Apple acquires Proximity Corp.

Brook Willard

Brook Willard

Well-known member
www.proximitygroup.com

ThinkSecret coverage

"We are pleased to announce that all Proximity technology and intellectual property, including artbox workgroup and artbox enterprise, was recently acquired by Apple," the note begins.

UK-based Proximity's artbox system debuted in 2004 and was billed at the time as the "first of its kind" delivering a "breakthrough video asset management system for broadcast televisions and post production creative departments."

Artbox enables artists and producers to manage all their work from a single interface. Proximity's clients include ABC Los Angeles, MTV UK, Gannett Broadcasting, Tribune, and NBC.

Apple was previously listed a "Technology Partner" of Proximity, with the company offering Xsan compatibility and support for artbox, in addition to Final Cut Studio support.
Click to expand...

We all got excited about Silicon Color's acquisition a while back... add proper asset management to the list of new toys. Hopefully we'll see 4K support across the board.
 
Hmmm... expect apple to promptly kill the Windows versions and compatibility. Yay Apple! Making it's hardware and software attractive through domination and exploitive pricing brackets. *Cough* Shake *cough*.
 
Well, Avid's Interplay is pretty extensive, even allwoing you to use it to set up billing, things like that. I'm not familiar with this other system, but it sounds promising. Interplay plays nice with Mac and PCs, even other apps. I'm definitely intrigued by what Apple is doing with its recent aquisitions. Let's hope they are implemented well.

Steve
 
Apple strategy

Apple strategy

I used to spend most of my time in business class oogling the hotties but my guess is that Apple likes selling high margin hardware into the media creators space. Their users, me included, are always begging for more robust solutions to avoid the high cost of entrenched and often overleveraged speciality post production service providers. Ever spent the day watching piles of potential profit go up in smoke on a Smoke suite, or a DaVinci, etc. If Apple buys the right companies, strip mines the tech and sells the software for commodity prices they will be able to make Final Cut and the companion apps too attractive to ignore. They can also take elements of the specialty tech and use it to make their consumer media apps best in class.

Bottom line - affordable software for every level of media creation work will sell a ton of Apple hardware. DTP kept Apple above water during some lean years and despite their iPod fueled success of late they are smart enough to see a vertical market that can be exploited for many years. Now about that native RedCode support...

Blair S. Paulsen
RedOne #19
 
alacritymedia said:
Ever spent the day watching piles of potential profit go up in smoke on a Smoke suite, or a DaVinci, etc. If Apple buys the right companies, strip mines the tech and sells the software for commodity prices they will be able to make Final Cut and the companion apps too attractive to ignore.
Click to expand...

Apple's control over the applications, the OS and the hardware puts them in a fairly unique position here. They can deliver a system that's as well integrated as high-priced turnkey systems, but at commodity prices.

This Xserve review is instructive. The server market is broken into a couple of segments. At the low-end, you tend to get generic commodity hardware and off-the-shelf software stuffed in commodity boxes with little integration. Buying further up-market doesn't just get you better performance (sometimes it doesn't get you better performance at all). It gets you better integration, which means less setup time, higher reliability, better known performance characteristics, and usually a single number to call when things go wrong. As the article notes:

"Apple engineered its quad-core Core microarchitecture Xeon server--which it could have purchased off the rack for $0 in R & D--to be an entry-priced server that meets the requirements of mid-level server buyers. In durability, serviceability, manageability and availability, Xserve more readily finds rivals among UNIX RISC servers than commodity Intel x86 systems."

In other words, Apple is giving you all of that integration... but they're doing it at commodity prices. Expect the same approach in the post-production market.

The big thing to watch with respect to future versions of Final Cut (and the Shake replacement) is how Apple is leveraging GPU technology. That rack of equipment in a DaVinci that costs as much as a house? A $1500 graphics card in a $3000 workstation will do the same thing in a couple of years. DaVinci Systems doesn't want to sell that to you -- it doesn't fit into their existing business model. Apple wants to sell that to you, along with Final Cut Pro 7 or whatever.
 
GPU leveraging

GPU leveraging

I think Chris hits an important point about the evolution of computer architecture for graphics and media applications. For years the high end solutions would custom engineer boards that made it possible to push pixels for that dedicated use at speeds that were exponentially faster than commodity hardware. Thanks to our friends who spend billions of dollars on video/computer gaming (higher gross rev than movie ticket sales according to the LA Times, how scary is that) companies like ATI and nVidia are now pumping out graphics cards that scream and selling them as commodity items. Newer software packages that properly take advantage of multiple GPUs will change the speed to cost ratio between desktop options and dedicated solutions so dramatically that companies like Autodesk will join Avid at candlelight vigils for their pension plans. The high end solutions are terrific tools and the highly competent and talented people who wield them will be able to keep those seats around for a while but economic Darwinism is an inexorable force.

