#2 "The NLE Wars"

Speaker 0 00:00 Okay. Anneli Wars episode two. It's nickeled here, Meryl Davis, where a from Chesapeake systems, creative it for the creative professional. Cause we're also creative. Yeah. This is episode two of the workflow show. Every time you say episode two, though, I feel like some star Wars references. No, it makes me sad. Yeah, there never was an episode to Merrill. That's right. This is actually episode 13. The return of dark. No I'm Donnelley Wars. We'll see that kind of fits into it to episode two, the <inaudible> Wars. Okay. Today on the workflow show, we are talking about something that we never thought we'd actually have to think about again, which is our editors, our workstations, what sits in front of us that we actually do our work on all day long. So I guess we should start. I mean, if you're listening to this podcast, you must know what NLP stands for. Speaker 0 00:58 If you don't, it's nonlinear editor, uh, that's important to know because this is the digital workflow, uh, for all modern film and broadcast editing the Anna Lee Wars. W w well, let's talk about what, what brought this about. Sure. Uh, I think it'd be important to talk a little bit about the history first, which is, um, pretty well known. Uh, Avids always been a big name in the game. They were sort of the grandfathers of the NLE in many ways. There were other, there were others don't, don't forget our media one hundreds and exist to this day. What was it? Speed. Razor was one of them and, ah, sounds like a Japanese movie to me. Yeah, probably is. But, um, you know, there were some editors, avid avid early on kind of ruled the roost. Uh, I remember in college, we were kind of transitioning from Sony three-quarter-inch pneumatic, linear editing over to, to avid based nonlinear. Speaker 0 01:54 And, you know, they ruled things for a while, especially in cinema. So in, in, in broadcast for operations, that, that went away from linear tape to tape editing, uh, which for some organizations is like two years ago. Um, so they might've actually skipped off it altogether and gone to Denta duh, the next big kid on the block, which was Apple and final cut. I remember when final cut, uh, first came out and, uh, you know, the first slew of television shows that were using it, I mean, like, uh, um, there were still, there were still a stigma associated with, uh, with the product because, you know, what does, what does Apple know about filmmaking? And, you know, it's interesting Chesapeake, we always kind of were oriented around final cut from the, you know, we've been around for over 20 years, but this whole video group of ours here at Chesapeake is really been like, I don't know, the last nine or 10. Speaker 0 02:48 And we were really squarely oriented around final cut from the get go. And, and it matured a lot over the years. It was something that really wasn't ready for prime time for the first few iterations. And then probably around, I don't know, final cut 4.5 or thereabouts, you know, it started to get to be a, quite a bit more credible. I think I agree. I mean, the expansion of the tool set, um, over time was great. And, and it's important to note that during this transition, uh, you know, the ultimate decider was cost of entry. Yeah. Yeah. Avid definitely was never really the value option that's for sure. So, you know, a lot of folks, especially in broadcast, uh, especially in reality television, a lot of folks move to final cut. I dare I say final cut is almost been an enabler in a lot of ways for an entire slew of what we now get on our like 300 channel television programming. Speaker 0 03:50 I mean, there's a lot of shows that probably wouldn't have been able to afford postproduction budgets if they had had to buy avid systems and ISIS, or were at the time, unity storage. I mean, it was just priced out of the production and postproduction budgets of a lot of organizations. And you talk about a, you know, quick turnaround here and mobilization, um, you know, there was something to be said a little on that. Yeah. Apple had the laptop editing thing going on or field editing. I mean, you know, it was viable to probably edit on a laptop and final cut, you know, before avid and then avid rolled out avid express, which no longer even really exists, but that was kind of their answer to the laptop editing thing. But Apple really forged ahead with that. And, you know, there was always Adobe premiere pro obviously important to mention it. Speaker 0 04:38 I, you know, in my own experience, I actually used it as a, my college gig of being an event, videographer shit, you know, and anecdotally that's what everyone really thinks of, uh, up until now, I would say about, um, Adobe premier, Adobe premiere was for a very long time, the product that wedding videographers and, you know, like weekenders who put their toe in the, you know, like the videography market would use, I would say it was pretty competent at that. And I remember, you know, using it, it was really the first NLP that I was comfortable using it. In fact, it was, I had a much easier time editing and premiere back in the day, uh, than, than I can't believe. I just said back in the day, you did say back in the talking about like eight or 10 years ago, but the thing that's important to note really is, uh, I found, and I've, I've worked with a whole slew of people who have, uh, come from every direction when it comes to editing. Speaker 0 05:32 And the truth of the matter is, is you're likely most comfortable with the Emily you started with. So I, for example, I started on the avid. So, um, I, I still feel, um, at ease in that setting. And then I went to FCP, um, and, uh, there were, I didn't like FCPS way of handling certain things, but I moved with the sea change in there and then it became proficient in FCP, but I can't, you know, not to, not to talk bad about premier because I feel like CS CS six release a premiere pro six is, is, uh, very robust and, um, uh, you know, a great entry to the market, but, uh, uh, truth be told there, there was a time that if I had walked in to interview for an editing job, and I said, well, I'm a premiere editor. They would have laughed and that wouldn't get you. Speaker 0 06:19 They would remain me. You know, uh, I think a lot of, uh, especially younger editors, you know, came up with final cut and maybe don't have avid media composer experience, but being able to be a final cut editor, especially here in our home based territory of the mid Atlantic, where you've got, you know, a lot of smaller and mid sized production and post production companies that were really very final cut oriented from the beginning that could get you a job. Sure. Being a premiere editor, really, you just didn't run into premiere as often in that kind of a space. And you know, it's also certainly not in New York, certainly not in Los Angeles. I mean, like just, it