[Tim Wilson]

[John Rofrano] “Did I guess right?”

So, THIS forum has the right name. It’s the OTHER forum that needs a new name.

This one stays “FCPX or Not: The Debate” (or Debates).

Maybe call the other one, “FCPX: Get Back To Work You Lazy Bastards.” LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Nick Griffin] “I spend something like $216 a year for HBO, probably half that for Showtime and $83.88 a year for NetFlix….”

I keep trying to come up with ways to spend less (“hmmm…maybe now I can drop HBO”) and keep finding ways to spend more (“hey, wait, Redbox means I don’t have to wait for it to come on cable….hmmmm, maybe now I can drop HBO”).

Thanks for the kind words on my psychotic post! I really do find this stuff endlessly interesting. With so many things having changed, it’s easy to forget all the ones that haven’t. We’re going to be in advertising’s thrall until programmers can find more someplace else.

I’m curious if there’s an age-gap in this. You and I are toward the upper end of the COW’s age spectrum, we pay a lot for content, and we’d like to skip commercials. Younger folks are less inclined to pay beyond Netflix, many have never had cable at all — so I wonder if they see ads as a problem, or if they just roll with it.

Too bad no young folks post in this forum. LOL Although if you’re out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts….

[Tim Wilson]

We’ve always tried to let the community drive the creation of forums. Every application starts with just one, and we let it evolve from there. Some examples:

— The Basics forums started because of new members who felt intimidated, partly because old members were being dicks. Both new members and old members made the request.

(By the way, we also added an option in your COW Profile to “Hide newbie posts.” This was added because of the geezers who, over a period of years, got tired of answering the same question, and couldn’t help themselves from being dicks about it. That option is ON by default.

I personally think that that’s the wrong default. I think most of the people who are still around in the COW are quite generous, and would happily answer the questions of each new generation of professionals, just as they themselves had been helped. But if not, they could choose to turn it off.

I do think that the right default is to assume that people are NOT dicks, and they DO want to help, so I may have to revisit that too. Opinions?)

— After Effects added a forum just for Expressions because, especially when that was a new feature, the traffic there really called for it. The forum remains there because the concerns of those folks are different. They’re often less concerned with DOING motion graphics than MANAGING motion graphics. The answers to their problems are mathematical, rather than, say, keying or compositing techniques or a menu setting.

Again, the request came from both the Expressive and non-Expressive.

— The separate forum for Resolve hardware configuration likewise came from the large number of posts asking ONLY about GPUs and computers. This became an issue after Resolve was released for Windows. Instead of a Mac and 2 graphics cards, the number of possibilities exploded, getting in the way of people needing to talk about how to USE Resolve.

This one actually might have been our most adamantly requested break-out.

The Final Cut Pro cluster combines dynamics related to all of these. The split between FCP and FCP Basics came naturally and organically. I think it was the first one we broke out after After Effects.

(Most of the dicks from the AE forum are gone, btw, but those guys could be vicious. If you’re one of the ones still here, please stay, but be less of a dick. LOL)

I wrote in my psychotically long overview at the top of this thread why we broke out FCPX or Not: The Debate. Nothing in that set of debates that started in April had anything to do with the USE of Final Cut Pro, which was of course what people could actually USE. Many of those folks won’t go FCPX before the sun goes nova.

I think you can see that virtually none of the day-to-day work problems of an FCP user and an FCPX user would have anything to do with an FCP user. Language is different, UI is different, some are old dogs, some are new tricks, etc etc etc.

But nobody could even start to do day to day work until FCPX was actually released in June. When it was, we started the Techniques forum, so named so that people could see in the names where they needed to be: ah yes, in this forum where we work, and this forum is the one where we avoid working. LOL And in fact, we get no more than 2-3 misplaced threads a month.

Over time, we have indeed merged some forums. This happened in storage in particular. We still have the front doors individually indexed, so that a customer of one particular brand will see that name and say “That’s me,” and head in that door. But what they’ll find will be storage experts from across the COW, who’ve come in their own front doors, because in fact, very few storage problems are brand-specific.

This was not at ALL the case back in the days when some storage companies had specific….issues. Now, there are pretty much only good products left, and only TERRIFIC ones working with the COW, and issues for all their customers are similar.

