Adobe moves to Creative Cloud, Cancels Creative Suite

Gary Huff said:
I would be very confident to say that the vast majority here do not make $75+ per hour for editing.
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Is that below or above? With the number of people that have flocked to DSLRs and post about the GH3 or 5DMKIII being "expensive" I would not throw any blankets around... The market is in a state of flux and maybe Adobe sees this and realizes folks are clinging to already purchased software and making it work instead of paying up. I know in my little micro business world pricing power has gone out of the window. A lot of folks just want HBO or NBC quality at the i-phone price these days.
 
...the one absolutely certain result of this move will be ....adobe will be pirated out of existence ! People will become unenamored about paying a rent check. That's what rent checks always do. Ask any renter. A crack will be offered . It will be too easy to refuse. The program will be locked in as long as it's offline. Viva la internet !

And the truth is ....Adobe has been overcharging their product for years. They put in the initial design....put a small team of programmers to slowly enhance it, and continued charging as if they were developing the space shuttle. They could ....and they did. It's the capitalist way. Now we'll see some payback. If you don't believe me...come to Mexico, where a bluray cost 2 bucks !
 
kurth said:
...the one absolutely certain result of this move will be ....adobe will be pirated out of existence !
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Why would it happen now and not yet? Some people don't pirate because, well, they don't agree that it's a good thing to do. It's not like the CC is going to turn them into a pirate.
 
kurth said:
...the one absolutely certain result of this move will be ....adobe will be pirated out of existence ! People will become unenamored about paying a rent check. That's what rent checks always do. Ask any renter. A crack will be offered . It will be too easy to refuse. The program will be locked in as long as it's offline. Viva la internet !

And the truth is ....Adobe has been overcharging their product for years. They put in the initial design....put a small team of programmers to slowly enhance it, and continued charging as if they were developing the space shuttle. They could ....and they did. It's the capitalist way. Now we'll see some payback. If you don't believe me...come to Mexico, where a bluray cost 2 bucks !
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I think piracy works like this. If you are a reputable editor working in the industry, you don't pirate. You don't want your clients to think they are working with a thief, you want your software to work, you want support, and most of all you are making enough money to just call the price of the software a cost of doing business no different than buying a tripod or a battery.

If you are a hobbyist with little or no income you might pirate since none of those things apply to you. If you're just some guy making star wars shorts with your friends hitting each other with light sabers, you'll probably just pirate the software and have some fun. You're not going to spend the money on a creative suite just to post a couple of youtube videos, and even if you would spend it, maybe you don't have it.
 
Gillvane said:
I think piracy works like this. If you are a reputable editor working in the industry, you don't pirate. You don't want your clients to think they are working with a thief, you want your software to work, you want support, and most of all you are making enough money to just call the price of the software a cost of doing business no different than buying a tripod or a battery.
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Your clients won't know unless you tell them...the point is that you understand it costs money to develop this niche software, and you want to support it so that they continue to upgrade and improve upon your tools, thus making you more productive.
 
Liam Hall said:
I must disagree. The pace of change in the communications and broadcast industries has been staggering in the last twenty years. And the innovation will continue.

Quick question for you, Alaskacameradude...

Do you use post-production software professionally? Do you charge for using that software?

BTW no one is calling you silly for not wanting to subscribe to Adobe.
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Sorry, I know you aren't calling me silly, just the tone from some is kind of
'C'mon it's only $50 a month, most people spend more than that on 'fill in
blank here'
I am pretty strict on money and don't spend it on things other than groceries
for the family, lodging, and gas. Because I live in a very expensive place, which
necessitates that.

I charge $75 an hour, lots of people deciding that is too expensive which means
I tend to stay with old tech longer than most I guess.

As for innovation with cell and cable, we will just have to agree to disagree.
Probably a regional thing, I have see no change in 5 years. In a related
development I am a 'cord cutter'. Yeah I hate monthly bills.
 
Bassman2003 said:
A lot of folks just want HBO or NBC quality at the i-phone price these days.
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Heh, yes that is about right….I am re-shooting a job for a client that a newbie shot with a Canon 7D. It was so bad I could not
use any of it. The client keeps saying what a waste of time the first shoot was. It was not really a money issue.
I am not charging much more than the newbie. But the client had several execs involved and now she is embrassed
because I am having to re-interview them…..From what she has seen - she understands that experience
can be bought for not that much more…..
 
I think the subscription is a great value. I just don't like subscription software and would not put my small concern in danger of being at the whim of Adobe.
 
Just a reminder to keep this discussion professional. This thread has already been reported for some of the things said. I don't want to close it because I think this is a great topic. Watch the politics and personal jabs. Everyone has an opinion.
 
Today I've been at an event with dozens of UK cameramen - and I didn't find a single person who thought this was a good idea. Some actually lease their vehicles, liking the fixed outlay each month - BUT, they pointed out that they get their car serviced, repaired and supported by the provider. You get none of this when you lease software - Video and Audio seem to need forums like this to solve problems. The big software manufactures never seem to actually fix problems, just at best give advice for you to do it yourself! If you pay Adobe to hire their software, do they guarantee your edit session will be trouble free? Will they fix your computer when a codec is missing, or a plug-in refuses to do what it should? I doubt it - they don't offer service like this (and probably couldn't).

Some were also very annoyed about the lack of assistance if you miss your upgrade. One said he'd spent thousands on software, but missed two versions, and discovered as far as Adobe were concerned he was a failed customer, and not worthy of a cheaper upgrade.

The other editors are going to use this to their advantage. I can imagine Sony offering a cheap cross-grade for disappointed Adobe customers who want to swap.

