SOT: Apple drops the ball, BBC buys CS3

farss wrote on 11/14/2007, 1:04 AM
This pieces of news caught me off guard, well it's not that new but the why is interesting.
The story goes something like this. The BBC wanted a system that'd work fully with Panny's P2 cards. Apple did their usual our way or no way head in the sand trick and in three weeks Adobe pulled the rabbit out of the hat. This shows one thing, any NLE can win prestigeous contracts if you're nimble on your feet and give the clients what they want.
During the panel discussion that I learnt this news at one of this forums members tore Apple to pieces. Apple seem to have devised the only operating system that can dmage video in a file video was the general gist of it. Things did get a tad heated from that point on!

After two days of listening to Red getting dumped on, directors talk about their first feature shot on a EZ1 and printed to 35mm (shudder), the staggering amount of data that Big Brother produces and how content management is the core of the whole monster, Vegas got one mention!
The only presenter that mentioned Vegas was a local Adobe Ambassador showing a few tricks in the latest PPro. Yes he said if you don't like PPro, no problem, you can edit in Vegas and use AAF to move your project to PPro and use some of these neat tricks. The one that got me was the Device Central console.
You render out for mobile phone delivery, send that to the console, select the phone and see how your video will look on that phone, you can change the ambient lighting conditions as well. Very handy for checking your text, can the titles be read, can the clients logo be seen etc. You can even dial back to your virtual server and check everything. Very cool and you don't have to really jump ship to use it.
One feature in PPro that I never knew existed that does seem kind of usefull was having multiple tabbed timelines. The presenter also made much about using nested projects, well OK we've got them too but he got me thinking more about just how powerful these things are. Between multiple timelines and nesting there's some very powerful creative tools in there and much of this that works just as well in Vegas.
By comparison damned if I could find anything that Apple and FCP had to show that even remotely got me excited.

One thing that did occur to me, Adobe have gotten smart. They don't exhibit much , instead they run their own roadshows and use these ambassadors to spread the word locally. They're free to say what they like and are therefore better received. Also their presentations go much deeper than what I see in Vegas demos.

Bob.

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 11/14/2007, 2:01 AM
On a slightly related tangent, I see where Avid has decided not to show at NAB 2008.

http://tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0157/t.9658.html
farss wrote on 11/14/2007, 3:03 AM
Indeed I noticed that too.
The way the word Avid got used at the conference I think it's achieved the same status as Hoover. Their market share at the high end is almost 100% and the number of systems are a bit daunting. Cutting Edge who post BB tie up 15 Avids and if they're doing another series at the same time they hire in more. BB employs 450 people for 16 weeks and generates 325,000 pieces of video, all cross referenced and online accessible, search by keywords and drop onto the T/L, much of it edited in almost real time as it airs. The software was locally developed.

Bob.


Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/14/2007, 6:32 AM
i missed the part where apple dropped the ball. They still got the gig @ BBC, right?
apit34356 wrote on 11/14/2007, 7:52 AM
Farss, are you referrring to the debate about FCP converting video into their own codec, therefore losing the "original" color space vs pixel compression issue?
Cliff Etzel wrote on 11/14/2007, 8:07 AM
I was recently contacted by a visual journalist from Colorado whose newspaper is moving heavily into video for the web and having been a vocal advocate of Vegas for the newsroom on other newspaper websites, he asked me why I felt it was better suited compared to the other offerings.

Simple: You can do 90% of virtually anything that needs to be done within the one Vegas application as compared to separate apps from Adobe or Apple. Since newsrooms are under tight budgets these days trying to retain ad revenue, it was a slam dunk for Vegas Pro8 - Basically I said, get yourself a copy of Vegas 6 from B&H, then order the upgrade from SONY - he was shocked at the way he could save money in his departmental budget and at the same time, work with a solid application for editing video - and look like he knew what he was talking about to the bean counters.

