Tim Kolb
Forum Replies Created
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[lasvideo] “I was suprised to find out how awkward and difficult it was to take a project from offline to online…a standard approach at the production facility I work at.”
This is a legitimate point and it certainly makes sense that PPro doesn’t work for this application.
However, I really see offline as being something being relegated rather quickly to history and I think that the assertion that Adobe will burn in the eternal fires of market obliviousness due to their lack of focus on it is a little over the top.
The interesting thing is that unless Avid makes their media storage more affordable…their customers will have been some of the first people to offline on a dektop computer…and also the last.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Talking Madness] “Are you saying Adobe was justified in a higher price just so the perception of their product would be as a more professional suite?
I’m saying that Premiere lost a lot of perceived value during the days when a third to a half of its users paid an extra 75 or 100 dollars for a DV or FW card and found the full version of Premiere in the bottom of the box. People value what they pay for. If FCP v1 was worth a thousand dollars…Premiere was worth far more than 400 (or 100 in a bundle), but nobody knew it because who really gets a professional NLE for 100 bucks with a 500 dollar DV card?
To this day I believe that if FCP is worth the MSRP on it…the bundle is worth what Adobe is charging for it.
The upgrade path from Video Collection Premium to Production Studio Premium seems to be alright (still a bit expensive in my mind, but fair enough). However, the upgrade from Standard to Standard is a fiasco — you pay $499 and lose two of your applications (Audition & Encore).
This is a tough one and I wasn’t consulted on the product bundling… 🙂
I suspect the current bundle scheme was by popular demand. When the original standard bundle came out, many users didn’t do audio or authoring and really would have liked to have Photoshop…which many said was a more common sense grouping for a visual artist than an audio and an authoring application. I suspect you are the user Adobe originally had in mind and preferred it the other way. As I’ve said, it seems continuously, for the last month on ths board, each of our circumstances are different. Your viewpoint is that you’re losing Audition and Encore…perhaps you can run the versions of those two that you have and ‘gain’ the added applications…no?
Glass half-empty…glass half-full.
You can like it or not decisions are not what inspires confidence in a company or its products.
Unfortunately every decision by every company regarding product features ultimately comes down to a “you can like it or not” point. There’s lots of stuff I don’t like about Microsoft or even Adobe products…but I’m not the only customer either one has…
On this board there are people who wish that Premiere Pro managed media like an Avid. There are those who think that the absolute worst thing about it was the audio conforming. Some have said that Adobe took way too long and that we don’t mind paying for updates more often…of course others were really up in arms that 1.5 came out so soon after PPro 1 and said Adobe was simply fleecing them with such frequent upgrades.
Some said that it is an absolute non-starter without cut removal…or time-remapping…or hot keys for EVERY function…or a decent bin structure (Amen)…lockable clips…undo lists for each sequence maintainable between sessions…the list goes on and on and on…
…and every person says that one or two things are the key to PPro being a professional app. So are the one or two things from every user what it will take?…because some conflict directly.
A better marketing angle would have been to include Audition, Encore and Photoshop for free (talk about something that would’ve gotten some people to switch over) in the new Standard suite.
Giving something away for free is nearly what Adobe is doing is you look at what Adobe After Effects Production Bundle cost just 4 years ago…almost exactly what the big Production Studio costs now…or more.
I can hear the marketing and sales people groaning right now about giving Photoshop away in the bundle, but it wouldn’t really be free for most people here since we already own it as a part of other suites. Heck, I bet everyone serious enough to commit to Production Studio already owns a copy of Photoshop — it would be a zero sum game for consumers and Adobe.
Wow…”everyone” huh? Again…whatever you own and whatever upgrade path you would prefer is completely wrong for someone else…the Adobe apps were bundled to get users of Adobe products to try other Adobe products with a price incentive…it’s worked. If everyone owned a copy of Photoshop…why would the full version even be a product?
Your or my or anyone’s situation on this board is not “standard” or universal. Everyone here is complaining because Adobe hasn’t catered directly to them and “people like me are the most numerous/important/professional/typical…”
Why is this such a hard concept to understand for people?
Don’t overlook the fact that many people are starting from scratch, or at the point where they’re buying a new computer to handle the demands of a video editing system, so the notion of having to buy a Mac won’t be a factor for everyone. With the production Studio Premium being $400 more than FCP, some will view this as a $400 discount on the price of a new Mac.”
Production Studio Premium isn’t even a comparable product to FCP…Premiere Pro is. I don’t follow your economics here.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Talking Madness] “1. The price is too high leading to a general sense that Adobe is taking advantage of me.
