As it turns out, Final Cut Pro 2 was released early the next morning, so the first thing I had to do in that second day of class was tell my students that what we had learned the day before was no longer relevant for version 2 because the software had become smarter, and that made it easier for people to use Final Cut Pro and no doubt contributed to its success.

There is an inevitable trend with technology (at least) that starts with something being difficult: it requires a specialist operator with scarce craft skills. Think about how challenging a Model T Ford would have been compared to a modern motor vehicle. To drive a car – even as late as when I was growing up in the 50′s – you really needed to have some pretty good mechanic skills as well. Cars still had crank slots in my youth in Australia! A driver really should have known something about timing, cleaning spark plugs, tightening (or replacing) fan belts and more. Not to forget the joy of manual chokes and manual gearboxes.

Zip forward a few years and we have the modern motor vehicle, which in most cases not only does not need the amateur mechanic to constantly fiddle, they make them almost impossible. But I don’t hear the massively enlarged group of drivers complaining about how operating a car has become “dumbed down”. I’ve certainly heard drivers who enjoyed tinkering complain, but not the average user/driver.

Configuring my first Media 100 system required skills I did not have: they were embedded in the reseller who knew the magic combination of drivers that worked, because there were conflicts and the setups were “fragile”. Enter Final Cut Pro and DV and, if you worked within those limits, there were many fewer conflicts – it mostly “just worked”. These days we add storage and hardware cards to our computers that “just works” with little chance of failure (most of the time). I distinctly remember that the VARs were not happy selling Final Cut Pro because it required a lot less involvement from the VAR: there wasn’t the value needing to be added by a Value Added Reseller! (Now there are still complex systems that require the input from experts to choose and configure, but for stand alone systems most people don’t need the VAR.)

The software and computers have become smart enough that the (then essential) role of the expert is needed much less.

Cars get smarter and require fewer “craft skills” from drivers; computers have grown up and require fewer interventions from experts, and most people consider these good things. People who aren’t mechanics or VARs I guess (which describes most of us).

So it puzzles me when one of the common criticisms of Final Cut Pro X is that it “dumbs down” the need for specialist knowledge or craft skills. It does this by making the software smarter and less prone to “user error” with mixed frame rates, frame sizes and Sequence settings. I’m sure there are skilled editors who pride themselves on managing all this without realizing it’s all workarounds! We are just more comfortable with the workarounds we know and use, than with new workarounds.

If you follow that thought, Media Composer has always been more “dumbed down” than Final Cut Pro! My cohort in The Terence and Philip Show and Lead Dog at Alpha Dogs once said that Final Cut Pro should only be used by skilled professionals because it is so flexible it lets you get yourself into trouble, whereas Media Composer wouldn’t let you get into trouble by (for the longest time) supporting only their own media format, forcibly managing media in its own way and keeping track of every Timecode reference the media walked past! He has a point.

So, Final Cut Pro X does what every technology does: moves from the realm of the specialist, skilled crafstperson out into the wider group of people who need smarter tools that won’t let them get into trouble. A skilled mechanic bemoans the fact that they can’t tinker with modern cars, and race-car drivers have very different needs than the average driver, there are those who need a fine-tuned vehicle, the general purpose vehicle that requires no knowledge of how the engine works in order to drive for pleasure or in fact to drive for a living. No special skills or knowledge needed. We’re not *there* yet with video editing but we’re heading there.

For those who want to tinker, or need a race car, the smarter “dumbing down” software is a threat or at best as useless as a Smart Car on a race track. But for everyone else – the vast majority of drivers – the dumbed down modern car is a big improvement.

This is simply part of a much larger trend: video production as a form of literacy, the use of templates or presets (the subject of the next Terence and Philip Show), cameras that are more sensitive and need less lighting (or none for No Reservations who no longer light thanks to the sensitivity of their Sony PM2-F3s) and decent quality production is accessible and affordable to many more people. Exactly as every technology in history has done, and every technology in the future will do.

There are many more ways that our tools will become automated. And like the trend in automobiles those who want to get in under the hood and tinker – or feel they need that level of control of their vehicle – will be disappointed, frustrated and annoyed, just as we’ve seen with some people’s responses to the “dumbing down” (by making it smarter) of editing in Final Cut Pro X. Apple may have been relatively late to the metadata party (Avid and Adobe being way ahead for many years in flexible metadata handling) but one way Apple have gone beyond the others is in the use of Inferred Metadata.

As well as the work-in-progess inferred shot type (inferred from the analysis of the size and position of faces, itself Derived Metadata) I have discovered that they use a lot of Inferred metadata in the ColorSync workflow. (A comprehensive article on the use of ColorSync in Final Cut Pro X is coming, but it’s a lot of research even with help from Apple.)

There will, of course, be those who need to see every frame, to “touch” the media and to use the tools that give them the control they need, and there are great choices for them. Thanks to the dumbing down of the skillset needed by making the software smarter more people can reach their creative goals. And I think that’s a good thing.

A number of times Joe pointed out just how logical I was. He’s right, I’m extremely logical. I’d probably go as far as to say that I eschew emotional responses.

But Joe pointed out that, for many people, the response to Final Cut Pro X is emotional. Like a jilted lover who still doesn’t understand why Apple broke up with them. And truth be told, I do find it hard to empathize with that. I try and recognize it but apparently at times I come across as a little “tone deaf” to the emotion side of the discussion.

For that I apologize. It’s not intentional.

Mostly the focus on logic serves me well. It’s what allowed me to be “scary accurate” in my writings about Final Cut Pro X (or what became FCP X) over the last 17-18 months. It’s how I “do my thing”. In that area being highly logical serves me well.

And serves you well, as a reader, because you get that insight months before those who don’t read this blog. That side of it is good.

