QuickTime currency
A very interesting piece by the always thoughtful Mark Christiansen on ProVideoCoalition.com about our industry’s dependence on QuickTime in post production. He’s drawn a fascinating parallel between the adoption of the US dollar as the world’s currency and QuickTime as a post currency.
Back in the 90’s I remember lobbying hard, along with many others, for QuickTime to be universally supported on systems from Avid and Discreet and smaller more specialized companies that shunned the format in favor of proprietary formats such as OMF (the “Open Media Framework”) that couldn’t be played back without buying something, and image sequences, which couldn’t be played back in real-time without a specialized hardware/software combination. We were also rooting for QuickTime as the underdog against the other web video formats of the day, the much dreaded Windows Media Real.
Now QuickTime has acquired a position of strength in post, and has made huge inroads into the consumer space, it’s no longer the underdog and post pros are at Apple’s mercy to fix major issues.
In a related area, my Avid colleague, Justin Kwan posted this helpful article on managing QuickTime issues when importing and exporting in an Avid environment.
Avid makes pop culture list
Entertainment Weekly has listed its picks for the 25 innovations with the greatest effect on pop culture since 1983. Avid came in at number 12. (It doesn’t call out a specific Avid technology. Assume it’s the NLE.)
The whole list is here. Avid came in behind YouTube and the iPod, but ahead of the web browser and the PlayStation2. So take it with a grain of salt.
Final Cut Pro HD resource
Philip Hodgetts has released a comprehensive guide for the video pro making the move to high definition production and post. It’s more than a compendium of frame rates, raster sizes, and media formats – though at 200+ pages there’s a good bit of that as well. The HD Survival Handbook is also loaded with advice for the class of 2008 HD debutantes.
Though it’s Final Cut-centric, there’s a lot in it for the Avid and Premiere Pro editors as well. At $15.95, I hope a lot of teachers replace more costly (and far drier) offerings with it. Ken Stone has a more detailed review.
Like most everything Philip posits I have my points of disagreement, but this book is a nice place to begin the conversation.
Corporate reading lists and the 4th of July
You can tell learn a lot about a company by perusing the books recommended and circulated by its executives. Jim Collins’ Good to Great is making the rounds at Avid these days. A pretty good read, its down to earth advice isn’t typical of the business bestsellers lists with their fad of the month approach to management. For those looking to read the tea leaves of their favorite NLE company, Good to Great’s not a bad place to start.
Years ago, as a journalist, I visited Avid and was given a copy of Dealing with Darwin. It’s not a bad book either, but it’s easy enough to finish that book and blame your situation on external factors. I like Good to Great. There’s no wiggle room. Get the right people on board, be willing to face the blunt realities of your situation, concentrate on what you can be the best at, and don’t look for a silver bullet because there won’t be one. Just get to work.
My favorite business book of the month club anecdote happened a few years ago at another company I visited. I ran into the CTO with John P. Kotter’s Leading Change tucked under his arm. “Excellent book. Just what we need.” Well, everyone needs change, I thought. It’s what you change that matters. Leading Change was the main text for a change management class I had taken, so I was well acquainted with it. It’s a typical n-step process book. (Eight in this case.)
The class was better than the book. At the end of the semester one student asked the professor if he believed the book’s approach really worked. “Seven years is a long time to wait for a cultural change to take hold,” she said. The professor replied, “It’s a safe estimate. That’s about how long it takes to cycle through a generation of management.” So either the book works, or no one’s around to remember how they were expected to change.
In this fast-paced era, coming up with a revolutionary new idea and waiting seven years for it to take hold is too risky. By the time you get there, you need to be somewhere else. Good to Great’s evolution over revolution approach strikes me as a more reliable path to success. (Several of the c-level executives in the company reading Leading Change have since been changed.)
What does all this have to with American Independence Day?
Getting back to Good to Great, one of Collins’ observations is that all great companies have core values, and it really isn’t important what those core values are. It’s just that they are shared. I don’t buy it. It seems like an easy way of explaining Philip Morris being ranked as a great company. I don’t care what the numbers say. If the net cost to society exceeds the return to shareholders, a company is not great — in fact it’s not even acceptable. Had shares in the Medllín Cartel been traded on the NYSE, and the numbers were solid, perhaps Collins would have considered it for inclusion in his study.
Core values do matter. For all its faults, and all its failings, the United States of America has succeeded and maintained its place because of those core values stated in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
At any given moment in our history we might not all agree on exactly what the words mean and how they should be implemented. In fact the people who wrote this document didn’t invite women, slaves, and Native Americans to the party. But we all agree that it is what America stands for. Two hundred years from now, America will still be here because of those core values. Phillip Morris won’t.
