I do not immediately think about satirist Randy Rainbow as a Content Creator, but with a body of parody music videos that have hundreds of millions of views combined, he is obviously a successful Content Creator.

As an aside, I am totally jealous of his ability as a lyricist, but that’s another story.

In a recent CNN interview Randy Rainbow talked through the process he takes for each new parody music video. It turns out he shoots and edits himself, on Final Cut Pro X. (FCP X is for those who create for themselves, etc.) He makes his income from producing videos, so is he a “professional?”

There are not many performers with millions of followers/views that have complete control over their career. Certainly not in traditional media, but for those who want to create content finding their own niche and audience isn’t as impossible as it was to get to the top in “Hollywood” and be a star that way.

Sam Mestman weighed in on what’s needed to be a modern content creator in a recent article at FCP.co.

The Top Ten earners on YouTube earn between $15-22 million a year as Content Creating Entrepreneurs. Musical artist Troye Sivan started building his audience on YouTube when he was 13 living in Perth, Western Australia (not the center of the entertainment world). He just had his best year ever with a World Tour and new album.

When you bring the audience you end up with a lot more negotiating power when it comes to distribution, merchandising and marketing deals.

Not just content creators but entrepreneurs as well. But are they “professional” editors? Definitely not. Professional Content Producers, definitely.

While it’s not the first app we released, Sequence Clip Reporter has now been serving the Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro and Resolve communities for 10 years! That’s an impressive achievement for a small Independent Software Vendor.

Greg and I are fortunate that we are able to make a decent income serving our community with tools that give them more time to do what they really want to do, instead of the boring parts of post. We’ve seen other ISVs move on to employment where they can get a more stable return for their skills. Being an ISV is a hard business.

Sequence Clip Reporter arose from a suggestion by our friend Les Perkins after I demonstrated some (now defunct) apps Greg had written. In those early days we had no idea what software helpers people needed, so we tended to follow up on most suggestions. Sequence Clip Reporter was an exception as most ideas turned out to fit a fairly narrow workflow.

Sequence Clip Reporter was created for FCP Classic, and we expected it to fade out over time, but with a little tweaking to accommodate Adobe’s custom version of FCP Classic XML, it’s now a valuable tool for the Premiere Pro community. It turns out Sequence Clip Reporter is the better of our reporting tools for Resolve as Resolve is a track based NLE.

Of course Producer’s Best Friend is our FCP X reporting tool that fits in where Sequence Clip Reporter does for Premiere Pro and Resolve. While superficially similar – they both produce all types of reports – the structure and the way the two apps work is remarkably different.

Happy Birthday Sequence Clip Reporter.

The discussion in this episode started with a recent article in The Atlantic Your Work Peak Is Earlier Than You Think. Is it time to think of a career as an evolving series of “careers?”

After listening to the show, what you you think?