X makes perfect sense from a business standpoint.

TimTheFoolMan said:
I think, given that Leonard Nimoy was out of focus in the last scene of the most recent iteration, that a lot of money was spent on effects that could have gone elsewhere.

Take a look inside the walls of a house. Are the 2x4's cut perfectly square at every joint? No. Does it affect the strength of the wall? No. Would you do it differently if you're doing it for yourself? Probably. There's this... "craftsmanship" thing that pops up in these kinds of discussions that I find interesting, but frequently irrelevant. I think if you're pushing the quality bar to the ultimate, you're probably never going to finish the project, and therefore, will go out of business.

If there are qualitative aspects of a product that you won't compromise on, which the customer doesn't care about, why are you taking such a stand? That, in my opinion, is wasted resources, because the time spent doing that could have been spent working on the next project.
Click to expand...

Who exactly is "the customer" here? Somewhere along the way we were talking about YouTube and Vimeo and, by implication, this vast "democratization" of content creation. That, of course, is what I was referring to. I was never referring to directly-paying clients.

Casual viewers on YouTube? I don't get a cent from them, and if I'm creating content, I'm absolutely going to aim higher than the lowest common denominator of their expectation.


Strive for? No. Allow and tolerate negative artifacts because they won't be visible/audible to the customer? Yes. - Tim
Click to expand...

Never what I was referring to, either. This started with comments about "audiences" being more tolerant of poor production values. That's going to be visible to everyone. Maybe not everyone cares, but I do.
 
The customer is whoever is paying me. That could be an executive producer, or it could be the audience if I self-produce.

YouTube viewers (or Hulu, or some similar service) are definitely one of my target audiences. Why wouldn't it be at least one of your targets? (Was that what you were saying?)

What if you were asked to edit "The Confession"? Knowing that it was going straight to Hulu, would you obsess over the same details as if it were going to TV or theaters? Would you create an audio track with 80+ dB of S/N ratio, even if that means the viewers will complain when they can't hear the quiet stuff because of ambient noise (maybe from the computer fan)?

What you seem to be lumping together as "poor production values" are some of the things I'm talking about. Take a makeup artists that's never done HD, and show them the details that *will* be visible, and they'll beg you for either more time, or to drop the resolution. Was SD makeup bad? No, but going HD reveals things you wouldn't otherwise see.

Compression artifacts online being what they are, I can envision many situations where tradeoffs will be difficult to spot.Going to YouTube may be where the target audience is (what if that's what the client wants?), and so you may be able to do a project with a time budget that wouldn't otherwise be practical. The issues we've been discussing, along with an expedient workflow in post (one if FTP X's goals), may be the difference between success and failure for such projects.

For me, it all comes down to caring about the viewing experience (for all viewers) more than my own obsessions. If those happen to overlap, then I've truly hit a sweet spot. - Tim

P.S. All of this is a very familiar discussion in software circles, where tools like Delphi, VB, and C# were lampooned as "not ready for professional development." Over time, the tools matured, but there are still people who insist that only C and C++ are powerful enough for pros. My guess is the same will happen with NLE's.
 
Last edited:
Why are you putting this in terms of "obsessions"? This has gotten quite a ways away from where it started, which was talking about poor color and subpar camera work on YouTube and Vimeo. It's an "obsession" to have enough pride in my own work to avoid those things? I don't get that.
 
David Jimerson said:
Who exactly is "the customer" here?
Click to expand...

If we would ever really know who our customers are and what they really want (and if they could really define that) we'd all be millionaires within a week and buy steven spielberg a beer.

We produce for assumed demands or for demands not yet definable because these demands start coming into existence only the moment the audience sees the product.

So anything other than trying to achieve the best result possible under the mostly constricted circumstances of production & budget seems unwise to me.... only my 0,02 € of wisdom.
 
Kind of sounds like we're getting into Good/Fast/Cheap ("Pick two, any two...") territory...

fast-good-cheap.gif
 
David Jimerson said:
Why are you putting this in terms of "obsessions"? This has gotten quite a ways away from where it started, which was talking about poor color and subpar camera work on YouTube and Vimeo. It's an "obsession" to have enough pride in my own work to avoid those things? I don't get that.
Click to expand...
Given that camera shake is much less noticeable on a small screen, and color variances abound on various monitors (i.e. the AF100/Quicktime fiasco), it seems reasonable to me to call a theater-quality color-grade "obsessive" for something that will only go to Hulu. That, for me, is the point at which I'm applying a set of standards that don't make sense for the intended delivery. - Tim
 
Anyone seen the movie Idiocracy?