wasn't really considered a big player. And I think it's important to note that, um, at the end of the day, all these Antilles give you the same end result. Speaker 0 07:03 There are six or eight different ways to skin a cat. Um, and, uh, the perspective that I've always had is that average sort of comes from this, uh, uh, this place where it keeps the idea of analog editing in mind. There's, you know, the bin is the bin because there was a bin for your, your scrap of films, you know, that actually you swept off the table into a bin. Uh, whereas, uh, final cut has always been more, uh, computery or if I stick with actually, which, uh, which relies more on a knowledge of an operating system and how to use a computer program as much as it does to think in an analog sort of, um, way about the editing. And then Premiere's really taking most of its QC stays firm from final cuts seven, no, there was also something else interesting that happened that some people kind of forget about, which is that both avid and Adobe with premiere stepped away from the Mac platform for a number of years, you had a time period where, you know, they basically both pulled their support of the Mac platform and went heavily PC. Speaker 0 08:08 And we were all like, what's up with that? You know, it was an interesting, because so many editors were Mac based and you always had been using say media composer on a Mac back in those bays G three days of yore. And, um, yeah, and even before that, and with the, like all of those ones I got when I got my express pro install, though, um, that was the last time I was, I was really heavily, uh, working on avid was around, um, they hadn't really consolidated their lines yet. Uh, and I was using express pro because at the time there that was the cheapest cost of entry to get to the avid platform. And, um, I had a lot of existing avid projects and things like that, but, uh, what, what happened when I, um, got express pro was I was delighted that I could install it on both a PC and on a Mac, but the stability was tenfold better on the PC. Speaker 0 09:05 Uh, yeah. Took them a while to kind of fully get back to the Mac, so to speak and, and, and be kind of a full fledged member. And that's why I said, I think these days, probably the majority, I would say of new avid installs are probably Mac based. Um, you know, I see a lot of Mac based avid systems out there and obviously Mac based final cut systems. Cause that was the only option and more and more of these premier systems. So, so let's talk about kind of why we're even thinking about this now when everything was so solid. I mean, the trigger obviously was cut X well, yes. And, and Apple's kind of, you know, forced reinvisioning, if you will, of NLAs and here they had a product that had finally kind of fought its way through the gauntlet to gain mainstream acceptance in the post and broadcast world. Speaker 0 10:01 And then like, just as we were getting comfortable, I would say torn from our hands. Yes. It was torn from our hands. And I would say this about FCP seven. Um, it did more than sort of forced its way to acceptance, uh, to give you a sense of its stranglehold on the marketplace, eight of the last eight jobs I did all were on final cut pro seven. Yeah. And I mean, you know, not only was it pretty good, although it was showing its age and, and certainly the software code base that it was written on was, was, was old and needed to be revamped. It, it needed to be everyone, you know, everyone was very used to how final cut work, but they wanted it to be faster, basically a little more elegant, a little bit faster render. And because of that old code, which yeah, lots of render. Speaker 0 10:51 So w you know, the thing that Apple really needed to do was rewrite some of the oldest portions of the code because it, number one was not 64 bit capable. It could not deal with more than a couple of gigs of Ram that you had installed in your system. So they needed to kind of redo a lot of the old code for that. They needed to redo a lot of the code to be able to make final cut, able to deal with these multi-core processors that we have. It really was barely capable of dealing with more than a single processor. Maybe, maybe for transcoding using compressor, you might get a little more than one processor maybe that could actually speed things up. Um, but final cut itself could never take advantage of like a 12 core Mac pro that was behaving like a 20 format pro. Speaker 0 11:36 This is true. Uh, and then the video cards, of course, as we all know, video cards have almost in some ways outpaced the performance of CPS and, you know, again, color and, and motion took advantage of, of your GPU, your graphics card, your 3d card to do two D video processing, but final cut itself never was revitalized. And so Apple knew they had to redo it, but what did they do? They redid it. Oh, they, they redid it. All right. I mean, you know, I hate to say it, but it's, it's, it's true. They, they kind of threw the baby out with the bath water and they came out with something very new and it was shocking and different. Uh, you know, I think it's important to note that, uh, they've sort of refocused the market here as far as FCPX is concerned. Uh, anecdotally, I don't know, a single individual filmmaker editor or production company that has done a, a full transition to final cut 10. Speaker 0 12:34 I just don't know of any of them. Well, and I think a lot of people are like, well, I've, I kind of want it in my toolbox, especially maybe for some short form stuff. It's, it's actually grown into a much more mature product over the last year, year and a half that it's been out and finally as appropriate for certain types of projects. But, you know, it isn't really, in some ways, I think aimed at the same sector of the market, at least as of today, that final cut seven and its predecessors were sure. And I think that the most common criticism, which is almost wrote at this point would be that it looks like they just took a bit of a movie and they, uh, you know, they, um, you know, FCPA did a little bit well, and I think there's some truth to that. Speaker 0 13:18 Our technician, Brian Sumo, who a lot of our listeners probably know and love, um, you know, had an interesting observation when final cut 10 was finally unveiled at NAB a few years ago, which was, well, we were actually kind of seeing it come together all along in that newer version of eye movie that Apple launched in we're at whenever it was, I think it was a movie 2008, that was like kind of the whole new rewrite of I movie. And in some ways we were seeing the structure of final cut 10 come together before our eyes, without really noticing that that's what we were seeing in eye movie. And the other thing really about final cut 10 is, you know, it seems to be difficult to really bring it into an enterprise, uh, you know, environment