BoganTW

Last two releases were announced end of July, but Siggraph is a couple of weeks later this year, so who knows? The traditional reaction threads this year should make for fascinating reading.

That's a bit harsh. Probably the fact that he's unknown to us makes some people suspicious. I'm guessing this will change reasonably soon. Also, re the typical grey suited CEO stuff, McGavran seems to very much be a software guy and very proactive with digging in to customer responses, chatting, letting folks know what's up etc. The radio silence from MAXON about different things was never popular. Over at the RedUser forum (the official forum for the HD Red camera) McGavran has more than 700 posts and by the look of it was posting there pretty much every week or so. This sort of stuff - So it seems like there is a minor bump around the contextual menu for Source Settings going missing in the timeline. But do you generally like the new Master Clip Effect? Other feedback? ...Hi Dimitri, Let me validate something because I don't think there is a bug here unless I missed something in this thread... In 2015 if you import Red files we automatically recognize that and apply the master clip effect to work with. If you open a 2014 project we can't (and decided not to try) to bring forward the source settings into the new master clip effect. So for those projects you need to use the source settings. We removed the keyboard shortcut and the context menu in the timeline not realizing that this would cause problems. So our proposal is to add back the keyboard shortcut. Is there another issue I missed in this chain? Does this sound correct? Thanks, Dave ... Yep that is what I am trying to get to. We always are fixing and enhancing XML and we also have a robust AAF workflow. Most customers are happy with that. Speed change is an interesting problem that I wasn't sure anybody attempted to solve (happy to be wrong). Generally the speed algorithms have been different in each app. Markers and eyeing seems to be the major workflows that I see. We have a ton of customers going to Resolve and other grading apps. Cheers, Dave ... Hi All, Lost in all the great talk about Color improvements is a great new feature for Red editors. This is something we have wanted to do for a long time and finally got around to it. There is now longer a modal dialog to edit Red settings. It is now a master clip effect that shows up in the effect control palette. This brings lots of benefits. You can use it now with the new realtime scopes and copy/paste settings easily between clips. Below is a new screen shot. Also in the other thread people asked about stability and minor improvements. We ALWAYS fix high priority issues that our customers tell us about. Also there are a ton of other features in this release that focus on making editing easier. Full notes should come out soon. Cheers, Dave ... Hi Brandon, That thread didn't crash in reality. It only crashed trying to save your project when another thread crashed. Can you post the whole log? Thanks, Dave ... I might be biased but I would go Premiere Pro ;). In all seriousness though, we just released 2014.2. It is probably the fastest and most stable version of Premiere we have ever released. Gone Girl was terabytes about terabytes of data and massively large projects. If you read the Gone Girl thread from Phil you will get a good idea of how hard we worked to nail that massive worflow. We have tons of long form projects going all and broadcasters all over the world are using or switching to Premiere. So my advice is give it a try and if it doesn't feel right come here or the adobe forums and ask questions. Bet you will get the answers you want. At any rate all the tools work, I just happen to think we work best. But again I am biased. Cheers, Dave ... Hi Guys, Most of the people who would answer this are busy at NAB. Many will be back next week. I will be going radio silent personally for about 8 weeks. (rest and relaxation) But I will ask someone to come in here and respond. Cheers, Dave ... Hi Guys, Can't say to much as it was just a technology preview... But you know I will be at NAB if you want and try and find me and say hi. Cheers, Dave ... Hi Tom, We haven't heard this before. However, we also don't have this monitor yet. Let me see if our test lab has one., Cheers, Dave ... Thanks Jarred! We are super proud of this release and the work we did with Red. First stop and enjoy this one, then sit back and think about what we probably have up our sleeves next! Red is a great partner to do cool stuff with ;) Remember this adds Dragon to all the Adobe Video apps :) Cheers Dave ... Yep I see it but I would need to get the Prelude guys on here to answer. Forwarding the message to them. Cheers Dave If he can even occasionally give the sort of feedback above about C4D things - and I know as CEO he'll be in a different role, but word from the top will always be welcome - I doubt anyone will be complaining. He seems to be a smart guy and I get the feeling he's not going to be lazy. If he pops onto the Cafe or other forums sometimes with word on what is happening it will be nice to see.

Sounds cool. You can see the C4dLive presentation clock down to the minute here. http://www.c4dlive.com Great bunch of presenters and they have Tim Clapham as one of them - met Tim at a Melbourne presentation a few years back (Nodefest) and he was the loveliest bloke ever.

