The present and future of post production business and technology

During a conversation last night about a new type of touch-screen display that mounts on regular glass (don’t know any more about it than that – hope to get more information shortly and share).

During the discussion I was reminded that in the earliest days of using NLEs (a Media 100 for me at that time) I had fantasies about being able to edit using a 3D display environment, where in this virtual world the clips would be in space or grouped together in some logical order (these days I’d say that was based on metadata groupings) and the editor could simply move clips around, stack them and build the story along a virtual timeline. Even composite by stacking clips.

Not that I ever really developed the idea beyond that trip to my imagination, it does make me wonder if some sort of surface like that being proposed for regular glass, or even maybe a 30″ Cinema Display type screen, that was a full touch-screen surface that supported gestures, etc. Microsoft’s Surface would be close to the sort of experience I’m visualizing.

In thinking about it further I realized that the sort of work we’ve been doing with metadata would tie in nicely. The metadata would be used to group and regroup clips organizationally, but also to suggest story arcs or generally assist the editor.

It’s probably time for a new editing paradigm.

If not for a future version of FCP or Media Composer, perhaps, for iMovie?

In the comments on my article on “Why no ExpressCard 24 slot in the new MacBook Pro” Andreas asked about Final Cut Studio and Snow Leopard and I briefly responded there. Larry Jordan responded on his blog (Andreas asking him the same question) but not in any detail. Neither Larry nor I are programmers, but  I direct programmers every day – both OS X software and Web applications – so I do know a little. Plus I’ve tracked the technology development for FCP from version 1 onward – every change from OS 9 to OS X CFM, to OS X Mach-O to a hybrid application.

So, let’s see if I can manage a little clarity even if it’s only based on observation and deduction. As I said in the brief response, I have no clue what development Apple are doing and whether or not this is at all accurate. No doubt there will be engineers at Apple laughing at my naivety!

Carbon was the technology that Apple developed to let OS 9 applications run on OS X. It’s a set of programming interfaces (APIs) that individual applications call. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Carbon, except that it can’t take advantage of any of the modern features of OS X – particularly those coming in Snow Leopard, nor can it run in 64 bit.

Cocoa is a different set of APIs, heavily drawn from NeXTSTEP – the NeXT operating system (Apple acquired NeXT in 1996). It is the preferred method for programming for OS X. In fact Apple have been pretty clear to its developers that, long term, Carbon will give way to Cocoa. They are encouraging all developers to get their code to “pure cocoa”.

When it looked like Apple were going to continue Carbon development with 64 bit APIs, as announced at the WWDC in 2006, there was really little incentive for Apple to spend the very many millions of dollars it will cost to rewrite FCP’s Carbon parts as Cocoa – to just get to where it is now. 64 bit Carbon was also Adobe’s preferred path for its older applications (Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects). With 64 bit Carbon coming, Adobe could get 64 bit support without a major rewrite.

But when, at WWDC in 2007, Apple changed the rules and said, “No 64 bit Carbon”, any high-performance application had to think seriously about rewriting to Cocoa, at least long term.

We know, from public announcements, that Adobe had to delay 64 bit support for the named applications until CS 5 on OS X because of the time it takes to move applications to Cocoa and therefore 64 bit support.

All new features in FCP, since FCP 5 onward, have been written in Cocoa – HDV Log and Capture, Log and Transfer, Multicam, FXplug (that I know of) are all Cocoa. OS X lets programmers mix and match programming languages with ease. My guess is that Apple, like Adobe, would have continued with a hybrid approachwith Final Cut Pro if the 64 bit Carbon APIs were going to be available. When they were not, the Pro Apps team, like Adobe, would have to have started porting their application to Cocoa. CS4 showed none of that progress, being released less than 2 years after the ‘07 WWDC announcement.