there. It seems much more geared towards an individual editor, um, than it does for, you know, an enterprise level kind of thing. Speaker 0 14:09 Well, you know, there's a, a lot of specific reasons for that. And like, for instance, if you have a sand system, especially an Exxon Apple's own sand, so to speak, they licensed it. Um, you know, it's, it's actually StorNext, um, the sand system, but if you have an ex San or, or similar Sam, you know, final cut 10 does not work as elegantly in that kind of shared storage environment. And I think it's important to note that as final cut seven, they have, they have released some white papers to make it work, but it's just, it's not intuitive. It's not as intuitive. It kind of still forces every user to be on their own page versus really seamlessly. And then, you know, you looked at final cuts server yanked from us. You know, a lot of people were, were convinced and we helped convince some of them let's make final cuts server, the heart of your environment. Speaker 0 15:03 It's a media asset manager. It, it integrates in very nicely with final cut and yet it kind of died on the vine and now is, is not a living product any longer. And it was at the heart of a lot of people's workflow. If you're at a place where, and this is what still, I'd say, 80% of our customer base and the industry at large is at where they're still on FCP seven. They, you know, I got a call this morning from a customer that, uh, uh, they say, uh, well, I've got four year old Mac pros and just, you know, updated the Ram and, and, and the video card, but nothing's working right. I'm like, well, what's your edit platform? Well, final cut seven at some point, your hands going to be forced. But I think most people have not made the ultimate decision yet. Speaker 0 15:51 Well, you know, remember too. And I think this is important to note how Apple handled the transition from 10 from seven to 10. Right. They, I thought they grabbed the rug and they pulled it well. Yeah. And then they very suddenly basically pulled a final cut seven from the market when they began selling final cut 10 through the Mac app store exclusively, you know, you had to buy it online through their new online sales mechanism. They at the same moment yanked final cut seven from the market, even though this final cut 10 thing was a completely new beast. And let's, let's be honest. It alienated a lot of folks. If you were a broadcaster or a production or post environment that had a number of workstations, and one day you need to ramp up production to do just, you know, a new show that's come in and you just need a few more workstations that behave just like the others. Speaker 0 16:46 You're not going to make that shift on that point in time to just say, okay, we're going to use this brand new thing. Final cut, 10, your, you want just another final cut seven machine. And it was like, Apple went out of their way to say, no, you can't have your toys, Jimmy, you've been bad. And it's like, what gives Apple? We've supported you for so many years, we supported final cut. It's become essential to our post production environment. And now you're going to literally cut it off and say, you can't buy just another one that works. How all of your other ones did that really alienated a lot of, a lot of folks. And this was the beginning shots of the NLE war. Yeah. So let's talk about option. Number one, that is on everyone's mind, let's talk about avid and avid media composer. Speaker 0 17:31 It's 64 bit. It can use gobs of Ram. If you have 16 gigs of Ram or 24 gigs of Ram or 48 gigs of Ram and a Mac pro you know, avid media composer six will actually use it. And, you know, I would say also the elephant in the room here really is a, as we talked about a little bit earlier, the cost to entry for avid has never, um, historically been been cheap, but within the last, um, I guess I would say cycle, we hate that word. Don't we cycle? I like the word cycle I get yelled at for using it, but I'll use it in like a salesy term. I see I've only got so many cycles to think about this stuff, man. So there was a time when there, the only IO hardware that you could use with avid was their proprietary hardware. Speaker 0 18:17 So if you needed to inject not cheap, it was average way. Or you could put together for final cuts systems for the price of an avid. And this is why for years, we were replacing Avids with final cut, but it it's gotten way cheaper, way cheaper. I mean like this offer just ended last week, I think, but they were giving you symphony the high end avid kind of editing and finishing product product. That if you were a final cut user, you didn't even have to give him your old desks. You just had to say, I'm a final cut user. Here's my final cut license, which are still gonna let me use. I'm just proving to you. I'm an actual customer of final cut. We're going to give you symphony for a thousand bucks and you can use it with a black magic or an Aja card. Speaker 0 18:59 That's right. Black magic Aja, which historically, I mean, I think that was probably one of the most longterm requests from avid users. So that was it exactly. Don't force us to use, you know, a while ago it was the adrenaline. Now it's been the nitrous and nitrous DX. Don't force us to use your hardware. It's too expensive. Let me use my kind of quote unquote, off the shelf, Aja black magic. What have you, card may trucks may be, you know, there's a few out there off the shelf kind of IO cards or these days maybe a Thunderbolt device or something like that. Let me use it. It works with all my other apps. Please let me use it. And they finally basically said, okay, I would say that, um, the landscape has changed in such a manner that there's an expectation from, from the consumer, um, in this market, openness. Yeah. They want to be able to get a piece of hardware and use it in avid. But also if they got to jump into it from premiere for anything, or if they're going to jump into after effects, they want to be able to do the same IO ingests that they were able to do on the other thing. Or just monitor out to an HD monitor or laid back to tape. If you're still having to do that, if you're laying back to tape, call us, we can help you. Um, some people have to, Speaker 1 20:12 Yeah, Speaker 0 20:13 Yeah. Tape isn't tape business thing in the world. Isn't the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world is tape wax cylinders, wax cylinders with tape. So avid is now an option. Media composer six is out six dot, whatever it does require you to be on a Mac on 10.7 0.3, I believe, but it can eat your gobs of Ram. It's cheaper than it's ever been. It may work with an Aja or black magic card you already own, or maybe you can buy one for it. If you don't have a card that's supported, or maybe you don't even really need an IO card, you just run it on your, your, your, just your