Veteran Apple pro video product manager on future of post-production

Steve Bayes worked for Avid for 10 years on Media Composer: the application used to edit most TV shows and feature films. He spent over 12 years working for Apple as the Final Cut Pro product manager. Now he is a freelance marketing consultant for businesses serving the post production industry.

He left Apple in July 2018, so is now free to join us on the internet in a private capacity. He has joined fcp.co as a columnist and commentator on the Film, TV and video production industry.

In his first column he outlines what to look for at the IBC 2019 video trade show that is coming to Amsterdam in a couple of weeks:

Look for more advanced workflows that handle HDR better. Use your dynamic range for good and don’t lose track of it on the way to the final display.

and he especially wary of those offering pure cloud solutions for video editing:

Every time someone talks about “the cloud” you need to down a shot of aquavit. Then ask, “I just shot a terabyte of 8K footage yesterday with my 3-camera rig, how long to upload it from my hotel before I can start to generate proxies in your cloud?”. They will point you to a workflow that requires very little footage and lots of GPU computing.

[…]

In the end, is there a clear ROI benefit to the cloud over local storage when working with the speeds and quality we expect today? I’d like to see those numbers and the justification. I predict it will remain a cloud/local hybrid for quite some time.

Here is the first of the fcp.co YouTube discussions featuring Steve Bayes on the fcp.co channel on YouTube: