Just want to express the heartbreak we feel about the LA fires.
NAB 2022: We’re going! Here’s a Free Guest Code Pass if you’re going too!
[ Updated NAB 2023 page is here: https://blog.digitalanarchy.com/trade-shows/nab-2023-exhibits-pass-code/, But we’ll be in booth N1217 and the 2023 code is LV98226 ] Well, it, appears NAB is actually on for sure this time! We will have a booth there (N4806), we’ll be showing off some new products as well as the usual suspects: Beauty Box, Flicker Free, Transcriptive Rough Cutter, PowerSearch and more. AND… Are you going? If you’ve got 30 seconds, please take this very short survey. Just be nice to know who else is going (or not): https://survey.zohopublic.com/zs/eVD7PA Of course, if you are heading to Vegas, here’s the Guest Code for a free pass: LV98226 You can Register here:https://amplify.nabshow.com/nab-show-sign-up/ We are looking forward to seeing everyone, giving out some t-shirts and having a drink with y’all! I have a feeling that parties are going to be more of a thing this year than they have been in a while. As mentioned, we’ll be in booth N4806. Doing a sort of mini-Plugin Pavilion with Revision Effects and Left Angle in 4807 and 4808. We’re in the front of North Hall (weird!) as South Hall is no more. Physically it’s going to be a somewhat smaller show just due to less real estate. But it seems there’s a good amount of companies showing up to Exhibit.
Why we charge upgrade fees
Most of the updates we release are free for users that have purchased the most recent version of the plugin. However, because we are not subscription based (we still do that old fashioned perpetual license thing), if you don’t own the latest version of the plugin… you have to upgrade to it. It requires a TON of work to keep software working with all the changes Apple, Adobe, Nvidia and everyone else keeps making. Most of this work we do for free because they’re small incremental changes. Every time you see Beauty Box v4.0.1 or 4.0.7 or 4.2.4 (the current one)… you can assume a lot of work went into that and you don’t have to pay anything. However, eventually the changes add up or Apple (most of the time it’s Apple) does some crazy thing that means we need to rewrite large portions of the plug-in. In either case, we rev the version number (i.e. 4.x to 5.0) and an upgrade is required. We do not go back and ‘fix’ older versions of the software. We only update the most recent one. Such is the downside of Perpetual licenses. You can use that license forever, but if your host app or OS changes and that change breaks the version of the plugin you have… you need to upgrade to get a fix. If one of your clients comes to you with a video you did for them in HD, and says ‘hey, I need this in 4K’. Would you redo the video for free? Probably not. They have a perpetual license for the HD version. It doesn’t entitle them to new versions of the video forever. We want to support our customers. The reason we develop this stuff is because it’s awesome to see the cool things you all do with what we throw out there. If we didn’t have to do any work to maintain the software, we wouldn’t charge upgrade fees. Unfortunately, it is a lot of work. We want to support you, but if we go out of business, that’s probably not going to benefit either of us. Apple may say it only takes two hours to recompile for Silicon and that may be true. But to go from that to a stable plugin that can be used in a professional environment and support different host apps and graphics cards and all that… it’s more like two months or more. So, that’s why we charge upgrade fees. You’re paying for all the coding, design, and testing that goes into creating a professional product that you can rely on. Not too mention the San Francisco based support team to help you out with all of it. We’re here to help you be successful. The flipside is we need to do what’s necessary to make sure we’re successful ourselves.
NAB And The Coronavirus, Covid-19
This was originally posted in the Digital Anarchy newsletter, but thought it was worth reposting. One change regarding my rant below about NAB organizers… they’ve removed the bizarre claim that free registrations somehow are a proxy for attendance, BUT have now replaced it with a stat that 96% of exhibitors will be there. This is total spin and BS. Exhibitors don’t get a refund if they cancel, so they have little incentive to tell NAB they aren’t coming. For example, Digital Anarchy is probably not going, but we haven’t ‘cancelled’. There’s an outside chance we’ll send a couple people but it’s not likely. But there’s no benefit in tell NAB we’re not going. We just haven’t shipped anything or paid for any booth expenses (carpet, electricity, etc.). So, no, 96% of the exhibitors will not be at the show. Original post: With Adobe, Avid, AJA, Ross Video and others cancelling their presence at NAB, I think the writing is on the wall. Especially with virus cases continuing to rise exponentially (300+ on Friday, 600+ on Monday). However, for those of you looking for a bit more info, here are the results from the NAB/Covid-19 survey I posted last week. We got about 200 responses, so it’s not a huge sample of NAB’s 90000 attendees, but should give you some insight on how folks are feeling about it. Keep in mind the vast majority of these responses came before Adobe announced their decision. (and our newsletter has a lot of Adobe users, so that might have changed some people from ‘on the fence’ to ‘No’.) Judging from the survey, it appears attendance would be down by 25% or more. Of the folks that were still on the fence, 60% cited ‘Significant number of Exhibitors cancelling’ as a reason they’d choose not to go. So the additional cancellation announcements are a big deal. Here’s a summary of the survey responses, so you can read what you want into the data: NAB/Covid-19 Survey Results Here are the comments from the ‘any other thoughts’ question. It’s interesting to see what folks think about the virus, why they aren’t or are going, and how important NAB is to them. Respondants Comments on NAB/Covid-19 Some notes about the survey itself: – If someone answered ‘No’ to ‘were you going to NAB before Covid-19’, then they were thanked and the survey ended. I was mostly concerned with the opinion of folks that were planning on going to the show. – I didn’t think to include the ‘Country’ field until after sending the newsletter out. So only about of a third of respondants answered. It’s mostly US based and I’m guessing that applies to the survey overall. – For the ‘Travel’ question, I didn’t consider folks that were driving. But it’s notable that 67% of respondants had not booked a flight. Flights are usually non-refundable, so it’s a commitment. If you book a hotel through NAB, you can cancel until 3 days before the show with no penalty… so it’s not really a commitment. Some comments on the comments. Why do I take issue with the way NAB is handling this? Because they’ve done almost nothing other than announce they’ll have extra hand sanitizer. What they have not done: – Explain to exhibitors proactively what the cancellation process is and what happens if NAB cancels. – They have not provided any guidance about what metrics they’re looking at and what would have to happen for them to cancel the show. It’s been nothing but ‘the show’s on!’ and ‘look, registrations are the same as always!’. You know, because everyone that signs up for a free exhibits pass is definitely going to show up. It’s not a good proxy for attendance. Just look at the survey results. – They have not made any concessions to exhibitors (or attendees) that don’t want to attend due to health reasons. Despite NAB’s encouragement to not come if you’re sick… it’s just lip service. If you don’t show up, you still pay for your exhibit space. No partial refund, nothing. So exhibitors have an economic incentive to show up sick or not. There’s an overreaction to the virus: Possibly, to some degree, but it’s not just about you. It’s true, you might be fine but who will you potentially give it to? It appears to be quite lethal to folks over 60 or people with otherwise compromised health. It’s probably good that the media has been warning about it, otherwise the numbers would be far worse than they are. What NAB means to us: It’s clear that for many people, NAB is more about people than seeing new, shiny things. So if there are less people, it really eliminates a lot of incentive to go. So much of NAB is sitting in a grungy bar with a client or friend. That’s the heart of the show. (and seriously, does anyone really think Vegas has found God and suddenly discovered cleanliness? The phrase ‘lipstick on a pig’ comes to mind with all the talk of extra hand sanitizer.) What To Do At this point I think NAB should cancel. The number of virus cases are growing exponentially. Exhibitors are pulling out. Attendance is going to be down (despite NAB staff apparently being in denial), and the more exhibitors that pull out, the lower attendance is going to be. Admittedly, it’s not quite as clear of a case as SXSW, where the whole point of the show is to go see bands in packed clubs/bars. However, a large portion of the value of NAB is the after hours parties and gatherings. Taking a quick walk around the tradeshow floor, doing a meeting or two and then quarantining yourself in your hotel room is hardly an experience worth the travel costs in most cases. With Adobe pulling out, it’s likely we will not go. The main value of doing the show is talking to customers at the booth and the after hours events. If few people are at
Sometimes we just need to fix flicker it in post. And that’s ok!