Mac hardware or your PC. And of course, PC is an option for that and it works great. And it's as cheap as it's ever been, really. And if it's a little too expensive for you yet, wait a few months in avid, we'll probably run another special offer and super cheap again, too. Speaker 0 21:00 They do. And there's something to be said, you know, fighting man fighting hard. And we should say we made a big shift at Chesapeake by becoming an avid elite reseller. We were always like, I don't want to say the anti avid guys, but frankly avid was not knocking on our door saying, we want you guys to be a reseller up until Apple kind of opened the door for them into a space. And I think they avid saw that it was an advantage to work with a lot of these outfits like ourselves who really did kind of push final cut into a lot of the environments it was in. And, you know, we, we welcomed them and we said, you know, we want to be a multi-platform solutions vendor for our clients. And we went through the rigmarole of getting signed up as an avid elite reseller. Speaker 0 21:46 Um, and we're actually making some very interesting headway there. We're opening up a new facility for one of our clients in New York in probably the next month, month and a half, which is going to be a heavy duty avid environment with avid storage, the ISIS 5,000 system. And for them, that was not only a viable choice, but it was a, a very good choice and a longterm one. I think it's important exact to talk about longevity here. Avid is not going away. Avid editors genuinely really like avid. And it's important to kind of mention one of the key differences between avid and final cut. So, you know, avid is a really interesting app. It's a lot like a lot of other high-end creative professional software in that if you're an avid editor, it's like, you basically need to know how to turn on your computer, how to launch media composer, and then you can edit. Speaker 0 22:38 It's very self contained. You don't really need to think about all the dirty nitty gritty stuff of, of the computer, the operating system, all of the little nooks and crannies of, of mastering that system as a whole in order English muffin of post-production nooks and crannies. Yeah. That's where I went with that, you know, I haven't had an English muffin in a long time. I had one the other day. They're great. They are, they are, I mean, like, you know, they evoke like a nostalgia. Not that I ever grew up in the, uh, um, you know, the English countryside or anything, but, uh, I don't think they actually have the style of English muffins that we know of as English muffins in England. Oh, is it like Chinese food? Like maybe I'm not in England, but I mean like in China, yeah. Like American Chinese is not a Chinese kind of thing. Speaker 0 23:22 Totally. Okay. Let's go back to the point that I don't even remember what the point, the point was that, um, avid editors turn on their machines. It's a self sufficient empire. And, and I think that was a lot of the pain in us over the years, bringing a lot of people from avid to final cut. I agree. It forced the editors to kind of know more about how their computer as a whole operative than they probably wanted to know. And, and, you know, even today, when you're working in avid media composer, it's very self contained, as you said, and the way it handles it's been management, for instance, you don't really have to think very much about your file system. Avid is kind of handling a lot of that for you. All you have to really be thinking about are your bins. And the reality is, well, that's a little bit more of an old school paradigm in some ways. Speaker 0 24:11 It's one that interestingly Apple is kind of themselves latching onto with final cut X because the event in final cut X is, is basically akin in some ways to the been in avid media composer. So, okay. So a composer as viable an option as it's ever been and a worthy contender in the NLE war indeed. And it has a wonderful place in my heart as the first Emily I ever learned on. So let's talk about another contender. Why is it that all these companies names begin with the letter a and that's what they show up in the yellow pages at the beginning? Uh, yeah. Uh, are no, I don't think an it company would actually like think of that. Well, no, we, uh, we decided that a Chesapeake, the letter C was good enough for us. Yeah. We don't want to be like the first thing. Speaker 0 25:02 Cause whoever goes with like the first thing that you stumbled across people. My last girlfriend certainly didn't think that, hi. Oh, Oh, uh, let's talk about Adobe, the next kid on Adobe. So we've been working with Adobe for literally like all of our company's existence over 20 years. I mean, Adobe and Apple are like, I don't know what they're like. They're kinda like, they're kinda like those love, hate relationships, the deal it's like your second cousin, you're always really happy to see them, but then you spend a little bit of extra time with them and then you realize why you liked them, but then you're ready for them to leave. I only have a handful of second cousins and I, I, I'm sorry to any of my second cousins and, uh, who are listening to this, especially for kissing cousins, but that's a whole, I don't have, I don't have kissing cousins. Speaker 0 25:51 I don't know. Um, anyway, probably so I'm no offense to all of our Baltimore based listeners. So we're, we're, we're Baltimore based. We're Baltimore, Ron's Baltimore ons, Adobe, speaking of kissing cousins, Adobe and Apple. So we targetable, we talked about, we talked about premier pro. We talked about how it was kind of a way from the Apple platform awhile it's come back, but it has a little bit of this stigma. That's the thing that kind of like wedding videographers use. So what, what's the very first thing that we can do to sort of ally that stigma, I would say. And, um, for the record, I'm editing two projects right now in premiere six. Uh, and um, one of them, uh, I'm using the keyboard preset for final cut seven. So it's literally exactly like, so they've gone out of their way to make it as easy as possible for avid users and final cut users to feel really comfy <inaudible> yeah. Speaker 0 26:50 Yeah. You can, you can do the avid key commands. You can do the final cut key commands, and it's also much more elegantly presented. It's much cleaner. It's not busy. Dare I say, as I was saying, it looks almost like what we would have thought final cut seven would have evolved into kind of feel like the spiritual successor to final cut seven, but they also have a way where you can lay out the windows where it looks a heck of a lot like media composer. Uh, if you take the time to map, um, and devise a workflow that works for you as an individual editor, um, you know, whether it's, um, I and O to Mark in and out, and, you know, it's, uh, you know, if it's V to bring it down to the paint, um, the timeline, if you're used to average scenario, you can make it that. Speaker 0 27:37 Or if you, if you confused along the way, and this is what I think most of the editors, um, are dealing with now, cause I've dealt with more than one platform is, Oh, well, I really liked this functionality from FCP seven. Uh, but I really want to be able to Mark market and Mark out and lay down to the track in a way that is, uh, uh, similar to Abbott. So you really have total flexibility and it, it bears saying that Adobe also is fighting really hard to, to gain some prominence here. Now, the funny thing about premier pro is as Adobe likes to say, most people already have it, or a lot of users already came from inside the house it's been lurking it's been watching. It has. I mean, like if you've, if you have production production premium or master collection, but if you even have production premium, cause let's say I wanted after effects and Photoshop and having like, you know, Encore for disc offering. Speaker 0 28:34 On addition for audio, you know, some combination of factors led to you buying production premium. Well guess what guys you already owned premier pro and most people bought it for Photoshop and after effects. Yes. And yet you may have a relatively or very powerful tool, especially if you do the upgrade to CSX right there, ready for you to begin using so long as you want to learn how to use it, which of course Chesapeake systems can help with no, I, you know, the thing about premiere and I think this is worth noting is that this is still new territory for Adobe. Um, and, uh, I, it should be aimed squarely at broadcast and cinema and, and, and all of that. Now I know, and there are, they have, there have been very large, um, uh, outfits that have gone, uh, premiere CNN comes to mind, lots of folks are. Speaker 0 29:25 And, and, and the reality is it's viable and, you know, launching, you know, premier pro six does, does not remove final cut seven from your system. So a lot of folks can kind of Wade into the territory comfortably. Uh, you made a very good point about still keeping final cut seven. I feel like we're, uh, we're, we're still a year or two away from, from not making a clean break on that, on the machine. So there's, you know, all the legacy projects, but, you know, in talking about legacy projects, I think it's important to note that it's actually a little bit easier to export a project from FCP seven and bring it in to premiere than it is to have these a third party tool to go into final contempt. Yeah. So I mean, like that's something to be, so yes, because of XML, the wonderful thing we know is XML in fauna in final cut, you can export your sequence or clips or whatnot as, as XML. Speaker 0 30:21 It maintains a lot of the characteristics of your project file, but in this kind of open form that Adobe again, knowing that they have to fight hard to kind of earn final cut editors business, they've been very good at adopting XML as a format of final cut XML specifically, then premiere pro knows how to work with. And so you can bring that XML dump of your final cut project into premiere pro and largely be up and running with it. You'll have to do some tweaks, but that's expected, but certainly, um, you know, uh, it's not as, uh, as big as a problem is bringing it into FCPX, which we'll talk more about FCPX and I'm on, but you know, the other thing I want to say about premier pro, you know, we talked about how media composer is 64 bit. Well, premier pro is 64 bit. Speaker 0 31:12 It also is very good at leveraging multiple CPU cores, GPU accelerated, and that's the kicker, that's the kicker buddy. It's what they call the mercury playback engine. So this is like kind of the architecture and premiere. And it's also kind of in some of their other applications, like after effects and now even Photoshop, where they can dramatically accelerate a lot of tasks that you would do moment to moment in your editing platform by utilizing your 3d graphics card. Even if you're not doing anything that involves 3d at all, and the way that they do this, or the way that it's done most optimally in premiere pro is using the instruction set that Nvidia has developed for the Nvidia cards or especially the higher end or more modern Nvidia cards called <inaudible>. Speaker 0 32:01 And these are like special programmable shader cores and such on your graphics card that actually video applications can be written to take advantage to accelerate things beyond what your CPOs are capable of doing in and of themselves. Just for a little bit of perspective, there used to be a time when, if you needed to really bite deep into, into some, some like HD video, it was let's get the Ram up. Let's let's, let's get a faster machine. Let's make sure these proxies are, are, are high enough that it can do the processing, but you know, now we're in a place where we, those are all things that we always want to do. And I, by no means, am I saying, don't upgrade your Ram, but you might be able to throw on a three D graphics card and dramatically have a better working environment just by kind of throwing in a new card upgrade. Speaker 0 32:49 So, but here's an important distinction and that is which card vendors support this GPU acceleration and which, yeah. So, so, so premiere pro CSX can get a little bit of oomph off of an ATI card. You know, I keep calling them NTI AMD bought ATI. They're not called ATI anymore. Nick, I have to kind of get used to calling them AMD. The Berlin wall has fallen. A ATI was bought by them, the graphics manufacturers. So that's now it's the AMD radiothons what did ATI stand for? I have no idea. I have no idea. I see. And I don't even know what, like AMD stands for. Max stands for M ms. Isn't Mac all capitalized. I don't even know. No, it's not. That's that's all I know. That's so, so anyway, but going back to the point was that premiere pro six can get a little bit of oomph off of, uh, off of a modern ATI card, but the crux of it is the Nvidia cards because they have this Kuda instruction set that premier pro and the other Adobe apps have been specifically written to leverage to really accelerate on screenplay back. Speaker 0 33:58 You know, you could have many channels of video in their native flavor without having had to transcode to an eye frame, Kodak light pro Rez, you know, lots of graphics and effects going on HD up the wazoo. You know, again, multiple layers, you know, graphics, text, you name it. And B if you have a suitable Nvidia card, which is one of the, Quadros like the 4,800 or the Quadro 4,000 or the Nvidia card in the brand new MacBook pro with retina display or the other, I'm very new Mac book pros that just came out that have Nvidia cards, you will be able to take advantage of this GPU accelerated mercury engine and premiere pro and boom, baby. That's like a whole other level. Typically