Most of the FC Studio applications are new enough to have been written in Cocoa – the second revision of DVD Studio Pro (Spruce, not the Astarte-based DVD SP 1); Motion, LiveType, Soundtrack Pro and Compressor are all pure Cocoa applications and can (relatively) easily take advantage of 64 bit and/or Snow Leopard features like Grand Central Dispatch. I say “relatively” because there is still work to be done, that generally can’t start until Snow Leopard’s features are locked (i.e. WWDC 2009).

No responsible programmer is going to attempt to write for a new OS until the OS is locked and finished. So, theoretically, the engineers working on those applications could start NOW to work on Snow Leopard features, ready for a release in a year or two.

I can’t imagine that even the Cocoa-based Studio products will be taking advantage of any Snow Leopard features this time round – the timing is just all wrong. And they’re already Cocoa.

FCP, starting life at Macromedia as a cross-platform OS 9/Windows application, has most of the core written in Carbon. My (educated) guess is that it will take 2-3 years to rewrite all that code to Cocoa. I doubt they started that before WWDC 2007, as until then there was little incentive to invest many millions of dollars in a Cocoa rewrite. (Remember this is before the announcement of Snow Leopard, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL too.) Those features do provide an additional incentive to get FCP to “pure cocoa” (I estimate $10-15 million will be required to write, test, test, and I hope test what will effectively be v1 code again).

Apple will no doubt do that because the Final Cut Studio is highly profitable for the company from software sales only. (You don’t need to get too much from 1.25 million customers to make a viable business, even without taking into account any hardware sales, which don’t benefit the Pro Apps team at all.)

However, wanting to do it and having the time to do it are different things. They didn’t start (most probably) until after WWDC 2007 when they, and the Adobe teams, learnt that 64 Carbon wasn’t going to happen. Allow two to three  years to finish that job, before they can start to think about Snow-Leopard feature optimizations.

Pretty much every release of FCP requires the latest OS (the exceptions being FCP 3 which was for OS X and OS 9 both, and FCS 2 which is Leopard OSX 10.5 or Tiger OS X 10.4.11) and the latest QuickTime. So, I think that Studio 3 will, on the balance of probability, require Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard has no problem running 32 bit Cocoa applications at the same speed they always ran. As Snow Leopard has no PPC version, it could mean that FCS 3 may be not supported on PPC, we’ll have to wait for Apple to let us know. (FWIW, Adobe’s Production Premium CS4 is Intel only; Avid’s 3.x releases are Intel only, by way of reference.)

However, absolutely do not even think about running FCS 2 on anything newer than Leopard. In fact NEVER run FCP on any version of the OS or QT other than the ones that were directly supported. To do so is going to cause you problems, pain and regret. Old versions are never tested on the new OS and QT so there’s no reasonable expectation that they will run on a newer OS.

So, whether or not FCP 6 will run on Snow Leopard or not is irrelevant. Only an idiot would attempt it, and none of my readers are that stupid, right? Bank on an FCS upgrade to run the studio on Snow Leopard because it’s the only way to guarantee you’ll still be in business with an operating NLE after the upgrade.

Based on all that, the timing of Snow Leopard etc., it’s not really reasonable to expect that there will be Snow Leopard features in the next release, but we won’t know until Apple releases them. Until then, I guess we can all dream!

It wasn’t until recently that I realized I had no “about Philip” or bio, whatever, on the site, so I’ve added a page so you can find out a little more about me, if you care.

Another addition is the calendar of upcoming presentations. Over then next couple of months I’ll be attending or speaking at the Orange county MCA-I Media Camp tomorrow (Saturday June 20). Media Camp is like a Bar camp, itself a reaction to the O’Reilly FOO (Friends of O’Rielly) exclusive, invite-only conference.  A Bar Camp (Foo Bar, get it?) is the opposite. Anyone is welcome, there’s no formal agenda so you make of it what the participants want to make it.

The Orange County Media Camp is like that – we’ll all be getting together and talking about/planning etc media production and distribution topics. I guess. I won’t know until I get there.

Then there’s DV Expo coming up In September, and the Professional Video Association’s Conference in January 2010 – more on that later but I’ll be presenting a full day on Final Cut Pro titling and a full day on growing your production or postproduction business.