Blair S. Paulsen
RedOne #19
 
Too bad Apple's "control" over their software and hardware isn't as tight as it could be.

If the FCP, Quicktime and OS teams all talked to each other more before a major release maybe we wouldn't have to wait for the updates to fix issues.

Affordable asset management should have been available years ago, but better late than never.

GPU processing is great, but it's all in the execution. I have been told that text antialiasing changes subtlely depending on what brand of GPU you are using.


Companies like Autodesk, Quantel, DiVinci will always have a place in the high end as long as their innovations are still in the bleeding edge.
 
alacritymedia said:
Newer software packages that properly take advantage of multiple GPUs will change the speed to cost ratio between desktop options and dedicated solutions so dramatically that companies like Autodesk will join Avid at candlelight vigils for their pension plans.
Click to expand...

You mean join Avid in decades of healthy business producing top rate products? When FCP can actually work in real time not "Real Time (tm)" I'll give it a try again as my primary workstation, but I don't intend to sit around in the mean time waiting for little orange bars to grow across my project. OR if it could scrub a project without spluttering... or if it could manage to not corrupt its own settings every other week... No Avid is doing just fine. And it's cheaper than FCP.

Autodesk has nothing to worry about. You don't use Smoke to edit a feature film, it knows where its strength is: compositing. You don't use Smoke or fire like you would an Avid box, the economics just aren't there. It's strength is its ability to take a project and without having to hand it off, finish it on the same system. Think commercials, trailers etc... And now you can with a single click hand off the project to a lustre or inferno machine in case you want extra polish.

If FCP can't even handle DV without constantly dropping frames and needing to render, I can't wait to experience the joy of uncompressed 4k. No feel free to keep your souped up Final Cut Premiere.

ok I'm done being crabby.
 
Thomas Mathai said:
Too bad Apple's "control" over their software and hardware isn't as tight as it could be.

Companies like Autodesk, Quantel, DiVinci will always have a place in the high end as long as their innovations are still in the bleeding edge.
Click to expand...

Apple's internal communications between the teams that develop closely related software products deserves our derision. I keep hoping that FCS 6 will be shipping by NAB '07 and will raise the integration bar.

I agree that there will always be a demand for high end solutions but IMHO unless those vendors adjust their pricing then their market share, for what is already a niche product, will melt down to less than 200 users which doesn't seem like much of a business model to me.

Blair S. Paulsen
RedOne #19
 
Avid Xpress system with a copy of Combustion and EDL import about $6,000
Autodesk Smoke 2007 system with storage > $350,000

The two products aren't even competing on price. If the price was a problem, they wouldn't still be selling machines.

I think they're in about as much danger as Microsoft losing the OS majority. Or Lotus losing out to Toyota.
 
Gavin, can agree with you that Real Time can be iffy in FCP, especially when you compare to some of the Avid products, but let's not forget that those Avid products rely on their hardware for a lot of processing. FCP often relies on the CPU. I'm sure they are finding a way to match the realtime power of the competition, but we'll have to wait and see what they come up with. As for FCP corrupting problem, when your system is well maintained, you "save as" often, and you manage media well, this tends to not happen too often these days. One of my biggest complaints is that larger projects such as features, do make the project run sluggish at times. Hopefully they are working on this. I tend to break up the projects into reels, just to keep everything relatively snappy. There are many other minor complaints I have, but I have some about Avid too. Bottom line: both get the job done. I think the competition has been good for both products.

Steve
 
High-priced Avid systems haven't gone away yet, but there's a pretty clear progression for how these things develop, which suggests they will.

There are basically three stages in the adoption of digital technology for creating media content:

1) A given task is only possible using high-cost specialty products.

2) A given task is possible using a low-cost commodity approach, but high-cost specialty products offer significant advantages.

3) Computing power, storage capacity, etc. reach the point where commodity hardware is good enough that there's no longer a major advantage to using high-end specialty products.

Desktop publishing is an example of something already at the third stage. I suspect a lot of people in the industry today don't even realize there used to be expensive dedicated desktop publishing systems.

Non-linear editing is at the second stage, which is why Avid's higher end stuff still sells. Fast commodity graphics processors are almost certainly going to push NLE into the third stage over the next few years. If Avid is smart, they're gearing up to deal with a market where they'll have to push more units, at much lower prices.