The other side is that I may not always respond to the emotional component with the understanding of the real pain people are going through. I understand it from an intellectual perspective, but I don’t feel it, and it’s likely that’s just who I am.

It’s a yin and yang thing – they go together and I’ll keep focusing on the logical, finding clues and data points to bring you the latest developments in the companies and technologies we care about, as we march to the future.

Speaking of logic, the the one thing that took me completely by surprise was the withdrawal from sale of Final Cut Pro 7. It causes real pain to current customers wanting additional seats, and I don’t see how it benefits Apple. It’s just not logical.

Most people associate “art” with the fine arts, but I think the term gets used without much real content. Most often “art” is conflated with “creativity”. With the additional complication that most people don’t understand what they mean by “creativity”, once again conflating it with fine art.

About 30 years ago, I shared an apartment with an up-and-coming artist, during the period he was doing an Arts-related undergraduate degree. David Middlebrook is still a highly regarded painter and artist is Australia. Although I haven’t had any contact in most of that time David taught me the difference between “art” and “Art”.

He had two functional definitions of “art” for himself: “Art is what the Art World will buy” (the cynical); and “Art is Passion” (the truth). He was true to both. On one hand he painted plain pots with unique designs, selling them at a significant profit. That helped fund his University time: that and selling paintings. He made no pretense that these were anything but “art”: created purely for the purpose of attracting a sale.

The designs were definitely interesting, and he was a competent craftsman, but he had no internal pretense that what he was doing was “Art”. There was creativity and craftsmanship but no passion. It wasn’t “Art”.

While it wasn’t “Art” it definitely qualified as “aesthetically pleasing”. I suspect many people say “art” when they mean that something is aesthetically pleasing. A good editor will make something way, way more aesthetically pleasing at every level: that the story flows, that nothing takes us out of the story, that music and any graphics or effects enhance the story. If you want that to be the definition of “art” then that is, of a sort. But it’s not passion driven.

As I tended to work late, I once arrived back at our shared apartment after he had gone to bed for the night, and there in the TV room/art studio was a painting that had only been started that day. That painting was so full of anguish and passion that my immediate thought was to wake him to find out what dreadful thing had happened. I didn’t but it had been a particularly distressing day for him, and there is was in the painting. The passion/pain that went into the canvas and oil, was so obvious that I have no hesitation calling it “Art”.

Interestingly, as the incident faded in his life, the painting became much less disturbing as it was finished. (In my opinion, less passionate, but I wasn’t the artist.)

So I cringe a little when I hear people talking about editing a film, TV show or other video production and calling it “art” because of their creative involvement – that all film and television is art, because it has been creatively put together. Now, if we’re going to use the “good aesthetics and creativity = art” definition I outlined above, then it is “art” by that definition.

Film can be “Art”; Television or other production can be “Art” but most is not. Perhaps it is reasonable to call it the “art” of the cynical Middlebrook: done because someone will buy it and it’s creative and competent enough.

True passion for a project means that you cannot NOT do it. That you drive forward regardless of whether or not there’s pay involved, because you simply can’t NOT do it. I’ve got deeply interested and enthusiastic about every project I’ve worked on, but I’ve never confused that enthusiasm with passion, because at the end of the day, I could walk away from the project without my life being changed permanently. If I had created “Art” it would have changed my life, and the lives of others.

I have never made “Art” in my life. Not that I recall, and with that level of passion involved you’d think I’d remember! I’ve made a lot of aesthetically pleasing stories, visuals and edits (and not a little motion graphic design). I have been incredibly creative. But that’s another word that trips people up because it has been complicate with the “art” concept.

Creativity is problem solving. Finding a creative solution means finding a solution to an insolvable problem. Good editing is highly creative because there are many problems to be solved: what’s the story, where’s the story, how do I convey the story in the available time, how do I make this scene flow, and how do I cut this 237 minute first cut into a 119 minute movie for release but keep true to the Director’s intention? These are creative decisions that require skill, experience and creativity to solve.

Some of my most creative work has been turning really bad, client-supplied, footage into something that is at least workable: making a less ugly sow’s ear, but no silk purse. And definitely no passion.

I also believe that architects are creative. Designers are creative. And yes, software developers are creative, because all use their creativity to solve the problem(s) in front of them. Some engineering is creative. These are particularly creative as they involve both science and “art” or, more accurately, aesthetics.

Design is the application of creativity to the suitability of (things, spaces) for their purpose. Interior design isn’t so much decorative as to make the dwelling fit the lives of the people there; that the objects they interact with will be a good fit for what they want to do.

Apple are very, very good at design. They have some incredibly talented and creative hardware and software people who create the perfect experience for the job. But it’s not “Art”, in most cases. But it is beautiful design (aesthetics) that involved enormous amounts of creativity to reach.

There’s a lot of filmmaking that has no real purpose other than to make money. In fact most “studio” film and television has no other purpose than make money. There is nothing wrong with that at all. It keeps people employed doing what they enjoy doing day by day, and it funds the next project. (And for those who want to argue that all filmmaking is art, I present Bring it On 5 as exhibit A.  A decently crafted movie, and the director and editorial cared enough about what they were doing that it’s an aesthetically pleasing film, regardless of what you think of the banality of the story). But no-one makes a fifth iteration of a movie out of shear passion for the story.

Bottom line, I think most of what people call “art” is aesthetics. Combine a good aesthetic sense, with creativity and I believe that’s what most editors do. If they bring an enthusiasm to the project, so much the better and it’s likely show in the result. It is “art” only by that most broad of definitions.

Of course we both have dedicated drives for our Time Machine backups (being all OS X based here) but they’re in the same physical space as our computers, so if for some reason that was destroyed, we’d be no better off than having no backup.  Ditto the demonstration media and archives of projects. Locally they’re stored on a RAID 1 drive for redundancy.

