, why didn’t one of them make the deal?

I dunno, maybe this is a play to drive the price up. They weren’t getting the reaction they wanted one on one, but maybe one of our putative prospects will step up to make sure that a competitor doesn’t acquire it first.

Anyway, I’m surely not alone in either ongoing vexation over this news, or letting my mind wander instead of giving my full attention to anything happening around me LOL but I wonder if you’ve had any more thoughts on this….

[Tim Wilson]

[Craig Seeman] “Can an article be both fluffy and provocative?
“

The answer is apparently, yes, an article can be both fluffy and provocative. LOL

So, provocatively, what’s your take on this? Not just your take on his take, but your thinking on the big picture?

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t know if you are directly calling people on this forum inapt, sir, or insinuating we are not capable of making adult decisions? If so, that is pretty out of character”

Thanks for acknowledging that that would be out of character.

Note that my post was agreeing with Walter (not to say that he would he agree with anything I said),and specifically NOT disagreeing with you, for exactly the reason you point out, that you think the simile is in-APT, ie, not applicable.

This is completely different from, and not all related to, in-EPT, ie clumsy or incompetent.

That would be me.

I sincerely apologize for my overly casual language and overreaching tone. I agree that they were inappropriate, making me both inapt AND inept.

Apologies again.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Moviepass and CC do not work on the same model at all, and I think that saying that Adobe is getting paid for doing nothing runs contrary to the evidence.”

EXACTLY.

This is the worst simile in the history of this forum, and that’s saying a lot. LOL The basis of a simile is that the things have to be similar, but in this case, they’re exactly the opposite!

Moviepass/Transit pass/gym membership/Gift card

• Vendor gets all the money up front
• Vendor doesn’t have to do anything to keep customer engaged
• Customer has to take significant action over long periods of time to receive any value

Software PURCHASE fits here. Vendor gets the money. Vendor doesn’t need to do anything after that. YOU have to hustle to get your money’s worth. That may never actually happen.

Compare that to:

Single purchase of movie ticket, bus ride, sandwich, iTunes download, etc.

• Customer pays for only what’s needed, when needed
• Customer otherwise keeps the money that the vendor would have had in scenario above
• VENDOR now has to take actions over long periods of time to PROVIDE value, or the customer goes elsewhere

Monthly software access fits HERE. You pay a month at a time, for exactly what you want. The theoretical vendor, for the sake of argument, let’s call them Abode, has to woo you if not monthly, no less than once a year.

Additionally, smaller transactions, whether monthly or annually, mean that at the end of every period, you’re vastly more likely to have extracted the value you need from the transaction — or you just don’t spend the money the next time.

So, sure, if you have a philosophical objection, no literary devices will sway you. I’d say that we’re wasting our time arguing about the aptness of literary devices at all, but arguing about the aptness of literary devices is all that separates us from the apes.

And if the financial model doesn’t work for you, welp, it doesn’t work. See above, re: literary devices.

But wow, heavens to Bowie, comparing Creative Cloud to a moviepass is stupendously inapt. Be a grown-up and take responsibility for stepping in before autopay kicks in. Keeping transactions smaller and more frequent puts ALL the power with you. Make Adobe keep earning your business.

Because that’s my other issue with literary devices. Nobody loves making sh|t up more than I do, but the one thing I’m not hearing out there is, “You know what? I’m just not getting my $29/months’s worth of value out of Adobe. They’re sitting on my money and getting lazy. They clearly don’t care about customer-responsive development.”

There may be some alternate universe where Spock has a beard and Adobe ISN’T the benchmark for major vendor customer-responsive development, but it sure ain’t this one.

So let’s at least set aside that aspect of Simile Or Not: The Debate until there’s a reason to debate whether Adobe is actually delivering. I’ve yet to see any meaningful debate on THAT.

The rest is all just literary wrasslin’, which, again, I’m fine with. What with arguing about literary devices bein’ all that separates from the apes and all.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “I think so. After Effects and Nuke excel in different areas.”