On the piracy front, I too think it will encourage piracy. Most people, I am sure, want legitimate, licensed software - but if a wanted product is just too expensive, I do see why people make take the chance. Look at Autocad - you must pay a high price to get it, and an annual subscription to keep it, and as a result - it's a bit hit for the pirates. Pay Pay Pay is a poor business model.
 
I remember one of the first big jobs I had after leaving university was doing After Effects donkey work on a T-Mobile advert at a very very well known and respected production company.
Amazingly none of their machines were running legitimately licensed software and the technician in charge of the studio spent most of her time faffing around with keygens and cracks for various plugins.

For quite a few years I went about various subsequent jobs thinking this was standard practice!
 
although the forced subscription does go against the grain for me (a bit) im going to bump up when CS7 comes along.

i have a $16 per month subscription fee for yousendit to be able to send unlimited 2 gig files. some months i dont use it but other months ill use it a dozen times or so. if I'm understanding this correctly CC offers 20gb's of storage to store and or to share. this reminds me of .mac where i used to send my files small or large. *i like this*! this becomes the neutralizer for me!

if this replaces yousendit then i see this as spending $34 per month andCC becomes even more appealing for me.

ultimately adobe has the upper hand if a user only has a soft need for adobe products. for me the price per month doesnt bother me at this point because i make money using several adobe products and i very much like photoshop & illustrator. have plans to move from FCP7 to PP on my macro. just need a CUDA card and i should be good to go. but... if my adobe needs becomes sparse in years to come then i can see feeling very negative like many on this thread.

david
 
david_p said:
i have a $16 per month subscription fee for yousendit to be able to send unlimited 2 gig files. some months i dont use it but other months ill use it a dozen times or so. if I'm understanding this correctly CC offers 20gb's of storage to store and or to share. this reminds me of .mac where i used to send my files small or large. *i like this*! this becomes the neutralizer for me!
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You can send a file up to 2 gigs for free using wetransfer.com and the speeds are faster than YouSendIt….
I found them the day that YouSendIt crashed and I could not send anything - my client needed my last version
and needed it that day….
 
Liam Hall said:
So, 40 minutes of your time to pay for one month's subscription. Look at it that way, it's good value, no?
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Again, it's not so much about price. It's definitely not about piracy. It's mostly about the harm this one-size-fits-all approach will cause customers.....

First, long time customers have invested an enormous amount into the current Adobe platform. Investments in time learning and then using products with proprietary formats that can't easily be used with non-Adobe products.

Second, it locks in new customers who are just getting started with content creation, to a platform that must continually be fed (with dollars). They won't have a CS suite to fall back on should they wish to stop stop paying.

Third, when CS6 breaks (new unsupported camera format for example) old customers will be forced to become "new customers".

Forth, when most everyone is paying for a subscription, Adobe will stop innovating. I hate to sound like a broken record, but in the long term this is the biggest problem for customers and Adobe.

In places where there's only one cable company, prices goes up, service and quality go down. You have the same thing in every market where there is a sole or dominant player.


THIS is a very short video with Robert Metcalfe on the monopolies. (He's a co-inventor of a little thing called Ethernet)
 
Michael Schrengohst said:
You can send a file up to 2 gigs for free using wetransfer.com and the speeds are faster than YouSendIt….
I found them the day that YouSendIt crashed and I could not send anything - my client needed my last version
and needed it that day….
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thanks michael. ill look into that in the meantime.

david
 
Great video, keylight. Thanks... and thanks for your thoughtful posts on this issue. I guess part of the reason this whole things makes me feel claustrophobic is the notion that Adobe, who I believe has a great product, has chosen to be so possessive and self centered about their place in the market and the world of their clients. I think it's going to be worse for the design people where their monopoly is iron clad. I think video editors have more options. After calming down a bit I'm thinking that as great as the suite is it has artificially limited my interests. For instance, I have thought about exploring Davinci Resolve and I didn't imagine working in it with PP with SpeedGrade's interface improving in CS Next.

So now I'm thinking that I can insure more freedom in the future by just not getting so locked in and being a bit more agnostic about the software I use. If things went great going forward more effort would go to integrating disparate platforms through workflow, and open data protocols. That's what I'm going to seek out. Open protocols, interoperability across products. Maybe the best way to protect your work from having it's platform abandoned is to create it with tools that produce the necessary meta data to take it across products.

As you say, the worst thing about this is that monopolies stifle innovation.
 
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Liam Hall said:
So, 40 minutes of your time to pay for one month's subscription. Look at it that way, it's good value, no?
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I guess it all depends. If I usually buy a perpetual license and use it for 3 years before I upgrade,the CC doesn't sound like a good deal, because I lose money. If I can get a car for my business for 4 grand and it does all I need and will last three years or longer, or I could lease a car for $200 a month and it has more options but didn't make make more money than the basic car, which one makes more business sense? I understand the CC does make business sense for some people, but it doesn't for me. So at that point I would be buying it cause I wanted it, not because it would help my bottom line.

I think Keylight makes another good point. I live in an area with one cable
company and the cell companies merged. So the monopoly may be why I see
no innovations here.
 
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hscully said:
I guess part of the reason this whole things makes me feel claustrophobic is the notion that Adobe, who I believe has a great product, has chosen to be so possessive and self centered about their place in the market and the world of their clients.
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Yep, that's why I am glad I will probably be retired in 4-5 years….Adobe is like that old friend that was reliable for so long. They had their quirks and sometimes frustrated the hell out of you but you keep relying on them anyway. Now they are saying that they are moving on and looking for new friends that will pay them every month for their company. Have a nice life, old friend….
 
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