Having started raising the question, what are the answers? And that leads to the examination of what it is that you would need to get your “life back”, at least close to where it is now. I thought I’d share our thinking to stimulate your thinking, not only about a total disaster, but an immediate smaller one.

For example, we’re heading to NAB shortly and I am doing two presentations. Because I had a nightmare about having my computer stolen at NAB, I realized that if it was stolen I’d be in trouble giving the presentations. And yet, I generally carry a USB memory stick in my pocket, so why would I not take three minutes to copy my presentations there before leaving? Overkill? Not really, as the only other alternative would be a 10 hour round trip back to LA to recover the presentation files I need. I’m sure my computer won’t be stolen, and if it is it is covered by our insurance, but that wouldn’t help a presentation on Tuesday and Wednesday at NAB!

If I lost my computer, I have the time machine backup. I don’t travel with that, so its at least geographically segmented from any loss of the actual computer. But what if something destroyed our office/apartment while we were out (say a huge earthquake while we were walking down to Keycode for a food truck)? It’s highly, highly unlikely, but so are all the things you insure against.

At this point, a disaster that collapsed our building so we couldn’t re-enter would be a very major setback as little data exists outside the building. Bad. Very bad.  At least programmer Greg has his Xcode projects for all our software stored on a backup area that Dreamhost provides free of charge (a generous 50GB).

But even Dreamhost isn’t that secure, given that it’s still within the Los Angeles region so it could be as clobbered as we are.

So, here’s our plan:

• Local Time machine backup and redundant copies
• Important files* to Dreamhost’s backup
• Those same important files to Amazon S3 storage, choosing an East Coast location for geographic redundancy. (For 100 GB stored we’d pay 10c GB per month for 99.99% security or 14.3c GB per month for super redundancy, or $120-180 a year.)
• Large Media files that aren’t urgent but I’d hate to go without, on DVD or Blu-ray to Australia with my mother, or possibly on a hard drive or two.

What will I be backing up?

• My iPhoto (or Aperture as I migrate) library without the proxies created for Apple TV and iPhone synchronization. That saves 10 GB but it’s still a 30 GB upload!
• All my presentations past and current.
• All writing – articles, books, etc – with an initial backup followed by work in progress
• Selected email boxes, particularly related to customer service and purchases.
• My DEVONthink database where I keep several thousand references.

As well, our accounting files, Xcode projects for software and no doubt one or two more pieces of data that we’d need to get back to a “normal” life moving forward.  The apartment contents can mostly be replaced (with a few sentimental items that I could probably live without); computers can be replaced – and we insure against both possibilities – but the data can’t be replaced if it’s lost permanently.

This has been a wakeup call for us, and we’re changing behavior immediately.  I thought I’d learnt my lesson after losing my iPhoto library’s metadata two years back, but that provided nothing out of the home office location.

What’s your backup strategy and what is important to you? How do you manage redundancy/security for media on a project, and for the project files of work in progress? Comments are open as usual.

After making the case that “professionals” rejected the founders of Google, the founders of Apple and that amateurs created the “much bigger than the pro encyclopedia” Wikipedia, the article finishes with this clincher:

My reluctance to work with so called ‘professionals’ goes so far that whenever someone says “Lets do this the professional way” or “But that doesn’t seems professional” I can’t help but instinctively move in the other direction. If it seems professional to me it sounds boring and unoriginal.

Its the awkward people, the creative thinkers and the unconventional innovators that rule the world. Not the people who act ‘professional’ and follow the beaten path.

Re-invent the world; act unprofessionally!

But what really is a professional?

I think there are two meanings of professional, that often become conflated. There is the professionalism of day-to-day operations. When applied that way, it is very valuable. I want other people I work with to be professional: courteous, prepared, knowledgeable, attentive.

But once you get our of the day-to-day into a more meta position, professionalism-as-conventional-wisdom falls short. Conventional wisdom (which I do think is what the writer means by their use of “professionalism” in the article) needs to be regularly overturned as it becomes too conventional and fails to adapt.

If you doubt me, think about the changes to RED’s postproduction workflow over just the last three years. For at least half that time, each RED workflow was updated and custom. In fact, RED Digital Cinema is probably another example of how the “professionals” (Sony, Canon, Panasonic, et al.) all said it couldn’t be done but “amateurs” (highly, highly skilled amateurs) did it.

If you look very closely at the restoration credits box at the bottom, you can see my credit as "Post Production Restoration Consultant".

Was at the Cinerama Dome to view the restored print of Windjammer and it occurred to me that there’s a lot of commonality between Cinerama (the three camera/three projector widescreen of the late 50′s and early 60′s) and 3D.

But first, a little back story. I have been consulting on the restoration of Windjammer as a technical consultant: making sure that the maximum amount of quality we could get from the print was available for the restoration.

I also advised on tools for the job. The Foundry’s Furnace Core featured prominently as did Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro. I also helped set workflow and kept everything running smoothly.

Unfortunately the complete negatives for the three panels of Windjammer are not complete. In fact the only place the entire movie is available was in a badly faded composite 35mm Anamorphic print.

You can see the trailer, remastering process and how we telecined (Oh look, it’s me in the telecine bay) online, but today was the only time it’s likely to be shown in a Cinerama Theater.

David Strohmaier and Greg Kimble did a great job on the restoration – all on Macs with Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

Now this wasn’t a full reconstruction so we worked in HD – 1080p24 – but used the full height during telecine and correction so we didn’t waste any signal area with black. For the DVD, due in early 2011, the aspect ratio is corrected and a “smile box” (TM) treatment to simulate the surround nature of Cinerama.

Because we were working in HD, I was pleasantly impressed by how great it looked at Cinerama size on the Arclight Theater’s Dome Cinema in Hollywood. (Trivia point: the Dome was built for Cinerama it never showed Cinerama until this decade.)

