Think Of Editors As Doctors – Some Specialise & Others Are GPs

What a paradox. Postproduction editing has seen an absorbing battle between a company that has struggled to make serious money from its products, and one that has broken every record going when it comes to generating turnover.
This A-team of Avid and Apple have both weathered developmental crises that served only to accelerate Adobe’s credentials. Other things to mark are that the word ‘offline’ has dropped from our everyday vocabulary, and that the biggest assumption doing the rounds is that Apple will soon wake up and see Final Cut Pro as a resource-sapping distraction, although FCPX initially looked very much a non-professional product.
Soho retains huge control over the short form business, while long form editing has become a more regionalised business thanks to the BBC. However, London has seen a lot of consolidation due to casualties amongst the mid to low end editing boutiques, and the emergence of a big five broadcast editing houses that own around 500 Avid systems between them.
The prevailing situation requires something altogether new – because all the editing systems are version rich – or a ghost from the past. This would be Lightworks, which now has the R&D muscle of Edit Share behind it.
The other player, with SMAC, is Autodesk.
In a virtual round table, its most committed fan represents Apple FCP. The same applies to Avid, and executive Maurice Patel fronts up for Autodesk. The overview comes from Root6, which supports hundreds of editing companies and is forever preaching about the importance of folder structure.
115,000 unique visitors a month
Freelance editor Peter Wiggins started in broadcast when VPR2 one-inch machines were top dogs. He jumped to Avid via Digital Beta suites and saw FCP when the Mac version of Avid was reduced to £1800. Back then he believed FCP was the future, and today he runs the site FCP.com, which attracts 115,000 unique visitors a month.
"We have a very vibrant forum and 15 pages of free FCPX plug-ins to download that users have contributed," he said.
A lot of happy FCP V7 users have not trusted in FCPX as yet; one user described it as like a Formula 1 car with a wheel missing.
"Everybody would agree that the launch of FCPX was handled badly, but the FCP team are committed to the development of X and are adding functionality with regular updates. The implementation of multi-cam editing is the best of any NLE, and the new feature rich 10.0.6 update has made a lot of editors take another look at FCPX," Wiggins insisted.
Better still, Sony has just demonstrated XAVC import into FCPX. How does he read the market? "The serious contenders are FCPX, Adobe Premiere and Lightworks. Final Cut Pro X is being used by hundreds of thousands of editors, and if you are a one man band who uses DSLR cameras then there is nothing quicker," he said.
"Should Apple announce it is supporting shared storage on a better basis, then FCPX will make bigger inroads into the broadcast market," he added. "The 10.0.6 update with RED support showed the true potential of FCPX. It is going to handle large resolutions and high frame rates with ease as it utilises all of Apple's core technologies."
What about Adobe and its ambitions? "It has taken much of the functionality out of FCP7 and replicated that in Adobe Premiere. FCP7 sequences can be opened in Premiere via XML, which offers an easy way to keep old content accessible, but there are differences between the two apps," said Wiggins. "The dark horse is LightWorks which is a free NLE with a minimal licence fee for professional codecs. There have been over 400,000 downloads of this so far, and that's before the Linux and OSX version have been released."
Integrating editing and effects
Over 30,000 people have downloaded the pre-release V5 of Autodesk Smoke 2013 for Mac OSX, and the users of Smoke 2012 are waiting to see what gets released, many because some Flame functionality must be involved.
Maurice Patel, head of industry marketing, first addressed the market drivers.
"It is not the dominance of low cost software that is impacting the global post-production market as much as it is the dominance of low cost hardware," he said. "Today there is still a need for large-budget production and while the needs of this have evolved it still faces significant technological challenges when it comes to scalability and complexity. Workflow is still significantly different from the broader market. However the growth rates of the broader market are far, far higher than that of large-budget production."
When the new version of Smoke puffs along, what will it offer?
"The primary, but not only USP, is the integration of editing with effects into a single application and the fact that Smoke allows editors to quickly and efficiently increase the visual quality of any project they produce," Patel said. "In many ways Smoke 2013 is a V1 product and therefore a little rough around the edges, certainly in the new market we are taking it into. The intent is certainly not to limit it to short form. It is designed to be a solution for improving the quality of any video production project."
The biggest single factor of recent times is the decline of film and the rise of numerous digital camera codecs. What about the obsession with workflows?
"The reality is that the workflows are not the most important nor are the cameras or the editing software. Business success will always depend on the end product you provide. Workflows just enable you to produce it more efficiently," said Patel. "Much of the post-production industry became hung-up on workflow because it was just so expensive to do even the basic stuff. This meant that a facility that could afford the equipment could often be successful just because they had the equipment and others did not – those barriers are rapidly falling away."
Some editors cannot import a CD
Gorilla Post Production in Cardiff, run by MD Richard Moss, is an Avid based facility of about 80 mixed systems. Most of its work is long-form broadcast, plus promos and OB work, and it has a core team of 20 editors.
Why Avid? "Because the shared storage and flexibility is second to none. Any platform can be used by any editor but when you need a team of five or 10 editors working on the same project with tight deadlines and many tech operators ingesting, playing out and clients viewing, then it's the only choice in my view," Moss said.
"The biggest change - apart from storage expansion - has been the part loss of 'offline' editing. This is still very present in genre's such as drama and features and generally anything with a camera such as Red or Alexa, but many broadcast shows now use so many formats that 'conforms' or 're-link's' are just impractical, as is the time required to generate proxies,” he added. "This has increased our storage needs but we now have different storage tiers (archive, near-line, high priority) which have all come together to create specific workflows for specific formats. Probably the largest issue now is overshooting."
"What does Moss want to see happen in the near future? I'd like to see more file delivery options, in-built real-time scopes and PPM and QC. I'm sure this will start getting implemented into newer releases but with facilities as large and integrated as ours I expect to be using a lot of external hardware anyway rather than seek these solutions within the edit software," he said. "Third party plug-ins for grading and compositing systems are interesting, but again, due to our size, a solid, stable editing platform with the tools editors need is paramount. Separate grading, finishing and effects can always be done in other systems better suited."
Read the rest of the article in the free online edition of RFV issue 195: viewer.zmags.com/publication/8d62a9fc#/8d62a9fc/1