The Future of Avid?

This week the audio and editing worlds were buzzing with news that Avid Technology was exploring a potential sale of the company. This stems from a single article at Reuters. I have no additional news on this nor any inside information. Not to mention that any such single news article should always be taken with a grain of salt. But, where there’s smoke, there’s often fire. Much of what I’m going to write next about possible future scenarios will be highly speculative.

Avid was the first nonlinear editing system I ever used, so there’s some fondness for the company. In spite of that, these days I mainly edit with Premiere Pro and sometimes with Final Cut Pro. I color correct in Resolve and of all the apps, that’s viewed by many as the up and comer.

At least one vlogger incorrectly noted that Avid was sold. That’s in part due to a principal investor, LVS, indicating that it was selling its interest in Avid back in April. While this might have been a trigger, I’m not sure the two are related. However, having a key investor bow out – coupled with a writers’ strike in Avid’s prime market – does not help their cause.

Avid is more than Media Composer and Pro Tools

Avid Technology is often viewed through the lens of Media Composer or Pro Tools, depending on your position in the industry. Yet, the company is way more than that, with offerings in newsroom software, graphics production, storage, audio hardware, and cloud/remote editing services. We often forget that Avid led the way in developing key technologies that we take for granted today, such as file-based field acquisition (Ikegami EditCam) and software-based color correction (Symphony).

Although Avid is a large company, it’s minuscule when compared with many others. Avid is focused solely on the professional content creation market – broadcast, news, television, feature films, and the recording industry. Despite several attempts, it has never successfully leveraged its technology into a viable consumer product line.

On top of that, Avid has struggled to meet the financial challenges of cheaper alternatives nipping at their heels in the pro space. In the past decade they appear to have reached a stasis point with some growth. This is partly thanks to Apple, when they re-imagined the original version of Final Cut Pro as Final Cut Pro X. That turned off many in the pro market and drove some to Premiere Pro, but also others back to Media Composer. Nevertheless, the Wall Street investment community wants significant growth and that’s hard to achieve for a company like Avid. A shift to a subscription model has been maligned by some, but it’s likely to have helped them. However, missing earning projections – realistic or not – hasn’t.

Hollywood

Ultimately, staking your business model on Hollywood (I use that in a broad sense and not a specific location) probably isn’t a good idea any longer. Film studios and TV producers often work through post companies that supply rental systems on demand per project. They maintain an inventory of decked out Media Composer workstations. Since most of the professional community is risk-averse, many of these rental systems go a while before being updated to newer versions of the software. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Plus, the owners want to maximize their investment in hardware and software. So, even in Avid’s core market, growth isn’t guaranteed.

The movie studios, streamers like Netflix, and TV networks have certain recommended workflows that often dictate Media Composer and/or Pro Tools systems. You would think that offers some stability. However, studios also used to be locked into film and relied on workhorse tools, like KEMs, Steenbecks, and Moviolas. I started video editing in the early days of CMX and, like the film benches, saw it come and go. There’s no guarantee for any of Avid’s products. In fact, in the early software NLE days, Lightworks was preferred over Avid by numerous editors. Yet, it too, is a shadow of its former self.

Who will step up?

So what’s next? I’m only guessing, but there are several options. The first is a simple sale to another investor, investment group, or collection of investors. A second option is to become a subsidiary within a larger company – for example Microsoft, who currently supplies Avid Technology with its cloud services.

Some have opined that a company like Blackmagic Design – who has made numerous strategic acquisitions – would buy Avid Technology. I find that highly unlikely. First, Avid is presumably still too healthy to make it palatable for Blackmagic Design. Second, Blackmagic already offers many products that directly compete with Avid’s and within the same market space. The company simply has no need for what Avid Technology has to offer, unless they only wanted to gut the company for its portfolio of intellectual property.

Apple is another name that pops up. I find that idea totally ludicrous. They have a different view of the marketplace than when Final Cut Pro 1.0 was launched nearly a quarter century ago. Having professional film and TV studios use products with the Apple name and logo is of interest for sure, but in reality it’s a minor blip on their radar.

What about a breakup?

More intriguing is what would happen if the company were split into several entities. After all, the Avid Technology of today has been built out of a series of acquisitions, plus internal development. As I see it, Pro Tools has the best chance of surviving as a standalone company selling audio hardware and software. The Pro Tools application started under the Digidesign brand before that company was bought by Avid. The current audio consoles and control surfaces morphed from Avid’s acquisition of Euphonix.