Another point of interest was that the whole show ran off an AJA KiPro as it did in Bradford earlier in the year, and Europe last month. Each Act of the 140+ minute show was contained on one drive pack. Can’t recommend the KiPro highly enough.

So, there we were enjoying the story (and restoration work) and it occurred to me that there were strong similarities in cinematic style between “made for 3D” 3D and Cinerama.

Before restoration, this shot was desaturated, shifted to red and blown out. (From the screening Sep 05, 2010.)

Cinerama seams together three projectors into a very wide screen view that was the precursor of modern widescreen. The very wide lens angles favor the big, panoramic shots and shots that are held rather than rapid cutting. Within this frame the viewer’s eyes are free to wander across multiple areas of interest within the frame.

Similarly, my experience of “made for 3D” 3D movies is that it is most successful when shots are held a little bit longer because each time a 3D movie makes a cut, it takes the audience out of the action for a moment while we re-orient ourselves in space. (Unfortunately there’s nothing analogous to that in the Human Visual System, unlike traditional 2D cutting, which mimics the Human Visual System – eyes and brain together .)

Both Cinerama and 3D work best (in my humble opinion) when the action is allowed to unfold within the frame, rather than the more fluid camera of less grand 2D formats or 3D.

Since 3D had its last heyday around the same time as Cinerama, maybe everything old is new again? Digital Cinerama anyone? (How will we sync three KiPros?)

And one little vanity shot since today was the first (and likely last) time I’ve had my credit up on the big screen in a real cinema:

My first, and likely last, big screen projected credit.

In a perfect world (oh *that* again!) the workflow would be thoroughly tested: shoot with the proposed camera, test the digital lab if involved; test the edit all the way through to the actual output of the project. Once the proposed workflow is tested it can be checked for improved efficiency at every step. Perhaps there are software solutions for automating parts of the process that require only small changes to the process to be extremely valuable. Perhaps there are alternatives that would save a lot of time and money if they were known about.

Instead of tested and efficient workflows, people tend to do “what they’ve done before”. When there are large amounts of money at stake on a film or TV series it’s understandable that people opt for the tried and true, even if it’s not particularly efficient because “it will work”.

Part of the problem is that people simply do not test their workflows. I’ve been involved with “film projects” (both direct to DVD and back out to cinematic release) where the workflow for post was not set until shooting had started. In one example the shoot format wasn’t known until less than a week before shooting started.

Maybe there was a time when you could simply rely on “what went before” for a workflow, but with the proliferation of formats and distribution outputs, there are more choices than ever to be made.

Which brings me to the other part of the problem. Most people making workflow decisions are producers, with input from their chosen editor. Chances are, unfortunately, that neither group are very likely to truly understand the technology that underpins the workflow – or even why the workflow “works”. They know enough of what they need to know to get by but my experience has been that most working producers and editors do not actively invest time into learning the technology and improving their own value.

And when they’re not working, they’re working on getting more work. Again, not surprising.

But somewhere along the way, we need producers to research and listen to advisors (like myself) who do understand the workflow and do have a working knowledge of changing technology that can be make a particular project much more efficient to produce, but I have no idea how to connect those producers with the people who can help.

We’ve seen, in just a little under two years, how technology can improve workflows, just with our relatively minor contributions:

Rent a couple of LockIt boxes (or equivalent) on set and save days and days synchronizing audio and video from dual system shoots;

Log your documentary material in a specific way, and take weeks off post production finding the stories in the material (Producers can even do a pre-edit);

Understand how to build a spreadsheet of your titles and how to make a Motion Template and automate the production of titles (and changes to same).

If you know you can recut a self contained file into it’s scene components, how does that change color correction for your project;

Import music with full metadata.

These are all examples of currently-available software tools from my company and others that are working to make post production more efficiently. I wrote more about this in my Filling in the NLE Gaps for DV Magazine.

My question though, is how do we encourage producers to “look around and see what’s available” and open up their workflows to a little modern technology. To this end, Intelligent Assistance is looking to work closely with a limited group of producers in 2010 to find ways to streamline, automate and make-more-robust postproduction workflows. So, if you’re a producer and want to save time and money in post, email me or post in the comments.

If you’ve got ideas on how encourage producers move toward more metadata-based workflows? How do we get the message out?

This is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s another industry that costs the book publishing business $100 billion a year in lost sales: libraries. Using the same methodology as the study in the cited publisher’s weekly article above, this blogger calculates that libraries have cost publishers $1 Trillion dollars in the last decade.

So, if we’re going to solve the book “piracy” problem in a way that really helps publishers, we’ll have to close all the libraries. After all they’re costing publishers more than 30x more than any unauthorized distribution does: even if you calculate that unauthorized distribution with totally bogus methodologies.

In fact, photocopying also costs the print publishing industry billions of dollars a year, so we should regulate their use. In fact, if the RIAA/MPAA want a “three strikes” rule, then it should be applied to everything.

A three-strikes rule (as introduced in France) would mean that if an unsubstantiated assertion from a record-company-appointed “watchdog” is made against an IP address, the account would be cancelled and the user taken off the Internet. (Note: this is without judicial process; without any proof that the account holder did the download; with a system that has accused dead people of “piracy” or any other legal process we normally hold as being important before issuing punishment. At least there has to be a trial!)

So, if this is a good idea for music or movies (like they’re some “special” category) then it obviously should be carried through to protect print publishers as well.  According to “Freedom to Tinker” it would work like this:

The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print.
As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year.
A few naysayers may argue that print bans might be hard to enforce, and that banning communication based on mere accusations of wrongdoing raises some minor issues of due process and free speech. But if those issues don’t trouble us in the Internet setting, why should they trouble us here?
Yes, if banned from using print, some students will be unable to do their school work, some adults will face minor inconvenience in their daily lives, and a few troublemakers will not be allowed to participate in — or even listen to – political debate. Maybe they’ll think more carefully the next time, before allowing themselves to be accused of copyright infringement.
In short, a three-strikes system is just as good an idea for print as it is for the Internet. Which country will be the first to adopt it?