In between I expect to be doing some presentations in Boston, Connecticut and New York and, depending on timing, other user groups or dealers. These will include a full day on New Media – where we’re going and how we’ll make money; and free sessions on how to benefit from First Cuts, Finisher, and Sync-N-Link. We may do the Growing your Business seminar there as well.

I hope to see you at one of the events. If you read the blog, come and say hello.

A couple of days ago I talked about why a “three strikes” law is such a bad idea. It’s also a bad idea because it’s pointless and bad for the content creators and/or owners’ businesses.

On the other hand, even the threat of a three strikes law in France (ultimately struck down by their highest court as against human rights) immediately created a business opportunity for encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPN). Not only that, but the Pirate Bay folks are also setting up an inexpensive VPN service for anyone that wants it. These services disguise the IP address of the downloader, so even if copyright owners tried to get an IP address to sue (not that you can sue an IP address, as many have found out in non-US jurisdictions) everyone using the service has the same IP address, not correlateable to any individual location. 

If that should ever become “broken” as a workaround, something else will be found. In fact there’s a move afoot to update the bittorrent protocol to a new form that resists seeders being identified.

It’s a pointless exercise. Whatever horse there was has long bolted the stable and the only reasonable response from an intelligent business person is to find new business models. Andy Kessler, writing at Forbes.com, discusses The Inevitability of Internet Pirates: 

Hand out as many guilty verdicts as you like, but folks on the Internet will copy away–because, really, who can stop them? Google won’t do it, Internet providers like Comcast ( CMCSA -news - people ) and AT&T ( T - news - people ), who can block a lot of this stuff, can’t do it without Network Neutrality proponents squawking, “Interference!”

Even authoritarian regimes fail. (The Great Firewall of China is quite leaky.) Plus, it is so easy to create a Web service to download copyrighted material that, like that arcade game Whac-A-Mole, if you take one culprit down with your mallet another five pop up in the next few nanoseconds. Sad but true, there is not much anyone can do.

Blocking sites does not work because it’s relatively trivial to find a proxy server to log into the “blocked site”. DRM has been an abject failure inconveniencing those who actually paid for the product without doing anything to reduce “piracy”. 

Piracy is such a daft word for infringement – a civil or business problem, not a criminal one. With theft of property, the original owner is deprived of ownership because the thief has taken it. Not so with a digital copy where millions can be produced without anyone being deprived of anything (other than potential, not actual, income). The copyright industry likes to use the word “theft” or “stealing” but it’s disingenuous at best and an outright lie in all likelihood. (As are the outrageous guesses at “losses” that make the ridiculous assumption that every download is a lost sale at a premium price, none of which is supportable by fact.)

Not only is it inevitable, but it’s not in the best interests of the content industry. As I’ve noted before, those who do pirate music are also the music industry’s best customers. Apparently the pirating is a way of testing new music that otherwise would never have been heard, appreciated and ultimately purchased. 

Not only that but a new Harvard study shows clearly that it’s in societies best interests to have weak copyright. Remembering that the writers of the Constitution of the USA reluctantly granted “limited” exclusive copyright in return for encouraging creative work.

Copyright law was never meant to protect the music business in the first place—instead, it’s intended to foster creative production in the arts. It seems that goal is fostered by weak copyright and file sharing. 

The idiot copyright industry keeps saying that nothing would be created without ever stronger, and longer, copyright. This is another lie that bears no relationship with any fact or research, but that doesn’t stop the IRAA and MPAA making the claim. (Heck, they simply change their story to suit whatever action they’re currently taking to prop up outdated business models – every action that is, except updating their business models.)

The Harvard Study, analyzed by Michael Geist (the original is a pdf and harder to link to or quote) has found that file sharing has significantly increased cultural production. 

The paper takes on several longstanding myths about the economic effects of file sharing, noting that many downloaded songs do not represent a lost sale, some mashups may increase the market for the original work, and the entertainment industry can still steer consumer attention to particular artists (which results in more sales and downloads).

