Canon C500 beaten. Arri Alexa challenged? Sony F5 and F55 shooting reports by Jon Fauer ASC and official pricing

[endlos]

Bruno. If your comment was restricted to DVD authoring -- I would agree that Apple through their actions has made it clear that they care neither for DVDs or Blue-Ray. Just look at how they deliver their goods and how they have removed those drives from their machines.

Regarding Hardware it wouldn't surprise me if Cringely was right that Apple is going to build a modular system powered by Thunderbolt and that therefore the investment in MacPros (as a platform) hasn't gotten as much attention because they are going to once again do things differently.

But to say that a future version of Logic or or even Final Cut X are Garageband like is really giving this next generation software short thrift. For one thing Logic's UI is very dated.

For the same reason that people love the GH2 (great price and ability) Apple is with Final Cut X delivering more accessible workflows and software. $299 for Final Cut X, $49 for Motion, are just opening salvos I think in winning the next generation of film makers.

Starting from scratch as Apple has done with Final Cut X is not something Apple did without a reason. The last thing a software company ever wants to do is start from scratch.

[Andrew Reid]

Pricing of FCP X or the advanced 64bit architecture wasn't the problem for me. It was they they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

I think Apple have a guy, possibly Tim Cook who is running a finger through the balance sheets and looking at how much effort they are spending in each area and for how much return.

The pro divisions in Apple are not generating as much money as the consumer divisions, that goes without saying. The 17" MacBook Pro got killed because it only amounted to 3% of MacBook sales.

Endlos - What about the stories of the Logic team being let go and their pro apps division staff decimated? Not a sign? 17" MB Pro scrapped not a sign? Steve Forstall has gone too!

It is clear to me that there's someone very high up at the company who doesn't seem to see the benefit in the cutting edge pro stuff or a flagship model, it all seems to be about capturing as much of the consumer market as possible and focussing all their efforts on that. Why else bring out a smaller iPad, but not a new and much needed Mac Pro?!

[Andrew Reid]

All the signs are that Tim Cook's Apple is becoming like John Sculley's Apple all over again http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikamorphy/2012/10/30/this-is-tim-cooks-apple-a-company-where-mini-steve-gets-the-axe/

And let's not mention IOS 6 maps shall we?

I still admire the products but they are becoming more corporate and more numbers driven by the day, in my view.

[Andrew Reid]

[quote name='andycorleone' timestamp='1354185665' post='22622']
Andrew, I think you have some facts wrong, Most information I have found reads the F55 can do 4k internally but in order to record RAW you need the external recorder
[/quote]

You're correct. What I mean is that it does 4K raw 'onboard' not over 3G HD-SDI, so the F55 and R5 raw box is basically one unit. I've corrected the article and made this more clear. The internal codec that comes with the camera brain is 10bit 4K XAVC 4-2-2 at up to 60p. A lot better than the 8bit 1080p 4-2-2 at up to 30p on the C500!

[Bruno]

We can't know if Logic will have a new version or no until they tell us, but the fact is that pro apps are seeing unusual long times between updates.
I'm not even ditching FCPX, I appreciate what they did and most people who got into it will never go back to editing in the old fashioned way. Yes, the first version lacked many things, but considering how different it was, it's not like people would make the switch straight away, and they did solve most of the issues in a dew months.

I have no problem with a possible Logic Pro X, I'm all for it. If you see what they did with GarageBand for iOS it's pretty cool, it's so much better than the Mac version in so many ways!

[lexicon]

Mahout - Sony F55 CineAlta 4k Camera Demo (Stargate Studios)

[url="https://vimeo.com/54499106"]https://vimeo.com/54499106[/url]

[endlos]

It isn't just FCPX. No Mac Pro update and decimated pro software team. Logic may be discontinued or turned into 'Garage Band Pro'. Logic X anyone? No thanks.

 

Why would Apple make for example the Redmatica aquisition in June if they weren't continue to invest in creating compelling professional grade audio applications?

 

Both for Final Cut X and Logic Apple has continued to release major updates. Almost all the things that people griped about when X came out have been resolved and the new features and workflow are really next generation. It's amazing to me how you extoll the game changing quality of the Black Cinema Magica Camera (in particular as it relates to price) and are oblivous to Apple doing something similar with FInal Cut X and Motion.

 

Regarding the Mac Pro. Robert Cringely speculated a while back that Apple may come up with something very different here as well.

Imagine a Mac Mini like form factor for units of processing power that you can stack/buy as many of as you need. Thunderbolt makes this possible. And who then needs a Mac Pro (or an Xserve)?

