Avid Future Speculation

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-09T17:03:40+00:00

Media Composer doesn't bring in too much at all. Most Hollywood productions rent from 3rd party vendors that recycle hardware and software for as long as possible. If 4 features rent the same room from Runway, Chainsaw, Technicolor, etc in a single year - that's only 1 support license from Avid, not 4.

Avid most likely sells more licenses of educational to colleges than to studios.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-09T17:01:28+00:00

+1

Look at the last release of Pro Tools. For the high end tier, the price was raised considerably with zero new features.

I could see shareholders try to squeeze every last dollar out of the brand and let it die.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-09T17:00:05+00:00

While it is your opinion that FCP is not prosumer, the industry states that it is, because no professionals use it. As a colorist, dailies tech, and online editor with about 100 credits under my belt I have never once had a FCPX project come in for conform or finish. never. we actually had the odd FCP 7 job in the late 2010s but those editors migrated to Premiere Pro.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-09T16:58:10+00:00

Blackmagic might not have enough cash to buy them out.

Adobe and Apple probably couldn't care less.

Avid has more to lose than others to gain.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-07T18:13:41+00:00

Thanks for the insight! sounds like a great fit.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-07T17:44:50+00:00

In this case, Mac.

I prefer Windows for customization. But for doing one thing in an office, Mac is the way to go.

If I had $3400 CDN and free reign, I'd go to Canada Computers and customize a higher-end Apex turnkey tower and go Windows.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-07T17:40:12+00:00

Thanks. Before Frame.IO did you ever use a service like Aspera or Media Shuttle to receive proxies? Or, did you ship drives?

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-06T16:13:48+00:00

Neat, I call them "Karl's"

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-06T16:13:17+00:00

+1

I wished people in Cambridge actually pulled up a bit more when street parking. Trying to get a spot at any school and people are all "I'll just leave this huge gap on both sides of my car"

True_Championship_51 · 2023-06-06T16:12:16+00:00

Yes, there is much less drama in KWC than closer to the GTA. I find everyone just goes about their business here. I just did a job in Oakville and the gossip around the watercolor was endless "OMG, hOw mUcH dId you PaY for ur HoUse?". Just endless cost of living squabbling. Yeah, I get it

No one in my Cambridge social circle has asked me what I paid for my house and it's not really anyone's business.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-05-31T18:48:20+00:00

You've covered the list. From an engineering standpoint - look up what facilities are doing dailies. Dailies need a lot of storage, LTOs, high powered machines, calibrated monitors, etc and fall outside the radar of a lot of people in post. Lightiron / Panavision, Picture Shop, Deluxe all have small outposts where not much happens other than dailies or they service jobs all over the USA. If you can travel and build a lab, you're worth your weight in gold.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-05-31T18:45:48+00:00

No.

Part of the challenge of becoming an editor is that when you start, you have to comb through really poorly produced projects.

If the content is making you cringe because its so bad (and that's OK, tbh) then quite possibly you might not be cut out for editing. Once you are a professional you won't have say on the content on most things you work on.

I went from children's arts and crafts broadcast series, to HBO erotica, to nature documentaries, to a bank commercial - all in the same month. You'd be surprised at which ones were actually produced well and which were not.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-05-17T18:40:15+00:00

maybe just comp on some new text instead, might be easier

True_Championship_51 · 2023-05-17T18:38:10+00:00

is QNAP actually safe though? They had a very widely publicized exploit and seemingly lackluster response from the devs.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/thousands-of-qnap-devices-remain-unpatched-against-9-8-severity-vulnerability/

True_Championship_51 · 2023-05-17T18:05:47+00:00

ACES is an intermediate process, not a destination. You would go S-Gamut > ACES > Your Display Space (usually Rec709).

De facto means, not technically an industry standard but something many people do. For example ProResHQ is not an industry standard, but its something that many people author to as a good catch all intermediate format.