And this:

The authors’ point out that file sharing may not result in reduced incentives to create if the willingness to pay for “complements” increases.  They point to rising income from performances or author speaking tours as obvious examples of income that may be enhanced through file sharing. In particular, they focus on a study that concluded that demands for concerts increased due to file sharing and that concert prices have steadily risen during the file sharing era.  Moreover, the authors’ canvass the literature on the effects of file sharing on music sales, confirming that the “results are decidedly mixed.” 

It’s time the MPAA, RIAA and their international associates, who do NOT really represent artists, simply realized they were flogging a dead horse and the only chance they have for a future is to adapt. Ever more draconian laws that turn almost every citizen into a civil offender (or worse a criminal) is not only stupid, it’s not in the best interests of those who create the content. Something many musicians have realized already.

Any chance of at least one politician understanding the argument? I didn’t think so.

The catalyst for this post was Henry Blodget’s provocative post Sorry, There’s No Way To Save The TV Business. There’s a lot in the article I agree with, but also a lot of good counterpoints in the comments. Clearly it’s not yet universally agreed upon!

That article alone would probably be worth commenting on, but add it to a whole bunch of other articles I’ve been holding for comment:

TV: The Next to Fall by Jeff Jarvis at Seeking Alpha (i.e. strong/good) Media

We’ve been wringing hands over newspapers and magazines, but TV and radio aren’t far behind. Broadcast is next.

It’s a failure of distribution as a business model. Distribution is a scarcity business: ‘I control the tower/press/wire and you don’t and that’s what makes my business.’ Not long ago, they said that owning these channels was tantamount to owning a mint. No more. The same was said of content. But it’s relationships (read: links) that create value today.

Why Television Needs a Reality Check on Sustainable Business Models by Diane Mermigas

Time for a reality check. You know your business model is in trouble when …

Revenues and free cash flow recede and profits evaporate

The TV Industry Is Terminally Ill by Bruce Everis, also at Seeking Alpha

The demise of TV is because it is old technology. Quite frankly I find it pretty boring these days. They just cannot compete with computing, the internet and gaming. And they cannot compete because they are not interactive (except in a farcically limited way), they do not connect the user with other users and their content is purely linear. Their main market now is the educationally subnormal, geriatrics and babies, because these are the only people left who aren’t online.

Broadcast TV Faces Struggle to Stay Viable in the New York Times by Tim Arango

For decades, the big three, now big four, networks all had the same game plan: spend many millions to develop and produce scripted shows aimed at a mass audience and national advertisers, with a shelf life of years or decades as reruns in syndication.

But that model, based on attracting enough ad dollars to cover the costs of shows like “Lost” and “ER,” no longer appears viable. Network dramas now cost about $3 million an hour.

The future for the networks, it seems, is more low-cost reality shows, more news and talk, and a greater effort to find new revenue streams, whether they be from receiving subscriber fees as cable channels do, or becoming cable networks themselves, an idea that has gained currency.

For Television, It’s a Whole New World again by Diane Mermigas

Anyone expecting television advertising–including network upfront spending that could decline more than 15%–to rebound to former levels is in serious denial of the deep-set economic changes underway.

Systemic shifts in how companies and consumers make and spend money could throw media and other commercial players into a death spiral if they are unwilling to alter behavior and expectations. Advertising is not going away, but its fundamental economics are changing. That makes widespread media market deflation and deterioration (the worst being local media) much more than a cyclical glitch, according to a new Goldman Sachs report.

There are others but it’s too depressing for a Monday evening!  For an industry that’s still making money and still incredibly popular – latest figures show the average American viewing about 310 minutes a day (just over 5 hours) – that’s an awful lot of doom and gloom.

And probably unjustified. New technologies have never wiped out any preceding industry. Film did not destroy stage. Radio did not kill film. Television killed neither radio nor film. It’s unlikely that Internet Video or Internet TV (call it what you will, I still like New Media with the caveat that it’s unmediated) will replace Television.