Audio has a chance of survival as a separate company, simply because Pro Tools has a much stronger presence in the consumer and indie musician community. These products are a staple of most recording studios and there are many aspiring musicians. Search YouTube and you’ll find a lot more influencers using Pro Tools than are using Media Composer. However, it could also be acquired by a larger audio-centric conglomerate, such as Audiotonix, which owns Solid Sate Logic, Harrison, and others. Then there’s the wild card of some music industry luminary buying the Pro Tools unit for its software and consoles in order to ensure their continued development. That’s not totally far-fetched, considering that Peter Gabriel owned SSL for 12 years for exactly that reason.

The next unit to go could be the news, graphics, and storage products. Although Avid storage works well within the Avid ecosystem, storage – even high-end storage – is a commodity product. As a group, this might play well within another broadcast company, such as Grass Valley. If this were to happen, that would be the ultimate irony. Grass Valley is owned by Black Dragon Capitol, which is run by Louis Hernandez, Jr., who was a former Avid CEO. Nevertheless, Grass Valley is already a composite of several other top-tier broadcast equipment companies, including the Grass Valley Group, Snell & Wilcox, and Quantel.

Where does that leave Media Composer?

I don’t mean to imply in all of this that the products, especially Media Composer, have no value. One of Avid’s biggest strengths is collaborative workflows. The closest of the competitors is Adobe with Productions for Premiere Pro. I’ve worked in workgroups using both and Avid still has the edge. If you are working on a large film or reality TV series with a team of picture, assistant, VFX, and music editors, then it’s hard to beat an Avid ecosystem. Unfortunately, that’s a niche.

It’s possible that the Media Composer software unit could go along with an acquisition like I just described. Not so much as Media Composer, but rather as the Newscutter version. This would allow such a company to offer a turnkey news editing solution tied directly to the storage. In spite of being viewed as the marquee product within the brand, Media Composer is the least attractive of all of Avid’s products from an investment and acquisition standpoint. It is the flagship product, but large companies who purchase tons of Avid storage often get Media Composer licenses at loss leader prices.

This brings to mind a different scenario. Since editing on Media Composer seems essential to many in the Hollywood community, it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that a group of Hollywood companies or directors could band together to purchase the assets and personnel necessary to develop, maintain, and sell the Media Composer application. This would not be unlike the Kodak deal pushed by Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, J. J. Abrams, and others. They brokered an arrangement between film studios and Kodak to keep the company alive and ensure the continued availability of film stock.

And…

Let me stress that it’s all very early and what I’ve discussed is purely hypothetical. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Avid has struggles ahead. If I were a betting man, then the likeliest scenario of all of these is that Avid finds a new investment group and continues along the same path with slight growth and ongoing ups and downs.

Regardless of what happens, if you operate Avid software or hardware, it’s going to continue to work in spite of potential changes. If you are a film or audio engineering student with serious plans to enter into the traditional film and/or recording studio worlds, then for the time being it will be worthwhile to know your way around Media Composer and/or Pro Tools. In the extremely unlikely event that Avid Technology went over the cliff tomorrow, its products would still be in use for some years to come.

So let’s just sit back and see how the story develops. This could be much ado about nothing and like Mark Twain’s comment on reading his own obituary in the newspaper, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

©2023 Oliver Peters

Impressions of NAB 2023

2023 marks the 100th year of the NAB Convention, which started out as a radio gathering in New York City. This year you could add ribbons to your badges indicating the number of years that you’d attended – 5, 10, etc. My first NAB was 1979 in Dallas, so I proudly displayed the 25+ ribbon. Although I haven’t attended each one in those intervening years, I have attended many and well over 25.

Some have been ready to sound the death knell for large, in-person conventions, thanks to the pandemic and proliferation of online teleconferencing services like Zoom. 2019 was the last pre-covid year with an attendance of 91,500 – down from previous highs of over 100,000. 2022 was the first post-covid NAB and attendance was around 52,400. That was respectable given the climate a year ago. This year’s attendance was over 65,000, so certainly an upward trend. If anything, this represents a pent-up desire to kick the tires in person and hook back up with industry friends from all over the world. My gut feeling is that international attendance is still down, so I would expect future years’ attendance to grow higher.

Breaking down the halls

Like last year, the convention spread over the Central, North, and new West halls. The South hall with its two floors of exhibition space has been closed for renovation. The West hall is a three-story complex with a single, large exhibition floor. It’s an entire convention center in its own right. West hall is connected to the North hall by the sidewalk, an enclosed upstairs walkway, as well as the LVCC Loop (the connecting tunnel that ferries people between buildings in Teslas). From what I hear, next year will be back to the North, Central, and South halls.

As with most NAB conventions, these halls were loosely organized by themes. Location and studio production gear could mostly be found in Central. Post was mainly in the North hall, but next year I would expect it to be back in the South hall. The West hall included a mixture of vendors that fit under connectivity topics, such as streaming, captioning, etc. It also included some of the radio services.