To get McGavran, McGavran had to also want to do it as well. He already had a significant role at a software company. When they made their pitch to him, it would have included the big picture of R20 and everything coming together for C4D in a very positive manner. I’m guessing this was an attractive proposition. Again, I get the feeling MAXON have picked quite well with McGavran. It could be much worse, ask Xbox fans how they feel about Don Mattrick’s time as CEO of that company. Phil Spencer (the CEO now) is still trying to clear up the mess.

I dunno, to be honest, I think McGavran may turn out to be a good, lucky pick. McGavran was never a CEO at Adobe, so I don't believe he was responsible for Adobe's decision to go subscription based. McGavran was in charge of software engineering. His LinkedIn page and IMDB profile show technical responsibilities and development of software. His comments (I've found more) on Adobe forums give friendly, nitty gritty answers to software questions. His blog showed him travelling overseas to chat with customers and ask them questions. None of these things are bad things at all. He was also at Adobe for 20 years. Creative Cloud came out 5 years ago. So, McGavran spent 75% of his career with a company that was not restricted to subscription-only licensing, and has now left it for another company that is not restricted to subscription-only licensing. I don't see a reason why he'd be that wedded to the concept for C4D. Some people think this is a Trojan horse effort to subvert C4D by sending him in to do Adobe's bidding. I don't really get that. If he and everyone else involved were that keen to pass C4D on to Adobe for Adobe to make use of it, McGavran may as well just have stayed at Adobe, and Nemetschek could have just sold the whole thing to them. They haven't done that, and having an Adobe guy come, newly take over as CEO, meet the whole team, take over responsibilities and then after that somehow drag everything back into the Adobe building seems like a very complicated way of going about things. Not to mention if you've finally been made the CEO of a company like C4D - a pretty cool thing - do you really want to just do all that just to sneakily satisfy some higher-up boss at the company you worked at previously? It can be just as likely McGavran thought being the CEO of C4D was a great, suitable and exciting opportunity, and the MAXON founders thought he'd be a good pick. As for how it happened - my guess - McGavran, in charge of engineering for Adobe's video products, dealt with MAXON when Cineware was being implemented into After Effects. I'm assuming things went positively. McGavran's bio mentions that from 2003 - 2009 he was also working with Adobe developers based in 'Heidelberg Area, Germany', and spent several years working in the country. So you have a respected guy who has been in charge of software development, who has happily worked in Germany in a similar role for several years, who folks at MAXON have had a positive experience working with in the past, and the MAXON founders perhaps want to showcase their recent years of hard work with a new guy who will hit the ground running and won't be shy about doing everything he thinks is best for the software. Things could be much worse, and there's probably a ton of stuff unknown to us that made the key folk at MAXON and Nemetschek think, yep, this is the guy for us. I think give him a chance - this feels like it will be a year for a lot of good new things.

First blog post from McGavran. He seems like a nice bloke. https://www.MAXON.net/en/news/MAXON-blog/article/day-1/

Here's a five minute clip of MAXON's new CEO, David McGavran, at the WWDC conference a few years back, showing off Illustrator and After Effects stuff. He seems like a smart bloke. The very scripted Apple stage isn't really the place for laughs so I'll be curious to see him speaking personally and honestly about C4D when he gets the chance.

A really lovely blog post from the founders here, which also seems to confirm further that R20 is something special. https://www.MAXON.net/en/news/MAXON-blog/article/thanks/ And on reflection it feels like McGavran may very well be a great choice as CEO. He’s an industry veteran with 20 years experience in motion graphics, who is widely trusted and connected to the broadcast industry internationally, and he can now go and sell the merits of C4D to those two decades of industry friends and connections. There are probably a ton of production houses that will have an open door and be happy to talk with him.

Well, here's David McGavran penning a blog about his work trip to Brazil. https://www.provideocoalition.com/once-in-a-lifetime-experience-in-brazil/ And - very nice - here's McGavran jumping in to an official Adobe thread just three weeks ago, discussing tech issues (Premiere Pro on the iMac) with a user. https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2504511

I tried to install the latest version of Houdini Apprentice again, and this time it worked fine. (Maybe it's happier with Sierra than with Mavericks or whatever I was using in the past). Having a look at the SideFX forum and there are multiple SideFX people, including devs, popping in and commenting and answering questions. It's quite encouraging.

Go back and look at the article again. Bloomberg said the info was stated which may as well mean no-one. No-one from Nemetschek would be contacting Bloomberg about it to leak against themselves - and if the people who know the info don't work for Nemetschek, why are they quoted anonymously again? It's more than likely that the people don't exist. More to the point, Bloomberg have listed Cinema 4D in the headline as 'James Bond's 3D software' and illustrated the article with a big fat pic of Daniel Craig. Do you think they did those two things to help impart newsworthy info, or to dredge up clicks? It doesn't inspire a lot of faith in their intentions with the article.