That’s exactly my point. There are millions of people who know the actual answer to this, rather than my armchair observations, but it seeeeeems to me that a large part of the use of After Effects in mainstream movie and vfx-ish tv making ends with a handoff to Nuke. There’s something of an overlap in the feature sets, but they’re more commonly used together than not, I think.

Not unlike, say, mocha’s tracker or Resolve’s grading. These aren’t either/or products for After Effects. Certainly part of why Adobe bought SpeedGrade, even though there are color tools in both Premiere and After Effects. They all have room in the ecosystem, and perform unique, invaluable functions.

I do get the appeal of this for Autodesk, though, but I think their toolset actually has more of an overlap with Nuke, making it less attractive. I also don’t see them having that kind of cash or high-value stock….but I would also be extremely surprised to discover I’m right about any important aspect of this. LOL Fun to talk about tho….

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Carlyle holds The Foundry in an investment fund…(in this case, 75 million euros to 200 million euros)….”

Not euros. POUNDS.

[Craig RussillRoy] “expects to realise £200m from the sale….Carlyle Group is said to want to realise its investment of the company, which employs 270”

[edit: corrected in a later article to 370]

Keep an eye on those numbers. They’re huge. That’s US$314 million give or take, plus 370 employees, which means as much as another $30-40 million or so a year in payroll + benefits. By my math, that rules out EVERY company in this industry but one.

It definitely rules out AJA. I don’t know what kind of money they have laying around, but aja.com says they have “over 200” employees. They’d need a LOT of money laying around in order to nearly double the size of their company.

It rules out BMD too. I don’t know the size of the company or its bags of cash, but my guess is that DaVinci and eyeon COMBINED were more like 10% of what Carlyle wants for The Foundry, and probably not much more than 10% in personnel either.

The other issue is business model. Carlyle thinks they’ve nearly tripled the value of The Foundry in 3 years. It seems unlikely that there’s enough upside for another investment group to say, “Yeah, we can make a lot more than $300 off this thing in a buy-to-sell in the next 3-5 years.” Eventually, somebody’s going to have to say, welp, the equity is the equity. I need this to pay for itself out of income.

Compare this to Grant Petty’s approach at BMD. It’s clear that BMD isn’t needing to create a bunch of incremental dollars from software sales. Quite the contrary. Just the idea of decoupling DaVinci software from hardware tells you that he’s playing a longer game.

Sure, there’s a hardware upsell for the DaVinci control surface, but that’s trivial compared to how much he’s leaving on the table with ridiculously capable software for free.

For hardware, his pattern is even more clearly to let the air out of the tires on margins. That’s how he buys Teranex, and takes $75,000 standards converters to sell them for $1995, while making them smaller and quieter, and adding features and formats. The exact OPPOSITE of what’s required for monetizing a deal the scale that The Foundry is gonna be.

While BMD’s website doesn’t say, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re also a smaller company than the 370 people at The Foundry. It’s one thing to say “But nobody predicted they’d make a camera” when I rule this out, but it’s another thing to say that they’d want to spend $300 million for the privilege of adding another 370 employees. Not gonna happen.

The last time there was a deal of this scale in this industry was Avid buying Pinnacle for $300 million in 2005, right? That didn’t go all that well in the end. Besides, a lot of that deal was in stock.

Otherwise, you have to go back to Macromedia by Adobe for $3.75 billion, but that was ALL stock.

So that means you’re looking at a publicly traded company as the only kind of precedent for a deal this scale.

Apple won’t bite on this one because there’s no chunky jewelry or apparel. Maybe if The Foundry made giant ugly hats. No wait. Those would cover the ugly headphones. Maybe giant ugly shoes? Parachute pants?

Avid’s out for reasons cultural and financial. Autodesk could conceivably do it, but I don’t see it. They’re in pretty rough shape, and are going to have to do some major restructuring just to hit current targets. Analysts are downgrading their stock. Nobody’s going to take that as part of a deal, and I can’t imagine that Autodesk wants to spend that kind of cash on anyone but themselves for now.