After all, if it’s fair to have people cut off the Internet (and their life) based on three unsupported, unproven assertions from anyone, it should apply to everything. Right? It should apply to the children of Record Company executives (who apparently only got a “talking to” from their father -wish I could find a link to that story).

This is, of course, after the RIAA and MPAA have totally failed to establish that they have had any loss from piracy. (The biggest grossing movies were mostly pirated before release from within the studio.) Study after study (sorry Adage login required) after study shows that those who download music are the biggest buyers of music, but facts have never gotten in the way of idiot assertions from these organizations.

So, either we apply “three strikes” under some reasonable regime that would require the record company or movie studio to actually do what the law requires and identify the person at the account and prove that they uploaded a file as “making available” is not established legal precedent in any jurisdiction; or we’ll allow a regime where anyone can be accused of “piracy” by any other person without proof or the need to follow established law.

Which are you going to support?

Although, as an aside from my main theme, I look ahead two years to when the actors’, writers’ and directors’ contracts come up for renewal. My feeling is that they’ll either have negotiated a settlement before the contract runs out, or we’re in for an apocalypse.

Remember that this a purely theoretical construct so I’m forgiving myself for not having every detail covered. What set me thinking, horrible-though-it-is was Demand Media. Wired’s article The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model is really a nasty kick in the mouth for production skills: essentially “quality” has no place in this (highly profitable) production line, where costs have been driven down by competitive pressure. It is probably the dystopian future we were warned against when the industry became “democratized”.

Fortunately I don’t think it’s feasible for television-like content. (I’ll just call it Television, but I mean the sort of content that people watch on networks, cable channels, or off a satellite or even via Hulu.) For a thousand reasons I’ll bet at a minimum a more complex production process and higher demands for writing skills. Even relatively successful Internet Shows often have underdone production values from lack of quality writing, lighting or sound. (And some are excellent in all three because they have been made by “old school” folk.)

But let’s step back and apply some of the principles and see what might come of it.

Based on audience demand

Instead of basing program ideas on  some ‘gut feeling’ of a producer or executive we can take a lesson from the Demand Media case and design shows tailored to specific audience demands. Demand Media have algorithms that watch search terms and derive future “shows” as answers to questions people are asking ‘now’.

I’m sure there are ways of tackling similar challenges for TV shows. Monitor social media interactions for the types of comments being made about shows; use that data to derive algorithms to direct existing shows and find ideas for shows that will have an audience, and the business model for that audience would also be known. (See below, Funding it All)

Production Line

Everything becomes a production line. It’s going that way now, but the whole process needs to not be recreated anew for each show. In a greenfield model, employment is constant with people moving from show to show as they come and go; moving from one creative grouping to another.

Everything is standardized: production gear, cameras, record formats, etc. Standard workflows, controlled by the studio.

Talent

Talent would be mostly staff – from writers, production crew, actors, editors, audio post – paid decent salaries and with good benefits. Everyone would get a decent salary with a flat salary structure (instead of the enormous salaries for some) but would also share in the studio profits. Everyone is motivated to make it work.

Talent (across the board) is nurtured in their craft advancement based on merit. (Implicit in advancement is the concept that people will leave, unless the studio always grows.)

Production

Put production in inexpensive facilities, either purpose built (long term) in inexpensive locales (low cost counties) or in excess facilities from a declining (declined) old industry.

I see a lot of standing sets and green screen, and frankly a lot of synthetic sets.

Again with standardized production gear, all matching grip and common set modules for set construction. Work on the model of Southwest, JetBlue and Virgin America: one standard service, in standardized aircraft with much simplified maintenance and costs for spares.

Standardizing on common equipment, workflows, formats and outputs would save production and post huge amounts of money. Equipping with modern gear that has great quality at affordable prices taking advantage of all the cost reduction of the last decade.

Production will require talent. We need it to “look and sound like Television” because that’s where a large market is at (if we’re in a greenfield remember). It will still need to be lit well; recorded well and finished to a high standard, but I would argue that the most profitable approach would be to go to the least expensive “good enough” solution. And by “good enough” I do mean that it has to be good, but maybe for this type of content, shooting with a Viper might be “more quality than we need to pay for”. But AVC-I or direct ProRes acquisition with a KiPro makes for high quality and efficient pipelines that maintain “good enough” quality.

Apply that concept across the range of production departments: good enough, but not luxury.

Promotion and Audience Building

I think there are a lot of lessons from the independent film producers who have learned how to build audiences, and it’s something I’ve presented on before. It will be more building and nurturing fan bases and involving them in the process as much as possible.

Funding it all

Ah yes, the million dollar question. Or multi-billion dollar question if we’re talking an alternative to the current Television industry. Of course, I don’t have any definitive answer because, well frankly, there won’t be one. As was obvious at Distribution U, there are many avenues to funding a program:

• some audiences will want to pay directly, and that’s a viable business model as I’ve demonstrated before, for even quite small audience sizes;
• less expensive productions make it easier for one advertiser (a.k.a. brand in recent discussion here) to sponsor the whole show (Mark Pesce’s Hyperdistribution model)
• use the show to promote merchandise, live performances, or other scarce good.

In one part of my mind I think a model like this could actually work. In fact I’m sure some variation on this is part of Jim Louderback is attempting with Revision3 and Kip McClanahan is attempting with On Networks. I suspect that no-one is going as radical as Demand Media, and I hope no-one ever does.