It’s been 5 years since we released Flicker Free, and we can for sure say flickering from artificial lights is still one of the main reasons creatives download our flicker removal plugin. From music videos and reality-based videos to episodics on major networks, small productions to feature-long films, we’ve seen strobing caused by LED and fluorescent lights. It happens all the time and we are glad our team could help fix flickering and see those productions look their best as they get distributed to the public. Planning a shoot so you can have control of your camera settings, light setup and color balance is still definitely the best way to film no matter what type of videos you are making. However, flickering is a difficult problem to predict and sometimes we just can’t see it happening on set. Maybe it was a light way in the background or an old fluorescent that seemed fine on the small on-set monitor but looked horrible on the 27″ monitor in the edit bay. Of course, in a perfect world we would take our time to shoot a few minutes of test footage, use a full size monitor to check what the footage looks like, match the frame rate of the artificial light to the frame rate of the camera and make sure the shutter speed is a multiple/division of the AC frequency of the country we are shooting in. Making absolutely sure the image looks sharp and is free of flicker! But we all know this is often not possible. In these situations, post-production tools can save the day and there’s nothing wrong about that! Travel videos are the perfect example of how sometimes we need to surrender to post-production plugins to have a high-quality finished video. Recently, Handcraft Creative co-owner Raymond Friesen shot beautiful images from pyramids in Egypt. He was fascinated by the scenery but only had a Sony A73 and a 16-70mm lens with him. After working on set for 5 years, with very well planned shoots, he knew the images wouldn’t be perfect but decided to film anyways. Yes, the end result was lots of flicker from older LED lights in the tombs. Nothing that Flicker Free couldn’t fix in post. Here’s a before and after clip: Spontaneous filmmaking is certainly more likely to need post-production retouches, but we’ve also seen many examples of scripted projects that need to be rescued by Flicker Free. Filmmaker Emmanuel Tenenbaum talked to us about two instances where his large experience with short films was not able to stop LED flicker from showing up on his footage. He purchased the plugin a few years ago for “I’m happy to see you”, and used it again to be able to finish and distribute Two Dollars (Deux Dollars), a comedy selected in 85 festivals around the world, winner of 8 awards, broadcasted on a dozen TV channels worldwide and chosen as Vimeo Staff Pick Premiere of the week. Curious why he got flicker while filming Two Dollars (Deux Dollars)? Tenenbaum talked to us about tight deadlines and production challenges in this user story! Those are just a few examples of how artificial lights flickering couldn’t be avoided. Our tech support team often receives footage from music video clips, marketing commercials, and sports footage, and seeing Flicker Free remove very annoying, sometimes difficult, flicker in the post has been awesome. We posted some other user story examples on our website so check them out! And If you have some awful flickering footage that Flicker Free helped fix we’d love to see it and give you a shout out on our Social Media channels. Email press@digitalanarchy.com with a link to your video clip!