I was having a few moments of doubt recently about moving back to Premiere Pro due to its plugin features that are sorely missing from Vegas, but when I did my first motion work in Vegas yesterday, that feeling quickly faded away.

Once again, it doesn't surprise me that Vegas is getting mentioned as a viable alternative to the other editing suite packages - SONY's apps really do bring much to the table - if they could only get their act together with various hardware vendors for the upper end editing segment.

Now I just have to wait for 64bit Vegas Pro and the new Quad Core Phenom processors from AMD to be released.

Cliff Etzel
bluprojekt
rmack350 wrote on 11/14/2007, 9:43 AM
Adobe certainly has its problems, memory usage being at the top of the list. I suspect they'll get that straightened out by CS5. Memory issues have made PPro a non-starter for us for a feature length doc. We just made a precipitous move to Final Cut for that.

Being able to have multiple timelines in a project is a good thing because it helps you manage a larger complex project. You've just got to handle memory carefully if you do that.

I like that you can open multiple instances of Vegas, and wouldn't want to lose that, but it'd be very, very useful to be able to tie the projects together in an overall interface that could manage them all.

Rob Mack
Cliff Etzel wrote on 11/14/2007, 9:55 AM
The multiple timelines within one app is a plus in PPro.

Something I did notice with regards to PPro and memory is that when rendering out a project, if you leave the PPro window open, memory goes through the roof. If you minimize the PPro window, the memory issues seem to drop dramatically.

Not sure why that should make a huge difference in memory usage but I've been able to repeat this several times with PPro 1.5.

Cliff Etzel
bluprojekt
TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/14/2007, 10:02 AM
can you render one TL while working on another in PPro?
Cliff Etzel wrote on 11/14/2007, 10:27 AM
I just tried that in PPro 1.5 - no can do

Another plus for Vegas... :-)

Cliff Etzel
bluprojekt
rmack350 wrote on 11/14/2007, 10:33 AM
I have no idea, but I suspect not.

I know where you're going with this, and I don't think there's any hard and fast rule that says that Vegas would lose one nice feature to gain another. Why not have several timelines in a project file AND allow one to render while you work on another?

The goal would be to enhance vegas' abilities to manage a large project. In fact, maybe they could follow Flash's lead and have a separate file format for project management files. Flash uses FLP files for collections of FLAs

This is actually, probably, PPro's Achilles heel. All the stuff it does seems to be in one big fat process. You can have multiple timelines and easily share assets, render settings, all sorts of stuff, but it all uses up memory. Given Adobe's bad example, fix it in Vegas.

Opening multiple instances of Vegas is a great feature, but it's also a work-around, and defending a work around too much just retards the product developement. I'd like to be able to use both of the features.

On the other hand, Vegas developement has a history of adding features at users' request and then not refining them. Wouldn't want to overburden the developement team.

Rob
TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/14/2007, 10:37 AM
I know where you're going with this, and I don't think there's any hard and fast rule that says that Vegas would lose one nice feature to gain another. Why not have several timelines in a project file AND allow one to render while you work on another?

I was actually just wondering. Haven't seen anyone say eigther way in a few years. :) But multiple instances has saved my butt more then I care to mention! ;)
DGates wrote on 11/14/2007, 11:17 AM
Bob, you're so biased against Apple/FCP, that it clouds anything constructive you may have to say. Get over it.
farss wrote on 11/14/2007, 1:38 PM
"Bob, you're so biased against Apple/FCP, that it clouds anything constructive you may have to say. Get over it. "

Well Mr Gates that might have some truth to it except I was only reporting what someone else had said. I had followed the fate of the HVX200 and problems that were being reported with corrupted and missing clips for some time. No doubt these issues had caused quite a few to shy away from that format. What I'd never heard until Barry Green spoke yesterday was the source of the problem had been found and the problem isn't in Pannys hardware, it's in OSX itself.
If you fail to write protect a card OSX will add two additional files onto the volume and in the process may corrupt the files containing video. The result looks like you've got dropouts in your video.