Although the booths covered nearly all of the floor space, it felt to me like many of the big companies were holding back. By that I mean, products with large infrastructure needs (big shared storage systems, large video switchers, huge mixing desks, etc) were absent. Mounting a large booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center – whether that’s for CES or NAB – is quite costly, with many unexpected charges.

Nevertheless, there were still plenty of elaborate camera sets and huge booths, like that of Blackmagic Design. If this was your first year at NAB, the sum of the whole was likely to be overwhelming. However, I’m sure many vendors were still taking a cautious approach. For example, there was no off-site Avid Connect event. There were no large-scale press conferences the day before opening.

The industry consolidates

There has been a lot of industry consolidation over the past decade or two. This has been accelerated thanks to the pandemic. Many venerable names are now part of larger holding companies. For example, Audiotonix owns many large audio brands, including Solid State Logic, DiGiCo, Sound Devices, among others. And they added Harrison to their portfolio, just in time for NAB. The Sennheiser Group owns both Sennheiser and Neumann. Grass Valley, Snell, and Quantel products have all been consolidated by Black Dragon Capital under the Grass Valley brand. Such consolidation was evident through shared booth space. In many cases, the brands retained their individual identities. Unfortunately for Snell and Quantel, those brands have now been completely subsumed by Grass Valley.

A lot of this is a function of the industry tightening up. While there’s a lot more media production these days, there are also many inexpensive solutions to create that media. Therefore, many companies are venturing outside of their traditional lanes. For example. Sennheiser still manufactures great microphone products, but they’ve also developed the AMBEO immersive audio product line. At NAB they demonstrated the AMBEO 2-Channel Spatial Audio renderer. This lets a mixer take surround mixes and/or stems and turn them into 2-channel spatial mixes that are stereo-compatible. The control software allows you to determine the stereo width and amount of surround and LFE signal put into the binaural mix. In the same booth, Neumann was demoing their new KH 120-II near-field studio monitors.

General themes

Overall, I didn’t see any single trend that would point to an overarching theme for the show. AI/ML/Neural Networks were part of many companies’ marketing strategy. Yet, I found nothing that jumped out like the current public fascination with ChatGPT. You have to wonder how much of this is more evolutionary than revolutionary and that the terms themselves are little more than hype.

Stereoscopic production is still around, although I only found one company with product (Stereotec). Virtual sets were aplenty, including a large display by Vu Studios and even a mobile expando trailer by Magicbox for virtual set production on-location. Insta360 was there, but tucked away in the back of Central hall.

Of course, everyone has a big push for “the cloud” in some way, shape, or form. However, if there is any single new trend that seems to be getting manufacturers’ attention, it’s passing video over IP. The usual companies who have dealt in SDI-based video hardware, like AJA, Blackmagic Design, and Matrox, were all showing IP equivalents. Essentially, where you used to send SDI video signals using the uncompressed SDI protocol, you will now use the SMPTE ST 2110 IP protocol to send it through 1GigE networks.

The world of post production

Let me shift to post – specifically Adobe, Avid, and Blackmagic Design. Unlike Blackmagic, neither Avid nor Adobe featured their usual main stage presentations. I didn’t see Apple’s Final Cut Pro anywhere on the floor and only one sighting in the press room. Avid’s booth was a shadow of itself, with only a few smaller demo pods. Their main focus was showing the tighter integration between Media Composer and Pro Tools (finally!). There were no Pro Tools control surfaces to play with. However, in their defense, NAMM 2023 (the large audio and music products exhibition) was held just the week before. Most likely this was a big problem for any audio vendor that exhibits at both shows. NAMM shifts back to January in 2024, which is its historical slot on the calendar.

Uploading media to the cloud for editing has been the mantra at Frame io, which is now under the Adobe wing. They’ve enhanced those features with direct support by Fujifilm (video) and Capture One (photography). In addition, Frame has improved features specific to the still photography market. New to the camera-to-cloud game is also Atomos, which demoed its own cloud-based editor developed by asset management developer Axle ai.

Adobe demoed the new, text-based editing features for Premiere Pro. It’s currently in beta, but will soon be in full release. In my estimation, this is the best text-based method of any of the NLEs. Avid’s script-based editing is optimized for scripted content, but doesn’t automatically generate text. Its strength is in scripted films and TV shows, where the page layout mimics a script supervisor’s lined script.

Adobe’s approach seems better for documentary projects. Text is generated through speech-to-text software within Premiere Pro. That is now processed on your computer instead of in the cloud. When you highlight text in the transcription panel, it automatically marks the in and out points on that source clip. Then, using insert and overwrite commands while the transcription panel is still selected, automatically edit that portion of the source clip to the timeline. Once you shift your focus to the timeline, the transcription panel displays the edited text that corresponds to the clips on the timeline. Rearrange the text and Premiere Pro automatically rearranges the clips on the timeline. Or rearrange the clips and the text follows.