This does speak to an overall philosophy of ours, which is to break forums out very, very slowly. (FCPX or Not: The Debate being the exception.)

We only had one originally because in 1995, there was no NEED to separate things out. We organized around Media 100, everybody used After Effects, which at the time had TWO sets of plug-ins, and everybody had ’em. We all had the same storage nightmares. We were all, by and large, grownups who’d had to take out loans and second mortgages to get into the business. (I did both.)

That original community was among the first web forums of any kind. Netscape Navigator had just been released, and we were having to explain to people what the internet even WAS.

But we found that our community grew exponentially faster than other, more segmented forums that came later, because when you let people talk about a lot of stuff, they bond along a bunch of different lines that you could never have predicted. It’s easier to get answers because there are more people seeing each question.

That is, I might not have a burning need to answer a “Final Cut Pro Storage Issues” question, so I’d avoid a forum broken out that specifically….but if I saw a storage question in the Final Cut Forum that I could answer, I’d answer it.

This is obviously a very different approach than the PHP “forum in a box” forums. Those have a lot of advantages because they were able to build mechanisms in the abstract. Ours is admittedly awkward in places because we built it on the fly, based on practical experiences, in real time.

It might SEEM like a segmented forum is the way to go, and we understand why some people prefer them, but in real time, in the heat of many moments, we have seen that they just don’t work as well. Which is why none of them have grown the way that we have, despite many of them having far more money, much larger staffs, and so on.

I think it’s an astonishing accomplishment that one video producer, Ron Lindeboom, with ZERO programming experience, could envision a database structure that’s still working 20 years later, supporting 3 million sessions a month, many millions of posts, and up to 30 TB of data every day. Doing this while he was actually making a living as a full-time video producer.

None of this was intended to be a business, or started as a business opportunity, or anything like that. There was still no such thing as a web banner at the time. Nobody imagined that you could make money as a content provider, only as an ISP or AOL. Ending the video production company to focus full-time on the web didn’t actually happen until the COW in 2001, when it NEEDED to be a full-time business if it was going to happen at all.

All of which is another psychotically long but contextually important overview of why we are very, very slow to open new forums. They get in the way of what we have proven is the right way to do communities — as few walls as possible. But when people tell us that THEY NEED a new forum, we open it as quickly as we can.

So I think the Final Cut cluster will look like this for a while. Lord knows what Apple might do that might necessitate a change later on, but for now, four forums seems like the right number.

[Tim Wilson]

Talking about conservatism in contexts like this is the ultimate straw man argument. There’s not one person in this forum who was looking for a new NLE in April 2011. Not one. Or if there is, you haven’t spoken up until now. If you COULD have stayed with a less disruptively upgraded FCP, you would have.

Change gets treated like an ethical imperative around here sometimes when 3 years ago, most of you hadn’t changed for years, and weren’t looking to.

I’m going to risk dipping into a metaphor because the “old dogs” thread brought it up. In this context, working dogs aren’t asked to learn new tricks. They’re drilled on the old tricks over and over, until they can perform those tasks surrounded by flames, underwater, while someone is coming at them with a knife.

Which is why it’s ridiculous to refer to experienced Avid editors as inflexible. There is no group of editors on earth more flexible at solving problems, because no group of editors faces more problems. LOL

Some of those are endemic to life with Avid, but some of them are endemic to large-scale operations that are under constant pressure. They’re underwater, surrounded by flames, and people are coming at them with knives. Learning an NLE which even its fans concede requires a bit of rewiring isn’t in the cards, nor should it be.

Here’s the thing. Many of you have trained students in NLEs. I’ve trained dogs. To extend our metaphor, the point isn’t the age of the dog. Its the suitability of the current tricks to the current tasks. Listen, sit, stay, fetch, come, find. That’s pretty close to the entire range for the dog’s entire working life.

To put it another way, the goal is to teach NEW dogs OLD tricks. There have been some nuances in HOW to train over the centuries, but the tasks haven’t changed much.

Not to overstate the nobility of editors or editing. There’s not a noble bone in the lot of us combined. LOL We’re howler monkeys hurling our own feces through the bars of the cage. Working dogs may incline to nobility, but they still lick their balls and pretend they didn’t fart.