Rename folders with any non alphanumeric characters and you cannot access the contents. Everyone just thought this was due to a camera problem. Who would have thought that a folder names "Reel 1" would be OK, call it "Reel #1" and you have a problem.

Is my vision clouded, I'd like to think not. What I do have an issue with is how things attain god like status. Another speaker and a local of considerable standing was attacked at both the conference and elsewhere for pointing out the current operational problems with the Red camera. Was his view clouded, I don't know but his Red cameras are currently shooting Australia's first feature shot entirely on Red. No one including a Red Ninja could dispute any of the facts so the attack as always gets turned on the messenger.

Bob.


Coursedesign wrote on 11/14/2007, 2:34 PM
A product can't do anything by itself, only a workflow can.

So some people say, "RED totally sucks because it doesn't work in a particular way I want to work, and I'm not willing to change my workflow," and "OS X totally sucks because it doesn't work in a particular way I want to work, and I'm not willing to change my workflow."

In the real life world of people who get things done without too many excuses, you hear, "it took me a short while to figure out how to best use it, but now it's really cranking."

In the case of OS X, I assume it wrote forks to the P2 cards (a fork is where Macs store file information).

If I remember correctly, this writing can be turned off.
rmack350 wrote on 11/14/2007, 5:37 PM
Hah! I meant to say "I have no idea where you're going with this". I just didn't know what I meant. :-)

Rob
DGates wrote on 11/14/2007, 5:49 PM
...Apple did their usual "our way or no way" head in the sand trick...

That's called giving us information with a bias. Plain and simple.

rmack350 wrote on 11/14/2007, 6:17 PM
Um, I have the forum set to thread view and it looks uncannily like you're addressing this to me.

But sure, I'll bite. If all the little NLEs got a report card, what marks would they get for "Playing well with others"?

Outstanding?
Satisfactory?
Needs improvement?
Unsatisfactory?

Rob Mack
AtomicGreymon wrote on 11/14/2007, 8:43 PM
I picked up the CS3 Master Collection from my school about a month or so before buying Vegas Pro 8, and I have to say I greatly prefer the latter. It's just so much more intuitive and easy-to-use, while retaining all the necessary features. Also, the inclusion of 5.1 AC3 encoding in Vegas impressed me, whereas the ridiculously expensive Master Collection requires yet another $300 purchase for the Minnetonka SurCode encoder before it can do 5.1.

CS3 has its advantages, of course... After Effects is useful, as it does do alot of stuff Vegas can't. Also, there's the image and print layout applications. I'm glad I've been a Sound Forge owner for a while, though, as that Soundbooth program Adobe stuck into CS3 as a replacement for Audition is embarrassing
farss wrote on 11/14/2007, 8:43 PM
I agree.

But I think it's much harder for us to adjust to different ways of working than it is to work with different tools. We all (myself included) dismiss things way too quickly. It takes time to explore things, find out how best to use them and then settle our brains into a possibly different way of working. With so much distracting hype flowing around today is it any wonder a lot of us shy away from things that might in fact be very good for us.

I'd even put OSX in that category. Every Mac user wants to dazzle me with it. And yet watching a demo of Cinema 4D and AE working together under OSX I started to warm to OSX. All the eye candy was shut down, clearly the guy wasn't even trying to flog OSX and yet there it was.

Bob.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 11/14/2007, 9:30 PM
Bob, you're so biased against Apple/FCP, that it clouds anything constructive you may have to say. Get over it.

I used Premiere for years & hated it. I downloaded the demo of Vegas and RIGHT THEN knew i would enjoy working with it more.

Premiere & Vegas are the only NLE's I've ever used. I can say today that Vegas did everything I wanted to. More then I was lead to believe it could. It was a 180 compared to Premiere that had so many little (*) next to everything stating the situations where things wouldn't work, which was every normal situation i could come up with.

It's like telling me I should like eating olives when I hate the taste, texture & look. I tried eating them, different flavors, over & over & they just suck. I prefer oranges instead.