In Memory of Norman Hollyn
First time I really had a conversation with Norm Hollyn, we were sitting down during ‘Casino Night’ at the Editors Retreat talking about depression. While it might seem kind of depressing to be having a deep conversation about depression while everyone else is having fun losing fake money, it was far from it. I had originally met him the day before as both of us were on a panel discussing the future of editing. I was sort of representing A.I., there were a few people from other companies representing other technologies and I think Norm was on the panel as the token flesh and blood editor. It was a great discussion and Norm had a very grounded and very positive view of how technology shapes filmmaking. I think he probably had to be that way. He had to prepare his USC students (he was Professor of Cinematic Arts at USC) not only how to create compelling films but also how to deal with any technology changes that were coming. Technology may come and it may go, but you still need to know how to tell a good story. As some of you know, I wrote a blog post about my depression and my struggles with it. I’ve had many people email me about it, both those who struggle with depression and those that it helped them wrap their head around the disease. It seems to have had a very positive impact. Norm had a lot to do with how that post came to be. I’m pretty open about my depression and am generally happy to talk about it (unless I’m in the middle of it). I don’t feel remaining silent about it helps anyone and had been mulling over the idea of a blog post for a while. However it’s one thing to discuss it with friends and acquaintances in person and another to put it out for the whole world to see in a blog post. I initially sat down with Norm talking about some of the topics of the prior day’s panel discussion, but somehow got onto the topic of depression. Being open about it, I started talking about my experience with it. He asked a lot of questions about it and, I think, got more detailed answers and a better understanding of the disease than he had previously. The end result of the conversation was an invitation to speak to his USC classes about what it’s like being creative and dealing with depression or other mental health issues. Encouraging me to speak to other creatives about something that was clearly not an uncommon problem. So in the Fall of last year I went down to USC and talked to both his graduate and undergraduate students. Both talks went really well, especially with the grad students. Perhaps because it was a smaller class, it ended up with a lot of back and forth conversation. Almost a group therapy session, as most of the students related their own struggles with depression or anxiety or whatever. It went well enough that after he returned from sabbatical this Spring, we planned on doing it once every semester. Unfortunately, as you may know, on March 19th he unexpectedly passed away in Japan, spending some time there as a guest lecturer. Every once a while you come across someone and you’re like ‘I’ve got to get to know this person better’. I was truly looking forward to spending more time with him, getting to know him better, and further fleshing out how to talk to creative students about depression and mental health. The blog post was a direct result of my conversation with him and my talk with his students. I had been on the fence about being so public, but his encouragement gave me some confidence that it was the right thing to do. And speaking to his classes really confirmed it was the right thing to do. He will be missed. He was a guiding light to many students and other filmmakers. In talking to other people in the industry since his death, I’ve come to realize how many lives he touched in a positive way. I think most of us can only aspire to that. And I have no doubt that I share something with many people who knew him. His unabashed encouragement to tell my story. For that I am eternally grateful. For those interested, here’s a link to the post on creatives and depression.
Artificial Intelligence is The New VR
Couple things stood out to me at NAB. 1) Practically every company exhibiting was talking about A.I.-something. 2) VR seemed to have disappeared from vendor booths. The last couple years at NAB, VR was everywhere. The Dell booth had a VR simulator, Intel had a VR simulator, booths had Oculuses galore and you could walk away with an armful of cardboard glasses… this year, not so much. Was it there? Sure, but it was hardly to be seen in booths. It felt like the year 3D died. There was a pavilion, there were sessions, but nobody on the show floor was making a big deal about it. In contrast, it seemed like every vendor was trying to attach A.I. to their name, whether they had an A.I. product or not. Not to mention, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Speechmatics and every other big vendor of A.I. cloud services having large booths touting how their A.I. was going to change