When FCP cost a thousand dollars American and Premiere cost four hundred, Premiere was thought to be a toy…this at a time when FCP didn’t even have audio level indicators in v1 for crying out loud. Adobe has chosen to take Premiere Pro to a different level of user…there’s no way to maintain it for the price-sensitive user while building the application’s capabilities. That’s why Premiere Elements was invented.
2. The upgrade path is non-existent. I feel like Adobe is trying to get people hooked on their other products so that they have too much invested to change. All companies do this, but it just seems wrong this time from Adobe.
It seems pretty right FOR Adobe as far as I can see. Can you upgrade Word outside of Office? No. Microsoft drove their competitors out buy bundling and putting all their applications in your hands at once…making you less interested in buying another spreadsheet or data base because you already have one. You can like it or not, but marketing-wise, it appears to be working pretty well.
3. There seems to be nothing here that’s gonna stop people from switching to FCP (in fact the price and upgrade path I’m sure will make some people finally make the switch to FCP). I want more of a feeling that others out there are gonna be joining the Premiere party, but it seems like everyone is checking out. This is a gut feeling, but I bet some of you have it too.
Other than for the forseeable future you have to buy a Mac that’s most likely more expensive and has less torque than a comparably priced PC with apps like AE…the Intel chips will help that so we’ll see how that goes. We have a Final Cut system in our facility. I honestly don’t see what the big differences are other than if you are a Mac person, obviously it’s the only game in town.
4. Too much concern on making the Adobe apps work together and not enough attention to making them work with the rest of the industry workflow standards.”
As I’ve posted before…MOST of the “industry standards” I’m hearing are either 1.) I want it to work like Avid or FCP and 2.) I need an offline/online workflow (most likely also because the user is used to Avid which still has harddrive pricing more reminiscent of 1996 instead of 2006 and the user isn’t accustomed to being able to afford having enough drive space to simply online the project and be done with it. We have an Avid in the facility too.)
…I’ve spent the last two days working around Avid’s huge “advantages” with some HDV-SD post work. My laptop PC running PPro 2 and ProCoder ingests/transcodes/ and transfers data faster than the Avid can even simply import it.
…I online. I online DV, SD, HDV, HD…all of it with PPro on a PC. The workflows usually referenced are legitimate, but they’re not oxygen. The application won’t suffocate for not having completely mimicked another app (from another era) I had Macs for a decade. FCP? At this point, PPro is doing the job. 5 years from now? Who knows?TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Dave Friend] “[Tim Kolb] “the error is only 9/10 of a frame”
Isn’t the error actually 3/100 of a frame? (30.00 minus 29.97 = .03)”
Actually, I said:
“Many people who do 30 second spots run non-drop because the error is only 9/10 of a frame…”I was speaking of the cumulative error for the 30 second spot…
3/100 X 30 = 90/100 or 9/10 of a frame for a 30 second spot.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
What camcorder is the audio from?
Was the audio in “locked” mode?
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[Bob Cole] “I’m still waiting for somebody with the numbers: how big a part of Adobe’s revenue comes from PP? How many copies of PP vs. FCP have been sold recently? Rather than just lambast the “marketers,” I’d like to get a bit of their perspective.”
I suspect that none of the manufacturer’s you mention are interested in us knowing those numbers so I doubt we’ll ever hear that information in any sort of unfiltered manner…
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[R. Hewitt] “However, if Adobe want to be serious with their aim of targeting professional editors, they need to produce an application that follows the most normal workflow. Handling of audio is just one example. NO professional NLE should ever base its timeline on stereo audio. Stereo isn’t nor has ever been an input format. That alone is one of the biggest bug bears and is reason for many in our industry to look elsewhere. Getting this one simple thing right would have boosted PPs chances in the market place. If Adobe genuinely listened, they would never have gone down this path in the first place.”
You have my agreement on this issue…now that it’s taken care of, we’ll see if it is an issue that is a “tipping point” for some users.
On the other hand, my colleague with his Avid finds himself in fits whenever I switch my timeline to audio sample increments and nudge an audio clip 700 samples instead of a whole frame in PPro, to seamlessly loop a music bed or flawlessly sync an ADR in small segments…
Each issue weights a bit differently for each situation.
I find that PPro makes the grade over Avid in a boutique where the same person is doing graphics/compositing and editing and tends to lack the edit-intensive features for facilities where all those roles are separate and each professional is immersed in their particular role all day every day…and looking at the layout of the program, I can understand this…
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
Do you mean the shots are out of sync with each other, or that the audio in one/both of the shots goes out of sync with the video?
