FCP 6 and RED?
Think Secret’s reporting on FCP 6. It’s not a huge leap of faith to predict the announcement of Final Cut Pro 6 at NAB.
Where it gets interesting is that once again rumors are swirling over an Extreme version of the NLE capable of handling a 4K workflow. With Graeme Nattress and Ted Schilowitz, the RED team is loaded with FCP expertise and Apple connections. I’m expecting a RED-capable 4K hardware announcement, perhaps from AJA this April.
I’ve taken a lot of heat for my lack of enthusiasm for RED. For the record, I expect it to ship. I expect it to live up to its promises. And I expect it to meet its targeted price point. What I don’t expect is for a $35,000 camera kit to create a revolution.
The bottleneck for indies is not the cost of acquisition. It’s distribution, distribution, and distribution. Sure National Geographic and Discovery won’t accept images from lesser cameras, but so what? As many readers point out, Nat Geo and Discovery don’t take spec work either. So to get into their distribution pipeline, you need a deal in place and thus you would have the budget to shoot with the camera of their choice. Realistically, even if Nat Geo and Discovery fling open their doors to indies, how big a market is that? (They won’t.) Hardly the stuff of revolutions.
My point never was that RED would not be superior, just that it’s overkill for a lot, though admittedly not all, the people queued up for one.
RED may make inroads into feature work. In fact it’s likely, but that’s not going to be revolutionary. Without getting into a graduate lecture on the price elasticity of demand suffice it to say that since catering costs more than camera rental for so many features, a lower cost camera will not change the industry or its output significantly. It will make RED fabulously successful, but again the indies lined up for one now won’t benefit.
The only puzzle to me: Why did Mr. Jannard choose to enter the market this way? He’s experienced at building premium products and selling them at premium prices. Oakley took sunglasses and made them “thermo nuclear protection.” And it worked. I just laid out $250 to keep my eyes radiation free on the highway. Why be a price buster? He’s not Crazy Eddie. His genius is finding exactly what people want and extracting exactly as much money as they are willing to pay.
The man’s smarter than me, so who am I to question him? Maybe he found the high end of the industry too snobby and cliquish and decided to enter from the bottom. I dunno.
Put succinctly, my issue’s not with RED or the RED team. It’s with the nitwits who think that the lack of a 4K camera is what’s been holding back independents from greater glory. A very few indies will benefit from RED. Most will continue to have problems landing a distributor, even the best camera won’t fix that. Most would benefit more from a viable IP delivery strategy than from a new camera.
I wish I’d put down a deposit last April. It won’t revolutionize my business, but it will be a joy working with its images.
Trip down memory lane
Someone posted the Avid/1 promo video to YouTube.
We got to beta test Avid/1 at WGBH in 1990.
Listen to the interview clips of editors extolling the virtues of a timeline. It’s hard to remember a time when a visual representation of the cut was considered revolutionary.
The video quality of the Avid/1 material in this video is much better than I remember it. I used to have trouble determining if dialog was in sync.
Some advice for Avid
For the past month I’ve been editing a series for WGBH. I’ve lived dangerously, opting to cut a multicamera program on Media Composer 2.7 beta software. That’s how much I love Media Composer. It’s in public beta, so I guess I can go public.
The software’s been phenomenal. A couple of bugs here and there, but nothing has slowed me down for more than a few minutes a week. I’d always been luke warm towards Xpress Pro, and remain so. It’s a nice editor, like that girl mom wanted you to date is nice. Editing’s a sexy profession. We want sexy, not nice. Final Cut Pro’s sexy. (It started out sexy in that cheap way, but now it’s respectable enough to marry.)
I cut my teeth on Media Composer, and I’ve always disliked where Xpress Pro cut corners – no center duration, no clip colors, only a single line of data above the source and edit monitors, and the list goes on.
I’m really late to my editor with my review of Media Composer software, so I won’t steal the magazine’s thunder here, but I will say my reunion with Media Composer has been a lot more successful than, say, Simon and Garfunkel’s attempts.
It’s true. I really love Media Composer, and that’s why I’m so peeved. Avid, it’s time to retire Xpress Pro. It’s a dud. Do like Apple. The Final Cut Pro interface is the same everywhere I go. I can be on a tricked out AJA system doing 2K work, or I can be on a DV-only laptop – and the interface is the same. No painful relearning of eccentricities and working around software limitations.
It’s 2007. The age of the $5,000 NLE is gone – a dinosaur like the Hummer H1. Kill Xpress Pro, sell Media Composer software-only for about $1,500, and recapture some of that market share.
