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Hello Everyone,

After a jam-packed summer edition, we’re back with a slightly lighter fall edition. Bryan Cahill gives us an overview of on-set concerns regarding safety as climate change continues to exacerbate the summer’s heat. Amber Maher takes us through her experiences working as a Video Assist Operator and why now more than ever, it is essential that the video department on set be given adequate staffing. Then we have an interview with Antony Hurd, who shares his insights into the world of mixing for professional sports. And as usual, our contributing columnist Ric Teller shares his thoughts about life, the universe, and everything. Then James Delhauer has some updates to share on the IATSE’s initiatives to address growing concerns surrounding the subject of artificial intelligence.

We hope you enjoy.

In Solidarity,

James Delhauer & Richard Lightstone CAS AMPS

Are you interested in telling your story? Production Sound & Video is always seeking new stories to share with our readers.
If you are interested in writing an article or sharing your story in our magazine, please contact us at mag@local695.com

In Solidarity,

There is no denying the allure of our industry. For many of us, it has been a privilege to work alongside the finest creative minds and most widely recognized celebrities. Year in and year out, we see record shattering box-office numbers as studios report billions of dollars in profits. Since its earliest days, Hollywood has always attracted those seeking to make their fortunes or express their creative minds. Yet this year, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Shortly thereafter on July 14, they were joined by more than 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, leading to the first dual Hollywood strike in more than half a century. Why is it that despite earning billions of dollars in revenue for the studios, these artists felt the need to walk away from the bargaining table in demand of more?

Because Hollywood is Broken.

When the earliest versions of our contracts were first written, the film business was a very different place. The business model was supported by ticket sales, TV ratings, and home media distribution. As key contributors to a film or show’s success, the cast and crew shared in the film’s success through residuals. For work-a-day directors, actors, and writers who might go months of even years between jobs, it made sense that residuals would be made in direct cash payments. That might be the only income those artists made while they were looking for their next job. For the below-the-line crew, the majority of whom were steadily employed directly by the studios, the needs of day-to-day life were already met by a steady paycheck. So, residuals were paid out in the form of contributions to our benefit plans.

But this model has been disrupted and the studio system has disappeared. Film studios have been acquired by or transformed into big tech companies, with many of the biggest players in the industry consolidating under fewer banners. 20th Century Fox, once a central pillar of the entertainment industry, is now a subsidy of the Walt Disney Corporation. Warner Bros. Studios, as it was known for over a century, is now Warner Bros. Discovery. Plus, the rise of streaming has fundamentally changed the way that entertainment is sold. Ticket sales and ratings are down across the board, but the industry is more profitable than ever. Movies and television don’t need to individually make a profit anymore because their real value is to be part of a bundle of content sold for a monthly subscription fee. This dwindling competition and complete control of distribution by the studios has effectively locked creatives and crews out of their fair compensation.

This is why the WGA proposal for residuals based on subscriber numbers makes sense. But the streaming companies don’t want to share that information. Why? Because then the creatives would know who’s watching what shows on the streaming service and how much they should be compensated for the number of subscribers watching the content they created.

The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are part of a larger trend growing throughout our country. We’ve seen thousands of school workers, hotel workers, and manufacturing workers go on strike. Companies once thought to be “union proof” like Starbucks and Amazon have been forced to come to the bargaining table and sign union contracts with their employees. An August 2022 Gallup Poll showed that approval for labor unions had reached 71%, which is the highest it’s been in nearly sixty years! Across the country, workers are standing up in demand of a fair deal. In all my years with this IATSE, I have never seen such momentum in the labor movement. But I know I’m excited to have that momentum behind us as we go into next year’s contract negotiations.

Hollywood might be Broken. But Labor is Stronger than Ever.

In Solidarity,

Scott Bernard
Business Representative
scottb@local695.com

by Doug Miller

I worked in television production for thirty years. When somebody asks me how I got my job, I start the story with my grandfather, Harold V. Miller, and I begin around 1930 because ours is a multi-generational story.