I’ve never met Mr Seacrest and I have no personal animosity but $15 million  a year to host a talent show seems just wrong. Way out of balance with anything real.  This is a 3x increase in salary over what he’s been getting – $5 million a year – for the same job.

That same amount of money would produce six episodes of Mad Men including paying all the far more talented cast (hey, they can act); paying the crew; locations; editors; facilities and presumably profit for the producers. All instead of paying one person to turn up.

I cannot believe that any one person brings that much value to a show. It just seems way out of balance to anything reasonable and human and really, tells me why the whole industry needs to be made over anew.

Equally stomach churning are the  sums paid to the CEOs of the major media companies, even when the results they turn in are “disappointing” to say the least.  Disney CEO Robert Iger earned $30.6 million last year while presiding over a 26% drop in profit at Disney? Where is the shareholder revolt? Why are they not demanding an $8 million drop in salary package?

It’s not just Iger; the rest of the crowd of losing value media company heads are all paid outrageous sums of money for the value they (don’t) bring to the companies they head.

Here’s my solution. Set a limit to the maximum ratio the highest and lowest paid employees of a company can earn. You want to increase the CEO salary, then everyone’s salary goes up to share in the (obviously great) results. Set the ratio at 100:1 if you like, but set a ratio that cannot be broken.

Until there’s some sanity I’ll be putting my efforts into demolishing that industry to start over afresh.

I thoroughly recommend reading Mike’s article, but the gist of the argument is that the Constitution provides for a “Limited Period” (originally 14 years, not 50 years past the death of the author) for “authors” (only, no descendants or corporate owners) “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. Useful Arts apparently being the business of invention in the language of the day. No mention of almost all our current copyright system.

We wouldn’t have the RIAA suing its best customers. The RIAA, MPAA and their kind around the world would have to work out how to compete, which is simple: provide a good product at a fair price and provide it conveniently. Without the crutch of copyright to protect a dying business model (and a highly profitable one, so it’s understandable they don’t want to adjust to the new reality) they would have to compete.

After all, television has been giving its content away pretty much since day one. Of course others (advertisers) pay for the privilege of interrupting the program with something irrelevant, which is why I’d rather pay a fair amount for my ad free copies, thanks.

If there was no copyright, then digital copies would abound, and content creators would either have to add value to their official (paid) version; or bundle advertising so closely with the show that it doesn’t appear like advertising. (In fact I believe the future of advertising is branded media, but that’s a post for another day.)

Of course, it can be done. iTunes and Amazon’s music store sell music that is fairly readily available via various P2P mechanisms. Every one of the 4 Billion songs Apple has sold has been available free.

Perhaps content could be free after a period of time, and people will pay for immediacy. This is the strategy the Direct TV hoped would give them more customers by showing Friday Night Lights on Direct TV before their outing on NBC. (See my earlier article on how the numbers stack up for new media, on how that program is being funded and what a fair price would be for a viewer.)

People will pay for convenience and simplicity – both reasons why iTunes has been such a successful model, despite charging way too much for television and movie content.

There are dozens of ways that television, and new media production, could fund itself if there was the necessity and they couldn’t fall back on copyright. In fact in my “Making a living from new media” seminar, I outline 13 different ways that free media can lead to a decent middle class income.

If “Hollywood” wasn’t covered by copyright, how different would it be?

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?

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.

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”?

Last time I wrote about the different types of metadata we had identified four types of metadata:

• Source Metadata is stored in the file from the outset by the camera or capture software, such as in EXIF format. It is usually immutable.
• Added Metadata is beyond the scope of the camera or capture software and has to come from a human. This is generally what we think about when we add log notes – people, place, etc.
• Derived Metadata is calculated using a non-human external information source and includes location from GPS, facial recognition, or automatic transcription.
• Inferred Metadata is metadata that can be assumed from other metadata without an external information source. It may be used to help obtain Added metadata.

See the original post for clearer distinction between the four types of metadata. Last night I realized there is at least one additional form of metadata, which I’ll call Analytical Metadata. The other choice was Visually Obvious Invisible Metadata, but I thought that was confusing!

Analytical metadata is encoded information in the picture about the picture, probably mostly related to people, places and context. The most obvious example is a series of photos without any event information. By analyzing who was wearing what clothes and correlating between shots, the images related to an event can be grouped together even without an overall group shot. Or there is only one shot that clearly identifies location but can be cross-correlated to the other pictures in the group by clothing.

Similarly a painting, picture, decoration or architectural element that appears in more than one shot can be used to identify the location for all the shots at that event. I’ve even used hair styles as a general time-period indicator, but that’s not a very fine-grained tool!  Heck, even the presence or absence of someone in a picture can identify a time period: that partner is in the picture so it must be between 1982 and 1987.

I also discovered two more sources of metadata. Another source of Source Metadata is found on negatives, which are numbered, giving a clear indication of time sequence. (Of course Digital Cameras have this and more.) The other important source of metadata for this exercise has been a form of Added Metadata: notes on the back of the image! Fortunately Kodak Australia for long periods of time printed the month and year of processing on the back. Rest assured that has been most helpful for trying to put my lifetime of photos into some sort of order. The rate I’m going it will take me the last third of my life to organize the images from the first two thirds.

Another discovery: facial recognition in iPhoto ’09 is nowhere near as good as it seems in the demonstration. Not surprising because most facial recognition technology is still in its infancy. I also think it prefers the sharpness of digital images rather than scans of prints, but even with digital source, it seem to attempt a guess at one in five faces, and be accurate about 30% of the time. It will get better, and it’s worth naming the identified faces and adding ones that were missed to gain the ability to sort by person. It’s also worthwhile going through and deleting the false positives – faces recognized in the dots of newspapers or the patterns in wallpaper, etc. so they don’t show up when it’s attempting to match faces.

Added June 2: Apparently we won’t be getting this type of metadata from computers any time soon!