Eventually we'll get to the point where there's going to be a film call "ass". And all it will be is an "ass" onscreen for an 90 minutes.

 
VGurcu said:
thats too much wisdom. All we need is 2 cent worth, apprx 0.01€ in total...*
Click to expand...

Don't forget that for today the Euro is only a Greek Drachme in disguise and the day you want to exchange that to your currency you may get only 0.00247 cents and a Hellenic tax deduction....
 
tipota said:
If we would ever really know who our customers are and what they really want (and if they could really define that) we'd all be millionaires within a week and buy steven spielberg a beer.

We produce for assumed demands or for demands not yet definable because these demands start coming into existence only the moment the audience sees the product.

So anything other than trying to achieve the best result possible under the mostly constricted circumstances of production & budget seems unwise to me.... only my 0,02 € of wisdom.
Click to expand...

Well, that's an entirely different conversation, of course.
 
tipota said:
If we would ever really know who our customers are and what they really want (and if they could really define that) we'd all be millionaires within a week and buy steven spielberg a beer.

We produce for assumed demands or for demands not yet definable because these demands start coming into existence only the moment the audience sees the product.

So anything other than trying to achieve the best result possible under the mostly constricted circumstances of production & budget seems unwise to me.... only my 0,02 € of wisdom.
Click to expand...

And that is what differentiates the good from the rest of the crowd.
 
David Jimerson said:
Well, that's an entirely different conversation, of course.
Click to expand...

You are right - I was just a tad flabbergasted by a notion here (clearly not by you) that somehow we should lower our standards to presumed lesser standards demanded by customers/audiences or the lower "bandwith" of transport chains. While I see us working in a surrounding more and more where our stuff needs to be "amphibian". So it should be as much up- and downward compatible as possible and that starts with producing, if possible and affordable, with as high a standard as can be. Call it "trickle down"-cinematics.... ;-)

But,yes, a discussion for another place maybe.
 
TimTheFoolMan said:
Given that camera shake is much less noticeable on a small screen, and color variances abound on various monitors (i.e. the AF100/Quicktime fiasco), it seems reasonable to me to call a theater-quality color-grade "obsessive" for something that will only go to Hulu. That, for me, is the point at which I'm applying a set of standards that don't make sense for the intended delivery. - Tim
Click to expand...

I didn't say a thing about "theater quality." I just said I can and will do better than crap, even if the audience doesn't mind crap.
 
Perhaps as things move further and further from television and broadcasting, and more towards "narrowcasting", there's a venue and audience for everything- high quality, acceptable quality, and not-so-quality...
 
David Jimerson said:
I didn't say a thing about "theater quality." I just said I can and will do better than crap, even if the audience doesn't mind crap.
Click to expand...
OK... choose your terminology to describe a color-grade applied to some footage, that achieves whatever metric is tossed about here as "not crap." Can you make color adjustments in FCP X (without going to Color) that are "not crap"? There is a difference, alluded to all over the place, but just as nebulous as the definition of "professional."

Ultimately my question is, if you can't do what Color does, can you at least make the necessary adjustments to some footage with FCP X that would be indistinguishable on small screens, with widely varying color temps, resolutions, refresh rates, etc.? If not, what does it not do? What is the lost functionality that is going to relegate the FCP X footage to the "crap" bin and the FCP 7 footage to the... "not crap" bin? - Tim
 
David Jimerson said:
I have no idea. I was never making any arguments about FCPX.
Click to expand...

Correct. Not directly you haven't. But language is a funny thing and you've made several veiled references to FCP X not being a high-end tool.

And if that's not the case, I fail to see your contribution to this thread other than arguing that we should strive for excellence in execution. Which seems to be a pretty obvious statement.[/quote]
 
stoneinapond said:
Correct. Not directly you haven't. But language is a funny thing and you've made several veiled references to FCP X not being a high-end tool.
Click to expand...

Nope. Never said a word about it. You're reading quite a bit into things. If I did anything, I simply accepted the way someone else described it for the purposes of the discussion.

And if that's not the case, I fail to see your contribution to this thread other than arguing that we should strive for excellence in execution.
Click to expand...

That's . . . rather confrontational.

Which seems to be a pretty obvious statement.
Click to expand...

If it were, there wouldn't have been a 40-post debate about it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top