Where Cisco wants to take video
Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital, makers of the Flip video cameras came as little surprise to the digerati. What Linksys was to wireless home networking, the Flip is to consumer video. Good enough, simple, and inexpensive.
Cisco made its name as a big iron networking powerhouse. With its heavily publicized purchase of Linksys the company bought its way into home networking. And with its less heavily publicized acquisition of set top box maker Scientific Atlanta, Cisco gained control of another digital gateway into the home.
So why would a networking company want into the acquisition business? GigaOm has written extensively on the purchase – the reasoning behind it and whether Cisco overspent.
Cisco is just the company to make video accessible to all. Every household has at least one camcorder. Mostly it sits idle. Acquiring the video is easy enough – hit record just as granny is about to blow out the candles or the cat is about to flush the toilet. The moment can now live forever on tape, disk, or flash media. Therein lies the problem. It’s cumbersome to do anything with it after the material has been recorded. Cuing up the media to show to family and friends around the flat panel is a pain in the neck. Editing and distributing the video online is a similar pain, just head south 36 inches.
The Flip camera solves half the problem. With its USB port, the camera can attach itself to any Mac or PC. Now comes the scary part for a guy who makes his living designing editing software… The Flip camera comes preloaded with all the editing software the consumer needs. Plug the camera into the computer, and it prompts the user to install all the necessary software to edit and publish his video online. The FlipShare software doesn’t compare to Pinnacle Studio or iMovie, but it doesn’t have to. It’s so easy that people will actually use it.
Cisco has the capability to solve the rest of the problem. As GigaOm noted, it can eliminate the computer. Shoot, push to the cloud, and edit on the cloud. No Macs. No PCs. What Polaroid did for photography 50-some years ago, Cisco can do for videography. It can make it instant, inexpensive, and fun.
Cameras preloaded with editing software will be a minor disruption to business as usual. Editing on the cloud is where this is all going, and the industry will be turned on its head.
Running Avid software on legacy machines
The folks at Genius DV posted this neat little trick to enable editors to run Avid Media Composer on PCs with unsupported audio cards.
For mission critical work I’m hesitant to use unsupported configurations, but sometimes I just want to get a jump on things and start logging on an old laptop.
Back to school
The katydids are out. As a kid the sound was the harbinger of the end of summer. To teachers their song is “write your syllabus.” This year is very different. Working at Avid will surely have a profound effect on how I teach FT504-Video Post Production I. Previously I’d always taught the class, quoting my lecture notes, as “Avid-centric, but Final Cut tolerant.” Meaning I used Avid Media Composer for classroom demos, but would answer Final Cut Pro questions.
Beyond loyalty to my new employer, and pride in my new position as Senior Product Designer for Media Composer, my Avid knowledge is deeper than ever, so I’m obviously tempted to make it an Avid-only curriculum. I can teach my students some pretty neat Media Composer tricks. But is that the right thing to do? Should I put more focus on Avid just because I know (and love) it better? Probably not.
This semester I’ll continue to be “Avid-centric” and include Final Cut Pro in some form in my teaching – not just to do right by my students, but to do right by my colleagues at Avid. Everyone should keep an eye on the competition.
YouSendIt plug-in for the NLE
Of course it’s not the NLE I’d choose to start with…
YouSendIt’s Final Cut Pro plug-in is a useful editor to editor collaboration tool. Right-click on a clip or a sequence in the FCP project, and choose Export > Send by YouSendIt. YouSendIt’s plug-in gathers the necessary source files in a queue, offering the option of including the project file as well.
Files are not compressed, and playing a sequence requires that the receiver must have FCP and all necessary codecs installed. It’s not much of a review and approval or general collaboration tool, but it might be useful for moving small projects via email without having to worry about attachment size limits.
YouSendIt has taken a first step towards making NLE collaboration over the web viable for small shops, but it’s not there yet. This is a huge growth opportunity, but also an opportunity missed. A Squeeze, ProCoder, or Compressor plug-in would be more useful to small shops.
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.
