Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

NLE's at NAB : opportunity and apathy

Lou Wallace raises some great points for NLE's and the upcoming NAB07in his Blog.

Its a big NAB/year for NLE's and I think there's a couple of things going on - The first is that all these four NLE's are very mature with a base level of comprehensive sophistication. Frankly they are all very good and very capable. there simple are no duds here. But, and this is the most interesting of buts, all four are leading in different directions and seemingly taking bets on where the market is going to shift in the future...

Avid seem to be sticking by their high-end guns but quietly hoping they've got a enough low-end line in the water for people to get hooked early and stay with them. Frankly I think they are in trouble and they know it. Like an aircraft carrier Avid are big and powerful and respected but they turn very very slowly and change course with enormous difficulty. Apple, Adobe and Sony are all chipping away at their market share with veracity. Apple withFCP in particular have been thoroughly successful at selling the image that Avid is for old farts and if you're a hip young thing you're usig FCP. There is no technical or actual truth in this at all but marketing is powerful and nobody markets better or with more grandiose hyperbole than Apple.

From what I can see, despite being forced to produce software-only systems at competitive prices on their low-end, the Avid 'concept' is still thoroughly geared towards hardware assisted, large scale, mostly off-line production and whilst this is just fine for Hollywood studios, quite simply the bulk of the worlds media production is not in this sphere any more. Media production in the 21st century is light, efficient and flexible. Avid is arguably none of these things. Its a tank in a battle of rocket propelled grenade lobbing militants. Their market has been chewed considerably and they are yet to launch a serious counter attack that can attract the 'hip young things' looking to make movies their way. They seem to have relied for far to long on the idea that to be a big time editor you could play with the other toys for a while but in the end you had to learn Avid. This just inst true anymore and Avid are paying the price for their complacency.

The other issue they have is that the big trend across software NLE's is towards offering the complete studio package suite of software apps, the end to end solution, and whilst Avid have Pro-Tools under their belt for audio production (itself an antiquated and inflexible dinosaur) the rest of their 'suite' is severally by comparison with offerings from Adobe and Apple ? no serious compositing tool, no imaging tool, no animation.

What do Avid need to do at NAB07? Show they are moving with the times rather than staunchly riding the same old and worn out mantra. Avid need come up with the flexible, efficient, hardware independent NLE that is part of an integrated package of holistic post-production.... Avid Adrealie is all well and good, hardware acceleration is nothing to be sneezed at but when film-makers start their careers, they wont start with an Adrenaline system and in the digital age they may quickly learn that they don't ever need one

So on to Adobe... Adobe are playing the ONE BIG BOX card (and a big card it is) - Complete, end to end, all bases covered in one box where all the apps talk to each other. Premiere Pro, Encore, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Soundbooth; the acquisition of DVRack (now called OnLocation), and frankly with Flash thrown into the mix it really is a killer suite that no other developer can come close to matching in an app for app comparison.

Its an holistic approach Adobe have been working towards for some time with various corporate takeovers. An approach that treats contemporary digital production as a hybrid and integrated process of editing, audio, compositing, effects, imagery, vectors, animation and interactivity. Adobe really are the only developer right now who cover the diversity of what digital media has become in post production.

This issues for Adobe however are just as tangible as for other developers. They need not just to tap into this new way of thinking about production, that embraces all these ideas and tools; but they similarly need to build that audience as well from scratch. A hearts and minds re-education process. That's a tough ask for old school editors and old school TV producers and old school designers... Its a change in culture that doest happen easily or quickly. Similarly whilst the Adobe suite carries name brand weight with After Effects, Photoshop and Flash ? tools so dominant they have become common nouns ? there are other apps in the bundle that are very new and or have a legacy of bad reputation to overcome. Première Pro is not the Première of old but some of the wounds heal slowly. All Adobe apps also suffer from bloatedness and inefficiency. Common functions in Première that should take one mouse click take three and simple functionality is often absent for reasons unknown ? such as why I cant have a mono audio clip and stereo audio clip on the same timeline track...???

What do Adobe have to deliver for NAB07? They need to tighten the ship. They have all the pieces on the board, more pieces than anyone else, but they're scattered and unruly bunch. At times beautiful but just as often ugly.