What has happened is that the role of different media has changed. Radio has few panel or game shows and very few drama programs anymore. These have migrated to Television. A lot of film production is dedicated to Television distribution so, instead of replacing the Film Industry, Television helped it grow.

So, it’s likely that Broadcast Television will remain – the big four networks will have a role. But I think we’ll see it change to feed the few mass markets remaining: sports (definitely); news (although most TV news is pre-recorded and edited before the broadcast); reality television, talk and game shows (because they’re relatively cheap to produce).

Pretty much everything else will migrate to on-demand consumption. There’s little loyalty to a channel, but there is loyalty to the programs. What a lot of TV executives haven’t yet realized is that people don’t care about their network or channel, just the individual programs that they carry. Increasingly – since the Betamax in 1976 – that has been consumed on the viewer’s schedule. The only thing I’ve watched real time in the last three years has been the Superbowl, because I’m at a Superbowl party! (And to be truthful, I’m there for the party and people first, the ads in the broadcast second with little interest in the actual game.)

As the audience for drama and comedy splinter, the advertising supported model is almost certainly unsustainable. Advertising online isn’t going to match broadcast revenues per viewer leaving only subscription or direct pay to support quality programming.

Not that any of this is going to happen overnight. Still, I have to agree with the doomsayers: the traditional advertising supported broadcast model (aped by most cable channels) is unsustainable long term for most programming.

I was reading and article on TorrentFreak discussing how the unaired (in the US) finale for Prison Break is already available via bittorrent sites. 

For those not following along, Prison Break wrapped up its run recently, without being renewed. Fortunately the producers and writers had enough notice that they were able to wrap up storylines for a neat ending. (I wish more shows would do that – even if it meant doing a special for the following season to wrap stuff up. But I digress.)

What’s different is that Fox didn’t really show the last two episodes on US television, withholding them for July 21st release on DVD. This is called artificial scarcity, or more accurately an attempt to create scarcity where it really does not exist, since these episodes were shown in non-US territories. The global nature of media consumption being what it is, there’s no way that program owners can artificially limit access, once it’s been broadcast or made available anywhere. 

In fact, it’s one of the things that will drive non-authorized viewing that does not accrue to the producer/copyright owner. 

Here’s the message if you’re a content owner: do not try and manipulate your audience, they’re smarter than you are. If you won’t provide your customers with:

• the programs they want to watch
• on the schedule they want to watch them
• at a “price” they’re prepared to pay

then you don’t have a business any more.

The Internet was designed to route around “damage” (even survive nuclear war). Artificial limitations based on territory might have once worked, but the world has changed. When your environment changes there are two alternatives: adapt or die. Apparently big  media has chosen “die”.

It’s not just this isolated case. When the modern series of Dr Who was held back from US release, but broadcast in the UK, it was downloaded over 5 million times. (Didn’t hurt the ratings though.) Australia, where there are too few outlets for programming anyway, frequently doesn’t get new programming from the major studios until months, or even years, later. Not surprising, Australians download a lot of unauthorized content because the content owners will not provide a legitimate alternative.

What we’re seeing is a broken system where the content owners will not listen to their  customers, so the customers take things into their own hands, providing the product the content owners should have been providing all along.

The fact that content owners want to charge about 2-3 times for every viewing than what they ever got from advertising revenue just adds insult to the “injury” of not serving your customers’ needs.

Like I said, the two choices are adapt or die. The old status quo is not an option.

In case you haven’t heard, The RIAA/MPAA and their international equivalents, are working desperately to make ISPs kick people off the Internet if they are accused of file sharing more than three times. (Three strikes and you’re out.)

There are so many things wrong with this idea it’s hard to know where to begin. Firstly, there’s no current legislative support for file sharing P2P being illegal and the RIAA, despite suing thousands of  people, hasn’t obtained a conviction. (It obtained one conviction but the judge himself overturned it when he discovered that “making available” was not a crime, contrary to his comments to the jury during the trial.)

