HD For Indies

What if they build Shake into Final Cut Pro and start competing with Smoke and Avid DS.
 

If they did, I'd be in exstacy, but for now I don't quite dare to dream about that. :)
 

Since joining the BBC (www.bbcresources.co.uk/ ) from Pogo Films (www.pogofilms.com ) I have had to get re-accustomed with Avid after working with FCP for the past 2 years. I will preface by saying I work in management and am not an editor, but am not beyond doing the odd online session when required (though that would never happen here). What I do is workflow and planning, and it is from this place that I pontificate.

Avid, while falling under the shadow of FCP over the past few years, has made leaps of progress with Adrenalin. Yes the systems cost more, but by the time you factor in the other hardware and the rent here in London against the rates of suites, the cost differential is way minimized. What we have had to do here in order to charge considerably less for our FCP suites (much politics as well as logistics involved) is to take all vtr’s, pen & Tab, ppm’s & mixers out of the FCP offline suites. Personally I feel this does little to aid the cause for FCP, as all the producer sees is a stripped down suite when they work on FCP. That aside, avid has the major winner in terms of workflow: Mixed res timelines!!! If Apple doesn’t release this at NAB, I will be greatly disappointed. Similarly, Apple still needs to do lots of work on the media mgmt side to gain ground on Avid. Everyone wants to see FCP do well, but be careful not to think Avid is standing idle. Have a look at my article on Interplay. http://hdto35.blogspot.com/2006/09/avid-release-interplay_19.html
I think the competition between these two is benefiting the consumer in tremendous ways. At the BBC, there is a big push to migrate to FCP for cost and flexibility reasons and I really hope the apple live up to the hype over the next few years.
Paul
www.hdto35.blogspot.com
 

The writing has been on the wall since Motion arrived. I said when it was released in its embryonic v1.0 state I sadi them Apple have their sites on Discreet. I was laughed at of course.

Look at Aperture and one gets a distinct feel for the way the Pro Apps are going.

I wouldn't put it past Apple to release an integrated suite of software that could easily compete with FFI. With the change over to Intel they are only limited by their ambition...
 

Right now I see Final Cut Studio as I see OS X - young compared to long-running apps like After Effects but able. In some areas such as GPU-based integration it is still unable to fully use the hardware.

But there is a lot of potential there when you start adding it all up and factoring in the high secrecy that Apple holds.

I think that I could get my employer to buy an Avid package very easily at my day job (local TV spots, naming/branding presentations, trade show or merchandising video, all very motion graphic oriented). Our clientele doesn't support the higher costs we would have to charge to support the more expensive products. In three or so years we've probably thrown about 2K at FCS software costs with maybe 6K for hardware that also is used for other tasks (we would've bought that anyway).

What I'm getting at is that FCS is not entirely on the level Avid is, it's just cheaper under certain conditions. It sounds like there is a business plateau and if you go above that FCP isn't a deal anymore because of what you're doing. But there is no way we could afford to do even a cheaper Avid package the way things are working right now.

I hear the Avid workflow is different or good or bad depending on who you talk to — so if you're fast on an Avid and can afford it you should use it by all means. At the moment I've invested no time in learning Avid products because I haven't had the opportunity/time, so I can't comment on how much better I would or wouldn't be with Avid over Final Cut Pro. I come from the budget indie side of things after all. And though there is plenty of room for improvement the FCS bundle basically gives you a ton of potential tools for very little, some of which do seem to be under utilized.

I thought Motion 1.0 to version 2 was very substantial. This was mostly in terms of speed or under the hood performance on the same hardware over the new features. Then if you think about how Apple is sitting on GPU integration at the OS level and has been slowly tweaking that for some time, with a lot of work and engineering behind it. There are things that aren't available to us yet in OS X (full Quartz Extreme) and they've announced Core Animation for Leopard.

So I can't believe they won't keep at it and offer us significantly better tools. It will just probably take time.