the way that somebody's going to be purchasing this is, is in the production premium tool set in the suite. Well, that's the thing, you're getting it anyway. Speaker 0 34:47 Right? You're getting it anyway. So if you are like, well, we gotta get after effects. This is the excellent opportunity to at least give it a dry run. And of course, both avid and, um, premiere have 30 day full free trials, go to their websites, try it out and then buy all of it from us. Yes. By all means buy it from us. But you know, the other thing that's, uh, uh, I would note before we, we move on to the next Annalee would be that look, you're getting evaluated by, by getting a suite we're, we're looking at like, um, you know, Adobe bought era dos, um, and speed grade grade grading is, is it's a neat phenomenally robust program. I wouldn't call it as robust as like resolve. It's not, it's getting there. It's not, but for, for something that is sort of an added component for something that a year ago was like 25, $50,000. Speaker 0 35:42 And now it's just thrown into the mix. It's, it's a reminiscent of one Apple bought color. We've got speed grade. It's a value add. Sure, sure. And you're going to get premiere pro, you're going to get your Photoshop. You're going to get your aftereffects. You're going to get your audition. You're going to get your Encore. You're going to get like the eight other apps in your encoder. You know, the other thing is, Oh yeah. Adobe's media transcoding app is, is pretty hot stuff. And it turns out flash does compressor never did without a third party plugin. Well, you know, thank God the Adobe is keeping it in the family. The other thing about it is great is that they have these wonderful presets for, for existing platforms. So if your, if your content delivery is ultimately to something like Vimeo, uh, you know, you know, that you might have to go and find just exactly what the settings are and then manually set them and the next port then upload then test, or, you know, they have some preexisting settings here. Speaker 0 36:33 There'll be, wants to make things stupid, easy YouTube, Vimeo, you know, that kind of stuff at that level of, of content delivery, uh, select your preset and go, yes. Thank you for selecting Johnny cap. I don't know, random total recall reference of the hour. And it's just, you know, they're remaking that it makes me so sad. It looks good from a special effects perspective, but from recent movie, well, not that recent, but, uh, it had really good special effects for the TJ. There was a Philip K Dick story too. Yeah. Yeah. I think like 90% of all science fiction movies actually were Phillip K Dick story. It's a shame that poor guy didn't make any money and was crazy. I think it was a drunk too. We all have our issues. We do. None of them are being Philip K Dick though. I'm talking to like alien space satellites that are beaming transmissions into your brain. Speaker 0 37:28 He's the real, although I actually have had that. Yeah. He's the real Ron Ron L Hubbard L Ron that's really said, okay, anyway, let's go back to the subject, which is a, well, I think we've kind of talked a lot about premier pro it's worthy. It's great. It's modern software. Adobe's fighting really hard for the users. They're making it as easy as possible to find out for final cut people to transition to it, give it a look. See, so we haven't talked about final cut 10 and it bears talking about because it's actually gotten kind of good. Yeah. So the first thing, you know, that one of the very first gripes about the initial release FCPX is where the hell is my multicam editing. Yeah. Multicam just like walked out on us. I mean, I've got multicam edits from FCP six and you're telling me now I can't have, you don't even get multicam anymore, buddy. Speaker 0 38:22 Yeah. So that's, that's upset that people, you know, the magnetic timeline for all of its attractiveness was a very new way of working that kind of, you know, it's kind of the, uh, the Apple way of, of, you know, we're going to kind of take a little bit of control away from you, but we're going to make your life easier because of it. So it's a trade you're probably willing to make, but, you know, there were a number of aspects of final cut, 10 that as it's been iterated with these look like minor updates on the store, you know, it's like 10 Oh one and 10 Oh two and 10 Oh three, I think they're up to like 10 Oh four. Now those, those have actually been many very significant upgrades. I mean, like multicam got folded back in, and this was a free update for people who bought funnel content. Speaker 0 39:05 At any point, since it was released, it's also two 99. Now, if you want to get compressor, it's another 49 bucks or whatever. And if you want to get, um, motion, it's another 49, every other app that was part of final cut studio either got killed or kind of had some of its features taken out and rolled into final cut 10. And I'm thinking of color here. There are some color grading abilities now in final cut 10 that clearly are kind of taken from color. But final cut 10 is interesting in that it's, it's inexpensive, it's, it's very modern software. The performance of it, you know, is, is very high performance, again, multi CPU GPU 64 bit. And I would imagine that as they move forward, uh, you'll see, uh, further enhancements as it relates to the retina display. Well, and they've already, you know, it's interesting with that new extraordinarily high resolution in the MacBook pro retina display final cut 10 is one of the, the very first apps that Apple adapted to use that ludicrous amount of screen real estate. Speaker 0 40:12 And so you can kind of monitor a 10 80 P video in the preview window at full resolution, and it's still eating up only like a corner of your screen. And you still have kind of, I won't call them bins, I'll call them events and your clips and sub clips, your timeline down below. And this is where Apple shines really is the kind of bleeding edge with this right now. But I would expect probably in a year and a half or so that a, this would be standard affair with the, uh, with the, uh, Oh yeah. I don't, I don't think it'll take that long for, for media composer and Adobe to adapt their apps for the, the, the retina display and then 10 factoring their announcement. They said that, uh, you know, Adobe was already a well, well in a partnership on board, so to speak, you know, it's, it's, anyone's guess as to when we'll see like all the Adobe apps and it'll probably be a bit as CSX just came out, you know, we shall see. Speaker 0 41:09 Right, right. You conjecture. But, but Apple has been very quick to adapt final cut 10 for this new technology and to leverage all the other very interesting hardware that's under the hood on a modern computer these days. I think it's great because one of the biggest problems that I have as an editor, um, is managing