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
[R. Hewitt] “There are a whole pile of professional editors out here that follow the time-honoured path of NLE willing to input advice to Adobe but they just don’t want to listen and provide next to no means of interacting with them. For that reason many have given up and moved to Avid. I’m sure there are also a large number waiting for FCP to be ported to the Intel platform. It is this group that Adobe need to start listening to if they’re genuine about the the professional market.”
Apparently you assume since they don’t talk with you that they don’t talk to professional editors?
That’s just simply silly.
Avid has it’s place…but I suspect the biggest seat unit/sales per annum gain Avid has had in the last five years was buying Pinnacle. FCP is certainly eating Avid’s lunch faster than any other competitive NLE, but Avid was taking a nap when the value proposition in the industry was changing radically.
Just because Premiere Pro doesn’t speak to Avid editors…I’m not sure that that’s a death sentence at all. But I don’t know how many users PPro is losing to Avids…probably not as many as Avid is losing in the other direction, but certainly FCP is taking more Avid users away than PPro is, no doubt.
I’m not saying Avid is a bad system…I’m saying that te industry has a far more diverse set of workflows than the one Avid is set up for…and PPro doesn’t have to be an Avid to sell.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
Hi Redgum,
(If you select text in the post you want to quote and type “Q”, it will automatically quote and footnote the selected text in your response…a timesaver.)
I think that there are two issues here.
1. PPro 2 is not a good upgrade.
My response would be if Premiere 5.0 didn’t put Adobe out of business, certainly PPro 2 can’t. PPro 2 has so much below the surface in plumbing and integration that unfortunately, it just doesn’t register with most users. A large part of this upgrade is the links and hooks between the apps. This was a very involved process and it has taken a long time. The “Gee Whiz” features aren’t all that numerous but the foundation put together with the connection between the apps sets up a new direction entirely.
2. PPro 2 being not received well will bring Adobe down as a company.
Ppro is not the largest product Adobe has on the revenue scale…I doubt it’s in the top three. Even if PPro 2 does prove to be less than a hot seller, Adobe will not start reeling. Also, with the bundles being the largest portion of the units going out, the weight of the collection of apps will be what ultimately determines the sales performance.
It’s a little early to tell. I don’t see a lot of difference between the reactions to PPro v1, v1.5 and v2…PPro 1 was received a bit better because it was SUCH a huge change and most didn’t have the grasp on the software soon enough to feel like critiquing it…though I just had an exchange with someone on this forum regarding how “Premiere 6.5 handled audio so much better…” so everyone’s perception is different. The main gripe with v1.5 was that it was so SOON after v1 that Adobe was being greedy and taking everyone’s money…though there were many very obvious user-oriented upgrades there. Now with v2, I’m hearing how after so LONG…that this upgrade isn’t nearly what it should be.
Bottom line: No matter what Adobe does, some group of users will be ticked off. No matter if you’re at the grocery store or at a family holiday gathering…not everybody will be happy. I’m simply not phased by the complaints. For all of this to have major implications for Adobe, the number of complaints isn’t nearly as important as the number of complainers. Anecdotally, if you count complaint-posts on this forum, you get a high number. If you count how many people are doing the complaining…not such a high number.
Again…if it’s not what you want, fine. Don’t buy it. Some of these complaints are certainly legitimate for certain workflows…and some of them apply to the majority of workflows…I’m not saying the complaints aren’t warranted…
…But I started editing on deck-to-deck systems. My first Umatic cuts system cost 12K USD. I could cut.
…After several cuts and A/B deck systems, I bought Media 100s…I needed two. For about 46K USD a piece, I got Power Macs with 96 MB of RAM, a 1 Gig system drive, a 2x CD-ROM player, and 36 Gigs of external media storage in 4 enclosures. I couldn’t believe how great non-linear was…
…The Media 100s are both sitting in a corner now and I have 3 PPro systems, one Laptop DV/HDV, one DV, and one HDSDI. I don’t have 15K USD in my HDSDI system with dual Opteron Processors and 4 Gigs of RAM. I can do stuff with PPro/AE/Photoshop/Audition that I could only dream about with our 46K M100s (and a 1600.00 USD version of AE…) and a very expensive Pro Tools Suite…
…so I guess that might be the reason I just don’t see how terrible things are.
Again, certain workflows just simply can’t use PPro because of feature gaps…that’s legit. But for most users, the Production Studio’s capabilities are frankly far beyond anything they’ll ever use to capacity.
TimK,
Kolb Productions,
Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net