Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[tony west] “One of the best things I saw on TV in years was that one take scene in True Detectives last year.”
Yes, I think we share the same tastes – that was a really great shot.
And all the cutting in TD was super slow – I don’t think that put the audience off and I’m pretty sure it was one of the reasons it worked so well. Great actors were just allowed to do their thing while we watched – it seldom gets better than that!
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Bill Davis] “Because the fundamental idea of cutting is to compress information flow, usually so that we can efficiently pack more concepts into a fixed period of time.”
Hi Bill,
Thanks for chiming in.
But I’m afraid I just can’t buy the notion that “compressing the information flow” is “the fundamental idea of cutting”.
That’s one tiny aspect of what editing can achieve – and probably the least important in a narrative context. (Let’s not forget that in narrative you often want to expand “the information flow” rather than speed it up – it’s a very commonly used tactic for dramatic, comedic, emotional effect – you only have to consider the use of slow-motion for this same purpose.)
Sure it’s important when we’re simply bashing together assemblies of material, but in terms of “telling a story” (that much overworked phrase), it just isn’t that relevant in the great scheme of things.
I can see why you want to elevate it to a fundamental principle since it supports your worldview of what Apple have done with FCP X, but I really do think you’re missing the bigger picture here.
[Bill Davis] “If you want to discuss “editing today” – you HAVE to also discuss consuming editing today. And the way that’s being done has changed massively. So I believe editing had better understand and react to that reality and keep audience needs firmly in mind.”
This is just a lowest common denominator argument and I don’t think it stands up. Your favourite folks at Apple don’t give the public what they ask for – they give them what Apple think they should be consuming. Why should film-makers be any different?
More to the point, lots of cuts don’t necessarily engage your audience better than the right number of cuts, or even perhaps fewer cuts. One can point to countless examples where movies have been overcut and it alienates the viewer rather than contributing to engagement. Action sequences are especially prone to this fault, to the point where you just have to zone out because even basic stuff like the line of action becomes hopelessly blurred.
At the end of the day, engagement is the one and only thing anyone creating anything for an audience needs to consider – you can create engagement far more successfully by surprising rather than pandering.
I think …
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Really nice job.
And you’re right, the wipes are an abomination! Totally stylistically inappropriate and déclassé. And of course the split screens scream out for air, as you wanted them to have – the crowded feeling is just not pleasant or elegant.
Sometimes clients are right … and sometimes they’re not.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “Pop quiz, FCP fans. I know some of you will know this. Whose movie was Cold Mountain?”
Hey – just cos Minghella was British, that’s no reason to have forgotten him already.
(And he directed some very good films besides Cold Mountain …)
😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Some background on this guy. Whoever would have thought paella pans could be so funny?
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Seriously fascinating post, I really enjoyed that!!!
Even though you disagreed with me, I will agree with you. AVID only ever sold two products that I would call premium: DS and AudioVision.
My contention is that an NLE, any NLE, is fundamentally not a premium product, despite all of AVID’s attempt to price Media Composer that way.
Compared to 3D applications, compared to Flame, compared to NUKE, compared to anything one can genuinely call high end, an NLE offering is basically small beer. You can create the perception that there’s something amazing going on, and obviously AVID’s early entrance into the game put them in pole position to frame the narrative, but really there’s nothing that special about bringing media together and enabling you to stick it back to back.
I’ve been spending the last few hours doing just that on Camtasia and it works just fine. HitFilm have a nice little NLE bolted onto their graphics/compositing offering that works just fine. iMovie works just fine.
NLE’s just ain’t special and they’re not premium.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Walter Soyka] “There are still premium products, but they’re in adjacent markets and they’re really premium.”
Yes, indeed. The thing that is perhaps interesting is that the divide between the companies that sell premium and those that do “economy” continues to widen as pricing competition at the latter end gets ever more unrealistic.
AutoDesk are rowing back from their somewhat half-hearted efforts to occupy the NLE space and have retreated back to premium where they are most comfortable since the abandonment of Discreet.
Perhaps there are inherent difficulties in simultaneously offering products that are premium and non-premium. AVID have flirted unsuccessfully with this for many years – 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.
[Walter Soyka] “Charging premium money requires delivering premium value.
And who would be in the position to bring such a product to market? Mature products can compete on features, but they have a hard time competing on workflow and training, due to their legacy idiosyncrasies. New products would have to develop massive feature sets before they could be considered viable competition.”
I know I keep going on about it but Modo is a really interesting example of a product that started out looking like a budget offering but then mutated. The extremely reasonable entry level pricing was the reason I picked it up for home use and just because it looked interesting.
Since then, the Luxology guys have added huge incremental updates at a carefully planned and predictable rate such that it is now genuinely a premium offering. I’m pretty sure that they had this strategy in mind from the very beginning and proceeded to follow it single-mindedly and very effectively.
Of course, this has come at a price – buying into all those updates has meant that we early adopters have ended up paying in total what amounts to a premium price. The entry price of a seat of Modo today remains extremely competitive but the product is not just outstanding value but outstanding in relation to the competition.
