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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Adobe Abandons Creative Suite, Announces Full Switch to Creative Cloud

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So who's next to offer cloud only services, Apple, Avid, Lightworks, Sony ?
 
Dave Blackham said:
So who's next to offer cloud only services, Apple, Avid, Lightworks, Sony ?
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lightwork already has a "mandatory" subscription model. unless you dont care about any codecs you would normally use.
 
Sandro Klopfstein said:
lightwork already has a "mandatory" subscription model. unless you dont care about any codecs you would normally use.
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Yes, but they started out that way. They didn't take thousands from their customers to become a successful business before going subscription only. (And it's only $60/year.) The problem we have with Adobe is not that they have a subscription model. In fact I quite liked the idea for those that wanted to get in cheap. It's that they sold their software first then left us who own the software high and dry after we spent thousands on it by dumping us and going subscription only.
 
Mike Smith said:
Yes, but they started out that way. They didn't take thousands from their customers to become a successful business before going subscription only. (And it's only $60/year.) The problem we have with Adobe is not that they have a subscription model. In fact I quite liked the idea for those that wanted to get in cheap. It's that they sold their software first then left us who own the software high and dry after we spent thousands on it by dumping us and going subscription only.
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Yeah, I think we are getting used to the Red Model for doing business...treat your customers like extended family and your core customers like immediate family. And of course, Adobe has left their family of users to become another Wall Street Player. The comparisons with Apple are valid.

If Adobe had been thinking customer base rather than Wall Street approval (which doesn't seem to be working either, at the moment anyway) they would have continued to offer upgrades to the owners of CS 6 (at least) via a 6.5 release or somesuch. This would be done in tandem with the CC while letting customers know that eventually CC subscriptions would be the only way forward. As Mike Smith et al have said, anyone owning CS6 who doesn't switch to the CC will not be able to do Dragon footage on their recently purchased Apps. And therefore, appearances are that Adobe sees that as a way to maximize profits and force switching to CC.

And truth be told, after searching for a viable alternative, I will probably join the cloud. But if I do, I will do so with an eye out for something that competes favorably in getting the job done. I've stood up for Adobe many times in the past. That's what loyal customers do. I don't see myself in that role going forward.
 
Elsie N said:
Yeah, I think we are getting used to the Red Model for doing business...treat your customers like extended family and your core customers like immediate family.
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And thats one very important reason I stay around this place and others of similar mind set. Other companies would be wise to take note.
 
David,

For a hobbyist like me who upgraded once every few versions, Adobe CC is just way, way to expensive.
And after the end of a subscription you'll end up with nothing to fall back on.
I'm thinking Hobbyists will stay with their current version until they abandon Adobe in droves.

-Matt
Regards, Matt
 
Sandro Klopfstein said:
lightwork already has a "mandatory" subscription model. unless you dont care about any codecs you would normally use.
Click to expand...

Yes, $60/yr plus one time license fee for DNXHD if you need it. If you want technical support, that is an extra $595/yr. Otherwise you rely on the forum and variable schedule update releases.
Plus you have to buy Boris or other plugin software products to get full graphics and VFX capabilities. I like Lightworks a lot, it will likely be my primary NLE even if I do subscribe to CC.

Adobe has really upped their game in recent years and I think the idea that they will stagnate under the subscription model is counter to what their plans really are, which is faster turnarounds and better support for bug fixes as well as frequent incremental upgrades in new features as soon as they are tested and stable enough for release. The subscription model gives them a much more predictable solid financial base for funding ongoing R&D.

For hobbyists, and I put anyone including myself in that category if they are not earning their living full time from media production work, the consumer level Elements line do most of what any of us typically would ever need though the extra bling that is supposed to make it easier to use just gets in the way IMO. If you are a full time pro working at reasonable rates, even at the low end, one typical small commercial or industrial production should cover the cost of an annual subscription.

Heck even as a hobbyist $49/month is less than a tank of gas, less than my cell phone or cable bill, and not much more than the monthly cost for my preferred organic fair trade coffee beans. For that modest price you get full access to what is arguably the best integrated solutions package for any kind of desktop digital media production. Since it covers two licenses, Suzy can load it on her Mac, and I can load it on my PC.

Unlike Apple, Adobe does not have a history of abandoning or crippling legacy products with new releases and updates.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Personally I don't have a problem with the cloud membership approach and in many ways it makes it easier to use it across more workstations, you can sign in/out of CC easier than activating and deactivating Creative Suite between workstations.
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Is it really? I was excited about this when they released the Creative Cloud last year, but then, after reading stuff around, I figured out it will be the same kind of trouble: activating, deactivating...

So can you do the following scenario? Youhave your CC apps on your laptop and your workstation, at your office, and for some raison you need to fly in another city and work there for 2 weeks. You just instal the softwares on a 3rd computer there, and login into your CC account. The pop-up window asks you which computer deactivate (you choose your workstation back at your office). Then you do your job, you fly back, and re-log your workstation (this time deactivating the 3rd computer in the other city).

Would that work that way - as easy as that?
 
David Rasberry said:
Adobe has really upped their game in recent years and I think the idea that they will stagnate under the subscription model is counter to what their plans really are, which is faster turnarounds and better support for bug fixes as well as frequent incremental upgrades in new features as soon as they are tested and stable enough for release. The subscription model gives them a much more predictable solid financial base for funding ongoing R&D.
Click to expand...

I don't doubt they plan to continue advancing the ball, and that the move will stabilize and increase their revenue stream but what part of that revenue gets spent on R&D remains to be seen.

I think this move is motivated by stock pressure and it will be that same pressure that will cause a reduction of R&D in favor of profit margins in the future. As I mentioned before, when innovation was directly tied to revenue innovation was assured. Now that it is not, the incentive to innovate is going to have to come from some place else, and that other place will be the competition.

How much competition does Photoshop currently have? Premiere's competition is thinning. AE accomplishes the same tasks as a number of other softwares but it occupies a fairly unique space, and as a part of the suite its position is very strong. You see where I am going with this?

Our capitalism, our stock market, rewards those that can capture the most profit for the least effort. The pressure to do the bare minimum is its major flaw. In moving to decouple their R&D from revenue Adobe is showing me that reducing R&D is exactly what they are attempting to accomplish.

Photoshop is a very mature product. I imagine they were hoping that the subscription model would enable them to continue to squeeze revenue out of a product that has become extremely difficult to improve substantially. WOW features continue to be added, but lackluster updates have become more and more prevalent in recent years and more and more photographers are skipping update cycles. I am wondering if Adobe could continue to offer and successfully sell Photoshop without the subscription model. Unfortunately Photoshop users are the ones who feel as if they have the least to gain by the move. They (I should say we) seem to be the most outspoken of the naysayers.

It would be ironic if this move were made to save Photoshop, but turned out to be the end of Adobe. That is an overdose of doom and gloom, but those are just some of thoughts that make the subscription model so worrisome.

I'm hoping that Adobe will continue to suprise and amaze me. I want a reason to remain optimistic, but so far you fail to convince. Make a case, David. :-)
 
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Mike Smith said:
Yes, but they started out that way. They didn't take thousands from their customers to become a successful business before going subscription only. (And it's only $60/year.) The problem we have with Adobe is not that they have a subscription model. In fact I quite liked the idea for those that wanted to get in cheap. It's that they sold their software first then left us who own the software high and dry after we spent thousands on it by dumping us and going subscription only.
Click to expand...

as far as I know, lightworks used to be super expensive and then it was abandoned alltogether for a while only to be resurfaced as a "free" software. I think, I would have felt much worse had I been a lightworks user back in those day than what some adobe users feel nowadays about adobe CC. probably, some autodesk smoke users felt the same, I dont know. anyone care to chip in?

things evolve, that's the natural course. cds, dvds, etc. are a thing of the past. now, we have app stores and application managers for that. I'm perfectly fine with that. this change also brought us the bonus of the software getting more affordable (which is very important for a small company like mine in a "baby steps country" like switzerland where there's really no big movie biz). it's the imminent future and most likely many other companies are going to jump on the band wagon soon. so far, I really only see benefits, at least for my situation. back in the days, I could only afford one licence of cs5 and one for fcp studio with everyone alternating on workstations depending on who had which job to do. now, we're all fully equipped with cs6 and happy about it. and as long as we're getting faster updates, faster bugfixes and more customer service (still a thing adobe has to improve, imho) and much less hassle about keeping your system up to date, I really really don't see the downside of it.

