Microsoft And Apple Both Had The Same Great Idea

I edit video quite a bit these days. I’ve done so for a few years now, having launched video for sites and been involved in TV shows which needed content to be put online. Indeed, when I went to college many years ago I spent a lot of time hunched over old-fashioned VHS edit suites cursing.

The reason for the cursing was usually that during an edit I’d forgotten to set the deck up properly. Doing this would punch a hole in the timecode of your edit, and cause the picture to break up. The only way to rectify a mistake like this was to wipe the tape, put a timecode back on it by recording tone and bars over the whole thing. Imagine doing that in the last scenes of a complicated edit.

And then along came nonlinear editing and took away all those problems. An edit that took all day on VHS can be done, literally, in minutes now. The march of technology is a very good thing but there is one thing that I miss about the old days – tactility, and that’s something that both Apple and Microsoft seem to be addressing with the new Macbook Pro and Surface Studio.

Here’s the issue now – nonlinear uses a keyboard and a mouse, but neither of these two tools was designed for video editing. In the old days we had a deck control which was a large dial, usually, that allowed us to speed through the tape to find the bit we wanted to dump in our edit. We can do that now with the usual PC tools, but it’s not as quick. Which is where that Touch Bar and Surface Dial come in.

Both of these new inventions are aimed at giving people a more modern way to interact with their PC. The dial can be used on the touchscreen, or simply left at the side. It would allow me, during editing, to shuttle through footage quickly. And when I’ve done the edit, I can use the dial to colour grade or adjust the sound mix. And the same is true of Apple’s Touch Bar – I can scrub through my timeline, perform cuts with shortcuts – anyone who edits will likely tell you shortcuts are a necessary evil, but very complicated to boot. Again, once that’s done I could do picture or sound tweaks with the Bar.

And of course, there are ways to do this with third-party tools. But guess what, most hardware devices don’t work brilliantly and are often very expensive. The really useful tools, like the hardware control surface for DaVinci Resolve are tens of thousands of dollars. So as creative industries get more and more accessible to people like me it seems like the tools from manufacturers are getting better too.

I know that journalists often tend to find fault with new tech, but here I wanted to say that these tools, from two different companies, are both aimed at making things a little bit better. It’s nice to sometimes acknowledge that.

Read full article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/ianmorris/2016/10/29/microsoft-and-apple-both-had-the-same-great-idea

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