Meanwhile over at Blackmagic Design’s massive booth, the new DaVinci Resolve 18.5 features were on full display. 18.5 is also in beta. While there are a ton of new features, it also includes automatic speech-to-text generation. This felt to me like a work-in-progress. So far, only English is supported. It creates text for the source and you can edit from the text panel to the timeline. However, unlike Premiere Pro, there is no interaction between the text and clips in the timeline.

I was surprised to see that Blackmagic Design was not promoting Resolve on the iPad. There was only one demo station and no dedicated demo artist. I played with it a bit and it felt to me like it’s not truly optimized for iPadOS yet. It does work well with the Speed Editor keyboard. That’s useful for any user, since the Cut page is probably where anyone would do the bulk of the work in this version of Resolve. When I used the Apple Pencil, the interface lacked any feedback as icons were clicked. So I was never quite sure if an action had happened or not when I used the Pencil. I’m not sure many will do a complete edit with Resolve on the iPad; however, it could evolve into a productive tool for preliminary editing in the field.

Here’s an interesting side note. Nearly all of the Blackmagic Design demo pods for DaVinci Resolve were running on Apple’s 24″ candy-colored iMacs. Occasionally performance was a bit sluggish from what I could tell. Especially when the operator demoed the new Relight feature to me. Nevertheless, they seemed to work well throughout the show.

In other Blackmagic news, all of the Cloud Store products are now shipping. The Cintel film scanner gets an 8mm gate. There are now IP versions of the video cards and converters. There’s an OLPF version of the URSA Mini Pro 12K and you can shoot vertical video with the Pocket Cinema Camera that’s properly tagged as vertical.

Of course, not everyone wants their raw media in the cloud and Blackmagic Design wasn’t showing the only storage products. Most of the usual storage vendors were present, including Facilis, OpenDrives, Synology, OWC, and QNAP. The technology trends include a shift away from spinning drives towards solid state storage, as well as faster networking protocols. Quite a few vendors(like Sonnet) were showing 25GbE (and faster) connections. This offers a speed improvement over the 1GbE and 10GbE ports and switches that are currently used.

Finally, one of the joys of NAB is to check out the smaller booths, where you’ll often find truly innovative new products. These small start-ups often grow into important companies in our industry. Hedge is just such a company. Tucked into a corner of the North hall, Hedge was demonstrating its growing portfolio of essential workflow products. Another start-up, Colourlab AI shared some booth space there, as well, to show off Freelab, their new integration with Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

That’s a quick rundown of my thoughts about this year’s NAB Show. For other thoughts and specific product reviews, be sure to also check out NAB coverage at Pro Video Coalition, RedShark News, and postPerspective. There’s also plenty of YouTube coverage.

Click on any image below to view an NAB slideshow.

©2023 Oliver Peters

Software Subscriptions

A decade ago Adobe launched its Creative Cloud subscription model to mixed reactions. On March 27th, the audio plug-in developer Waves once again raised the ire of the creative community by switching to a subscription model. Let’s dig deeper into the topic.

Prior to the digital era, when a company built a recording studio or a post facility, they invested in physical hardware – mixing desks, switchers, edit controllers, etc. These were assets on the ledger that had value if the company decided to sell. Once the industry moved to software tools, those no longer functioned as assets with any value. You could sell the building and furnishings, but no one wanted the old software. That’s assuming you could easily transfer licenses. Instead of an asset, software became an ongoing operational expense.

In response to this shift, many software companies have introduced a SaaS (software as a service) subscription model and dropped perpetual licensing options. To understand this, first take a look as any of your EULAs and you’ll quickly see that you never really own software and the company can make changes to the agreement as they see fit.

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” – Darth Vader

To be fair, a company has the right to offer their products in any way they like. But, users are also free to accept or reject the company’s business model. The tougher part is how to correctly transition from one model to the next without alienating established users. SaaS models typically benefit both the developer and active, professional users.

Stepping aside from the subscription issue for a moment, there is a huge advantage to staying within a single ecosystem. That’s the big plus for Adobe users, but it is also an advantage for Mac users who purchase products through the Mac App Store. It’s easier to keep track of updates and make sure things are compatible, as opposed to a hodgepodge of unrelated third-party products.

When a company “sells” products with perpetual licenses, it becomes an act of juggling development costs and trying to estimate how many new sales will be generated. When you shift to a SaaS model, development and revenue projections become more predictable. According to Adobe, subscriptions also help combat software piracy. Obviously, companies like the model and many are shifting to it – Microsoft, Filmic, Avid, and many other plug-in developers. In fact, Waves is coming late to the idea of subscriptions.