My grandfather came to this country with his parents as a very young boy from London. He was an engineer son of a bike shop owner. By the time he was a young man, he had purchased a small movie theater on the west side of Los Angeles. It was during this time, he made friends with another engineer type who worked at Mitchell Camera Company. With his knowledge of gears and bike chains, he and his friend came up with an ingenious idea. With two paired stationary electric motors and two bike chains, he locked a 35mm film camera with a 35mm projector accurately enough to shoot the projection and have no frame line flicker. With the addition of a translucent screen and a rear projection, they could place talent in front of the screen, light them, and shoot them with a moving projected background. The process was cleverly called “Process,” more accurately known as “Rear Screen Projector/Camera Interlock.” When two such electric motors are wired correctly, they sit idle. Any movement applied to one is replicated exactly by the other. With one motor on the camera with gears and a chain and a second on the projector connected also with a chain to replicate the movement of the camera, the two are perfectly locked and can never drift. Growing up in a bike shop had paid off. His work was written about in Who’s Who around 1932. The invention would change the way movies were shot for the next eighty years.

He was forced into early retirement by cataracts of the eye that made him legally blind before his untimely death from a heart attack and stroke while on his first trip back to the UK in 1964. The seeds had been sewn, however, for my father to follow in his wake.

Growing up in La Cañada and running movies at The Montrose Theatre, my dad, Robert V. Miller, became a Projectionist at the tender age of sixteen. His love of the moving picture was second only to his love of sound recording. While the gig paid well, he eventually went on to get a degree in sound from Pasadena City College.

An older neighbor down the block heard of my dad’s love of projection and bequeathed an old machine to him upon his death. It was the second projector ever owned by Cecil B. DeMille. The old man had one stipulation. If they ever built a Hollywood museum, he was to donate that old 16mm with the shutter in front of the lens to the museum. I grew up in a house with that projector displayed prominently. When they finally moved the Lasky Barn from Paramount to the location across from the Hollywood Bowl, my dad followed through and donated it. It sits on the floor at The Hollywood Heritage Museum in a glass case, but it needs a plaque or something to explain its importance—something I have been meaning to correct for years.

After meeting my mother, Peggi McClain, who was an usher at The Montrose, they wed in 1960. He was committed to projection, but he really loved sound. His first few calls beyond The Montrose were at Paramount as a cable wrangler in the sound shop. One day while working as a daily there on Dobie Gillis, he heard that the old Process Gear on Stage One had failed and a feature was going to be shut down for months while they shipped it to Minnesota where the only living guy left who could fix it was located. Dad went over and fixed it on his lunch break. When the Projection Department heard what he did, they came to his stage and asked, “Hey kid … how the hell did you fix that so fast?”

“Well, my dad invented that.”

He was swiftly offered a weekly in projection, which he of course, accepted.

After a short time there, I was born into the family the first week of ’63. Little did they know at the time, how this business would continue in our family. My mother’s brother, Tom McClain, studied to be an Industrial Design Engineer at Long Beach State College. When he met my dad, he expressed a desire to learn the art of projection too. My dad showed him all about the simplexes and carbon lamphouses he loved so much and helped my Uncle Tom get a trial in the Projection Department at Paramount Studios. Tom tells the story as a trial by fire. He was in the projection booth and in comes a big pile of track and picture. After threading up two picture machines and two sound heads, about two minutes into running, he hears over the intercom “Next!” so off they come to the rewind bench while reel two is running and he threads up reel three just in time to hear “Next!” again. Off goes reel two and while three is now running, he loads up four … “Next!” This went on while he was sweating up there trying to keep up. Which he did. He was told it was Robert Evans out there saying “Next!” but he always suspected it was my dad, who informed him shortly after that he had a job at Paramount. My father went on to become Chief Engineer at Paramount and was responsible for about fifteen screening rooms and eventually, Head of the Projection Department. My uncle Tom’s humble career started at Paramount, which had him working around Orange County on daily calls running all kinds of screening rooms. He got quite good. He was running shows at The Miramar Theater in San Clemente when the new young theater owner wanted to do some rock & roll shows there. Tom jumped at the chance to help. He helped build the stage and install all of the lighting and the sound equipment. After a successful run of music shows and similar work at the Orange County Performance Center, he eventually joined Local 504, Orange County Stagehands. He then landed a job as Head of Sound at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, where he spent the next thirteen years. He would go on to be the go-to technical director for Disney when they came looking for someone with live rock show experience to help with some ambitious movie premier events. He worked with Disney as a freelancer for about ten years from Pocahontas in Central Park to Pearl Harbor on the deck of an aircraft carrier under way to Hawaii with a full orchestra and a giant screen that he designed to fold out of and back into a tiny box on the deck, complete with working curtains. Since then, he has done things for The Pentagon, a presidential inauguration, and even the opening and closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games in China, but his favorite was The Concert for Valor in Washington, DC. He was tasked with drawing up, planning, and pulling off a concert for seven hundred thousand people at the Washington Monument.
As a kid, I loved art and learned how to make stained-glass windows with my dad and wire sculptures with a soldering iron in my hand. I also helped my friends who were talented musicians with their sound equipment at rehearsal halls in San Dimas. One of the first semipublic gigs I had was as a roadie for my friend Brian Duffield’s band, Tygress, when they had two shows in a rented hall on the outskirts of Whittier with an unsigned local band called Slayer. I didn’t find my calling for sound quite yet though. First, I took a job from music legend Ken Scott, who had worked on The Beatles White Album and later mixed for the likes of Supertramp, David Bowie, and so many others. At the time, he was bankrolling a Zappa spin-off band called Missing Persons and was also managing and recording them. He hired me to sell merch at gigs. I was a senior at Burbank High and just eighteen. This experience got me hired by Bill Graham at Winterland in San Fransico to sell merch on tour with Night Ranger, where I drove a rental truck full of T-shirts from gig to gig for nine months in 1984.