You know who I like? Adobe.

Adobe is the ONLY one I can see doing it, because they DON’T need to spin equity into another equity deal, and they don’t need to make incremental dollars. They need Nuke et al to add incremental VALUE.

It’ll give more people more reasons to sign up and stay signed up. Nuke could really cement Adobe’s place all the way to the end of the production pipeline, past where they now end with After Effects.

Thinking about Macromedia as an all stock deal, Lord knows Adobe’s stock is valuable enough to throw around. Their stock has nearly TRIPLED since the Macromedia deal, from $27 to $77 give or take, and has been skyrocketing of late. And Adobe has the payroll resources.

The big burst of energy behind their latest stock surge — in addition to, ahem, a terrific quarter for CC adoption, sorry haters — is their $800 million acquisition of Fotolia, a stock media company.

Did I mention that Fotolia was a cash deal? Fotolia was a cash deal. Adobe had $800 million in cash. They spent it all in once place. On Fotolia. For $800 million.

Who knows? Adobe could have another $300 million cash already tied up in a bow. That suddenly sounds like not all that much money. But as sharply as their stock is climbing, and as quickly as analysts are raising their targets, a deal sweetened with stock could be a pretty sweet deal indeed.

The stock makes sense to me, in that it looks to my beady, bloodshot eyes like Adobe will be partly monetizing Fotolia by selling you stock media from inside your CC apps, and as noted, I don’t see $300 million cash to be extracted from Nuke and its kin in the next few years.

That’s also why I think after Adobe, you’re pretty much looking at another investment group, right? And there you run into my quandry about how much more juicy equity goodness you can suck out of The Foundry.

That means it HAS to be monetized through new sales…unless you’re a company whose cashflow is reliable enough without sales per se, but needs to keep adding value to make long-term commitments attractive to both existing and new customers. You also continue to burnish your well-established track record for exactly this kind of relentless value addition.

So it’s not my prediction by any means, but if I was Adobe, I’d have made this deal already.

Which is why I’m not Adobe. LOL They’ve made their fortunes by ignoring advice from idiots like me.

But no kidding, I love this. Make the deal by the end of the year, unless it’s better for taxes to do it in January. But no dilly-dallying. You need time to give everybody a couple days off before working around the clock for next few months to add a new wing to the NAB booth.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “this does seem to bring out in you a certain..I don’t know what.”

Thanks for noticing! LOL For better and worse, that’s pretty much just me. I really do talk like this in real life, including liberally LOL-ing.

But yeah, I love this one for sure. I’ve had to be away from posting at the COW for a while, and I saw a couple topics here that jumped out at me, so I merrily jumped right back on…

…but over the long haul, I think I might post more often at one of our least-trafficked forums, TV & Movie Appreciation. The original idea a long time ago was simple: we’re sophisticated consumers of media, and I think we’re generally sophisticated consumers of media…but we almost never talk about it.

That forum HAS changed names. It was originally called “Film History & Appreciation,” but now, TV is often better than movies, and it’s more about current stuff than historical stuff, which is fine by me. I’m going to be able to come up for air in a little bit, and while you’ll definitely see me here more often than I’ve been around lately, I suspect you’ll find me over there even more often.

There’s only like a dozen of us, and it’s been pretty quiet of late, but when we’re cooking, I love talking about this stuff. I’ve turned several of my posts there into articles, and could probably turn a couple more into articles as well.

Depth of Field: Gregg Toland, Citizen Kane and Beyond

and

TV’s All-time Greatest Openings, Part 1: Friday Night ABC 1971-72

are actually two of my favorite pieces of writing at the COW, and both started as posts, adding a few pictures and subtracting a little psychosis.

The Toaster & Tim’s Vermeer was one of a handful of pieces I’ve written where I got to combine both sides of it — the making of media and the watching of it. A cool interview on a strange subject that was turned into a cool movie.