my workspace. I'm literally not having enough space to put everything. And yeah. You know, having like that 28, 80 by 1800 display makes that kind of easy. Plus, you know, you do, you know, do an output to a second screen with, with a map, a pro with a Scott HTMI built in, you know, just how long have we been waiting for that on a Mac laptop. That's great, but that's another podcast. So, but final cut 10 to 99, very much worth looking at the problem is say, like, let's say you're in a San environment. Speaker 0 41:57 If you're in a sand environment, you know, all of your media either needs to be inside of one of these so-called event folders or an event folder needs to be kind of pointing at media file. And that's outside of the event folder. Only one editor can be really connected to and using an event at once. And so this is like, kind of like, well, why did I buy a Sans if only if I really can't have multiple people utilizing the same media at once. And so Apple comes out with this white paper, right? It turns out while you can have a common set of media files say on a sand system that everyone is using and editing on this at the same time, the problem is everybody needs to create their own event folder. And those events then have little pointers that are pointing to the media files that are outside of them. Speaker 0 42:45 Um, and even though you might not actually have to duplicate those media files, all of your sub clipping, all the little metadata keywords, that final cut 10. So gloriously allows you to associate with clips and sub clips in your events. Well, no one is sharing that information. So it's like you have like half of this little mini asset management system built into your editor, but only one user at a time can use it, even if you're on a sand. So it's like, guys, what's the point. And, and some people I know have told me that if you kind of like look at some of the interesting little assets that are buried inside of the final cut 10 application, you can actually find some little parts of the program that aren't really maybe even used today that are kind of maybe hinting at some things to come, maybe a more multi-user friendly kind of world for final cut 10. Speaker 0 43:35 And I think that's really, when it comes down to a decision associated with, with FCP X, we're talking, if you're a college student and you're working on your very first short film, by all means plunk down the two 99 and like, you know, give it a whirl. Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, it's, I bought this nice DSLR recently and I was like, well, what editing program do I want to buy and really learn the heck out of, to use for my own, just kind of messing around as a hobbyist, so to speak. And it was like, yeah, I'm going to spend two 99 and get final cut 10, cause it's going to be great for me. Would I necessarily switch a department of, you know, six or eight or 10 or 12 users in a broadcast or post production environment over to final cut, 10 new. Speaker 0 44:18 I wouldn't, there needs to be a compelling reason for that. And I, you know, I haven't seen it yet. So I think the different, the differences, you know, and I think this is the thing that's been lost in the conversation about Anneli, uh, in the last, uh, you know, six or eight months. And that is that it has nothing to do with whether or not the product is better. And it has nothing to do with whether or not you can complete work with a product. I think a lot of people have taken up stance that says like, look, what's wrong with FCPX X. I can edit my videos and it just fine look at the production quality everything's okay. And that's true. That's true. But that's also true for avid. That's also true for premiere. This largely has to do with how can you implement this? Speaker 0 44:57 You're not making a TV show by yourself. If you're at a production company that has three, uh, you know, shows running gun Eng style, reality shows going on in the United States at any given moment. And then everything's coming back to, to be ingested, cataloged, and then thrown into an editor. Um, you know, FCPX justice. Well, and let's be honest. And what vendor do we feel comfortable throwing our resources and our money at and orienting our environment around. We've been so recently kind of scorned by our previous lover, Apple who yanked final cut seven from our, from our, she sent her friends over to get our records. And now they're just somebody we used to know. Yeah, it is that kind of situation. Not that I've been very familiar with it. No, no, but you know, but, but you're right. It's, it's like, you know, do we want to align with that? Speaker 0 45:48 Uh, you know, am I going to stay warm to Apple? In fact, Apple's way of handling the final cut seven transition and also their lack of substantial Mac pro updates, which we're going to talk more about, I think next week, I think it's forced a lot of users even wonder, like, should I even be using a Mac anymore for video and hark? I mean, let's be clear. I love my Mac. We love our max I've, I've worked at creatively on my it's hard to imagine switching, you know, but there are instances where, um, pure processing power and availability are outweighing the love of Apple. And I think people are like is, you know, I was very glad to see that the Mac pro actually didn't get yanked. I think it's an important message from Apple that they actually don't want to discontinue it. And I do think it's also an important message that they said they have something very interesting coming for pros, which again, we'll talk more about next week in the Mac pro episode, you know, coming in 2013, I don't think they're turning their back on this market at all. Speaker 0 46:46 I don't, I think they're trying to reframe it. And in typical Apple fashion, um, there is no news in until there is such substantial news and let's be honest, right? I mean, with many different things that we now take for granted in the computing landscape, whether that's kind of on the consumer end of things, or the pro end of things, you know, Apple has been a huge mover in the last 25 years. And I think they just have this culture now I know. Right. But we're really not. No, no, it's a, you know who David Ryan on the other hand? Oh, just kidding. Speaker 0 47:21 So, uh, Apple has a culture of keeping things close to their chest because they often do things that are a shakeup. And so I don't think it's, it's a good idea to count them out of the pro space just yet. But I think people also, you know, validly are saying, well, here's avid, here's Adobe, their entire corporate models at this point are based on catering specifically to the creative professional user. Maybe I want to get more friendly, friendly with those guys because they need me as a creative you're targeting their markets in such a manner that, uh, that is a little more, uh, laser focused