video production forever. I’ve talked before about the limitations of A.I. and I think a lot of what was talked about at NAB was really over promising what A.I. can do. We spent most of the six months after releasing Transcriptive 1.0 developing non-A.I. features to help make the A.I. portion of the product more useful. The release were announcing today and the next release coming later this month will focus on getting around A.I. transcripts completely by importing human transcripts. There’s a lot of value in A.I. It’s an important part of Transcriptive and for a lot use cases it’s awesome. There are just also a lot of limitations. It’s pretty common that you run into the A.I. equivalent of the Uncanny Valley (a CG character that looks *almost* human but ends up looking unnatural and creepy), where A.I. gets you 95% of the way there but it’s more work than it’s worth to get the final 5%. It’s better to just not use it. You just have to understand when that 95% makes your life dramatically easier and when it’s like running into a brick wall. Part of my goal, both as a product designer and just talking about it, is to help folks understand where that line in the A.I. sand is. I also don’t buy into this idea that A.I. is on an exponential curve and it’s just going to get endlessly better, obeying Moore’s law like the speed of processors. When we first launched Transcriptive, we felt it would replace transcriptionists. We’ve been disabused of that notion. 😉 The reality is that A.I. is making transcriptionists more efficient. Just as we’ve found Transcriptive to be making video editors more efficient. We had a lot of folks coming up to us at NAB this year telling us exactly that. (It was really nice to hear. 🙂 However, much of the effectiveness of Transcriptive comes more from the tools that we’ve built around the A.I. portion of the product. Those tools can work with transcripts and metadata regardless of whether they’re A.I. or human generated. So while we’re going to continue to improve what you can do with A.I., we’re also supporting other workflows. Over the next couple months you’re going to see a lot of announcements about Transcriptive. Our goal is to leverage the parts of A.I. that really work for video production by building tools and features that amplify those strengths, like PowerSearch our new panel for searching all the metadata in your Premiere project, and build bridges to other technology that works better in other areas, such as importing human created transcripts. Should be a fun couple months, stay tuned! btw… if you’re interested in joining the PowerSearch beta, just email us at cs@digitalanarchy.com. Addendum: Just to be clear, in one way A.I. is definitely NOT VR. It’s actually useful. A.I. has a lot of potential to really change video production, it’s just a bit over-hyped right now. We, like some other companies, are trying to find the best way to incorporate it into our products because once that is figured out, it’s likely to make editors much more efficient and eliminate some tasks that are total drudgery. OTOH, VR is a parlor trick that, other than some very niche uses, is going to go the way of 3D TV and won’t change anything. Jim Tierney Chief Executive Anarchist Digital Anarchy
Artificial Intelligence vs. Video Editors
With Transcriptive, our new tool for doing automated transcriptions, we’ve dove into the world of A.I. headfirst. So I’m pretty familiar with where the state of industry is right now. We’ve been neck deep in it for the last year. A.I. is definitely changing how editors get transcripts and search video for content. Transcriptive demonstrates that pretty clearly with text. Searching via object recognition is something that also is already happening. But what about actual video editing? One of the problems A.I. has is finishing. Going the last 10% if you will. For example, speech-to-text engines, at best, have an accuracy rate of about 95% or so. This is about on par with the average human transcriptionist. For general purpose recordings, human transcriptionists SHOULD be worried. But for video editing, there are some differences, which are good news. First, and most importantly, errors tend to be cumulative. So if a computer is going to edit a video, at the very least, it needs to do the transcription and it needs to recognize the imagery. (we’ll ignore other considerations like style, emotion, story for the moment) Speech recognition is at best 95%, object recognition is worse. The more layers of AI you have, usually those errors will multiply (in some cases there might be improvement though) . While it’s possible automation will be able to produce a decent rough cut, these errors make it difficult to see automation replacing most of the types of videos that pro editors are typically employed for. Secondly, if the videos are being done for humans, frequently the humans don’t know what they want. Or at least they’re not going to be able to communicate it in such a way that a computer will