It was at these shows that I saw the sound engineers installing and mixing where I got the bug. T-shirts were sold in the lobby while the real fun was down in the house.

Shortly after my return from tour, my dad heard a friend named Charlie Massa had purchased what was left of “Quad Eight,” a sound company, and had moved it into a tiny building in Burbank. He had drawings and parts but needed somebody to solder stuff together. He hired me at minimum wage, about $4 an hour at the time. He handed me a power amplifier, pointed me to a wall of parts, and said, “Can you build me a dozen just like this one?”

I did.

After a year or so, he sent me to a Pro Audio dealer around the corner to get a sub-woofer for a system upgrade we were doing at the home of Barbra Streisand. Pro Audio Services and Supply Co. was in a famous old recording complex once known as Kendun Recorders. It had two full studios with large control rooms and two extra smaller rooms. In the ’70s, everyone from Stevie Wonder to Paul McCartney had recorded there but the gear was gone, repossessed a decade earlier, and the buildings had been emptying for years.

I started bugging the new owner, Bob Hacken, for a job. He had built his company selling new and used gear for music studios and now his plan was to find tenants for the rooms and to sell them new and/or used gear, along with a service contract. After many visits, he agreed to hire me. He told me he had rented the first and largest room and sold a big package, including a big Trident 80B mixing console. My first day would be the day that console arrived from England in a 9’ crate. He needed the help to move it. He and his tech, Mark Bonasara, had me soldering mic lines and Tuchel connectors for weeks. I was up to about $8 per hour and I was learning a ton. Warranty repair on Crown and Crest amps, outboard stuff like Lexicon and TC. and 2” 24-track tape machines, Studer, Ampex, 3M, and Otari. I learned about 1/4”, 1/2”, 1”, 2” tracks, 4 tracks, 8 tracks, 16, and 24. A few weeks after that first studio opened, I found a drummer I knew from the club scene in Hollywood just walking across the patio where I ate my lunch.

“Hey Steven, what are YOU doing here?” I asked.

“Dude, I got a $120,000 record deal, can you buy me and my friend Slash lunch?”

They were penniless local kids from the Hollywood club scene with a little-known local band called Guns N’ Roses. They had the studio for a thirty-day lockout to do guitars and vocals for their debut album, Appetite for Destruction. I will never forget when the studio owner, Steve Smith, found me outside and pulled me in a week later so he could play play me rough mixes of “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Paradise City” through that Trident 80B from the MTR90 2” Master.

“Wow, this room sounds good!”