than, than Apple. Well, publicly. I mean, the reality is I think Apple really likes their pro users. I think the fact that pros use max kind of has this halo effect. She is an Apple term to get people very interested in the platform, but let's, let's face it. Speaker 0 48:15 If they're not the core user group, Apple stopped selling stuff that was specifically catering to pros. You know, you wouldn't even notice safe in like a quarterly report because it would be akin to like one creative eye pads accidentally fell off of a ship. So at the end of the day, we're talking three Emily's, one avid has been around for, um, over 20 years has, is time tested, um, has a track record to go with. It has shape as it's ever been. The cheapest it's ever been, has a built in knowledge of, of, of an industry and, and professionals have used it for 20 plus years. Can't go wrong. You really, you really can't. And then Adobe, and then you have Adobe who has been in your backyard the entire time. Anyway, clearly oriented around the creative professional user. You probably half of you already own premier pro just upgrade to see us six, what you should anyway, thrown in video card in there. Speaker 0 49:06 And boom, good to go. You have an opportunity to, to even move to premiere with a FCP mindset, you can do that. So again, shoot your XML out, pull it into premier and good to go. So, and then final cut, 10 to 99, the chief downloads. We can't even sell it to you. You got to get it yourself. You got to go to the app store, you got to download it. You've got to pay two 99, I think a 30 day trial. So you can play with it. And that's the thing, all of these have 30 day trials, but you're looking at, um, a state institution, the newcomer, and then the cost effective one is the way you look, here's the thing, right? Like, and, and this debate of the NLE Wars, and we should probably wrap up. So maybe this is the note we want to leave it on. Speaker 0 49:52 Um, you know, the Anneli Wars itself, you know, is obviously kind of giving the perspective that you have to choose sides, right? Let's be honest folks, all three of these pieces of software can use quote unquote, off the shelf video cards, right? You can use an AIG black magic card, just make sure it's one of the more current ones it's platform agnostic. So you can get a super cheap, yet highly powerful IO card. You could probably buy all three of these pieces of software for still cheaper than it would be to get the avid 10 years ago, cheap haul way cheaper, cheaper than even I think final cut studio was in the early days. You could own all of these pieces of software. Why not have a system that's a loaded up with everything? You know, we have a, a client of ours that we've worked with for many years and had an interesting anecdote for me as we were chatting recently, he says, I've got everything on my system. Speaker 0 50:51 I got after effects where I spend a lot of my time. Now he says, I got premiere pro, I got final cut seven, I've got a media composer. And I'm finding that for certain types of projects, I actually like a gravitating to one platform or the other, because I find that it's most efficient for that specific type of project. If it's a quick little, couple minute piece, just basically some kind of slash slash stuff. Yeah. Final cut. 10 might actually be great, especially if it's just something you yourself need to churn out without much interaction with other users. If you're trying to do something super well-produced, especially kind of narrative feature, length stuff, media composers. Great. If you want to do kind of a lot of the stuff that was your staples in final cut, seven premiere pro is a great option. Why not get an agent or a black magic card throw all of the software on your system? Speaker 0 51:43 Yeah. Get a functional knowledge of each. These are not really that difficult pieces of software to use, try learning some three D rendering, the three D software, sometime this editing software, it looks like a breeze compared to that, get all of them, load up a system, build it to be agnostic, be able to say to any potential client. Yeah. I can edit in that and just be ready to go. And you'll probably find that certain projects you're working on kind of make sense to handle with one tool or the other, and just load up your computer to be kind of, as we like to say, the, the digital creative Swiss army knife, where you have like a little tool for every little thing that might come at you and you are highly marketable, you've got the best tool for the job. It's all really inexpensive. Speaker 0 52:26 And, um, today you basically can, can handle any eventuality that comes your way. So that, so the answer to the NLE Wars really is be Switzerland. You don't have to choose sides. You can choose to do all of them. Yeah, absolutely. You, you, you can have every tool loaded on your machine for cheap, cheap, cheap, you know, we, we would encourage you to, if you choose to purchase any of these pieces of software, think of us, your buddies at Chesapeake systems, we are reseller and partners for all of these folks, you know, and like, let's maybe just throw out, you know, there are some other platforms out there that are competing for the space. You've got Autodesk kind of taking smoke in a more NLE direction. Of course, there's, there's still media 100. It still exists. Um, Sony, Vegas and vaguely available for sale. Vegas does exist. Speaker 0 53:16 Vegas is, you know, uh, not surprisingly, really, really popular in the education space. So, you know, there's a lot of choices. You don't necessarily have to throw yourself purely into one camp. And, um, I guess that means despite this being kind of a period of flux for our editors, it's actually probably the best time to be an editor. Cause there's so many options that are at a price point that they've never been at before in terms of how low they are. And there's so much reality television that's being shot right now. Yeah. There's, there's a, there's plenty of work. Yeah. There is. And being able to say, I can jump into your environment and I can deal with any editing platform that maybe you want me to just true is great because you're going to find, and this is my parting thought for the day, you're going to find us an editor or is it somebody who works, you know, uh, with this, uh, this technology that as the landscape changes, there is going to be an expectation that you understand more than one platform. You gotta be adaptable folks, be ready to move in different directions. Okay. So next week, you're your hardware, the Mac pro your other options stay tuned next week, workflow Shaw and the work flow. So it's worth, David wants us to remind you that all of your hate mail can be [email protected] that's w O R K F L w S H O [email protected]. This has been Nick gold and Meryl Davis signing off. Talk to you next time. Bye. Bye.