In the case of media, Adobe Creative Cloud covers many applications used on a daily basis by working designers, editors, photographers, etc. Likewise, Waves (or other plug-ins) are used on a daily basis by professional mixers and recording engineers. However, the landscape of potential users has shifted over the past decade. Thanks to social media outlets, there are many more hobbyists and part-time content creators who are also using these tools. They are often not using the tools on a daily basis, so SaaS doesn’t work for them. There’s no incoming revenue to offset the expense. This group of users is far more interested in free and cheap tools, which thanks to software development, are bountiful. These users far surpass the professionals in whatever way you define that.

Waves has traditionally had a weird business model. While their plug-ins are usually quite good, the company has been selling them like they are the “Kmart blue light special” of the audio world. Plug-ins are listed with a retail price of several hundred bucks, but almost always are “on sale” in the range of $30-$50. As a casual user, I appreciate the low cost, but I can’t help but think this undervalues Waves.

The Waves product mix includes a lot of simple variations to what are more or less the same plug-ins, which tends to make the portfolio look larger than it is. You have to routinely pay for updates, which are priced proportionally to the number of plug-ins you have. The truth of the matter is that you can go for a few years and never need to pay for the upgrade. But, due to an OS change or a move to Apple Silicon, you can’t avoid it and may get hit with a surprisingly large invoice.

When Waves shifted to subscription, they made two huge mistakes. First, it was done overnight with no advance warning. Second, all perpetual licenses were frozen without the ability to update. They’d continue to work, but at some future date might not work any longer. The Waves Creative Access subscription plan itself includes two tiers: Waves Essential (110 plug-ins for $14.99/mo) and Waves Ultimate (all 220 plug-ins for $24.99/mo). But there are some important details. The Essential plan is not just any 110 plug-ins, but rather a curated group. You might find that certain key plug-ins that you need require the Ultimate plan.

Needless to say the nature of the change and the lack of advanced communication caused an uproar in the online audio community, with plenty of negative posts by YouTube influencers. Anyone familiar with how Apple handled the transition from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X should have seen this coming. Learning from the past can head off a lot of embarrassment.

The Waves Creative Access plan doesn’t seem to me to be one that really has professional users in mind either. Seriously, what pro studio uses 220 Waves plug-ins? I think the company is trying to entice casual users to pick up more Waves plug-ins than they are now using. And to experiment with some that they might not have otherwise thought about using. That’s good, but it opens Waves up to a world that’s different than Adobe faced a decade ago.

Product promotion is often pushed through social media influencers, including many YouTube channels devoted to certain product types, such as audio. They usually are an affiliate with the company and earn revenue through affiliate links. Therefore, influencers are quite sensitive to the blowback that comes from angry comments on their channel. And so, having a formerly favorable influencer trash your product or company policies does impact sales.

I’m purely speculating now, but in the case of Waves, this may have also been coupled with back-channel feedback from other partners. For example, famous mixers and studios like Abbey Road, who have lent their names to branded products. Or large retailers, like B&H Photo, Thomann Music, or Sweetwater.

But wait! There’s a silver lining. On March 29th, Meir Shashoua, Waves CTO and Co-Founder, issued an open letter acknowledging the concerns and backtracking on the decision. According to the letter, plug-ins will once again continue to be available with perpetual licensing and updates, in addition to the Waves Creative Access subscription plans. At least at the time of this post, all Waves plug-ins are listed at $29.99. If they are sincere and continue with both models, then it’s a win-win for both professional users and hobbyists alike. After all, do you really need 220 plug-ins? It’s refreshing to see when the user voice actually has a positive impact. Hopefully trust isn’t violated again.

©2023 Oliver Peters

The Oscar. Now what?

Everything Everywhere All at Once dominated the Academy Awards night, including winning the Best Film Editing award for Paul Rogers. The team used Adobe Premiere Pro as their NLE of choice. By extension this becomes the first editing Oscar win for Premiere. Of course, it’s the team and editor that won the award, not the software that they used. Top editors could cut with any application and get the same result.

The Academy Awards started as a small celebratory dinner for insiders to recognize each other’s achievements in film. Over the decades this has become a major cultural event. Winning or even being nominated is a huge feather in the cap for any film. This can be heavily leveraged by the marketing teams of not only the film distributors and talent agents, but also the various products used in the process – be that cameras or software.

Avid’s dominance

When it comes to editing, Avid has been the 800-pound gorilla in the modern digital era. Ever since Walter Murch won for editing The English Patient using Media Composer, the specific NLE on an Oscar-winning film has become a hot topic among editors. This was never the case when the only options were Moviola, KEM, or Steenbeck.

