Phil Hoppes
Forum Replies Created
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These number are so bogus as to be insane. Consumer video growing at 0%-1% CAGR with a TAM of $0.6B? Looks like some marketing suit bending over backwards trying to justify their plan. And they have only a 20% market share but this market is the one they have been using to justify their terrible financial performance. ROTFLMAO.
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Sandy Bridge 8 core Xenon CPU’s are already out. I can buy them today
I can’t see a MacPro coming out. Heck rumors are now flying that the 17″ MBP is dead too. If these unit volumes are correct, and I would guess they are, MacPro towers certainly fall in the same catagory. Apple wants to sell millions of units not thousands.
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My only point is that this is really a worthless argument. I’ve had very good experiences with Apple support both in stores and over the phone. You’ve had contrary. There are folks on this board who use HP and Dell machines and have had very good experiences with them. Me, for my 2cents Dell is just passable and HP is nothing but crap… but, I am biased by my experiences. I’m not trying to convince you Apple is good and you won’t convince me they are evil so the entire point is moot.
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Interesting story. I have no doubt that it’s true. I also have numerous stories of Apple but of the 180 degree from that story version. One had to do with an issue on my Mac Pro, another on two on MacBook Pro’s I’ve had. In all cases the support people at Apple went out of their way to make sure my problems were resolved. In one case they replaced a mother board when they really did not need to (it had just gone out of warranty) and over all were quite interested that I was a happy customer. The glass is half empty or half full depending upon your experiences. They don’t walk on water but they are not the Imperial Army either.
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Well yes and no. What I believe is being seen in this industry closely parallels what has already happened in a business I use to be in, semiconductors. When I started in that business back in the mid 70’s designing and manufacturing semiconductors was the private domain of large corporations with very deep pockets that made huge investments in capital and software. A “typical” software suite one needed to competently design a chip was around 1 – 2 Million dollars with another half to 1 million dollars in hardware. Designers were a specialized breed with very specific knowledge at a detailed level. They used very complex and sophisticated tools.
Fast forward to what that industry looks like today. Today a moderately competent individual, with no engineering degree and using software that costs from free to less than a $1000, can design in days, a very sophisticated device. They “manufacture” it themselves because the entire device is programmable. Hardware costs are nothing more than a mid level PC with a USB port. This has fostered a complete proliferation of custom low cost devices that are used in thousands of applications. None of the demand today could have been supported with the design flow that I started my career. Over the course of my previous career I literally watched what I use to do for a living get reduced to nothing more than a mouse click on a software package. I’m not bitter but I realized for myself that I had to move on. Now granted, Intel still uses an army of engineers and millions of dollars of hardware and software to design their chips. But the total semiconductor market has been completely changed and a huge portion of the lower and mid range end of devices has exponentially expanded to what I describe above and the very, very high end has shrunk to a much smaller list of large players.
I would posit that that is exactly what is going on within the video industry today. The internet, YouTube, smartphones and tablets with 1080p video cameras have completely destroyed what use to be a small and private market. High end solution providers will be needed for sure going forward but the huge bulk of video editing demand going forward simply cannot be met with solutions of the past. Net result is exactly what is going on. Tools are dropping dramatically in price. Totally untrained individuals are entering your sandbox and are competing with you for work at un-heard of prices.
So where do you go from here? I wish I had those answers. This is a very hard problem. Learn to love change is one thing I have had to do. Be innovative and keep reinventing yourself is another.
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I just ran into this on a project I was doing. The only way I can figure out how to do it is you make a dummy project. One at a time take the clip you want and copy it to the timeline and then do an export. Delete that clip from the timeline and then grab the next clip, copy to the timeline, do and export, delete, grab the next, etc. etc. etc.
I’m guessing their may be a better way to do it but as a hack that worked for me.
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As in all things there are certain elasticities to a market. With the negative reaction to FCPX in some of the professional market, Adobe looks to have tried to capitalize on this with their current offering in CS6. If you throw in the fact that one seat of Media Composer costs more than one seat of Adobe Master Suite or close to 3x Premier Pro stand alone, and you look at the features in Premier Pro and FCPX and their cost points I’m sure there are a lot of editors who are saying MC is nice but not at that price. I looked at it my self and for my needs it simply does not incrementally add that much more over PP and FCPX. If I now compare that to CS6 PP and the continuous additions to FCPX its a no brainer.
I know Walt Biscardi is very heavily invested in both is legacy and support of lots of tape broadcast customers and for him and other of that need, MC appears to be clearly the choice. For those that don’t I see a whole lot more options.
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Ok,,,,,, Truly ROTFLMAO
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I am shocked to see that they did not feature all of the editors on Conan
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More than likely they will be bundling Luster with Smoke. I’d love to see a price drop to make it competitive with Avid and Adobe but my guess is no.
I used Smoke for about 6 months working with a local VAR. It was very frustrating when I was picking it up as the available training from Autodesk was somewhere between Slim, None and Zero. Smoke has a very radical GUI as well as it’s entire data structure is quite unique. If you think moving from FCP7 to FCPX is hard, hold on to your hats as Smoke is a different beast entirely. While you can use a mouse, it was designed and really needs to be used with a tablet. I was running it on a MBP over FW800 and it performed quite well so the concerns on iMac vs MacPro I do not believe are justified. I’ve not touched it now for about a year but at the time it did not support multiple monitors well. That may have changed.
All that said, Smoke is very powerful. It is best for an environment with multiple editors working on multiple jobs together. It is integrated with 3D applications very well and supports 3D compositing. The integrated effects that come with it are pretty amazing. It runs quite fast and once you get the hang of the interface you can operate it very efficiently.
The training has been vastly improved in a huge contribution by ( Grant Kay He has made a large number of training videos now that with some concerted effort on the part of the user you should be able to come up to speed fairly well on how to work Smoke.