understand and be able to make changes. If you’ve used Alexa or Echo, you can see how well A.I. understands humans. Lots of situations, especially literal ones (find me the best restaurant), it works fine, lots of other situations, not so much. Many times as an editor, the direction you get from clients is subtle or you have to read between the lines and figure out what they want. It’s going to be difficult to get A.I.s to take the way humans usually describe what they want, figure out what they actually want and make those changes. Third… then you get into the whole issue of emotion and storytelling, which I don’t think A.I. will do well anytime soon. The Economist recently had an amusing article where it let an A.I. write the article. The result is here. Very good at mimicking the style of the Economist but when it comes to putting together a coherent narrative… ouch. It’s Not All Good News There are already phone apps that do basic automatic editing. These are more for consumers that want something quick and dirty. For most of the type of stuff professional editors get paid for, it’s unlikely what I’ve seen from the apps will replace humans any time soon. Although, I can see how the tech could be used to create rough cuts and the like. Also, for some types of videos, wedding or music videos perhaps, you can make a pretty solid case that A.I. will be able to put something together soon that looks reasonably professional. You need training material for neural networks to learn how to edit videos. Thanks to YouTube, Vimeo and the like, there is an abundance of training material. Do a search for ‘wedding video’ on YouTube. You get 52,000,000 results. 2.3 million people get married in the US every year. Most of the videos from those weddings are online. I don’t think finding a few hundred thousand of those that were done by a professional will be difficult. It’s probably trivial actually. Same with music videos. There IS enough training material for the A.I.s to learn how to do generic editing for many types of videos. For people that want to pay $49.95 to get their wedding video edited, that option will be there. Probably within a couple years. Have your guests shoot video, upload it and you’re off and running. You’ll get what you pay for, but for some people it’ll be acceptable. Remember, A.I. is very good at mimicking. So the end result will be a very cookie cutter wedding video. However, since many wedding videos are pretty cookie cutter anyways… at the low end of the market, an A.I. edited video may be all ‘Bridezilla on A Budget’ needs. And besides, who watches these things anyways? Let The A.I Do The Grunt Work, Not The Editing The losers in the short term may be assistant editors. Many of the tasks A.I. is good for… transcribing, searching for footage, etc.. is now typically given to assistants. However, it may simply change the types of tasks assistant editors are given. There’s a LOT of metadata that needs to be entered and wrangled. While A.I. is already showing up in many aspects of video production, it feels like having it actually do the editing is quite a ways off. I can see creating A.I. tools that help with editing: Rough cut creation, recommending color corrections or B roll selection, suggesting changes to timing, etc. But there’ll still need to be a person doing the edit.
De-flickering Bix Pix’s Stop Motion Animation Show ‘Tumble Leaf’ with Flicker Free
Like us on Facebook! One of the challenges with stop motion animation is flicker. Lighting varies slightly for any number of reasons causing the exposure of every frame to be slightly different. We were pretty excited when Bix Pix Entertainment bought a bunch of Flicker Free licenses (our deflicker plugin) for Adobe After Effects. They do an amazing kids show for Amazon called Tumble Leaf that’s all stop motion animation. It’s won multiple awards, including an Emmy for best animated preschool show. Many of us, if not most of us, that do VFX software are wannabe (or just flat out failed 😉 animators. We’re just better at the tech than the art. (exception to the rule: Bob Powell, one of our programmers, who was a TD at Laika and worked on Box Trolls among other things) So we love stop motion animation. And Bix Pix does an absolutely stellar job with Tumble Leaf. The animation, the detailed set design, the characters… are all off the charts. I’ll let them tell it in their own words (below). But check out the 30 second deflicker example below (view at full screen as the Vimeo compression makes the flicker hard to see). I’ve also embedded their ‘Behind The Scenes’ video at the end of the article. If you like stop motion, you’ll really love the ‘Behind the Scenes’. From the Bix Pix folks themselves… breaking down how they use Flicker Free in their Adobe After Effects workflow: ——————————————————————- Using Digital Anarchy’s Flicker Free at Bix Pix Bix Pix Entertainment is an animation studio that specializes in the art of stop-motion animation, and is known for their