It’s not as wacky idea as it seems.  Go back a couple of  years and you’ll find only a very small elite had the tools and skills to read and write (the classic definition of literacy). Pre Gutenberg it was a very elite skill and definitely not something you’d want the unwashed masses doing. The ability to read and write was a defining skill that separated the “educated leadership” from the masses of followers. The Catholic Church continued the elitist practice of a Latin Mass, in part to continue a “mystique” about the ceremony because only the priesthood understood Latin.

Literacy, or the lack of it, is a way of controlling a population. Then we had the Industrial Era and (relatively) cheap printing and slowly more and more people acquired the ability to read and write. It was no longer “special” and no longer a guarantee of income or career that it once was.  Being able to read or write no longer defined the position.

Now that about 90% of the Western population reads and writes acceptably, we see how important it is to all types of jobs. There are very few jobs where you could fulfill the function of the job without knowing how to read and write.

For some people, their ability to write is their primary skill. Novelists, playwrights, screenplay writers, etc all primarily use their writing skills to make a living. But nearly every business person writes reports or writes PowerPoint presentations. People fill out forms for a living, or correct filled out forms and enter them into an electronic storage system. People (used to) write classified ads before Craigslist  came along. 

If you think about it, there are very few places where you could survive without knowing how to read and write: to be literate.

As I predicted, I think we’ve seen video production and post production skills move from being niche knowledge areas, accessed only by the High Priests (and occasional Priestess) of the Television and Film businesses. The technology was hard to work with, bulky, needed a lot of power and a lot of light. There were genius engineers who kept cameras aligned within themselves and with other cameras.

Today’s young production crews don’t have the joy of recalling the pain of aligning the three tubes in a camera to each other; or the “fun” of 4-Field (NTSC) or 8-Field (PAL) frame sequence in editing. Personally I’m glad those days have gone, along with linear editing and all that went with it.

Now, like the advent of cheap tools in reading and writing like the ball-point pen, electric typewriters and eventually laser printers, means that anyone who has a reason to write, can do so.

That’s where we are, or are heading, for the very broad field of ‘video production and post production’.  It’s not the job any more, it’s just a set of tools almost everyone uses in their life somewhere.

But like classic literacy, only very few will make it their primary means of earning an income. Instead, those skills will be common to most people. Some will use the same basic skills to add some video to a news website along with the article, some will use it to record and present events, some will use it only personally, some will have to use it as part of their work and some will make it the primary means of income generation.

Instead of the latter being the only way to exercise these skills there are now many, many more ways to exercise them. As I say in my seminars on the subject, because of the advent of low cost, high quality production tools, anyone who has an idea and the drive can produce their project.

I don’t think “high end” production is going to go away, any more than widespread literacy forced the novelist out of business. 150 years later there are still highly successful novelists, just not a whole lot. There are a whole lot more (thousands of times more) who use their literacy skills as part of the way they make their living.

And that’s where we’re heading: to a world where there’s nothing special about video production skills, per sé, just different ways of leveraging those skills into an income stream in association with other skills.

There are a lot of mult-talented, multi-faceted people and I’ve never known how to describe what I do. So from now on, when asked “What do you do”, I’m going to reply “I’m a hat stand”.  I’ll still have to describe that I do a whole bunch of different things (from writing this blog to business plans, editing, encoding, some graphic design, marketing, etc, etc) but at least there’ll be a bit of fun while we talk.

The term first came up at an Adobe event in LA last week, when thinking about the Olsen Brothers who between them wear all the hats needed in production. That’s a lot of hat stand!

There was no problem with shipping back the first incorrectly ordered card, and even though I’d opened the sealed inner package on the second before realizing my mistake, it was also accepted back without restocking fee.

That’s good, but when I realized my second mistake I got on their live chat and within a minute or two was chatting with Mark. I explained the situation and he made a couple of suggestions as he got closer to understanding the limitations of the configuration. Ultimately he made a different recommendation then took the time to check that it would work with the existing drive enclosures. He thought it would with one type and not with the other, but ultimately it turns out that neither were suitable.

But Mark didn’t stop there, he then pointed me to a Sonnet Tech card (that they did not carry), which sadly Sonnet have stopped making! Apparently determined to solve my problem even though there was no longer much chance of a sale (this time) Mark very quickly found a refurbished unit at another dealer and gave me the URL in the iChat.

Ultimately PC Pitstop are going to be refunding these purchases as they’re returned, but Mark, who appears to be a search engine master, has certainly guaranteed I’ll be shopping there again some time in the future.

Justin has one very, very good point: a RED One is not a good investment for a rental company. Sadly neither was setting up for Final Cut Pro rentals. In both cases a solution you rented as needed (because it was so expensive you couldn’t afford to own it) has been supplanted by “buy it and you’ll always have it to use.” That pattern also applies to HD video camcorders.

The DV Rebel’s Guide author Stu Maschwitze advises readers to own their own camera above owning an edit system. He proceeds to give several examples of where he’s been able to get dramatic shots that add high production value to his shows, just because he had the camera with him.

Projects that wouldn’t have been made are now being made. There are more opportunities to make money in video production than ever before. There are probably few opportunities to make enormous – dare I say “excessive” – profits.

Right now budget projects tend toward formats like HDV or AVCHD/AVCCAM because the cameras are very affordable and the quality “isn’t too bad.” Heck, it’s high definition with quality at least 10x that of my first pro video cameras, and in inflation-adjusted terms about 1/10th the cost. (Not to mention 1/10th the weight.)

But it does limit production in two ways: it limits where the product can go given the quality requirements of some outlets, and it limits what you can do with the image. Particularly with RAW footage – what the sensor saw is what’s in the image – you can push the image in Color Timing a lot, lot further than those formats that limit color information.