I remember when I bought emagic logic and 10 days later it was announced that apple bought logic and was going to release a new version within days for a much smaller price. I was slightly annoyed about having wasted some money but it certainly didn't discourage me to keep on using it, instead of, say, switching to the more or less equivalent steinberg software. it's all about going forward and adapting to the changes around you.

I think the time to really start worrying is when adobe pulls an apple and starts forgetting about the pros and focusing on "photoshop wedding edition CC", "easy effects CC" and "instant design CC" etc. for the average joe.
 
Our capitalism, our stock market, rewards those that can capture the most profit for the least effort. The pressure to do the bare minimum is its major flaw. In moving to decouple their R&D from revenue Adobe is showing me that reducing R&D is exactly what they are attempting to accomplish.
Click to expand...

Not sure I track with this Scott. The marketplace, when relatively unfettered, is an extraordinarily powerful engine that facilitates the distribution of goods and services to consumers, while compensating those entities that provide what consumers want and need. Adobe's subscription service does not disengage them from the marketplace. If CCs unpopularity among many posters here is an accurate predictor of how it will fare elsewhere in the market, then Adobe will be forced to change or lose revenue and face unhappy stockholders.

In terms of revenue and R&D, I would suggest that a subscription service provides much more reliable funding for R&D, which could serve to enhance product development. Companies that are moving forward and increasing market share tend to attempt to cement their gains and keep the trend going. If they don't, another company will see an opportunity and take up the slack.

None of this is an endorsement of the CC subscription plan, although I happen to like it. It's simply an attempt to say that Adobe has not, by any means, monopolized the graphic arts and video markets, allowing them to sit on their hands. Market forces are much more powerful than any corporation, and there are abundant examples of once great companies that are now simply a byword because they did not compete.

I hope this comes across as intended - in the spirit of thoughtful dialog.

Tim Eaton
 
Sandro Klopfstein said:
as far as I know, lightworks used to be super expensive and then it was abandoned alltogether for a while only to be resurfaced as a "free" software. I think, I would have felt much worse had I been a lightworks user back in those day than what some adobe users feel nowadays about adobe CC. probably, some autodesk smoke users felt the same, I dont know. anyone care to chip in?

things evolve, that's the natural course. cds, dvds, etc. are a thing of the past. now, we have app stores and application managers for that. I'm perfectly fine with that. this change also brought us the bonus of the software getting more affordable (which is very important for a small company like mine in a "baby steps country" like switzerland where there's really no big movie biz). it's the imminent future and most likely many other companies are going to jump on the band wagon soon. so far, I really only see benefits, at least for my situation. back in the days, I could only afford one licence of cs5 and one for fcp studio with everyone alternating on workstations depending on who had which job to do. now, we're all fully equipped with cs6 and happy about it. and as long as we're getting faster updates, faster bugfixes and more customer service (still a thing adobe has to improve, imho) and much less hassle about keeping your system up to date, I really really don't see the downside of it.

I remember when I bought emagic logic and 10 days later it was announced that apple bought logic and was going to release a new version within days for a much smaller price. I was slightly annoyed about having wasted some money but it certainly didn't discourage me to keep on using it, instead of, say, switching to the more or less equivalent steinberg software. it's all about going forward and adapting to the changes around you.

I think the time to really start worrying is when adobe pulls an apple and starts forgetting about the pros and focusing on "photoshop wedding edition CC", "easy effects CC" and "instant design CC" etc. for the average joe.
Click to expand...