Sony, the cocky young upstart with their media suite of Vegas, Soundforge, Acid and DVD Architect have gained an enormous amount of market ground and credibility in the face of bigger, stiffer, more established competition. Enough to be considered a very serious contender against the three A's. But still their biggest battle in perception. Still far too many editors respond to the Sony Vegas name with the words "never heard of it". The simple fact is they should have and need to, as Vegas is arguably the most forward thinking and efficient NLE on the market today. 100% Resolution and Codec independent long before anyone else had considered such a thing possible. The best audio tools of any NLE on the market. The best compositing options of any NLE on the market. Wrapped around a very competent and flexible editor in ways capable of editing feats other apps can only dream about. Any format, just about any codec, any resolution, any frame rate, mixed together on one timeline, real-time playback, no waiting for rendering. Once you have had this efficiency in Vegas its very hard to go back to anything else. When you've had the ability adjust any and all effects and filters in real-time preview whilst the timeline plays back anything just seems slow....

Vegas is in may ways heading in a similar vein to Adobe but in the somewhat opposite direction - rather than half a dozen apps in one box, Vegas is embracing complete editing, audio production and effective compositing in the one app rather than across different apps. Sound Forge is amazing audio surgery, Acid is an incredibly powerful multi-track recorder and sequencer but the truth is that Vegas doesn't Need either to function is a very holistic manner for end to end production. Vegas is very much part of the new bread and the three A's would do well to watch very closely what Vegas does every step forward form here as it has always been two steps ahead of them.

However Sony are at a crucial point ? no support for 10bit production seriously hampers Vegas' pro cred with studios; limited functionality for titling almost no inter-change between other Sony applications; and limited third party plug-in support ? These criticisms all make Vegas vulnerable to growing into the truly comprehensive tool it promises to be. More than anything what Sony need to do with Vegas is built credibility, market perception and a tighter relationship with third party developers of both hardware and software. Hopefully NAB07 will deliver these things.

And then there's Apple. Arguably, on the surface at least, the most confused one of the bunch. Fact is the bulk of FCP users are indie film-makers, low budget movie guerrillas, corporate video makers, wedding videographers. But Apple are consistently marketing to, and marketing on, an appeal to the very high end (Walter Murch, David Fincher, Cold Mountain and so on). Their plan seems to be to maintain their low-end user base bread and butter market sector by appealing to the low-end's ever present desire to be the high end. People use FCP for their low-budget projects because at night they dream of being David Fincher and they perceive FCP as being the choice of the dynamic high-end. Apple are selling the aspiration rather than the reality of the tool. Its a strategy that in theory has a lot of legs. BUT... By going after that traditionally Avid market perception they have, over several past versions, neglected a great many of the things that indie, self reliant film-makers really need in their NLE and post-production suite. FCP's congenially traditional approach to editing, its focus on off-lining, cinema tools, segmented workflow and non-inclusion of decent audio tools, no surround sound and very limited compositing and colour grading, is fine and great for NBC and traditional Hollywood who have no need of these things but is arguably of great detriment to the indie, guerilla film-maker base. The Apple suite, as a bundle, is decidedly weak. FCP is a very focused and limited editor that cannot function on its own so it needs audio and compositing tools. Sadly Soundtrack is a cruel joke of an audio system (VU meters that have no dBfs markings or numeric read outs!!! WTF??) DVD Studio pro is excellent but Motion is sorely lacking by comparison to competition like After Effects. Its a mixed bag.

What Apple deliver in NAB 2007 will set the path they are taking into the future. Do they want to be Avid? Do they want to be the new Hollywood standard? They certainly seem to be heading that way and frankly doing very well at it ? in perception at least if not tangible reality. Or do they want to be the flexible and efficient indie alternative; lightweight, flexible, accessible, efficient, inexpensive, fast? Can they straddle the fence and do both? Probably not whilst the Apple share holders are demanding the next i-pod and starving their software development team of resources. Its here that FCP, seemingly very strong in the market right now, may actually be the most vulnerable NLE on the market to the arguably less traditional and more forward thinking competitors. If Apple continue to chase the big end of town their user base may quickly grow tired of missing out on the flexibility and efficiency offered by the competition.

All four of these NLE systems have the potential at this NAB to bring about great changes and go in great directions. All four could squander the opportunity and maintain an apathetic status quo... we shall see....

Posted at 01:00AM Apr 12, 2007 by Mike Jones in video  |  Comments[4]