Even this year nine out of the ten nominees for the Oscar for Best Picture and four out of the five nominees for Best Film Editing used Media Composer. Yet, Avid’s dominance in the winner’s circle has seen some occasional cracks from competitors, like Apple’s Final Cut Pro (legacy version) and Lightworks. Nevertheless, Media Composer is still a safe bet. And let’s not forget sound, where Pro Tools has even less competition from other DAWs among film and TV sound editors and mixers. All of the nominees for the Oscar for Best Sound at this year’s Academy Awards used Pro Tools.

There are, of course, many awards competitions around the world, including the ACE Eddie Awards, BAFTA, Golden Globes, and others, including various film festivals. Many of these don’t give out specific craft awards for editors or editing; however, a lot of these winning films have been edited with other tools. For example, many award-worthy indie films, especially documentaries, have been edited with Premiere Pro. Even Final Cut Pro (the current “X” version) has had wins in such categories. This includes wins for the short films, The Silent Child and Skin at the 2018 and 2019 Academy Awards.

Stacking up the NLE competitors

The truth of the matter is that today, there are seven viable applications that might be used to cut a professional feature film or documentary: Media Composer, Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Lightworks, Edius X, and Vegas Pro. You could probably also factor in others, such Final Cut Pro 7 (now zombie-ware) and Media 100 (yes, still alive), not to mention consumer-oriented NLEs like iMovie or Movie Maker. Realistically, most experienced film editors are likely to only use one of the first five on the list.

Of those five, Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is the app that most editors have their eyes on. Aside from its widespread use in color correction, Resolve is also a perfectly capable editing application. Although it has yet to pull off an Oscar win for editing, Resolve has been widely used in many aspects of the production and post workflow of top films. Owing to its nature as a “Swiss Army Knife” application, Resolve fits into various on-set, editing, and visual effects niches. It’s only a matter of time before Resolve gets an Oscar win for editing. But other Blackmagic Design products also shouldn’t be overlooked. In the 2023 Academy Awards, more than 20 films across the technical, documentary, short film, international feature film, and animated categories used some Blackmagic Design product.

Marketing

When an application is used on an award-winning film, I’d bet that the manufacturer’s marketing department is doing high-fives. But does this really move the sales needle? Maybe. It’s all aspirational marketing. They want you to feel that if you use the same software as an Oscar-winning film editor used, then you, too, could be in that league. Talent is always the key factor, but we can all dream. Right? That’s what marketing plays upon, but it also impacts the development of the application itself.

Both Avid and Adobe have been fine-tuning their tools with professional users in mind for years. They’ve added features based on the needs of a small, but influential (or at least vocal) market sector. This results in applications that tick most of the professional boxes, but which are also harder to learn and eventually master.

That’s a route Apple also chose to pursue with Final Cut Pro 1 through 7. Despite a heralded introduction with Cold Mountain in 2003, it took until 2010 before Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter nailed down an Oscar with The Social Network. They then reprised that in 2011 with a win for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Even as late as 2020, the discontinued FCP 7 was represented by Parasite, winning Best Picture and nominated for Best Film Editing.

Apple and Final Cut Pro’s trajectory unexpectedly changed course with the introduction of Final Cut Pro X. This shift coincided with the growth of social media and a new market of many non-traditional video editors. Final Cut Pro in its current iteration is the ideal application for this market and has experienced a huge growth in users. But, it still gets labelled as being not ready for professional users, even though a ton of professional content is posted using the app. Apple took the platform approach – opting to leave out many advanced features and letting third party developers fill in the gaps where needed. This is the core of much of the criticism.

How advanced/complex does a professional NLE really need to be?

In the case of FCP, it’s certainly capable of Hollywood-level films along with a range of high-end, international dramas. Witness the many examples I’ve written about, like Focus, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Voice from the Stone, The Banker, Jezebel, and Blood Red Sky.  However, a wide range of professional editors would like to see more.

The internal corporate discussion goes like this. Marketing asks, “What do we have to do to get broader adoption among professional film editors?” Engineering answers, “It will take X dollars and X amount of time.” Top management asks, “What’s the return if we do that?” And that’s usually where the cycle stops, until the next year or awards season.

The truth is that the traditional high-end post market is extremely small for a company like Apple. The company is already selling hardware, which is their bread and butter. Will a more advanced version of FCP sell more hardware? Probably not. Avid, Adobe, and Blackmagic Design are already doing that for them. On the other hand, what is more influential for sales in today’s market – Oscar-winning professional editors or a bevy of YouTube influencers touting your product?