Lightworks has always been a high end system designed to run on dedicated hardware, originally for editing of feature film productions by teams. The freeware/low cost license port to open platforms is only possible now because of the orders of magnitude increase in the power of desktop workstations over the last decade. It is similar to the market model Black Magic Design has taken with Davinci Resolve that is available as freeware at the low end, but still sells as a turnkey hardware software solution for $30k plus workstation cost.

If you take a look at Editshare's website, you will see they still offer turnkey hardware and software solutions for high end post facilities of which Lightworks is one element. You can even buy the Lightworks hardware console for $2800 if you need that level of convenience and efficiency.

Adobe already has a separate line of low end consumer products, CC seems more geared toward collaborative work by production teams made up of people linked only by the web rather than working in the same facility.
 
Thanks Tim,
But I was referring mostly to the flaw in the stock market, and I tend to think (Rightly or wrongly) of that market and the free and open marketplace where the company interacts with consumers, as two different places. I have great faith in free trade, but in the stock market, not so much... Not these days.

It will be interesting to see how the marketplace responds to the new model. So far most of the bitching seems to be coming from the photography camp. I don't know what the responses on other editing, multi-media and design forums have been. Adobe of course is holding the line, trotting out international subscription numbers generated by the early bird special and calling it a success. I'm not buying that. It is too soon to tell.

Things could play out the way you describe, with strong competition helping to drive Adobe into the future. The subscription model could become a success. It could tank and Adobe might correct their course in spite of today's hard line... Netflix did it... It could happen.

While I agree with you that Premiere and AE can not sit back on their laurels today (I know little or nothing about many of the other apps' positions in the marketplace) I am looking further down the road. Bundling all of the apps together might tend to average the strengths of the individual apps and make the CC suite a unique force that is able to dominate the various markets without being superior in all of its facets. If that were to happen and stock pressures did cause R&D funding to be redirected the suite would languish.

There are so many ifs and I don't have a crystal ball. I sure wish I did. Thank you for sharing your optimism Tim.


Until a few moments ago I would never have even considered the idea that Photoshop might be in trouble, given Adobe's outright dominance in that area, but what do you think about it? Is it possible that Photoshop is fully mature and simply can not continue to generate the numbers it needs to survive if it earns only on new revisions? Has the law of diminishing returns caught up with Photoshop R&D? Could that be the real catalyst behind the shift? It was only a brain fart but I'm still thinking about it. How are Photoshop's sales tracking over the last 8-10 years? Has Lightroom cannibalized PS' declining sales, or is my impression without basis? Have PS CS6 numbers been good? I have not done any research into it yet.

Timothy Eaton said:
Not sure I track with this Scott. The marketplace, when relatively unfettered, is an extraordinarily powerful engine that facilitates the distribution of goods and services to consumers, while compensating those entities that provide what consumers want and need. Adobe's subscription service does not disengage them from the marketplace. If CCs unpopularity among many posters here is an accurate predictor of how it will fare elsewhere in the market, then Adobe will be forced to change or lose revenue and face unhappy stockholders.

In terms of revenue and R&D, I would suggest that a subscription service provides much more reliable funding for R&D, which could serve to enhance product development. Companies that are moving forward and increasing market share tend to attempt to cement their gains and keep the trend going. If they don't, another company will see an opportunity and take up the slack.

None of this is an endorsement of the CC subscription plan, although I happen to like it. It's simply an attempt to say that Adobe has not, by any means, monopolized the graphic arts and video markets, allowing them to sit on their hands. Market forces are much more powerful than any corporation, and there are abundant examples of once great companies that are now simply a byword because they did not compete.

I hope this comes across as intended - in the spirit of thoughtful dialog.

Tim Eaton
Click to expand...
 
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Yeah, I suppose I share your skepticism about the stock market, Scott. Just passed 15,000 in the midst of a meager to nonexistent recovery.