Then there’s the methodology. These organizations are seeking to implement three strikes merely based on their accusation. No legal due process, no right of appeal. We already know that these same clueless organizations have been very, very wrong in the past, attempting to sue people who had no computer (but may have paid for an account) or other blunder. No other place in law, particularly in a “innocent until proven guilty” legal system, allows – effectively – conviction upon accusation. There is no right of appeal.

Finally, there are already copyright laws in place that provide the protection that the copyright owners feel they need. They have it. It just has this teeny tiny shortcoming that the copyright owner has to prove   that the accused actually committed the “crime”. They’d have to actually prove the case to a suitable legal standard.

Fortunately, although France’s ruling body enacted three strike legislation. That legislation was rendered Unconstitutional by the French Constitutional Council (their highest court). This is in line with the European Parliament who also ruled against three strikes laws as has the UK.

The real problem isn’t file sharing because it turns out file sharers are also those industries’ best customers and the piracy can actually help sales, but rather there’s an industry that’s changing in a way that means there is less and less need for the role that the RIAA or MPAA’s members once played.

Instead of doing the hard work of trying to find a new business model they expect governments, ISPs and just about everyone else to help maintain the one that is heading for obsoleteness. Of course it doesn’t help when the make up totally bogus numbers to support their contention as to how much is being lost to “piracy”. (I’d call it free promotion.) 

Even actually studies manage to be spin-doctored beyond control, even exaggerating the number 10x, and yet no reporter or journalist checked them for accuracy, leaving the thorough debunking of the numbers to non-professional journalists. (This is why I don’t care about the news industry as it is; they’re notoriously inaccurate.)

The solution isn’t to try and prevent piracy, because it’s not possible. It’s time to realize that you can sell abundant goods at premium prices. What you have to do is to find where there’s scarcity that can attract premium prices. The role of abundance and scarcity is the subject of another post.

Digital Rebellion blog called it “one step forward, two steps back” and questioned whether or not Apple are in touch with their “pro market”. I’m sure they care about their pro markets. Note the plural? While the pro video market is significant, the pro photography and pro audio markets by comparison are huge.

As for the ExpressCard34 slot. Sure I’m disappointed. I’m ready to upgrade laptop and want to use it for video and now my storage won’t be able to connect. That said, I have to take a step back and look at the business from Apple’s perspective. As Phil Schiller said during the presentation, only “single digit” numbers of their users use the ExpressCard34 slot. At least 90% of people were paying for a feature they didn’t use.

It’s not like the SD card slot is useless. There are a couple of Sony HDV models that optionally record to SD cards; the new JVC FCP-specific camera records XDCAM EX to a SD card and most digital still cameras work with SD cards (including a Canon 5D Mk II).

It won’t be as convenient for SxS users either, but USB adapters, although probably slower, are available as they have been for the old P2 form factor when CardBus was dropped.

I think it’s important to know that, while I’m convinced Apple are serious about Pro Apps long term, that division does not control the hardware direction of the company. There is still a model MacBook Pro that has everything (well except an eSATA connector natively) that a pro video or audio person would need. It’s bigger and more expensive than I’d prefer for most of my needs, but if my primary application for the laptop was digital video, then the 17″ meets the need as well, or better, than the 15″.

Frankly, my experience with the ExpressCard34 slot has hardly been stellar: cards unmount with the slightest bump.

So, I’m personally disappointed that Apple haven’t tailored the perfect laptop for me personally. Boo hoo. Life is full of compromises and I’ll either limit myself to digital ingest via FW or SD card or I’ll compromise and go for the 17″. I’d probably appreciate being able to play 1080 video full screen at last! That’s not possible on either of the other models.

As for QuickTime X – like OS X pronounced “ten” not “x” – we still don’t know anything more than when I wrote about QuickTime X about a year ago after the last WWDC. Sure, we’ve seen a new interface and we’re told it’s “all new” underneath (again – QT 7 was all new also). What we don’t know is if it supports all the non-video features of QT or if it’s an optimized video player targeting the <video> tag in HTML 5. (I’m not a developer and if I was I’d be under NDA on the subject, fwiw.)