Well, the mojo was there and the acts that followed over the next four years included Heart, Cheap Trick, Billy Idol, Jason Bonham, Roy Orbison, and so many others. Subsequently in another studio there called Red Zone, in which I installed an AMEK Angela mixing console, we saw Green Day’s debut Dookie, LA Guns, Steve Lukather, Warren Zevon, Slaughter, Kenny G, and Vanessa Williams fresh from her Miss America falling out. Around this time, I joined the Orange County Stagehands Local 54 so I could take gigs working with my uncle down at Irvine Meadows. I only worked on shows I wanted and only if they didn’t interfere with my job at Pro Audio. It was a fun few years.

Then it happened. My father asked me if I was ready to make a little more than $8 an hour. Some years earlier, his local had merged with a small group of sound folks who recorded actors on sets of features and TV. He took me to meet Mr. Wacter and, with my experience and some entrance dues paid, I was allowed into IATSE Local 695 and was looking for new work.

The next two years went by fast. I was playing ping-pong with Ann Wilson and drinking beers with Slash but still only up to about $8.50 an hour when Bill Harrington at Paramount needed somebody to make fifteen thousand feet of mic cables in a hurry. He and Dan Brewer at Tech Services on the Paramount lot had been providing sound and video tech to Cheers and a few other sitcoms when they picked up another and had to scramble. I called in sick to Pro Audio on a Wednesday in December of ’89 and reported to the basement of Paramount’s Stage 31. I made a boatload of cables that day with Canare Star Quad and a few hundred nice new black Neutrik XLR’s with gold pins. They liked my output and asked me to come back the next day, and the next. Then Bill asked me if I could be a maintenance person on a sitcom. My mind flashed to the day my parents had taken me to the studio to see an episode of the I Love Lucy show, the one where Lucy worked at the bank with Vivian Vance. I still remember looking up and seeing the Boom Operators waving their arms around up in the green beds and thinking, “hmmm ,that looks like fun. I bet I could do that.” I think I was about twelve. However, I had never seen inside the sound booth. He took me to Stage 25 to see the booth on Cheers. What looked like a little baby console to me, a Yamaha 1516, and a pair of reel-to-reel decks? Otari B2 1/4” and a 1/2” MRKIII4. I could fix a couple limiters I had installed dozens of and a patch bay I could wire easily. Oh, and there were some of my new XLR cables on the floor standing by.

All I said was, “Well, I am a warranty repair trained tech on both of those machines and this console looks like a toy to me. Is that it?”

I was in, he was down. I was on Dear John for two nice twelve-hour days a week and would make more than a week’s pay back at my soon to be “old job.” I had to break it to my boss in Burbank that I didn’t have the flu for three days like I had said I did. I went in on Monday to give my notice. He asked what my new rate was and thought maybe he could match it and keep me …. I told him.

I think he actually spit out his coffee and said, “I’m gonna miss you, Doug!”

I stayed there at Paramount, installing and maintaining the sitcom packages for seventeen seasons. In the process, I learned how to wrangle cables on cameras, what a PL system was, and how to install and repair that. I learned how to string Fisher booms and move perambulators around, how to run four channels of microwave video assist transmitters and monitors, how to install mic lines and PL’s and effect speakers in the green beds and how to install a dozen little shotgun mics to capture audience reactions. I saw ways to make installation and un-installation more efficient by replacing hundreds of single-line mic cables with multi-pin snakes and I re-wired the packages, a couple a year, for a couple years till I had them all the way I liked them. Most of this work was done in the summer when the shows and all the freelancers were on hiatus. The stages got new patch bays and new mic lines and eventually, we replaced all the reel to reels with High 8 Digital DA98 and the Sony version, which I liked better as it had separate XLR ins and outs over the “D” connector fanouts on the Tascams.

I got derailed a year after I started at Paramount when the unthinkable happened. Dan Brewer had a heart attack and died while playing tennis with his cardiologist. By then, we had our new packages at Paramount, Universal, Fox, and Disney. Dan had been the keeper of those sweet rental deals and most of them went away when he died. Our department lost half its business and I got laid off. I think it was about eighteen months before Randy Dixon told the new guys, Tom Bruhl and Frank Estrada, about me. I was working with my friend Jamie Sutton out of a storefront in Burbank, installing and repairing music studio gear for about half what I had been paid in the union. We got pretty famous for taking old beautiful Neve Mic Pre/EQ modules from older desks and racking them up. I built racks for The Rolling Stones and for Heart and a bunch of studios around the country that ended up being used by big names like Pantera, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and many others. We were restoring a big API for a studio in Seattle when I got the call from Frank Estrada at Paramount. They had picked up a couple sitcoms again and I was back!

I worked on Cheers, Coach, Major Dad, Frasier, Becker, and all the rest. All in all, about eighty shows in and eighty shows back out again. Pilots counted. For me they were just as much work as a show that hung around for years. I worked steady from ’92 until 2006, when Paramount closed our department and laid me off again, this time for good. I had been there seventeen years and was in deep shock when that happened. I figured I would never again smell the inside of a hot stage. I purchased a little mixer from a new company called Sound Devices and with a 416 and K-Tek pole, I worked for Entertainment Tonight, grabbing B-roll at parties and a few other odd gigs. There was a one-day call to run a small PA at the equestrian center near my house for Warner Bros. Then, I was asked by an AV company in Santa Monica if I wanted to mix a couple bands down at Olvera Street. I had mixed weddings and bands at backlot parties at Paramount hundreds of times, so I said sure. I figured it was the little concrete bandstand at the top of Olvera Street. The day of the event, as I was parking at Union Station, I turned around to see the whole park fenced off for an international televised music festival and party sponsored by Seagram’s with a huge stage and lighting truss. I was to mix three big bands from a tent three hundred feet from stage on a Digital Yamaha 5D. I was mixing for the cameras and had to follow along during sound check between the Front of House and The Monitor guy … in Spanish! I don’t speak Spanish. I also had to track it all on a 48-channel Pro Tools and 48-channel Tascam. The Pro Tools crashed 3/4 of the way through but the Tascam lived. So did I, somehow by the skin of my teeth. I grew a few gray hairs that day.

After starving for another year or so, I got called by Warner Bros. again to do the same one-day PA gig at the equestrian center. I worked with Steve Blumenfield again, only this time, I realized WB really needed to hire me. Mike Riner had taken the job as Department Head and needed to replace himself in engineering. I lobbied hard and he told me he’d call me if and when he could. While I waited, I took a gig for a company installing video conferencing equipment at Amgen in Thousand Oaks with my friend Mark Aragon. We were to upgrade three hundred fifty rooms at Amgen with HD projectors, cameras, and all new audio. Mark and I were on about our fourth room when I was over at Disney in Glendale measuring a room for an upgrade late on a Friday by myself when I got the call.

Mike from WB said, “Hey, I’m thinkin’ about bringin’ you in Monday.”

“What time do you need me?” I asked.
“To be there? 8:30.” I replied, “I’ll see you at 8:00!”

WB had DM2000 digital consoles on the sitcoms and they also had mobile wireless single-camera show packages with Cooper mixers that ran on batteries. Wow, I was back in school! With Mike’s help and the tutoring I got from Mitch Quinones and Ara Mkhitarayn, I learned the WB version of a sitcom package and all about the single-camera stuff too. Then I went to work, first rewiring all those single-camera carts and then all new everything for the sitcoms too. It took a long time to get everything the way I wanted it. Like before at Paramount, I was able to work on the packages during the summer hiatus. After a few more years, every package had new everything. The single-camera shows got rid of the Fostex PD4’s and the DB824’s and moved onto Sound Devices. In two years, we purchased twenty-four 788T 8-track decks and helped the manufacturer with testing software versions and getting the bugs out. Then all the sitcoms got new patch bays, multi-pair snakes between racks all connected with Elcos for quick disconnect. We also added a nice A/V tie line rack down on the camera isle and got some Sound Devices PIX270i for recording the audio masters and for HD video playback for the sitcoms. I had the packages all right where I wanted them. In 2020, we were starting to buy Sound Devices’ newest Scorpios and CL16. I was there for twelve seasons. From Two and a Half Men, Old Christine, Cold Case, and Without a Trace to The Big Bang Theory, Mike & Molly, Two Broke Girls, Mom, The Mentalist, Shameless, Lucifer, and Young Sheldon and all the others. Another eighty or so. What a ride!

I went out for a two-week medical leave that turned into six weeks. The very day I was ready to return was March 27, 2020; the day they locked the gate and closed Warner Bros. because of the coronavirus. By the time the studio re-opened about five months later in August 2020, I had moved my wife and kids to Maui and I never looked back.

Most people have a job they go to where they see the same four or five people every day and they become like family. I had fifteen stages each with at least twenty people I considered family. My family was hundreds of people. I spent all my time with them, ate all my meals with them, and they truly became my giant family. I love them and miss them and I am forever grateful to each of them for being professional and personal and for making my career what it was.

I was twenty-seven when I joined 695 and now, in 2022, my son Skyler is twenty-seven. He has dabbled with sound a few times, once even mixing a school play on a Mackie in high school. Now he wants to join the family business. Skyler has been in Seattle since college but is moving back to LA this summer to join Local 695. He plans to learn how to operate Fisher booms and peds with his sights set on sitcoms. He will be the fourth generation in my family to enter this crazy business and when somebody some day asks him how he got his job? His story will start in 1930 with my grandfather Harold, son of a bike shop owner, and his “Process.” The next chapters are yet to be written.

by James Delhauer

There is a famous quote from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in which Batman says, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

When Nolan, his brother Jonathan, and David S. Goyer wrote this line, I doubt they expected it to be applied to the wonderful world of non-linear editing software.

But alas, life is funny and here we are.

Now as a disclaimer, the jurisdiction over post-production editing falls squarely with our Brothers, Sisters, and Kin in Local 700. However, for Local 695 Video Engineers, whose responsibilities on the set include media playback, off-camera recording, transcoding media with or without previously created LUT’s, quality control, and syncing and recording copies for the purpose of dailies creation, an understanding and utilization of non-linear editing technology is essential. With that out of the way, let’s talk some history.

The practice of digital non-linear editing began in 1989, when Avid Technologies released the Avid/1, a turnkey, all-in-one editing platform. Though crude by today’s standards, the original Avid represented a monumental leap forward in editing technology. Where editors had been required to manually cut their films throughout most of the twentieth century, the Avid/1 was the first time a computerized system was powerful enough to take on the task. In 1991, Adobe Systems released Adobe Premiere as a standalone competitor to Avid and, in 1998, Apple unveiled Final Cut Pro as their entry in the non-linear editing race. For more than a decade, these three were regarded as “The Big Three” of editing platforms. While Avid quickly became and remains the industry standard for cutting film and television projects in Hollywood, both Premiere and Final Cut Pro developed dedicated followings of their own.

During the period between 1998 and 2010, all three developers worked to incorporate features and quality-of-life improvements that would steal users away from one another. The user interfaces began to resemble each other more and more, while features praised in one platform soon found their way into the others. At the same time, however, each attempted to leverage its own unique strengths to go places where their competitors couldn’t follow. Avid’s software was supported by its vast array of hardware peripherals to achieve processing results far and above what Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere could manage. To close this gap, Apple began to develop its Mac Pro workstations specifically with Final Cut Pro optimization in mind. Adobe, with no hardware portfolio at its disposal, began to integrate Premiere Pro with its other suite of award-winning software, including industry standards like Photoshop and After Effects.

As a result, all three products saw some degree of use in the Hollywood creative sphere. Avid Media Composer has maintained a majority share of the userbase since its release, but Final Cut Pro began to see use on major productions as well. Films like the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, David Fincher’s The Social Network, and Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain (for which retired 695 member Walter Murch won the Academy Award for Best Editing) were all edited in Apple’s application, demonstrating its ability to compete in professional work environments. Premiere Pro, on the other hand, struggled to break into the professional market, gaining a reputation for being a prosumer grade product.

Then, in 2011, it seemed as though Apple dropped the ball. It had been two and a half years since Final Cut Pro version seven had released and the application was beginning to show its age. Even as Apple’s workstations migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit processing architectures, their software had not. A Mac Pro might have shipped with eight, sixteen, or even sixty-four gigabytes of RAM, but without rewriting the software to take advantage of the new architecture, Final Cut Pro couldn’t utilize more than four. Multicore processor threading had been poorly implemented, meaning that Apple’s software wasn’t fully leveraging the power of the Apple computers for which it was exclusively made. Moreover, the application was designed only to work with Apple QuickTime files, meaning that many modern camera formats simply weren’t compatible and required transcoding before use.

To be sure, these were issues that Avid and Adobe encountered as well, but their solutions had been to patch their software accordingly. Both programs were optimized for 64-bit computer systems and multicore threading, allowing them to fully utilize the hardware of whatever system on which they were installed. Additionally, although both programs had been optimized for specific file formats (Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes files respectively), both could also import and work with a multitude of file formats while Final Cut could only make use of Apple QuickTime files. At this point, it seemed as though Apple had puzzlingly elected to fall behind its competition. And then came Final Cut Pro X. At NAB in 2011, Apple unveiled a new edition of their editing program and the editing world collectively lost its mind … and not in a good way.

Final Cut Pro X may have carried the Final Cut name, but on a fundamental level, it was a brand new and untested program.Allegedly, Apple had internally developed a working version of Final Cut Pro 8, but it was rejected for being “evolutionary, not revolutionary,” at which point their software engineers were tasked with creating a new program from the ground up. This new version of the software lacked many professional features that users had come to rely upon, was not backward compatible with previous Final Cut Pro projects, and did not integrate with most of the infrastructure that users had invested in to support Final Cut Pro editing. At the time, this decision to so drastically change their product was viewed as a major betrayal of trust. The backlash was so severe that the Stephen Colbert show even did a segment lampooning the new Final Cut in primetime.

Now until this point, Apple’s market share in the editing world had been growing. Their suite of editing applications were becoming popular with independent and low-budget filmmakers who couldn’t afford the infrastructure to support editing in Avid. Many considered them to be in second place in “The Editing Wars,” but the release of Final Cut Pro X changed that. Their market share amongst professional editors dropped and, to this day, they still have not recovered. Adobe, keen to capitalize on the situation, fast tracked an incremental update to Premiere Pro that included the option to switch keyboard commands and shortcuts to match those of the old Final Cut Pro and began offering the reduced upgrade pricing they typically offered to their own customers to Final Cut users. They even began publishing tutorials on how to import old Final Cut projects into a Premiere workflow, proving that they did a better job of offering legacy support for Apple’s product than Apple did. This was a crucial opportunity for them as a company and their bid was successful. Premiere quickly became a major player in the low-budget, independent, and web video editing worlds, replacing Final Cut Pro as the number two player in the race. Though not as widely used on major Hollywood blockbusters, it is currently estimated that Premiere has the largest market share of all three editing applications as of this article’s writing. They’ve inspired a passionate fanbase, myself among them, who argue their merits over other applications until we’re blue in the face.

But alas, I fear those days might be numbered as well.

You see, in 2012, Adobe made the controversial decision to switch from a purchase business model to a subscription one. The justification at the time was that this would give customers the ultimate user experience. Rather than waiting eighteen to twenty-four months to access new features via paid upgrades, Adobe could now churn out bug fixes, new features, and software updates all year long by distributing them online. A single $600 a year subscription (this was the price in 2012) that included Premiere and all of Adobe’s other creative design apps was cheaper than spending $2500 every two years on the Master Collection of the newest version of Adobe’s Creative Suite. And, in response to Final Cut Pro’s misstep, Adobe was quick to assure users that they’d never lose access to their software because older versions of the programs would be hosted on the new Adobe Creative Cloud server.

Well, it has been ten years since that decision was made and those marketing promises have aged like fine milk. In recent years, the company has been accused of feature stagnation between releases. Depending on how you look at it, their “cost-saving” perpetual subscription model can be far more costly while offering less value to users. For example, if I paid $2500 in 2011, I’d still own my license for Adobe Creative Suite today. But having now paid $6000 for Adobe products since 2012, if I miss a month’s payments, I am left with nothing. This is to say nothing of service outages, which have on occasion left users unable to utilize the software for which they’ve paid. Worst of all, in contrast to the company’s promise to maintain legacy versions of their software, Adobe is no longer hosting all previous entries of their applications on their server, meaning discontinued features can simply be lost to time. In fact, in 2019, I was among many Adobe users who received an alert from Adobe that my licenses to previous versions of their software had been terminated and that if I did not upgrade to the latest version, I could face civil action from third parties. That’s not a good look.

Why did this happen?

Well, when a company sells someone a perpetual license to their software, like Adobe did before 2012, that user has permanent access to that software. It doesn’t matter if the company loses the intellectual property rights to the software and can no longer sell it. The new software owners can’t invalidate your previous perpetual purchases. That isn’t the case with a subscription model though. A company can only license you subscription software for as long as they have the rights to do so and Adobe Premiere, a program that has been compiled over the course of thirty years, has a lot of third-party code that Adobe doesn’t own in its programming. That third-party code costs money for Adobe to include in each version of their software and, in order to avoid raising subscription costs, they have started to remove third-party code that supports older and no longer commonly used features. But since they’re no longer paying for that code, they can no longer legally distribute older versions of their software that utilized it, meaning that users have lost access to features for which they have already paid.

When I called Adobe’s customer service center in 2019 to express outrage for a lost feature (support for .mkv files in case you’re curious), the service rep simply said, “Sir, it’s Adobe’s prerogative to add or remove features as they see fit.”

Touché. I suppose that it is. However, removing features has caused another problem and this is where I see Premiere’s downfall in the coming years. As I said, this program has been compiled over the course of thirty years. New code has been dropped on top of old code for three decades. And by constantly adding and removing modules, “load bearing” code has been impacted. In recent years, Premiere Pro has garnered a reputation for being very unstable. Projects are prone to crashing even on the most expensive hardware, especially on the Windows port of the application. Adobe users, particularly power users, are beginning to spend a lot more time troubleshooting their software than using it and I say that from experience.

This is the outcome of the software as a Service Model. By locking themselves into annual subscription releases and out of distributing older versions of their own software, Adobe has cornered themselves into a position where their product is struggling and they can’t even refer customers back to older iterations of it to tide them over. The unstable versions of Premiere are now the only ones legally available to customers without searching for a pre-2012 used copy. This application is in desperate need of the time and resources needed to thoroughly debug it or, as an extreme solution, to be rebuilt in the same manner Apple rebuilt Final Cut Pro. Of course, I’d recommend avoiding a few of the pitfalls from that experience. But as it stands now, Premiere is becoming a less viable option for industry professionals—especially in light of the new kid on the block.

Originally released in 2004, DaVinci Resolve has joined Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere Pro as the fourth member of the professional non-linear editing club. Though initially released as a color grading and finishing application, it has had all the features necessary to act as a standalone editing solution since 2014. What’s more, as the industry standard color grading application, this program has a host of features that go far and above its peers in that area. Plus, the application includes professional audio and visual effects tools that Avid, Apple, and Adobe all keep in secondary applications. This makes working in Resolve particularly appealing, as project workflows no longer require round tripping sequences of edited media from one application to another. Resolve users can simply click a button to move from the Editing tab to Visual Effects or Audio or Color tabs. Best of all is the application’s pricing. There are currently two iterations of Resolve on the market: DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci Resolve Studio. The standard edition is completely free and comes with the vast majority of the application’s feature set. Support for resolutions higher than ultra-high definition, frame rates higher than 60fps, high dynamic range color grading, GPU acceleration, advanced noise reduction, and several visual effects plugins are exclusive to the studio version of the program. However, these features are unnecessary for many users—including many Local 695 Video Engineers. Still, if the extra tools are needed, the Studio Edition of Resolve only costs $300 (or comes for free with the purchase of any Blackmagic Camera) and includes a lifetime of free upgrades. My DaVinci Resolve license from 2015 still allows me to use the latest version with all of its enhanced features without paying a cent to upgrade.

So with a new competitor in the mix, Adobe’s seeming apathy for their product’s own shortcomings and their much maligned pricing model might spell the end of their reign in the editing world. For my part, I’ve found myself launching Resolve more often than Premiere in the last year and I see little reason to revert back to my old workflows. Learning a new application always comes with some trepidation, but any member interested in learning more about any of these applications can take advantage of IATSE’s LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) subscription. All IATSE members are eligible for this service, which includes thousands of educational courses and video tutorials across a wide variety of topics and subjects. For more information on how to take advantage of this service, contact your Local office.