Re: Working Over the weekend...

[Walter Soyka] "Apple is inviting studios to consider PCs."

Since when did this market segment require an "invitation?"

Isn't this precisely the market segment where budget considerations play under different rules than the "rest of us?"

The couple of movie sets I've been invited to were places where if you had to pay 50% of the purchase cost of something in order to bring it on set as a prop - and then subsequently drop it back off with the original owner - that was a smart deal. The requirement to look at overall "costs" against the total scale of the operation made an otherwise foolish economic deal very, very smart in it's particular context.

I just read Rami Katrib's article up top here - and in his business model I think he's making eminently sensible decisions. With his clients he could care less about squeezing out nickels and dimes, they just want the work down properly and as bullet-proof as possible.

I actually remember sitting down talking to Rami back at a conference when he was just starting out to help Walter Murch build the "home studio" workflow that he used for Cold Mountain, and I remember his enthusiasm for the brand new possibilities of digital editing via the early FCP.

I suspect he would agree that his choice of FCP way back then was a huge driver in his subsequent success.

But it's also sensible that he's sustained that success over these years by understanding that people succeed not by defending the way things have "always" been done, but by seeing how they're changing and trying to get ahead of the curve as it applies to ones' particular circumstances.

For shops like his, at the nexus of Hollywood episodic TV work, broadening the toolset from all Mac to Mac, HP and whatever has been very smart. With those budgets you do whatever it takes.

But I suspect that having been at the table, listening to him talk as a brash young 20 something year old, I suspect that there's a new kid out there just like young Rami, who sees precisely the same potential in FCP-X.

We shall see.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor