Re: OT: Question for Anim

On 3/12/24 12:06 AM, anim8rfsk wrote:

Dimensional Traveler <dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

Anim, as someone who has worked in the TV/Film industry I'd like your
serious opinion on something.  Elsewhere I'm involved in a discussion
where we are wondering how Apple can get away with the prices it charges
and is there anything it actually does better than a high-end PC.
Someone suggested video and audio (music) work.
>
So my question is what would you use now for video and/or FX work?  And
why please?
>

 Well, I’ve been retired for a few years now and just doing consulting and
kibitzing so I really can’t speak to what I would use if I were going to
start over.
 But in my day, the people that actually did the work did it on Macs or
Linux and the people who thought they did the work, but were  just in the
way used windows.
 There’s a school of thought that “cheaper is better“ regardless of anything
else. And those are the people that always wanted us to use windows. They
would buy a PC for $1000 and say see this is way better than your Mac that
cost 1500 but then they would have to go out and add a whole bunch of stuff
to it and end up out of pocket $2000 and still not have half the computer
the Apple guys did.
 Compare this thinking to beta versus VHS. There’s absolutely no doubt Beta
was better in every measurable capacity, but VHS was better at promotion
and underhanded pricing deals. So it won.
 The big thing, though was the software. The powerhouse software for
animation didn’t exist or existed in limited form for windows. We used
electric image for years and the big award-winning Intel inside commercials
that everybody loved were done on Macs because the windows Intel machines
couldn’t run electric image!  Linker systems, animation stand, which was
the big deal for coloring and animating traditional cel animation, same
notation. Mac only.
 Similar notations for audio editing and production.
 When I switched over to Maxon Cinema, 4D, because electric image got
destroyed by evil Ukrainians there was a larger penetration of Windows
users, but the serious version of the software and the serious users of the
software were still all Apple based.
 About the only things we couldn’t use were MAX and MAYA. MAYA finally came
around. Then there was light wave, which I never liked for a moment. I told
the guys at IIRC zoic who were doing firefly, and the new Battlestar
Galactica, and the company was saying it was all done on lightwave that
while Galactically sucked firefly was by far the best light wave I’d ever
seen. They laughed and fessed up that lightwave never got anywhere near
firefly; that was all Maya. Galactica was done by their B and C team in
lightwave, copying as best they could stylistically what the A-Team was
doing with Maya on firefly.
 

You know what really made VHS more popular than Beta?  In the early days, VHS had a longer run time. Beta didn't.

Betamax’s ultimate demise was the shortage in recording times. A longer film, or even the average sports game, would have to be separated into at least two cassettes for the Betamax. But do you know why Sony intentionally kept the cassettes small?
The cassette design was inspired by its predecessor U-matic. U-matic had a recording time of only one hour. But since broadcasters were the main user group of the U-matic, they never expressed any concerns because studios had multiple machines running and typically had commercial breaks separating recordings.

Based off these trends, Sony believed one hour cassettes would suffice. They even dubbed the small size as “convenient” compared to the larger VHS tapes. Even the Betamax’s longest cassette, the L-830 tape, could only run for a maximum five hours versus VHS which started creating tapes covering up to ten and a half hours of film. Size does matter, and in this case the bigger the better. Consequently, VHS took over the market as the standard home recording device.

Since most movies used to clock in at 2 hours and under, VHS was a no brainer.
--
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