My point is that the KINDS of editing that Avid editors do hasn’t really changed. Not since the days of film. Timelines are simple, so don’t fgjking mess with my timeline. Don’t make it do different stuff because you think it will be neato. I don’t have time to follow your neato suggestions, because I have a profoundly NOT neato client and an even less neato deadline.

I’m reminded of what Jeremy Garchow said re: Windows machines being faster back when we were wondering if Apple would release a new Mac Pro. He conceded that Windows machines probably ARE faster, if for no other reason than you can load up more RAM and GPUs — but how MUCH faster would it have to be to make up for the time he lost learning Windows? His answer is the correct one: it’s almost inconceivable.

And coming back to the beginning, not one of you was looking for a new NLE in April 2011. Some of you still aren’t.

To the extent that you have, many of you have stretched the process out for a couple of years. You’ve had the mental, occupational, and temporal bandwidth that a feature editor, or a TV editor working in a feature-style workflow, simply doesn’t.

Not because Hollywood-style workflows or work are “better” than your work. It’s almost surely not. Most movies and TV shows bite. LOL Those editors aren’t necessarily more professional or superior in any way. But they have a set of luxuries that most of us haven’t: a purpose-built set of tools, provided by a company with only one basic constituency for those tools, and workflow parameters that have stayed largely the same for over a very long time.

Nor do they have what many of us had to face over the years: a company that couldn’t figure its market out and collapsed (Media 100), or blew up established workflows for a neato future, and in some cases, still not provided a suitable replacement. I’m still positive that if Apple hadn’t changed course, virtually none of you here would have either.

FCPX guys are self-selecting as WILLING to change, because they’ve HAD to do it to get here in the first place, whether they’ve liked it or not, or I think maybe even more often, guys who LIKE change, who WANT new things, and have the time to make those changes.

In the same way, I think Avid editors are people who tend to prefer depth of experience, and a narrower range of improvisation, rather than expanding breadth of experience.

Is enjoying change for its own sake a negative? No. Neither is recognizing that change is being forced on you and adapting. But neither is being a cattle herding dog or a bomb-sniffing dog, who’ll go their entire career with the FEWEST SKILLS POSSIBLE. Mastery matters more than novelty.

Hey, if your work changes, change tools. Or if you like change, change. But I don’t think there’s anything “better” about tending to prefer change, any more than I think it’s “better” to prefer sticking with something that’s working.

But you know what, someone sticking with what’s working WORKS, whether or not it’s something that works for YOU.

[Tim Wilson]

I agree…but I think it’s going to get a lot worse.

On cable/satellite, ads account for 40-50% of revenue. Subscriptions cover the rest.

So no matter how much you pay, without the business model changing, which includes subscription costs skyrocketing, streaming networks like CBS will STILL need to find 40%-ish of their revenue from advertising.

But of course, they’re getting a fraction of the money for online advertising that they are for “real” advertising, because there’s not yet a “real” audience for advertisers to reach, so subscriptions make up a bigger part of the picture, but there’s currently no way that enough people would pay enough money to stream traditional networks ad-free.

Here are some of the ways this works out in practice.

There was actually a lot more talk about this a couple of years ago when there was the whole carriage war with DirecTV, and newer numbers aren’t widely available, but in 2012, ESPN took in $6.1 billion in cable subscriber fees, and $3.3 billion from spots.

Note that this combination represented 57% of Disney’s operation income, and generated more profit for Disney than every other part of the company combined! And the key was the COMBINATION of subscriptions and spots.

The fact that they were only taking in $3.3 billion in ads vs. $6.1 billion in subscriber fees represents the delta between the relatively smaller value of ESPN’s audience to their advertisers, and the larger importance of ESPN’s programming to its audience….but, even in a world where ESPN allows subscriptions, ain’t no way they walk away from the 30% or more of their revenue that ads represent.

Cable news is close to the other end of the spectrum. I found this handy graphic. Again, from 2012 when all the carriage fights were happening….but there you go. 39% of revenue from ads.

