[Phil Hoppes]

[Scott Shucher] “You can have it good, fast or cheap. Pick two.”

I see this quote and am amused. This was the thinking perhaps years ago. Holding on to that mantra I believe will not lead to anything good going forward. Why? Because your competition can and will do it good, cheap and fast, and they will figure out how to make a buck at it in the mean time too. You say something like this in manufacturing even 15 years ago and you will get laughed right out of the building as your prospective customer would be more than willing to show you a very large list of competitors that are doing just that. Services are no different. I learned long ago that winners are the ones that ask Why Not? instead of just Why?

[Phil Hoppes]

I would get the Production Premium Suite from Adobe in which the academic version is $445. With this you not only get Premier Pro but you will get After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Audition among even more applications. With Avid or FCPX all you get is a video editor. Ask anyone doing editing and I’d be willing to bet 99% of them use Photoshop or some equivalent program somewhere in their editing. After Effects, bar none, is the premier effects generating software package to own. I know lots of FCP editors, that use AE on a daily basis for generating their effects. I think you will get the most bang for your buck with this purchase. If you already started to learn FCP, you can set up PP to use FCP keyboard shortcuts and the layout of PP is very similar to FCP. I use PP, AE, Photoshop, Illustrator & Audition on a almost daily basis. Getting the entire suite for that low of a price is a steal.

I would do what some others have recommended too, ie, go ahead and download the 30 trial of Avid MC6. I just did that myself. It is a very impressive package. For me and the customers I serve, it’s incremental improvements over PP and FCPX are simply not worth the cost delta as I really don’t require those features, but it’s nice to have 30 days to check it out non the less.

As far as training goes, especially for the Adobe suite, nothing beats Lynda.com. The total number of training videos that they have for PP, AE and Photoshop alone are gold vs any how-to book you can buy. For $250/yr you can get access to all of their entire library sans download of the material. For $375/yr you can get the material for download. Lots of free training on all of these apps on the Cow, YouTube too. I’m sure you’ve seen that YouTube is a bit of a mixed bag. I’ve seen some good training vids there but for every good on there are about 20 terrible ones. Takes you a bit to sift through all the noise to find something worth while.

[Phil Hoppes]

I’ve not worked with FCPX enough to know it well but I have been bitten by the “no save” button feature myself. It was just a test project so I really did not care but quite frankly, to not even have a “Save as…” is very limiting no matter how forward thinking one is on software. I back up ALL the time, however, windows or mac, regardless of what OS I’m using because Murphy is always working overtime.

[Phil Hoppes]

Here is an updated post on cnet

Lewis CK Article on cnet

In just 5 days he cleared $200K. I believe Taylor Swift distributes her music in much the same way. If you thought the last 5 yrs had a lot of change…. hang on.

[Phil Hoppes]

[Craig Seeman] “Apple business goal isn’t necessarily to match pricing on competitor’s boxes. If they can’t make money following their business model, they just wont do it. Apple will have to come up with a compelling box. It may not be the “fastest” because that alone isn’t their formula for best form/function/utility.”

Exactly my previous point. 1) There boxes in the high end market they are attempting to serve are WAY out of line. 2) At what point to you quit beating a dead horse and go play in a market that gives much better ROI?

I’ve obviously switched my workstations and servers to Windows. I had to for reasons too numerous to mention. I love Macs and OSX but in the end I have to get my work done and not go broke doing it and I just can’t sit around and “wait” to see what Apple is up to.

[Phil Hoppes]

I never said iMac sales are declining, in fact Apple has shown amazing resilience in defying the current market trends and iMac desktop sales enjoy are enjoying a very brisk increase in sales and total market share.

High end PC graphic workstations, ala MacPro, however are declining as main stream (iMac’s and PC equivalents) continue to increase in performance and decrease in cost.

Hey, I’m an original Mac FanBoy and I continually recommend iMacs to family and friends. Apple machines, sans MacPros, are a very good value. I’ve continually shown people that if you compare a Dell, HP and Mac, spec for spec and as equivalent configurations as you can the cost difference is usually nill. You can get more configurations from HP and Dell but within the same specs, the point has really become moot.

On MacPros, Apple is simply a rip off. I just installed a 2xXenon 2.4Gz Hex Core 24GbRam, 1Gb disk server on my farm from Asus. Cost me a whopping $2600. I just priced it at over 6K from Apple. Thats crazy. I like Apple but I don’t like them that much. They don’t really support nVidia Quadra, which I need for all the other software I use, and their overall high end graphic card driver support is abysmal on the cards they do support.