Here’s the thing I learned from that forum and this one, though. The COW has never been about ideas. We celebrate our 20th anniversary next spring, and we’ve ALWAYS been about ACTIONS and NEEDS. It just so happens that needs and actions have intersected with ideas in this forum over the past couple of years…but without the DEBATE (yes, debate) about FCPX OR NOT (yes, that’s mostly what the debates are about), this forum would cease to exist.

Nobody wakes up and says, y’know, this is a great day to talk about what I want from an NLE. The DEBATE (or debates, but yes) about FCPX OR NOT (which is mostly what the debates are about) are the spine of this forum, maybe also the heart. Nothing survives without a spine and a heart.

(Notice: no mention of a brain. Jury’s still out on that. LOL And actually, now that I think about it, plenty of folks seem to be getting by without much in the way of a heart or a spine either.)

I also know this from having tried to start a general-interest forum along these lines many times over the past 20 years, and them never taking off. Why now? Why this time? Because there was a DEBATE over FCPX OR NOT. It’s not general interest AT ALL. It certainly spins OFF into other generally interesting stuff, but it all starts in a very specific place.

The COW as a whole will survive us all, but as long as there’s some question over the suitability of FCPX to a given task or market, OR NOT, this particular forum will be around. We’ll know almost to the day when the debate ends. It ain’t yet.

Anyway, the other thing that fires me up is music. I’ve tried MANY times to start up a music forum here, but none of ’em have worked, for the same reason that general-interest industry forums haven’t taken off in the COW. Nothing to talk about RIGHT NOW, no reason anyone HAS to speak up, so no spine and no heart.

Music is actually what I write about in my spare time (hahaha). I’ve had to put a music-cultural history kinda book on hold for the moment, but I do write a TON about it. That means plenty of overly long, not-as-witty-as-I-think writing along those lines too.

One of these days, I might even getting around to linking to my off-topic music stuff in my sig. Right after I make a sig. LOL

I do love this industry, though, and I feel lucky to have come at it from so many directions: owning a business, making lots of different kinds of TV shows, user groups, software development, marketing, trade shows, vendor partnerships, writing and editing a trade magazine, and a bunch more, including watching what alla y’all are talking about. It’s fun, and I like having fun.

Thanks again!

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Witthaus] “I would hardly say that is representative.”

It’s not, which is why I object to surveys.

But the best ANY survey can do is be specific. This is of course less than a survey. It’s a poll, which require even MORE specificity to be useful. “Hey, what do you guys want on your pizza?” is a legit poll question. Extrapolate even one step from there about what MOST people want on pizza, and you’re just making it up. Useless.

So to ask “this group of colorists” is entirely legit, and as you point, extrapolating out even one step further is useless.

The last ACE survey I can find is, ironically, 2010, the year before It Happened. My theory based strictly on anecdotes from a number of directions is that Avid use went UP, as a number of Avid to FCP folks went back to Avid. Not a matter of laziness or fear, but of productivity. Gotta get to work, man. We’ll think about the rest when we get a break….which in those cycles, is pretty rare.

Which is why it’s also useless to extrapolate even one step further from THEM.

The most we can hope for in any of these discussions is specificity. If done properly, none of these polls will relate to anyone except those answering.

Now then, a properly done SURVEY will be able to account for the opinions of people who don’t answer, but there are no proper surveys being done like this. To the extent they ever will be, they won’t be conducted on the web.

But as a specific answer from a specific group with specific needs, well, you have the answer. And outside those people, you’re exactly right, Scott. Means nothing.

Specifics, though, those are the only things worth anything. The more specific, the more minute, the less broadly applicable: the better.