 

What Apple lacks right now is an integrated suite a la what Adobe offers. And that is why I think they are refactoring to make exactly that happen. And when they do here is what will happen:

 

- Apple will go after Adobe's jugular on pricing (1/2 to 1/3 of the cost of what ever Adobe charges for comparable applications)

- deliver tools that are easier for pro-sumer and aspiring professional to adopt than comparable offerings from competitors

- have accomplished a complete technology restart (similar to Apple's change to Mac OS X from their old legacy OS) which will their competitors applications look like a turtoise in a few years

 

[Bruno]

What Apple lacks right now is an integrated suite a la what Adobe offers. 

 

They've been closer to that with Final Cut Studio and they discontinued it, like they discontinued X-Servers, which were unique in the market at that price point, but then again wouldn't sell as much as the iPhones.

 

FCPX and Logic are not only pro, but also prosumer and even consumer apps, so they still stand a chance, the rest I don't really know... and as for the "processing power module", maybe they'd open it up for a third party company to do it before doing that themselves, we'll have to wait and see, but it's way too many pro products being discontinued or abandoned indefinitely to be hopeful.

[ScreensPro]

[url="https://vimeo.com/54571154"]https://vimeo.com/54571154[/url]

 

Pretty stunning..... Both in narrative and production.... (download the 1080p version)

 

The F55 is the real deal. I expect it to big THE camera for 2013, unless ARRI go 4K.

[Chris Santucci]

Comparing two cameras that have a $10K price difference? OK...

[hmcindie]

10k is basically nothing from a film production point-of-view. They are usually rented anyway. The F55 has a global shutter and that is huge.

[Per Lichtman]

[EDIT: There was a typo before so this was directed at the wrong person.]

 

@endlos You want to know why those apps are not getting the attention the BMCC is? Because with the BMCC you are talking about expanding a segment of the pro philosophy, workflow, paradigm and quality into a much lower price range. It's about asking people to do more with their images, asking prosumers, amateurs and indie people to take advantage of a new opportunity to work like their higher budgeted peers would (or to adopt a variant of that approach) in regards to getting a bit more serious about color, detail and grading. It's about not saying "good enough" in terms of quality.

 

Key components:

- Massive increase in quality available at a given price point.

- Preservation of/refinement of a workflow designed for professionals (in regards to color grading) and emphasis on a tweak-able RAW acquisition format.

- To be crystal clear: the camera is designed to encourage people to really focus on getting good quality. 

 

There are tons of issues that go along with that camera that are more or less important to given people but let's compare that to the Apple Final Cut X Pro (I'll ignore Motion for the moment because I think a smaller community could contribute to the discussion at present).

 

- Final Cut X Pro was not an evolution of the industry standard editing approaches. It could not be seen as Final Cut Pro 8, etc. and it did not encourage a lower income subset of the existing market to think more like their higher paid counterparts had done. Instead it completely restructured the approach taken and asked everyone (professionals included) to adopt it. The fact that certain facets of the approach had been more clearly signaled in earlier consumer products than in the professional ones also left a bad taste in many peoples mouths.

 

- BMCC delivers a product that directly responds to what many indie filmmakers (and would-be filmmakers) had been asking for. The benefits were clearly visible and many parts of the online community felt listened to and respected by the design decisions. Some people wanted to wait for the next evolution (in terms of mount or sensor size) but few people said anything amounting to "this is the wrong direction".

 

- There was no obvious increase in image quality with FCP X. Let me be crystal clear about that: if you spend a similar amount of money on a new or used competing product vs Final Cut X Pro new, you will be able to buy something else that can get you similar quality. You are paying for the workflow approach you prefer. I am not saying that one is better or worse and I know several people that really enjoy FCP X and I'm not trying to bag on the app. But it is not (and never has been) a product that brought higher image quality to a massively lower price point - it just brought Apple's price point down.

 

 

- Final Cut X Pro launched at $300. That's a big cut from ca. $1,000 but less impressive compared to some of the competitors. Premiere Pro and Vegas already occupied a price-point between the two and Premiere Pro currently offers a rental program that the competitors do not. On top of that, the low end variants (such as Sony Vegas HD Movie Studio Platinum) have expanded to included more and more functionality at price points under $100 (not to mention less mainstream efforts such as Lightworks being even more aggressive).

 

- All this doesn't even take into account that Apple already had Final Cut Express available at $200. FCP X represents a price increase for that (discontinued) product.

 

- The BMCC represents the addition to the marketplace of a new product without the removal or discontinuation of another.

 

- To re-examine the respective differences, the gap in price between FCP 7 Studio (which included more in the way of bundled applications) and FPC X (which costs less but got rid of some of the bundled software) is $600. If we consider the excluded apps as having value of their own, that means we are looking at a proportional difference that is smaller than that. Apple had already reduce the pricing of FCP 7 by $300 compared to a previous edition - so they completely changed functionality but continued with their decreasing pricing strategy.