[Phil Hoppes]

Well we will all see won’t we. A lot of people really don’t understand profitability especially when it comes to large business (but they should even for small ones). There is a significant cost (which is factored into the total “profit” equation) called “Opportunity Cost” which basically boils down to if you have X resources to use what is the best way to maximize your ROI on those resources. If you have a product line that is in a declining market (High end desktop PC’s) that is also returning less profit than it should, a prudent business manager will look at that and say is there another use for those resources (say a low cost iPhone????) that can return far more revenue and profit? If you don’t think those arguments are not going on within the halls of 1 Infinite Loop, well you are loopy. Relative to:

“Apple’s business model is not to have you update the GPU but buy a new Mac.
Apple says 5770/5870 only “officially” supports MacPro 2010 forward even though people bought them for MacPro original 2006 for FCPX.”

Well, if they are killing the MacPro line they may in fact not do what they have done in the past just so the new AMD cards could be supported.

I don’t think it is a question of IF Mac Pros will die, simply a matter of WHEN. Their may be one more spin left in there but it’s future is most certainly on the bubble.

[Phil Hoppes]

This means nothing other than 10.7.3 will have drivers to support a new AMD card. It could me a new MacPro or simply that this newer version of Lion will be required to support the new AMD cards that will be released in Jan 2012 for existing MacPro’s.

That Apple is approx 18 months off cycle for a MacPro, that they’ve dumped the main app that needed MacPro’s (FCP) for something that runs fine on an iMac (FCPX) would lead me to believe towers are not long for this world in Apple’s lineup. In terms of both revenue and profit, this product line is nil. It doesn’t even register it is so small and desktops in this traditional sense are a declining market. There may be one more spin left in there but I would not bet on it and I certainly would not bet my company on it.

[Phil Hoppes]

10 years ago and nothing has changed?

Hmm…. somehow I missed the 8Mb 1080p HD video I could shoot with my Motorola Flip Phone and Netscape must have had YouTube buried somewhere along with the thousands up thousands of people making videos and a means of communicating. I know… I must have been the only person using 56Kb dial up modems and everyone else had broadband. Along with everyone else must have been recording to dirt cheap 32Gb EE Flash drives while I was still using tape.

The only point I was trying to make is, I personally witnessed before, first hand, when a major shift in market and technology came together to radically change how I worked. I made the mistake of dismissing it completely that time and I was very wrong. I see a world today where people are making movies funded by donations collected on line (Iron Sky). Distribution of video and film content are shifting radically. FCPX is not quite the game changer in NLE as Verilog compilation was to making chips but at the 100,000 ft level, in just the 5 or so years I’ve been working in this field I think things have radically changed.

Like I said, I may be full of it but I would not be so quick to dismiss things simply because it’s new. For example, for the life of me I don’t understand the fascination with FB and Twitter, but I recognize that it is THE medium of choice for communication with the younger generation. I don’t need it to support my customer base, but if I did, I’d be using it and using it a lot, whether I liked it or not.

[Phil Hoppes]

A personal experience:
This is not really quite the same but who knows, maybe it is similar. In my previous life (career) I designed integrated circuits. Those marvelous chips that go into all the gadgets we love to use. About 10 years into my career there was a major shift in how these were designed. Initially, chip designed mirrored the way an electronic circuit board was designed. The tools existed to do that task and they were simply adapted to the needs of chip design. As manufacturing kept doubling what we could put into a chip about every 18 months, we reached a point where there was simply too much information to deal with in the short amount of time required to do the task at had. A fundamental shift in tools and methods came about where chips ceased to be designed like circuit boards and the industry shifted to designing chips much in the same manner that software was designed. This removed the designer from the lower level tasks but allowed the designer to work at a much higher level of abstraction, which in turned, allows for much faster turn around in the design of large and complicated systems.

We may be seeing the same type of fundamental shift in the video editing industry as a whole as, once again, technology has significantly lowered the barrier of entry to making your own movie, allowing a significantly larger user base of movie makers, who simply won’t follow the previous traditional methods used to create a movie. They want to work with more media, do it faster and do it cheaper.

I’m probably full of it, but time will tell.

……

and on a side note, as a designer and manager, I first resisted the change to the new “methodology” with amazingly similar arguments as presented here about FCPX. My company only needed to get it’s “Clock Cleaned” once by a competitor who used the new method to blow our doors off on a new product release and I rapidly saw the errors of my way.