I’m not privy to sales numbers, so I have no idea whether or not going after the very small professional post market makes financial sense for either Blackmagic Design or Adobe. In the case of Avid, their dominance pays off through their ecosystem. Avid-based facilities are also likely to have Avid storage and Pro Tools audio facilities. Hardware most likely covers the development costs. Plus, both Avid and Adobe have shifted to subscription models (Adobe fully, Avid as an option). This seems to be good for both companies.

Blackmagic Design is also a hardware developer and manufacturer. Selling cameras and a wide range of other products enables them to offer DaVinci Resolve for as little as free. You’d be hard-pressed to find a production company that wasn’t using one or more Blackmagic products. Only time will tell which company has taken the approach that a) ensures their long term survival, and b) benefits professional film editors in the best way. In the case of Apple, it’s pretty clear that adding new feature to Final Cut Pro will generate more revenue in an amount that many competitors would envy. Yet, it would be small by Apple’s measurement.

In the end, awards are good for a developer’s marketing buzz, but don’t forget the real team that won the award itself. It’s wonderful for Paul Rogers and Adobe that Everything Everywhere All at Once was tapped for the Oscar for Best Film Editing. It’s an interesting milestone, but when it comes to software, it’s little more than bragging rights. Great to have, but remember, it’s Rogers that earned it, regardless of the tools he used.

©2023 Oliver Peters

What is a Finishing Editor?

To answer that, let’s step back to film. Up until the 1970s dramatic television shows, feature films, and documentaries were shot and post-produced on film. The film lab would print positive copies (work print) of the raw negative footage. Then a team of film editors and assistants would handle the creative edit of the story by physically cutting and recutting this work print until the edit was approved. This process was often messy with many film splices, grease pencil marks on the work print to indicate dissolves, and so on.

Once a cut was “locked” (approved by the director and the execs) the edited work print and accompanying notes and logs were turned over to the negative cutter. It was this person’s job to match the edits on the work print by physically cutting and splicing the original camera negative, which up until then was intact. The negative cutter would also insert any optical effects created by an optical house, including titles, transitions, and visual effects.

Measure twice, cut once

Any mistakes made during negative cutting were and are irreparable, so it is important that a negative cutter be detail-oriented, precise, and works cleanly. You don’t want excess glue at the splices and you don’t want to pick up any extra dirt and dust on the negative if it can be avoided. If a mistaken cut is made and you have to repair that splice, then at least one frame is lost from that first splice.

A single frame – 1/24th of a second – is the difference in a fight scene between a punch just about to enter the frame and the arm passing all the way through the frame. So you don’t want a negative cutter who is prone to making mistakes. Paul Hirsch, ACE points out in his book A long time ago in a cutting room far, far away…. that there’s an unintentional jump cut in the Death Star explosion scene in the first Star Wars film, thanks to a negative cutting error.

In the last phase of the film post workflow, the cut negative goes to the lab’s color timer (the precursor to today’s colorist), who sets the “timing” information (color, brightness, and densities) used by the film printer. The printer generates an interpositive version of the complete film from the assembled negative. From this interpositive, the lab will generally create an internegative from which release prints are created.

From the lab to the linear edit bay

This short synopsis of the film post-production process points to where we started. By the mid-1970s, video post-production technology came onto the scene for anything destined for television broadcast. Material was still shot on film and in some cases creatively edited on film, as well. But the finishing aspect shifted to video. For example, telecine systems were used to transfer and color correct film negative to videotape. The lab’s color timing function was shifted to this stage (before the edit) and was now handled by the telecine operator, who later became known as a colorist.

If work print was generated and edited by a film editor, then it was the video editor’s job to match those edits from the videotapes of the transferred film. Matching was a manual process. A number of enterprising film editors worked out methods to properly compute the offsets, but no computerized edit list was involved. Sometimes a video offline edit session was first performed with low-res copies of the film transfer. Other times producers simply worked from handwritten timecode notes for selected takes. This video editing – often called online editing and operated by an online editor – was the equivalent to the negative cutting stage described earlier. Simpler projects, such as TV commercials, might be edited directly in an online edit session without any prior film or offline edit.

Into the digital era

Over time, any creative editing previously done on film for television projects shifted to videotape edit systems and later to digital nonlinear edit systems (NLEs), such as Avid and Lightworks. These editors were referred to as offline editors and post now followed a bifurcated process know as offline and online editing. This was analogous to film’s work print and negative cutting stages. Likewise, telecine technology evolved to not only perform color correction during the film transfer process, but also afterwards working from the assembled master videotape as a source. This process, known as tape-to-tape color correction, gave the telecine operator – now colorist – the tools to perform better shot matching, as well as to create special looks in post. With this step the process had gone full circle, making the video colorist the true equivalent of the lab’s color timer.