I don't have a crystal ball for how all of this will play out. I do know that I've been very pleased that Premiere is finally for real, that it edits R3Ds, and that Adobe understood the value of attracting the Red demographic. I'm essentially a one man shop with freelancers, and since subscribing, I looked over all those app thumbnails in the CC, and thought it was pretty cool I could download any of them if the need arises.

Don't know about Photoshop. Saw some new features at NAB that will be nice to have. I use both Lightroom and Photoshop.

Best,

Tim
 
Back in the day, video was Beta SP, Digi Beta, VHS, Hi-8 or DV. This was all captured via FW400/SDI or similar into stupidly large AVI files. This was only 10 years ago. The world has changed. Software companies took different approaches to try and solve the capture issue. Avid came up with a very clever Excel spreadsheet to tell you how much of their ISIS storage you needed to buy (locked into AVID) for the number of seats you wanted and won the race for the broadcast market. Apple took a different view and decided that if they developed their own codec and wrapper to rival AVI, then they could control the data rate a bit better and hey prosto, Apple ProRes was born and you were locked into Apple MAC's.

Adobe have always been format native and worked with all that they could. 10 years later, we have so many new camera manufacturers with their own codecs and wrappers, your workflow will undoubtedly be locked into a .MOV or .DNx codec for finishing for the foreseeable future if you work with Avid or FCPX. When RED release the new .RED wrapper for delivery to Odemax/RedRay, how long will it take Avid to build that into their export settings? Hell, they're still only at 1080P sequences when editing 4K footage! Apple have only just started supporting native RED 4K in FCPX. Abode were doing this back in CS4!!!!!

I know who my money is on.
 
It seems from the reading that Adobe's long game might be to take a bit of a hit of some unhappy campers leaving the ship versus shareholders being satisfied with maybe a smaller but predictable and controllable revenue stream spiced up by some leaning down of staff numbers permitted by getting out of the software ownership models. It is their business to do with what they wish. --- Where is Xerox as an icon brand these days? By leaving a free-kick software ownership niche for other NLE software brands to develop and exploit, Adobe might also be heading off any government challenges relating to being too dominant in the marketplace.
 
Dr. Sassi said:
Hi David,

I have one question, and perhaps I miss something. I shot the music video (see link in the bottom area) as a multi cam shot. The RED implementation worked great. As music videos have the song as backbone, the timing is a given.

In this way, the multi camera/angle editing tool is certainly a great way to work. Very efficient and straight forward.

My problem, after I was done with it in PP-CS6, I tried to export it via XML. Which I got not to work at all. I got only one stream of the many streams I had used to create it. The exported file was cut exactly where I had my edit points, but always the same single stream, no switch at all to anything else. Relatively useless. (Lets say I had streams called A,B,C,D. The edit was e.g., ABCDBABDC, but I got AAAAAAAAA only, I hope that makes sense)
Yes, it took me only an hour to rebuild it, but any change in PP CS6 needed then a manual copy to the parts that I had in my XML file.

Will this be fixed one day (or did I something wrong?)

I will not say a lot right now about the CC, except that I hope things will change soon; I couldn't care less about CC or its entire options (I'm investing currently time in FCPX again, after last Monday's announcement) . So lets focus on what is important, that the software is useable.

My best wishes.

Sassi
Click to expand...

Premiere Pro CC has the ability to flatten a multicam sequence. This makes it much easier to go into other apps via xml or edl.

Cheers

Dave
 
Julien Deka said:
Is it really? I was excited about this when they released the Creative Cloud last year, but then, after reading stuff around, I figured out it will be the same kind of trouble: activating, deactivating...

So can you do the following scenario? Youhave your CC apps on your laptop and your workstation, at your office, and for some raison you need to fly in another city and work there for 2 weeks. You just instal the softwares on a 3rd computer there, and login into your CC account. The pop-up window asks you which computer deactivate (you choose your workstation back at your office). Then you do your job, you fly back, and re-log your workstation (this time deactivating the 3rd computer in the other city).

Would that work that way - as easy as that?
Click to expand...
yes
 
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