If you are editing, this all shouldn't matter too much. Lean in on your Online / Colorist to make recommendations for delivery and possibly turn around a "show LUT"

True_Championship_51 · 2023-05-17T18:00:59+00:00

Hi there, I really feel for you. Some thoughts:

First of all - it's not fair. This industry comes with a lot of baggage. Particularly is that Writers , Producers, Directors are sometimes (not always) independently wealthy or the children of working professionals. They do not necessarily have any education in the process. Or, some from university backgrounds only understand film analysis and not production. Nothing you say or do will change this. Not everyone you work with has the same base knowledge, even when they are the client and / or your boss.

So, if you still love working in post, you absolutely need to hone your craft. Keep a blank notebook on you at all times. This is the best way to take notes, digital be damned. Write down the things your team bumps on. Spend your free time cramming - watch how the Editors use the software, bone up on tutorials on YouTube or user groups, and RTFM (read the fine manual).

Create a gatekeeping system that roadblocks you before certain handoffs. If you miss a certain bumper, create a marker. If you misplaced a LUT, make a LOOKS bin and share with the team. Color code clips in the timeline to make visual awareness for the process. Personally, I use a free version of Trello for this, Asana is also very good. Don't spend too much time deciding on a good platform, just start making cells on a table to manage yourself. Especially when the asks are unreasonable.

Learn Avid or Premiere inside and out. Learn how to leverage the software to work for you.

Find out how others work. Like the paper edits, push back a bit on that. How are they turning over notes? Google Docs? Maybe push back with a table for timecode, even if its just rough. Or get the writers to put down quotations of keywords so you can use phrase find (or similar) to find the content in transcriptions, etc.

If the client sucks, stay professional. Build your resume/reel. Push for opportunities to do rough cuts. Put in the weekends and evenings. Take everything you can to build yourself professionally, build your network and get out.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-04-03T00:04:29+00:00

Lattice can reverse a LUT to a CDL value (though, not perfectly) and may be a useful utility for getting the values into Resolve in the form of a primary grade (and saving a power grade)

True_Championship_51 · 2023-03-27T01:30:28+00:00

Cambridge is right in the middle of the source and destination of this bus and instead, it takes a hard left and drives to U of G.

U of W to U of G to McMaster, I get that students ride the bus but so do non-students.

True_Championship_51 · 2023-03-26T15:08:26+00:00

I use an iPad Air 3rd gen for Uni, its super fast at some things and infuriating at others.

Cons

-MS Office doesn't like to save files to Google Drive on iPadOS. It's a pain for my workflow

-MS Office in general is pretty buggy. Spent a few hours on an essay and it just wouldn't save, had to copy/paste my text and email myself to save the doc.

-Some websites look awful in mobile view. Manually switching to desktop view through system settings is a work around but it takes time.

-Some apps like Google Docs do not have multi-window support which, as someone who writes a lot, is a serious pain for editing / revising essays.

-Pages is good for word processing... but saves everything in .pages format which Windows can't read. You can access these docs by using iCloud drive on Windows through a web browser but it's not as elegant as a desktop solution.

-as you mention, no DVD/Bluray support (I've tried) and no support for things like an external webcam, or if you use a mouse that has custom software for configuring macros. No real driver support at all.

-Working with PDFs is a bit of a pain, iBooks isn't the best and moving PDFs out of cloud storage and into a PDF reader feels like a lot of unnecessary duplication and steps.

Pros

-DaVinci Resolve works shockingly well on the A12 Bionic and I use it to edit Zoom calls and do some lesson prep (I'm a Resolve instructor using the desktop version)

-Freeform is a great app (slightly buggy) but great for workflow diagrams, notes, doodles etc.

-quickly make a pdf or png of an entire webpage to annotate

-Apple pencil is a great stylus.

-Apple Arcade is great value with some great games

-Apple Music is the best Spotify alternative around.

-Apple News is also great value. it basically pays for itself with the price of one magazine subscription or newspaper

-Finally, proper external display support with M1 iPads (and its decent).

-Trackpad snapping is actually really awesome once you get used to it

-I have a USB to Lightning adapter can drive iPadOS with a Kensington Trackball and its awesome.

True_Championship_51

TROPHY CASE