Talking of Modo in the context of product support, of course, Brad Peebler and the team have really put a lot of thought and creativity into how they interface with their users and it’s very effective. Brad’s hugely entertaining and informative modcasts are a real treat. Andy Brown’s training videos are among the best of their kind anywhere. There is a great community forum. There are great Modo events across the world. What they’ve shown is that there are many ways of building and supporting a thriving user community – you just need imagination and passion. And of course a great product doesn’t hurt.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Hi Kevin
Thanks very much for chiming in.
And apologies for being unnecessarily harsh about Adobe support, which I have only very rarely used and not recently – I am aware that there have been improvements, and I’m pretty sure you guys are working extremely hard to keep those improvements happening.
I’ve already flagged up in my original post the incredible value that we get as users from your participation in the forums, and of course that of Todd and Dennis and others. This is one of the things that Adobe does seriously well in my view, and it’s pretty unique. (AVID kind of do it too but not nearly as well or as thoroughly.)
In fact, it is so consistent and quietly helpful that we are in danger of forgetting how remarkable it is.
One of your own posts got me out of a long-standing problem only last week (one that customer support hadn’t been able to resolve) – that you are prepared to go into specifics about specific problems is a huge help. That you will also go as far as volunteering to escalate an individual issue is seriously valuable as well. You’re not just here for the PR value – it’s always so much more than that.
But of course, the PR value of you guys being here is enormous. For example, there are, it seems, a number of Adobe users who are less than happy (if we can put it that way) with the subscription model, but there is no doubt that your calm, helpful and measured responses are an emollient that if it does not take away the pain at least helps to soften it.
More than this, it’s your continuous presence, contributing to the discussion (not just of Adobe products even) that of course makes us feel that you genuinely care about your users. That’s a really big deal in terms of perception. Privately you may think we’re all “dicks” but if so you do very well to disguise it 😉
That probably all sounded unbearably sycophantic, but it’s actually nice to be able to praise for once rather than snipe. It doesn’t stop me from still really not being happy with the documentation of Adobe products which sadly just never seems to get any better. But in terms of the overall support offering, this “forum participation support” model is imaginative, proactive and of huge value in my view – not just to us as users, but also to Adobe – and I’m more than happy to celebrate that.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
Great post. Very much agree with all of that.
[Walter Soyka] “Charging what a product is worth sounds like a great way to make no sales. “I can buy a whole editing application for $300, why should I spend $500 on just a keyer?””
I wonder whether there isn’t a collective failure of nerve, however, and whether the notion of a premium product can’t be retrieved by players bold enough to risk it. As things stand, virtually everyone is terrified of being more expensive than the competition and would sooner sacrifice profits to market share.
Within just a few years we seem to have seen the almost complete disappearance of “premium” in a lot of software product categories.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “Thinking about that purely from my own point of view as a user, I would always expect the supplier to respond to a bug report – even if it’s just with a form letter to say that it’s a known issue. That’s irrespective of whether I was paying for support. Just because a bug is frequently reported shouldn’t, I think, exonerate the supplier from this (ethical) obligation.”
To amplify this point a bit.
There is definitely a sense in our industry that there is no over-riding obligation on the part of the supplier to respond to each and every bug report, but the fact of the matter is that bugs are the responsibility of the developer, not some random act of nature, and an acknowledgement or better still an apology doesn’t seem an outrageous thing to ask for. A form letter (snippet) could easily take care of that.
There is also a perception that having a very large customer base means that free support is simply not feasible under any circumstances, but this is not necessarily true.
Let’s take the example of a typical large supermarket chain with millions of customers and thousands of product lines. The fact is that I can contact my supermarket directly in a variety of different ways simply to discuss my experience as a customer – in fact, they actively welcome the engagement because they fully understand the commercial value of it.
If I buy a pot of cherry jam (jelly?) that has a pit in it (the jam equivalent of a software bug, let’s say), not only will I receive a fulsome apology, I can be pretty sure they’ll be offering me a month’s free jam and a fistful of vouchers to boot. For all they know, this may be the first and last purchase I ever make from them, so it’s not as if they are even amortising the support costs over my lifetime’s shopping with them.
OK, so software is a bit more tricky to support than jam, but the commercial point still holds. My supermarket has found ways to provide total support, of a kind that is supposedly unthinkable, despite the absolutely minuscule profit generated by any one product.
The supermarket analogy also helps to reveal another piece of slightly faulty thinking. A million customers doesn’t equal a million customer support requests – or if it does, then there’s something seriously wrong with your business at every level and you won’t carry on trading for long. Clearly the supermarkets can afford to respond they way they do because the ratio of unsatisfied/satisfied customers is extremely small, as it should be in any well run business.
The problem with almost all software is that the relentless downward pressure of the market and, if we’re honest, some frankly silly behaviour on the part of certain players in depressing prices far below any sensible level, means that most businesses are either monetising support or simply not offering it. That’s not the same thing as saying that there is no possible business model that could accommodate free support.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com