award-winning show Tumble Leaf on Amazon Prime. It is not uncommon for an animator to labor for days sometimes weeks on a single stop motion shot, working frame by frame. With this process, it is natural to have some light variations between each exposure, commonly referred to as ‘flicker’ – There are many factors that can cause the shift in lighting. For instance, a studio light or lights may blow out or solar flare. Voltage and/ power surges can brighten or dim lights over a long shot. Certain types of lights, poor lighting equipment, camera malfunctions or incorrect camera settings. Sometimes an animator might wear a white t-shirt unintentionally adding fill to the shot or accidentally standing in front of a light casting a shadow from his or her body. The variables are endless. Luckily these days compositors and VFX artists have fantastic tools to help remove these unwanted light shifts. Removing unwanted light shifts and flicker is a very important and necessary first step when working with stop-motion footage. Unless by chance it’s an artistic decision to leave that tell-tale flicker in there. But that is a rare decision that does not come about often. Here at Bix Pix we use Adobe After Effects for all of our compositing and clean-up work. Having used 4 different flicker removal plugins over the years, we have to say Digital Anarchy’s flicker Free is the fastest, easiest and most effective flicker removal software we have come across. And also quite affordable. During a season of Tumble Leaf we will process between 1600 and 2000 shots averaging between 3 seconds and up to a couple minutes in length. That is an average of about 5 hours of footage per season, almost three times the length of a feature film. With a tight schedule of less than a year and a small team of ten or so VFX artists and compositors. Nearly every shot has an instance of flicker free applied to it as an effect. The plugin is so fast, simple to use and reliable. De-flickering can be done in almost real time. Digital Anarchy’s Flicker free has saved us thousands of hours of work and reduced overtime and crunch time delays. This not only saves money but frees up artists to do more elaborate effects that we could not do before due to time constraints, allowing them to focus on making their work stand out even more. If you are shooting stop-motion animation and require flicker free footage, this is the plugin to use. ———————————————– For a breakdown of how they do Tumble Leaf, you should definitely check out the Behind the Scenes video! I even got to meet the lead character, Fig! My niece and nephew (4 and 6) were very impressed. 🙂 Cheers, Jim Tierney Chief Executive Anarchist Digital Anarchy
Thoughts on The Mac Pro and FCP X
There’s been some talk of the eminent demise of the Mac Pro. The Trash Can is getting quite old in the tooth… it was overpriced and underpowered to begin with and is now pretty out of date. Frankly it’d be nice if Apple just killed it and moved on. It’s not where they make their money and it’s clear they’re not that interested in making machines for the high end video production market. At the very least, it would mean we (Digital Anarchy) wouldn’t have to buy Trash Can 2.0 just for testing plugins. I’m all for not buying expensive machines we don’t have any use for. But if they kill off the Mac Pro, what does that mean for FCP X? Probably nothing. It’s equally clear the FCP team still cares about pro video. There were multiple folks from the FCP team at NAB this year, talking to people and showing off FCP at one of the sub-conferences. They also continue to add pro-level features. That said, they may care as much (maybe even more) about the social media creators… folks doing YouTube, Facebook, and other types of social media creation. There are a lot of them. A lot more than folks doing higher end video stuff, and these creators are frequently using iPhones to capture and the Mac to edit. They aren’t ‘pro editors’ and I think that demographic makes up a good chunk of FCP users. It’s certainly the folks that Apple, as a whole, is going after in a broader sense. If you don’t think these folks are a significant focus for Apple overall, just look at how much emphasis they’ve put on the camera in the iPhone 6 & 7… 240fps video, dual lenses, RAW shooting, etc. To say nothing of all the billboards with nothing but a photo ‘taken with the iPhone’. Everyone is a media creator now and ‘Everyone’ is more important to Apple than ‘Pro Editors’. The iMacs are more than powerful enough for those folks and it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple just focused on them. Perhaps coming out with a couple very powerful iMacs/MacBook Pros as a nod to professionals, but letting the MacPro fade away. Obviously, as with all things Apple, this is just speculation. However, given the lack of attention professionals have gotten over the last half decade, maybe it’s time for Apple to just admit they have other fish to fry.
Is The iPhone A Real Camera?