It’s clear Apple’s goals for QT are now much more modest than the complete Rich Media Architecture that QT 3 introduced but hasn’t received much development since QT 5. Practically speaking, that also makes sense for Apple (and will annoy many QT-loyal developers) as Flash/Silverlight currently dominate the interactive space. But with faster and faster Javascript (note how much that was mentioned today), HTML 5 and a QT that was open to both and supported the <video> tag, that might be enough to replace most of what QT 3 introduced.

A while back I conjectured that Apple’s answer to Flash was QT/HTML 5 Canvas element/Javascript. Of course, my good friend James Gardiner pushed back, given Flash’s current dominance, how could Apple get traction against Flash?

Well, we now have Apple and Google actively pushing the HTML5/Javascript combination with the <video> element. (While what format the video element must support hasn’t been finalized MP4/H.264 is almost certainly to be one format with support for the significantly inferior quality Ogg codecs, which are open source, included in some browsers.) Two of the biggest companies pushing open standards against another two big companies with their own competing proprietary standards. But still, Flash is very entrenched.

Except there are 40 million active Internet users who see every Flash site as a black blob (iPhone and iTouch users according to figures from today’s keynote). Use Flash and alienate these mobile users (which account for 65% of mobile browser usage). Add in 20-30 million OS X desktop users who have a very poor experience with Flash, but who will get great performance with Javascript/QT X, also hating Flash.

If you were building a site, what would you use? Can you afford to alienate 40 million potential users? If you can, go ahead and use Flash or Silverlight. The rest of us aren’t able to be so arrogant.

When Dan Green interviewed me earlier in the week for Workflow Junkies, in part about the different types of metadata we’ve identified, Dan commented that he thought we’d get to “seven or eight” (from memory). I politely agreed but didn’t think there were going to be that many. I should have known better.

The “iPhoto disaster of May 09″ is actually turning out to be good for my thinking! In earlier versions, iPhoto created a copy of the image whenever any adjustments were made. The original was stored, which explains why my iPhoto folder was almost twice the size of my actual library as reported in iPhoto. iPhoto 09 (and maybe 08, I skipped a version) does things a little differently.

When I changed images while the processor was under load, the image came up in its original form and then – a second or so later – all the corrections I’d made would be applied. It was obvious that the original image was never changed. All my color balance, brightness, contrast and even touch up settings were being stored as metadata, not “real changes”.

The original image (or “essence” in the AAF/MXF world) is untouched but there is metadata as to how it should be displayed. Including, as I said, metadata on correcting every image blemish. (The touch up tool must be a CoreImage filter as well, who knew?)

So, I’m thinking this is a different type of metadata than the five types of metadata previously identified. My first instinct was to call this Presentation Metadata – information on how to present the raw image. Greg (my partner) argued strongly that it should be Aesthetic Metadata because decisions on how to present an image or clip or scene, but I was uncomfortable with the term. I was uncomfortable because there are instances of this type of metadata that are compulsory, rather than aesthetic.

Specifically, I was thinking about Raw images (like those from most digital cameras, including RED). Raw images really need a Color Lookup Table (CLUT) before they’re viewable at all. A raw Raw file is very unappealing to view. Since not all of this type of metadata is aesthetic I didn’t feel the title was a good fit.

Ultimately, after some discussion – yes, we really spend our evenings discussing metadata while the TV program we were nominally watching was in pause – we thought that Transform Metadata was the right name.

Specifically not “Transformative” Metadata, which would appear to be more grammatically correct, because Transformative has, to me, a connotation of the transform being completed, like when a color look is “baked” into the files, say after processing in Apple’s Color or out of Avid Symphony. Transform Metadata does not change the essence or create new essence media: the original is untouched and Transfomed on presentation.