Disney argued that if people had to pay for ESPN without bundling, it would cost $15/month — and that was 2012. Look at the massive sports programming contracts, to say nothing of Disney’s need to bolster profits across every division. Subscriber fees are indeed up, but content cost has skyrocketed.

Beyond ESPN, in addition to needing to cover content creation and acquisition costs, vendors are having to hedge against declining overall revenues from cord-cutting.

Which is currently a myth. It’s just not happening in a way that’s moving the needle. That’s another story, and one I’d written 6000 words on, and figured I was only halfway done, before I gave up.

But the fear is still real, and driving business practice. They need to prepare for online programming to deliver 100% of the revenue they’ve been getting from traditional ads AND entirely replace the money they were getting from subscription fees.

CBS is figuring that if you’re subscribing to their online service, they’re not getting paid for you by cable/satellite operators. So they need to cover the money they assume they’re losing from you as a non-cable subscriber AND the money they get from advertisers — again, in that roughly 60-40% mix of subscription vs. ad revenue.

The additional problem is that digital revenues are a fraction of what traditional cable / satellite / OTA rates are. As well they should be, because the streaming audience is a fraction the size too.

NBC president Jeff Zucker observed that they were trading traditional dollars for digital dimes…now down to digital pennies. Literally single digit percentages.

In the case of CBS, the only way they get to $6/month is leaving out stuff like football….but if they were going to recover the same revenue that they would on TV, they’d need to get 40%-ish on ads ABOVE the subscription rates. Which they’re surely not. So subscription fees are a bigger percentage, but no way they can go high enough for CBS (or Hulu or whoever) to go ad free.

Sticking with CBS, if you wanted to go ad-free, the price would have to poke right up against HBO money. So CBS has to ask itself, would the SAME NUMBER of people be interested in CBS minus football and other premium content at $9 vs. $6? No, of course not. So, without cable and bundling, they have to use ad revenue to offset what the “true” cost of programming would be, because they can’t compete at the “true” cost.

The thing is, people keep calling bundling a dodge, and in some ways it may be…but in practice, in most ways, for most people, it’s just not. A la carte is only going to happen when it’s worth it to CABLE providers, and there’s no way that’s going to happen until programming providers are sure they can make more from YOU than make from cable operators….and with the value of advertising so much lower on streaming, I guarantee that you will see MORE ads on streaming programming as time goes by, and it will be increasingly unskippable.

The fact is that subscribing to content with commercials in it has been the case for well over 100 years with newspapers and magazines. It’s been the case for CATV since day one, too, and not just for retransmitted OTA channels. Most channels will never create HB0-style centers of gravity, even if they have larger viewerships, advertising is critical to their ability to even get in the game.

I think that there ARE people as devoted to NCIS, Blue Bloods, Big Bang Theory or what have you as there are devoted to Games of Thrones or House of Cards. But the business model for paying for the former group relies on a combination of subscriptions and ads. The leverage it will take to turn the crank to make you pay that much more for programming without ads doesn’t currently exist.

Hulu is kind of interesting, because it functions as a kind of bundling deal. You get a lower price by having networks band together. The problem is that those networks also splitting the revenue pie, so, over time, this is a REVERSE benefit to them.

I see two inevitable results for Hulu: it falls apart as individual providers want more of their own dough, or it charges a lot more and functionally becomes a cable provider, gathering more and more bundled channels to support a value proposition that actually makes everyone money….which right now, Hulu is not.

To drive Netflix-like attachment, Hulu needs to create original, streaming-only programming that’s compelling enough to extract incremental dollars — but Hulu’s content providers are years away from doing that, if ever, because they’d rather recover those dollars across tens of millions of viewers on cable, without sharing the dough with anyone….and it’s a boatload more dough than they’re going to get from streaming for decades to come.

The longer version of this story that I’d started on included lots of charts, and quotes from providers, details of the paltry showing of supporting for legislature supporting unbundling, and a look at the ACTUAL, currently virtually microscopic economic impact of cord-cutting. It also includes the revenue that local sports is driving, which is far beyond what national sports is driving, because there are so many high-value markets.

None of that even BEGAN to account for the rock bottom necessity of advertising to support a streaming distribution model, every bit as much as the cable model.