 

- By comparison, the BMCC arrived into a market that had no RAW movie options under $9,700 - yet it launched for just under $3K, with $1k professional color grading software bundled at no additional cost. While that may look like a similar percentage to the Apple pricing change, that's a price cut of more than $6,500 in the market with no competitors (then or now) available at the same price point for RAW recording (without factoring in the software). If we look at the overall price difference (as it relates to the funds available for the potential consumers) this is a very big deal.

 

And in regards to discussion of Redmatica and Logic: I remember when I was read to switch sequencers to Logic, right as Apple bought EMagic and discontinued the PC version. I remember all the headaches of AU and the discontinuation of VST support - not to mention the frequent Quicktime/AU incompatibility issues that cropped up with subsequent OS upgrades. I also remember that quality did not improve in the plug-ins compared to TDM, VST, MAS, Direct X (etc.) alternatives already in play at the time. 

 

I remember their consolidation of the Logic range, the eventual price cuts and I compare to those to the price cuts by many competing companies on products they were about to discontinue. I do this not as evidence that Apple has any plans to discontinue their audio products, but to refute the argument that they could be used as evidence that Apple will not discontinue those product lines.

 

I remember how one of the first things Apple did after the bought EMagic was to port underlying technology from Logic to Garageband. I also remember that Garageband had very serious limitations in terms of sample rate and bit depth - limits that were exceeded by various freeware applications on the PC that adopted a different workflow. In fact, if you were just recording live players, you could have gotten better samplerates and bit depth with inexpensive shareware like Cool Edit 2000. In other words, Apple bought a company primarily making professional tools and one of the first things they dedicated their resources to was an inescapably consumer/amateur oriented product with some very hardwired limitations. While Apple may use Redmatica to leverage their professional line, they might just as easily emphasize the lower end here.

 

Apple has a history of creating new approaches, discontinuing old ones and forcing their entire customer base to either adopt the new approach or jump ship. Some markets are much more open to this than others. Microsoft, for all their faults, only recently discontinued support for Windows 3.11. Different companies take different approaches and people value one priority over another.

I really like Apple's industrial design. I consider them to be market leaders in that area for good reason. I find their software design to be much more of a mixed bag and I disagree with many choices they've made in the software area. In other words, I feel both positive and negative things towards them and have no desire to see them put on a pedestal or unfairly critiqued.

But I see very little to support your thesis that Apple is doing for video editing software what BMCC is doing for low-priced cinema cameras. To some people it may be just as important, but it is fundamentally different - and to people like myself, it is less helpful.

[Per Lichtman]

@EOSHD Andrew, that was one of your best blogs to date. Kudos. I mean I'm sure lots of us have small differences of opinion about some of the analysis, but you put so much great information into this one and often did a good job of clearly indicating what was fact vs opinion that I really can't see how anyone interested in the topic could fail to benefit for reading it.

I personally I'm really looking forward to the C500 (the image quality I'e seen so far has been so very good) but this was a really good blog - if we nominated our favorites for the year, this might be it for me.

[Bruno]

@bruno You want to know why those apps are not getting the attention the BMCC is?

 

...

But I see very little to support your thesis that Apple is doing for video editing software what BMCC is doing for low-priced cinema cameras. To some people it may be just as important, but it is fundamentally different - and to people like myself, it is less helpful.

 

My "thesis that Apple is doing for video editing software what BMCC is doing for low-priced cinema cameras"???

First time I hear about it, where the hell does that come from? When did I ever even mention the BMCC in this thread?

 

If you read my posts you'll actually realize I agree with most of what you're saying, only thing we might differ is that I think FCPX will still be quite a valid pro app, it was a brave and risky step, and it will take some time, but it might find its place with time.

[Per Lichtman]

My "thesis that Apple is doing for video editing software what BMCC is doing for low-priced cinema cameras"???

First time I hear about it, where the hell does that come from? When did I ever even mention the BMCC in this thread?

 

If you read my posts you'll actually realize I agree with most of what you're saying, only thing we might differ is that I think FCPX will still be quite a valid pro app, it was a brave and risky step, and it will take some time, but it might find its place with time.

 

@bruno Yes, it would almost seem as if I was talking to a different person... which I was. I had just typed the wrong name. Sorry about that. :) Fixing it now. It should make more sense in a minute.

[FilmMan]

Lower price for the Sony F55,

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/898428-REG/Sony_PMW_F55_CineAlta_4K_Digital.html

 

And the F5,

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/898427-REG/Sony_PMW_F5_CineAlta_Digital_Cinema.html

 

Still over a month away.  Will pricing come down further?  With Red's Dragon Chip coming soon, will things heat up even more?  Will Red work some more pricing magic?  Will another company announce a 4K product?  Will Canon lower pricing or beef up specs or both?   And so on.