Re: The future of post

"Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."

various.



In the case of computer history it is quite tragic not to know the history, because there is so little of it and it happend a very short time ago.



Is it even worth listing the "well thought out", looks good on paper, utter failures that followed this model?



Didn't Circuit city come up with some sort of ultra cheep DVD that required paying a nominal fee to take the disk home (about what you would pay for a rental) and then an even more nominal fee every time you wanted to re-watch it? Now that makes a lot of sence. It is way cheeper then renting and even cheeper then owning unless you watch your movies a LOT.



But it didn't work. There is a certain, fundemental soundness in owning something. Now, given their track record it is likely that future discrete coustomers might wish to limit their liabilaty and dependence on discrete by never commiting to their products more then a month or so at a time. That would be understandable. However this is a limited phenominon and not a market ideal.



There is a large segment of the market that looks at things quite differently. Every piece of equipment I own was paid for off the procedes of a single production. Once I paid for it, I owned it. From that point on, I could charge for using it and either take the profit to live on, or plow it into other equipment. After a couple of years of modist projects and modist living, I had quite a stack of resources to bring to bear on a clients production. At no further cost to me. What I realized was that as long as I was renting time from post houses and cameras from rental houses, I was making 10-15 percent of the budget. Once I owned the equipment, I was making something more like 70-80 percent of the budget. Now, why would I want to move back to a buisness structure where I go back to renting again?



Now let's look at the other side of the equation. I now work for a large company. If the money is available to purchase equipment I will still go out of my way to make do with what I have simply because the PROCESS of getting a purchase order cut getting bids, explaining why I want brand x instead of brand y, is such a hassle that I really don't want to do it. Now WHY would I ever put myself in a position where I have to do this for every project. This is lunacy.



Now, let's look at the bigist problem with this ignorance from discrete. They totaly fail to realize the impact their product and others has had on the market. They have long boasted about how they have changed the post production industry but they clearly don't believe their own marketing hype, even though in this case it is true.



I have writen before in other venues on the following thesis. "Those who simply replace there linier, tape based editing suites, on a one for one basis, with new non linier editing suites, then step back and say "look, we have joined the digital age" fail totaly to understand the impact or the promise of the age they are futaly attempting to join."



NLEs do not change the way you edit so much as they change the way you do your entire job.



Consider the following analogy. Long ago, men did not type. Executives had their secretaries who typed for them and middle management had their secretary pools that typed for them. Into this work environment we introduce the computer. All the "exceptionaly bright" forward thinking people instantly understand the full impact of this technology and replaced, on a one for one basis every typwriter with a computer word processor. And business continues on exactly as before. (appologies for the sexist nature of the history lesson, but lets face it, history was sexist)



Is there anyone who doen't see, in retrospect, how limited the vision was?



I would submit to you, the way discrete, and many of us, think of the editing an post industry, post NLE is exactly as myopic.



Perhaps this is the strength of FCP. It seems FCP users "get it" they understand that FCP doesn't just change the way the edit. It changes the way they write, the way they shoot, even the way the pitch their projects.



This industry has built a tradition around the post production phase of the production process that was largly the result of cost. Because of the excessive cost of editing equipment and therefore the excessive cost per hour of sitting in an online suite certain practices grew in popularity because they were efficient. I recall MANY nights sitting up checking my paper EDLs for color framing accuracy to save time the next day in the online session.



How silly would I be to do that same job today when I have a full function editor sitting on my desktop. The shear ECONOMY of cheap NLEs has made the offline process an anacronysim. Today you can begin to edit your show while you draw your story boards, cut them together see how they flow. You can edit while you write, if you work from stock footage or interviews that have already been shot, why not see how it cuts together while you are writing. It doen't cost you anything now. Just open another app and go to town. You can edit while you shoot. Instead of hitting the craft service table during setups, just sit in your chair with your laptop and see how that last shot matches up with all the others. This is the future of the NLE.



Here is where the Discrete business plan disintegrates. With discrete we can't just open up another app. OUR APP. Suddenly we once again have to think about cost. And that is unacceptable.



Idiots.



Solak