Something like 4K color grading is presently at the first stage, inching toward the second stage... but the insanely fast rate of progress with commodity graphics processing hardware, combined with compressed workflow solutions, could push this over into the third stage within a few years as well.
 
im.thatoneguy said:
Avid Xpress system with a copy of Combustion and EDL import about $6,000
Autodesk Smoke 2007 system with storage > $350,000

The two products aren't even competing on price. If the price was a problem, they wouldn't still be selling machines.

I think they're in about as much danger as Microsoft losing the OS majority. Or Lotus losing out to Toyota.
Click to expand...

I have much to say about Final Cut vs. "high-end" systems, but for now, let me suggest reading the book "The Innovator's Dilemma". It summed up the trends I had been seeing in our industry, especially post, and helped me figure out how to survive and thrive the march of technology. Today's marginal technology will become tomorrow's killer apps. Figuring out how to ride the waves is the key to long-term survival. Applying the concepts in the book saved my business.

Red is a perfect example of disruptive technology. And remember that technology is not just equipment, it can be a process, so how we use and apply equipment can be disruptive as well. An actual disruptive technology is something we want to use, not be destroyed by. There is still a place for the "high-end", but that place is getting smaller and smaller.

By the way, I worked on Quantel and Discreet for a good part of my career, and bought an Avid DS (now Nitris) in 1998, before it was considered top-end. I finally sold the Nitris in 2004 after going through many expensive upgrades over the years. I loved that system, but it no longer made business sense, and I was able to wean myself and my clients off of it and on to a mix of Final Cut, After Effects, Motion, Combustion, Maya, and countless plug-ins. Not as elegant, but ultimately more powerful and much less costly, especially when considered as a continuing cost.

Just my two cents.

Verko

P.S. Final Cut has been rock solid for me - especially when compared to Avid and Discreet (I just can't say Autodesk. Can't do it.)
 
stevesherrick said:
Gavin, can agree with you that Real Time can be iffy in FCP, especially when you compare to some of the Avid products, but let's not forget that those Avid products rely on their hardware for a lot of processing.
Steve
Click to expand...

I don't have a Mojo and I'm running Avid on my 'POS' athlon 2000+ and it runs silky smooth. I can scrub 10 minutes of video without stuttering, with data coming off of a 10Mb network connection. I step over to a Final Cut Machine on a G5.. and little orange bars start popping up all over the place with local media.

It really comes down to software optimization. Smoke and even Inferno now run on commodity hardware (except for stone) thanks to optimization.

A beautiful example of this is Combustion vs Toxik. A toxik box could render out the 'same' project in almost real time, meanwhile the combustion project on the same machine might take 10 minutes. Just about everybody has the same features now a days, interactivity and workflow is how I tend to judge a tool. Personally I view performance as Full Version update worthy.

hehe.. I still type in "www.discreet.com" when going to the autodesk page.
 
Gavin, I'm not quite sure I understand the comments about FCP not doing real-time well. Orange bars don't necessarily mean you have to wait for a render, they just mean the effect you've applied is an "Unlimited RT" rather than "Safe RT". If your system is correctly profiled, this stuff should play back fine in real time most of the time. It's just not guaranteed. On high-end systems, FCP can do pretty much every type of common operation in real time, even with supported 1080p formats.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I expect much more leveraging of the GPU in future versions of FCP, which should make real-time effects easy.
 
Gavin,

Amen brother. Earlier this year, when we needed to set up a "C" suite at our shop, we decided to give Final Cut a chance. Being career long Mac users, we were discouraged at Avid's (at that point in time) desire to distance themselves from Apple. So we proceeded to purchase and configure a top of the line, full blown, "real-time" FCP system. What a joke. In our business we truly can't afford to not have the integration, reliability, and stability of an Avid system. Not to mention that we take real-time scrubbing and playback VERY seriously and it's completely essential to our workflow and clients. So we sold our system at quite a loss to one of our freelancers and bought a new Adrenaline system. Thank god Apple and Avid kissed and made up!

Still willing to try FCP in the future, but it's just not a professional solution right now.
 
Not a proffesional solution ????? what are you smoking? maybe it doesn't work for you but I and other "professionals" are thriving with it.
Avid is in real trouble after being in a dominant position for many years. It remains to be seen weather they will adjust and survive.
Aloha
-A
 
I've NEVER had any of these "so called" problems you guys are talking about. FCP' real-time playback has always been amazing. I'm working on a Dual 2.7 and working in 1080P DVCProHD using the 3-way color correcting and getting phenomenal performance results. It's almost embarrassing how well this system cuts through HD.

That's just my experience.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top