[Tim Wilson]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’d say this – a lot of editors out there are very well disposed to ppro? there is a ton of good will. “

[Aindreas Gallagher] “but for corporate mixed design edit assets with animation there’s nothing within a country mile of it….feels an embarrassment of riches. “

I don’t think either of these can be overstated. Apple upset a lot of people, and Avid is Avid, but in the facilities world, few companies have more fondness toward them than Adobe. A debate forum here notwithstanding, those kinds of customers have been all-in on support contracts from the beginning. Creative Cloud and the water bill will be the two smallest monthly bills for many of them, and the idea of stopping payment on the latter is no more conceivable than stopping payment on the former. A non-issue.

With such a low barrier to try it out — $80? Why not? — and an adoption that doesn’t require rewiring one’s mind or workflow, AND integration with After Effects, I think a lot of people are kicking themselves wondering why they didn’t do this sooner. I also think more and more people are going to find it harder and harder to resist, even among those who’ve been hold-outs for strongly-held business philosophy objections. If it’s a good fit for your work, chances are good that it’s also the BEST fit, which historically may not have been the same thing. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Joseph Owens] ” whether Orwell’s nihilistic vision in 1984 is still relevant”

To Postman’s point in Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s almost completely irrelevant compared with the numbing effect of being overwhelmed with nonsense, a la Brave New World, where TV can never be turned off and thinking is discouraged. Surveillance doesn’t need to be stealthy and sinister when people are stumbling over themselves DEMANDING to expose everything about themselves.

But I think both are overstated, and neither is on topic to the DEBATE over the appropriateness of FCPX to a task OR NOT.

Wow, FCPX or Not: The Debate. We should name a forum after that! Sure seems to describe an awful lot of threads, where people DEBATE whether FCPX is the right choice OR NOT.

So please tread lightly around dystopian fiction (my favorite genre, btw, that and teen vampires), as politics are specifically not on the menu chez COW.

You do raise an interesting point about expense, though, which I’ll also gently disagree with that too. If EVERYTHING was about cost, then the cheapest thing would ALWAYS win. I’m obviously overstating your point, and cost is certainly an issue, especially where public budgets are concerned (thinking more about schools than government agencies per se), but I don’t see much evidence that decisions are being driven BY cost.

See, there’s no debate about cost. But there IS debate about the appropriateness of FCPX OR NOT for a given task, AND for different styles of working, AND for different personalities.

That’s why I’m ultimately not too interested in FCPX market share, even by verticals (within schools, within indie production, within commercial production, within SoHo, etc.), because none of those tell me anything important about ME. And it really is all about ME. LOL Does YOUR experience have anything to do with ME?

I continue to believe that feature sets, workflow, compatibility, and price are ALL secondary to personality traits. I like what I like, and nobody’s experience is going to budge me. You liking what you like is only meaningful until I try it myself, at which point your experience ceases to have any relevance whatsoever.

Speaking metaphorically rhetorically. LOL

In that sense, I’m far more interested in seeing a correlation between NLE choices, verticals and Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. (INFJ, holla!) What works for ME has a lot more to do with I’m LIKE than what I DO, no matter what I like to tell myself about how rational I am and how carefully I consider every choice. I do. I use the “draw a line down the middle of a yellow legal pad and list the pros and cons” approach to EVERYTHING, including what to wear today.

(I haven’t decided yet, but I’ll let you know.)

But seriously? In the end, I go with what I LIKE, and make it fit my needs because I WANT it to.

That is in fact the history of this forum in a nutshell. People WANTED X to work, and forced themselves into workflows that X demanded because people WANTED to use X. Then, over the following couple of years, X has continued to evolve to be more capable out of the box….but in fact, there’s an extent to which people are going to use it because they WANT to use it, and will let everything else about their working experience flow from that.

Which, again, I think is not only a good thing, but an inevitable thing. And, if we’re being honest, the ONLY thing.

In fact, I was going to say “except in cases where clients or markets force other choices,” but a big part of this forum is also people liking what they like and forcing the issue AGAINST clients or markets where necessary.

So, somebody give me a quantifiable PERSONALITY correlation between FCPX OR NOT, and you’ve got my attention.