For whatever reason I’ve seen several articles/posts over the last few days about whether you can be a photo/videographer with a camera phone. Usually the argument is that just because the iPhone (or whatever) can take the occasional good video/pictures, it doesn’t make you a good videographer. Of course not. Neither does a 5Dm4 or an Arri Alexa. But what if you have a good eye and are a decent videographer? I think a lot of the hand wringing comes from people that have spent a lot of money on gear and are seeing people get great shots with their phone. It’s not going to change. The cameras in a lot of phones are really good and if you have a bit of skill, it can go a long way. You can check out this blog post comparing the iPhone’s slow motion video capabilities to a Sony FS700. The 10x price difference doesn’t beget a 10x quality difference. There is obviously a place for long or fast lenses that you need a real camera for. There are definitely shots you won’t get with a phone. However, there are definitely shots you can get with a phone that you can’t get with your big, fancy camera. Partially just because you ALWAYS have your phone and partially because of the size. Sometimes the ability to spontaneously shoot is a huge advantage. Then you add something like Dave Basaluto’s iOgrapher device and you’ve got a video camera capable of some great stuff, especially for stock or B roll. There are issues for sure. Especially with these devices trying to shoot 4K, like a GoPro. It doesn’t matter how well lit and framed the shot is because it’s often got massive compression artifacts. Overall though, the cameras are impressive and if you’ve got the skills, you can consistently get good to great shots. What’s this got to do with Digital Anarchy? Absolutely nothing. We just like cool cameras no matter what form they take. 🙂 (and, yes, I’m looking forward to getting the new 5D mark4. It was finally time to upgrade the Digital Anarchy DSLR)
VR: Because Porn! (and Siggraph and other stuff)
Over the last few months I’ve been to NAB, E3, and Siggraph and seen a bunch of VR stuff. Most VR people with their headsets One panel discussion about VR filmmaking was notable for the amount of time spent talking about all the problems VR has and how once they solve this or that major, non-trivial problem, VR will be awesome! One of these problems is that, as one of the panelist pointed out, anything over 6-8 minutes doesn’t seem to work. I’m supposed to run out and buy VR headsets for a bunch of shorts? Seriously? E3 is mostly about big game companies and AAA game titles. However, if you go to a dark, back corner of the show floor you’ll find a few rows of small 10×20 booths. It was here that I finally found a VR experience that lived up to expectations! Porn. Yes, there was a booth at E3 showing hardcore VR porn. (I wonder if they told E3 what they were showing?) One of my favorite statistics ever is that adult, pay-per-view movies in hotel rooms are watched, on average, for about 12 minutes. Finally! A use case for VR that matches up perfectly to its many limitations. You don’t need to worry about the narrative and no one is going to watch it for more than 12 minutes. Perfect. I’m sure the hot, Black Friday special at Walmart will be the Fleshlight/Oculus Rift bundle. Surely There Are Other Uses Besides Porn? Ok, sure, there are. I just haven’t found them to be compelling enough to justify all the excitement VR is getting. One booth at Siggraph was showing training on how to fix damaged power lines. This included a pole with sensors on the end of it that gave haptic (vibrations) feedback to the trainee and controlled the virtual pole in the VR environment. There are niche uses like this that are probably viable. There are, of course, games, which are VRs best hope for getting into the mainstream. These are MUCH more compelling in the wide open space of a tradeshow than I think they’re going to be in someone’s living room. For the rank and file gamer that doesn’t want to spend $8K on a body suit to run around their living room in… sitting on the couch with a headset is probably going to be less than an awesome experience after the novelty wears off. (and we don’t want to see the average gamer in a body suit. Really. We don’t.) And then there are VR films. There was a pretty good 5 minute film called Giant being shown at Siggraph. Basically the story of parents and an 8 year old daughter in a basement in a war zone. You sat on a stool that could vibrate, strapped on the headset and you were sitting in a corner of this basement. It was pretty intense. However, the vibrating stool that allowed you to feel the bombs being dropped probably added more to the experience than VR. I think it probably would have been more intense as a regular film. The problem with VR is that you can’t do close-ups and multiple cameras. So a regular film would have been able to capture the emotions of the actors better. And it’s VR, so my tendency was to look around the basement rather than to focus on what was happening in the scene. There was very little interesting in the basement besides the actors, so it was just a big distraction. So if your idea of a good time is watching game cinematics, which is what it felt like, then VR films are for you. And that was a good VR experience. Most VR film stuff I’ve seen are either 1) incredibly bland without a focus point or 2) uses the simulation of an intimate space to shock you. (Giant was guilty of this to some degree) The novelty of this is going to wear off as fast as a 3D axe thrown at the screen. There are good uses for VR. It just doesn’t justify the hype and excitement people are projecting onto it. For all the money that’s pouring into it, it’s disappointing that the demos most companies are still showing (and expecting you to be excited about) are just 360 environments. “But Look! There are balloons falling from the sky! Isn’t it cool?!” Uh… yeah. Got any porn?