That is actually funny, and I’m glad this thread is running over the topic in good spirits. To be honest it doesn’t make much sense for Nemetschek to sell C4D if it’s a steady earner, but I’m not them and I don’t know why they do the things they do. I’d also probably be one of the few happy if MAXON announced some joint Adobe partnership where development continued as normal but everyone with an After Effects sub got the full version chucked in with their CC subscription, but that’s just me. i just noticed the Lynda site has a ton of recent Houdini training by a guy who seems to know what he’s talking about. I’m going to watch all those then let them ferment in my brain for another year or two before I peek again at what the crazy Houdini guys are up to. I met a hotshot Houdini / VFX trainer at some Aussie festival gathering a few years back. His encouraging words to his students when telling them to get working on their reels was basically “Blow something up! Blow up a building! Blow up Melbourne!”, which was pretty funny and quite different from the world of lighting an extruded logo or something.

“No smoke without fire”? If I had a buck for every bogus story that had appeared this year on different subjects referencing anonymous “people familiar with the matter”, and no other evidence, my money troubles would be happily over. That said, it’s obviously something that can’t be ruled out. Nemetschek has denied it, for whatever that’s worth. The timing of the announcement is weird. It came out the week of the R19 announcement at Siggraph, just a couple of days after R19 was announced online. If Nemetschek were ‘exploring’ a possible sale, they would have spent longer than 72 hours doing so. And then some helpful character decides that regardless of where that process is, or isn’t, the best time to leak the story is just as MAXON are attempting to whip up excitement about R19. Strange.

The latest Houdini does look great. Really really good. The fact that their indie version is so cheap is even better. I installed the free version a year or more back on my iMac to have a look, couldn't get it to run as my machine is several years old now and I think just under the wire as far as minimum GPU specs go. SideFX were very responsive on the forum when I mentioned this, but I decided to leave it there until I could afford a machine that could do it justice. My uninformed guess about some lingering C4D issues. Rick and Paul mentioned a couple of years back (post R17) in a Q&A that unified dynamics were coming in the 'next few versions'. ("It's coming... will be out within the next few releases" etc). Stuff like cloth and Pyrocluster and other bits and pieces that would benefit from being redone and using those unified dynamics to interact have had to wait, and the dynamics have had to wait for the big new core to finally land. So Core>Dynamics>Redone legacy features that need to use both, and R20 might go someway (who knows) along that line to get that train rolling. I could be totally wrong though. Cutman's feedback is very valuable. I'm stuck with AE and basic Cineware and am learning the long neglected basic components of my Creative Cloud sub right now, but I read the forums and pay attention to the annual comments thread post C4D release each year. I always figure if Cutman nods and approves of something then MAXON have really done something decent, and if he's still negative then it means MAXON have more work to do.

How does offering slight updates maximise the IP again? I thought offering a large/well-received update that received lots of good reviews and word of mouth would serve the IP better, as for the duration of the year people would be happy with it, stick with it, recommend it to others, see good reviews of it online etc etc etc. A marginal upgrade would do less of all of that. I can't see any reason at all for them to cripple things deliberately. I've got less of a dog in this fight than others, as I'm still on Lite and barely have time to learn After Effects, but I've been reading the C4D forums since version 9, and the negative doom and gloom when various signs (new core, new hires, expanded Canadian dev team) point to the opposite sometimes feels a bit odd.

I know a lot of game makers and programmers locally who use Unity. They're pretty happy with it. The consensus (and I also encountered this) is that Unreal requires a beefier rig and graphics card to run. I briefly subscribed to Unreal when it first came out and my MacBook Pro sounded like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. Your mileage might vary with it. There are substantial tutorials online for both programs (Unreal has a very active official Youtube channel) so maybe try both and see which looks like a good fit for you.

I recall after R17 came out Paul Babb and Rick Barrett were asked in an online chat if C4D would get unified dynamics at some point. They said yes, it's scheduled to happen within the next few versions. (18, 19, 20). Presumably if it doesn't occur this year, it may be in the works for next year's release.

Big kudos to Nigel for his years of hard work and help for C4D newcomers. My sympathy and appreciation too for Hrvoje for doing his best and utmost under that pesky NDA. I hope Nigel really enjoys himself and has a fulfilling time in Modoland.