Not that there’s no reason to rant. There is. I love commercials so much that I’m more likely to use the backwards-skip button to watch good commercials two or three times than I am to rewatch the last few seconds of programming content, even with sports. However, I nearly jump out of my skin if I can’t skip the stuff I don’t want to watch.

So I’m with you, believe me. But I also don’t see any likelihood that it will go away, and if anything that it won’t increase.

[Tim Wilson]

Sorry, that should be “Abraham.” 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

So Dave, I passed your comment along to our IT Director, who took a stab at it. I think it looks great, but I’d love to hear what you think.

His name for it is “View posts by Topic (Date Updated),” which is the third one down.

How’d we do?

[Tim Wilson]

My guess: they sat in a conference room with a whiteboard and said, “What would we do if we were designing this thing from scratch? We don’t owe anybody anything, so ignore what anybody else has done. Including us. What’s the Apple-iest way we could do it?

That’s what Mac was, after all. Torching Apple’s position as market leader with Apple II, a position they never regained. Compatibility with anyone else, including ourselves? No idea what you’re talking about.

In fact, Apple as a Mac sales business is a middling success at best. They hovered on the brink of disaster for years. As late as 2003 (or 4?), their stock never reached double digits.

Being a Mac maniac in the 90s was exhausting, let me tell you. Init conflicts, System 7 (again with the incompatibilities!), EOL’d product lines — printers, scanners, cameras (what? You didn’t have an Apple QuickTake? I had TWO). We still loved what we loved, mind you, but we wondered when it was going to be fun again.

What changed Apple’s fortunes, and ours, was when Apple stopped acting like a computer company trying to be compatible with everyone. The turning point was iTunes on Windows, allowing Apple to sell iPods to the whole world. (Check it out. The stock started climbing nearly that very day.)

All of which Apple did while still choosing a path of their own making, with little regard for industry conventions. ANY industry’s conventions, whether music players, phones, or computer software and hardware interfaces.

NOW we’re talking fun.

The fact is that FCPZ (aka, FCP Zombie) was conventional, ie, very much in keeping with industry conventions. Even ProRes was Avid DNxHD, four years after Avid did it.

As a result, FCPZ was one of least Apple-y monstrosities ever unleashed on the faithful.

And FCPX is one of the Apple-iest. Which it was never going to be if it adhered to any meaningful convention.

So I don’t think that they had any interest in what Avid or Macromedia or Apple itself had ever done. I don’t think they intentionally TRIED to do something different either. I just don’t think they cared.

Of course the guys doing this thinking came from this world, and stories are still being told similarly enough over time that they couldn’t burn EVERYTHING to the ground, but again, burning EVERYTHING to the ground on purpose requires them to have paid closer attention to the past than I think they did.

Or to coin a phrase, rather than think “compatible” or “conventional,” they decided to think “different.”

Arguably, in this area, for the very first time.

[Tim Wilson]

Sorry for the delay replying guys. I saw “meta” in the subject line, and assumed it was some new-fangled FCPX depravity. I normally loves me some depravity, but I didn’t smell actual blood, so I decided to re-read the Old Dogs thread instead…because, given the choice, I’m always going to choose blood AND depravity.

Others here have surmised the thing, which is that we have a default temporal frame for viewing that’s set on a per-forum basis. Thanks for pointing out that the windows for the two Debate forums needed revisiting.

Two additional notes:

— While I’ve taken a best-guess stab at what might work for most people in our default, you can set your own per-forum preferences, using the “VIEW” pop-up just above the post index. These kinds of choices are persistent whenever you’re logged in.

— For this forum in particular, I HIGHLY recommend setting the View Posts by Thread pop-up to “View posts by Newest.”

A thread like our old friend Old Dogs will drop off the front page at some point, but it’s obviously still got a few tricks left in it. Especially when somebody responds to a post somewhere in the middle of a thread like that, it’s incredibly easy to miss it. Sorting by new posts makes it much easier to keep up.

Just a suggestion, but those pop-up options came into being after we got member requests for them. They default to the configurations that reflect our heritage site organization, but the options are considerably more flexible than that.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “You can’t have it both ways.
“

YOU can’t, but apparently Apple CAN. 🙂