Quality has always cost. No-one’s ever been unhappy about that other than the cost-requirement limited what got made and distributed. So industries evolve high cost structures. Budgets get bigger because there’s more at stake and when successes happen, everyone who contributed to their success wanted their share of the (quite often extreme) profits.

Television is the child of film and radio and inherited many of the same cost structures for program production. Given the limited outlets of the day that was entirely appropriate. In the last decade there’s been an explosion of outlets. The number of cable channels have dramatically increased thanks to the Clinton-era Telecommunications Act of 1996. And there’s this thing called ‘The Internet’ that seems to be opening up increasing number of distribution opportunities.

Back in 1999, if you told me there’d be more than 1.25 million registered Final Cut Pro users within 10 years, I’d have been credulous. Although there were about 300,000 Premiere 5/6 users at that time, it was the dominant NLE – Avid having fewer than 1/3 that number of customers at the time. People seem to find a reason to pay for professional editing software beyond what ships free on every Mac.

Apple announced their customer number at the MacWorld ’09 Final Cut Pro User Group Supermeet, but these following are likely to be reasonably close. Avid’s user base has continued to grow and I’ll say a generous 200,000. Premiere Pro has to have well over half a million legitimate customers. Sony Vegas is up over 300,000 customers. Avid Liquid has about 400,000 customers iirc. Other NLEs, like Edius I don’t have a feel for. (Please feel free to correct any numbers in the comments or private email.) Add them together and there about 2 million people in the world who have paid for professional editing software.

You’ll note how I’m carefully avoiding calling them all “editors”. People are obviously using Final Cut Pro in ways that would be quite foreign to an experienced entertainment industry or documentary editor. But if they’re editing, satisfying a need and making a living from it, that’s a good thing. That’s a heck of a lot more people employed (or working for themselves in some way) – making a living doing what they like doing – than ever there was before.

It’s the same in the music and print design businesses. The transition to digital technologies demolished existing cost structures and opened up thousands of new employment opportunities.

Red Digital Cinema, with the RED One now and Scarlet and Epic coming up, will probably sell in numbers that “make no sense” if you expect the industry (film, television, entertainment, education and all other types of production) to not change.

The concept of an “Independent model of Television production” came from Mathew Winer, write/producer of Mad Men: Television production more modeled on Independent Movie production approaches. People like Television, and YouTube-like content supplements but does not replace Television programming.

What we’re currently seeing is a trend for “quality production” away from the big four Networks to smaller players simply because the market (viewers and therefore advertisers) for drama or comedy production on the networks is not big enough. Even ratings winners like American Idol attract audiences that would have seen the show cancelled even 10 years ago.

The cable industry doesn’t have the same cost structures as network, and the Internet has even fewer constraints. Josh Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog was purportedly produced for around US$100,000 on the SAG “low budget production” contract. His cast probably didn’t get paid as much as their Network Shows did, but at a time when nothing was shooting because of the writer’s strike, any work is good work. Particularly if that work is in a Guild that has a greater than 95% unemployment rate!

Shows like Mad Men and Friday Night Lights are doing high quality work with “very constrained” budgets. (Anyone know what the per-episode budgets are, let me know in the comments or private email.) What’s to say that under-employed actors and under-employed writers and under-employed-everything-else in LA (Toronto, New York, Vancouver, Denver, wherever) couldn’t produce their own shows for Internet distribution?

There are budget ways to do effects and better green/blue screen tools than ever before. Apple has put advanced color timing in the hands of anyone who wants to try and give their project the “big production” look.

The availability of “quality that no-one can complain about, ever” tools like those coming from Red Digital Cinema completes the production side. The tools of quality production are democratized. A new, new industry arises that aspires to decent middle class incomes with employment opportunities for anyone with the desire, drive and talent to create television, film, conference video, or event videography…

May a million United Artists bloom. If only we could get the distribution side solved.

Avid, and then Apple’s withdrawal from NAB 2008 seemed shocking at the time, but it makes sense. They have better ways to reach their customers: More cost-effective smaller – but focused on the Apple product – Pro Apps events and better online communication.

Today it became public that RED Digital Cinema would not be attending NAB this year. The stated reasons echo what Avid and Apple said last year: there’d be too many mock ups on the NAB booth because key components won’t arrive until a month later. NAB (like MacWorld) puts deadlines on developers calenders that don’t really suit them. RED will be holding “RED Day” somewhere, some time in the future instead. Their brand is strong enough, so they can do that.

Isn’t it crazy that in April Apple announces a version of Final Cut that doesn’t ship until September of that year? It was barely in beta testing and really not ready to be seen. Not exhibiting at NAB leaves Apple flexible as to whether they announce an upcoming version of Final Cut Studio at a special event coinciding with NAB; or they hold it back until after Snow Leopard ships because it will use features only available in Snow Leopard and not yet announced. Hypothetically. (Please, that is NOT a rumor, it’s a hypothetical case. I know nothing!)

Why were trade exhibitions valuable? There’s the opportunity for direct comparison, theoretically. But the camera folk are all over the place and you’ll probably get a better “shoot out” at a local dealer or through a user group. And you don’t have to shout at anyone to do it.

A Trade Show was a way for companies to get attention, because media focused on shows. But that kind of changed with the Internet. In 1998 my then editor at Digital Media World magazine in Australia wanted a decent article on the latest news. By the next year, he wanted a “color piece” because all the news was on the Internet and he didn’t need no expensive journalist writing that up. (It could have been written in India as one local Glendale, CA website does for its local news.)

They are also a way of stumbling over unknown little companies or technologies that you might not already know about, but with news sites like Digg, Blogs like newteevee.com, freshhdv.com (and another 293 I use to keep in touch) all feeding the latest stream of information, it’s unlikely I’ll miss something.

So why am I going to NAB 2009? To socialize and to see what I would have missed otherwise.