Right now we’re a long way from being able to do all color correction, reframing and digital processing in real time as metadata on moving images as iPhoto does for still images, but in a very real sense an editing Project file is really Transform Metadata to be applied to the source media (a.k.a essence).

This is very true in the case of Apple’s Motion. A Motion project is simply an XML file with the metadata as to how the images should be processed. But there’s something “magic” going on because, if you take that project file and change the suffix to .mov, it will open and play in any application that plays QuickTime movies. (This is how the Project file gets used in FCP as a Clip.) The QuickTime engine does its best to interpret the project file and render it on playback. A Motion Project file is Transform Metadata. (FWIW there is a Motion QuickTime Component installed that does the work of interpreting the Motion Project as a movie. Likewise a LiveType QuickTime Component does the same for that application’s Transform Metadata, a.k.a. project file!)

I think Dan might be right – there could well be seven or eight distinct types of metadata. It will be interesting to discover what they are.

I was once an avid reader of newspapers – a three-paper-a-day man: the local paper for local news; the capital city daily for national and international news and the national Financial Daily for business news. I now read none and think that the whole industry has the stench of death about it – not financially (although it certainly has) but the quality of work was what sent me away.

Newspapers (and television news) is notoriously inaccurate. There are exceptions. Occasionally a paper will do a great job of investigative reporting and team it with great writing, but this is not the “norm”. Most newspaper content is filled with slightly rewritten press releases, information easily found elsewhere (movie start time, tides, weather, TV program guides, etc) and copied from the real source to the newspaper) and some hastily written article about an event that is full of inaccuracies because the reporter hasn’t a clue about the content.

Do you think I’m judging too harshly? Consider this. Have you ever watched the TV news report, or read a newspaper article, of an event you were part of or participated in? Has that report been 100% accurate? I can honestly say that, of the dozen or so appearances I’ve made in newspaper or TV media, or those associated with other family business where I’ve been privy to the facts, not one report was 100% accurate. Not a single one.

So I have to assume that every article is written with the same sloppy adherence to the facts of the story.

The average newspaper adds very little value. Most of the content is not original reporting – between the previously-mentioned press releases and Associated Press and/or Reuters and fact-based content sourced from elsewhere there’s not much original, true news gathering.

The little there is is easily reproduced elsewhere. For example, local news site Pasadena News outsources the writing to Indian writers. If you’re only rewriting a press release, or reporting the outcome of local council meetings, which are placed online anyway, then the desk could be in Pasadena or Mumbai. Fact checking (if anyone actually does that) is an email or phone call away wherever you are in the world (as long as you’re prepared to deal with time zone issues).

Newspapers, in their current dying form, are not adding a whole lot of value. Instead it’s nostalgia that’s keeping them going – the nostalgia of lazy Sunday mornings with paper, family and coffee, not the delivery of well-researched original reporting.

If we have Associated Press – who have a very useful RSS feed to deliver relevant content directly to me – why do I need the LA Times to print it for me? If they added a local angle, maybe.

Journalism won’t die with newspapers. In fact, contrary to the opinion of some journalists, the blogosphere – the sheer number of people fact checking – has led to some real stories breaking. Remember the Dan Rather/George W Bush faked papers scandal? Or how the citizen reporter who videotaped (and shared) George Allen’s “macacca” moment that lost him re-election in 2006? It seems in many, many recent cases, citizen journalists have out-performed (in aggregate) the established media in uncovering stories.

So, I’ve gone from a three-a-day habit to a zero newspaper life and am better informed about news than ever. I keep track of Australian news and am better informed than my Australian-resident mother. I scored very highly ion the Pew Research Test Your News IQ with a better score than my newspaper-reading, TV news watching friends and associates.

I won’t be dancing on the graves of newspapers, but their failure to adapt and their high minded refusal to see the log in their own eye makes me indifferent to the failure of the whole industry. Let it be replaced with new forms of news-gathering where some accuracy might slip in.

See also: We need a Fifth Estate and Will “amateurs” save democracy from the “professionals”?