As technology marched on, videotape and linear online edit bays gave way to all-digital, NLE-based facilities. Nevertheless, the separation of roles and processes continued. Around 2000, Avid came in with its Symphony model – originally a separate product and not just a software option. Avid Symphony systems offered a full set of color-correction tools and the ability to work in uncompressed resolutions.

It became quite common for a facility to have multiple offline edit bays using Avid Media Composer units staffed by creative, offline editors working with low-res media. These would be networked to an Avid shared storage solution. In addition, these facilities would also have one or more Avid Symphony units staffed by online editors.

A project would be edited on Media Composer until the cut was locked. Then assistants would ingest high-res media from files or videotape, and an online editor would “conform” the edit with this high-res media to match the approved timeline. The online editor would also handle Symphony color correction, insert visual effects, titles, etc. Finally, all tape or file deliverables would be exported out of the Avid Symphony. This system configuration and workflow is still in effect at many facilities around the world today, especially those that specialize in unscripted (“reality”) TV series.

The rise of the desktop systems

Naturally, there are more software options today. Over time, Avid’s dominance has been challenged by Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP 1-7 and FCPX), Adobe Premiere Pro, and more recently Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve. Systems are no longer limited by resolution constraints. General purpose computers can handle the work with little or no bespoke hardware requirements.

Fewer projects are even shot on film anymore. An old school, film lab post workflow is largely impossible to mount any longer. And so, video and digital workflows that were once only used for television shows and commercials are now used in nearly all aspects of post, including feature films. There are still some legacy terms in use, such as DI (digital intermediate), which for feature film is essentially an online edit and color correction session.

Given that modern software – even running on a laptop – is capable of performing nearly every creative and technical post-production task, why do we still have separate dedicated processes and different individuals assigned to each? The technical part of the answer is that some tasks do need extra tools. Proper color correction requires precision monitoring and becomes more efficient with specialized control panels. You may well be able to cut with a laptop, but if your source media is made up of 8K RED files, a proxy (offline-to-online) workflow makes more sense.

The human side of the equation is more complex

Post-production tasks often involve a left/right-side brain divide. Not every great editor is good when it comes to the completion phase. In spite of being very creative, many often have sloppy edits, messy timelines, and their project organization leaves a lot to be desired. For example, all footage and sequences just bunched together in one large project without bins. Timelines might have clips spread vertically in no particular order with some disabled clip – based on changes made in each revision path. As I’ve said before: You will be judged by your timelines!

The bottom line is that the kind of personality that makes a good creative editor is different than one that makes a good online editor. The latter is often called a finishing editor today within larger facilities. While not a perfect analogy, there’s a direct evolutionary path from film negative cutter to linear online editor to today’s finishing editor.

If you compare this to the music world, songs are often handled by a mixing engineer followed by a mastering engineer. The mix engineer creates the best studio mix possible and the mastering engineer makes sure that mix adheres to a range of guidelines. The mastering engineer – working with a completely different set of audio tools – often adds their own polish to the piece, so there is creativity employed at this stage, as well. The mastering engineer is the music world’s equivalent to a finishing editor in the video world.

Remember, that on larger projects, like a feature film, the film editor is contracted for a period of time to deliver a finished cut of the film. They are not permanent staff. Once, that job is done the project is handed off to the finishing team to accurately generate the final product working with the high-res media. Other than reviewing the work, there’s no value to having a highly paid film editor also handle basic assembly of the master. This is also true in many high-end commercial editorial companies. It’s more productive to have the creative editors working with the next client, while the staff finishing team finalizes the master files.

The right kit for the job

It also comes down to tools. Avid Symphony is still very much in play, especially with reality television shows. But there’s also no reason finishing and final delivery can’t be done using Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro. Often more specialized edit tools are assigned to these finishing duties, including systems such as Autodesk Smoke/Flame, Quantel Rio, and SGO Mistika. The reason, aside from quality, is that these tools also include comprehensive color and visual effects functions.

Finishing work today includes more that simply conforming a creative edit from a decision list. The finishing editor may be called upon to create minor visual effects and titles along with finessing those that came out of the edit. Increasingly Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve is becoming a strong contender for finishing – especially if Resolve was used for color correction. It’s a powerful all-in-one post-production application, capable of handling all of the effects and delivery chores. If you finish out of Resolve, that cuts out half of the roundtrip process.

Attention to detail is the hallmark of a good finishing editor. Having good color and VFX skills is a big plus. It is, however, a career path in its own right and not necessarily a stepping stone to becoming a top-level feature film editor or even an A-list colorist. While that might be a turn-off to some, it will also appeal to many others and provide a great place to let your skills shine.

©2023 Oliver Peters