I've paid this much for a hobby DAW.
If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the submission page, you'll notice a bunch of hardware for controlling DaVinci and its modules. It ranges from $400 to $50,00 and they have even more expensive hardware as well. This is where they get most of their profits from, and where the larger companies really spend the money on when it comes to buying from BMD.
Everybody except Grant Petty. I've definitely heard stories about an expletive-filled rant when Adobe discontinued their "buy once, own forever" products.
Both him and Doug (the other main co-founder) genuinely care more about making good-quality, affordable products than being worth an extra few hundred million.
How do you get your product in? Easy, release product for free so small time creators, experimenters get familiar. Those people go to work for professional studio, they request davinci since they know it better. Then company further optimizes by buying expensive intergrated hardware to better streamline production...
Its brilliant to see this nonobvious market oppportunity. Further you get extra street creds, as yt people will love your product just for the fact its so accessible (free).
DaVinci is ridiculously cheap because the entire company is owned by three guys, at least one of whom has a personal, burning disgust for the way that the television industry (in particular, the Australian television industry) used to be run back in the day.
I distinctly remember getting a bizarre company-wide memo at one point, directly from the CEO, where a particular product launch (I think it might have been the Pocket 4K) would assist in democratizing TV production to the point where no company could force the nation to watch Hee-Haw again.
He's genuinely on a mission from God to break up the monopoly in TV production, and profit comes second to that goal.
100% man. I left two years ago due to some major life changes I didn't know how to handle, but still get nostalgic about the place to this day. It's not just the perks, but the culture too - both in terms of striving to improve as professionals and the laid-back, larrikin attitude towards just about everything else.
I run my own business now, but my long-term goal is to be able to create the same environment and provide the same opportunities that Blackmagic gave me.
>coffee daily
You're really underselling Bing there, mate. ;)
Yeah, I mean that probably affects how they setup their pricing, but as you quoted me, it seems you're arguing against my point, rather than adding to it.
Without the hardware side of BMD, I'm not sure how they would be able to sustain the company as it is with just sales of the (very cheap) software. My point was not to say anything about the motivations of the founders, but more about how that price point can remain cheap, even though it costs way more to develop than what they can ever make back from selling just the software.
I don't understand the specifics, but I know Resolve is profitable in its own right (used to have lunch multiple times per week with one of the co-founders).
I think a lot of the IP was picked up during an acquisition, and most of the work on it is done by a fairly lean team up in Singapore.
Of course, that's not to say it's as profitable as it could be, but neither optimising for profit nor making a loss is not the goal of the founders.
(I usually don't really care about potential backdoors from a foreign nation state, but the Australian police has shown itself to be really really helpful with foreign law enforcement agencies. The FBI recently used them to set up a massive sting operation that would've been illegal for the FBI to do on their own.)
• Selling to the pro field (50+ person studios) is a meager few billion dollar market, but highly demanding in terms of features. In Israel (where I worked in TV a decade ago), there are likely under 1000 'pro' edit stations, for almost 9M population [1]. • Selling to the general public is a much larger chunk, but you're competing against iPhone apps (previously against multimedia software, which is geriatric by now).
That's why the prosumer market is that lucrative: Same software as pro, with some flags to limit features. For every professional who can shell $5k (/year, which is new), there are 50 hobbyists willing to pay $250. Triple the income stream with marketing as the sole expense.
But not all companies have access to broadcast markets. For example, Adobe never got Premiere into newsrooms, but did make money off After Effects and Photoshop in design departments there. So Adobe changed their licensing structure to account for a different consumer:prosumer ratio by creating a "bundle" license paid monthly. Studios paid less (licenses for AE used to be single payment, and a lot) and consumers paid more.
Avid made money primarily from broadcast & film, so their flagship products factor that in their licensing, so their prosumer ratios are tilted towards their primary market (more expensive prosumer products).
I wonder how many studios switched to Blackmagic software. Davinci and Fusion (their compositing software) don't have a lot of success stories nowadays, but the feature list (multicam! high end grading! scripting! compositing!) is objectively more focused towards serving studios than Adobe's. I hope the adoption story looks a lot different this decade.
[1] I don't have official numbers, but a post house owns 5-50 Avid licenses, there's about 15 of them, plus universities, schools, military + corporate offices. That's still about 1 broadcast license per 10K population.
If you think Resolve is ridiculously inexpensive, Adobe Creative Cloud is actually rip-your-arm-off-where-do-I-sign inexpensive.
Just think about it.
For a business expense that is essentially pittance a month, you get:
- Adobe Premiere (arguably one of the best, if not *THE* best video editor)
- Adobe After Effects (as above, but motion graphics and visual effects)
- Adobe Audition (as above, but audio)
- Adobe Media Encoder
- Plus old friends Photoshop, Illustrator etc.
No. Its not.
With the greatest of respect, have you ever run a business?
I could list many reasons why 600USD is cheap, but I'll leave it with the easiest one to understand, the old adage "time is money".
1. How much are you paying those video editors using the Adobe suite that you're paying 600 USD each a year for ?
2. How many projects are those video editors working on ?
3. What is the profit margin on those projects ?
As for $other_reasons, let's see .... IT equipment, Video/Lighting Equipment, office space, cost of customer acquisition (vs keeping them happy via prompt completion on time) .... the list goes on. The 600USD will be at the lower-end of all the other expenses.
600USD a year is cheap compared to what it is saving your business in time and money, and the efficiencies it brings.
FUD Alert ! FUD alert !
I know lots of people working extensively with Premiere. Not one of them has complained of crashing.
Daily reminder Premier, in 2022 can’t even update its preview window as you drag video clips around. No idea how it can be considered even a good video editor with that incompetence.
I know everyone has their own editing style, but calling the editor incompetent because of this weird workflow issue seems a bit much to me.
Also just because you’ve conditioned yourself to work around this limitation doesn’t excuse the developers from not implementing a feature even iMovie has.
Like why can the preview not just represent what’s under the play head all the time, why does it have to wait for me to stop dragging…
> Before this change, the pre-built versions of Resolve had been the only available options, selling for between $200,000 and $800,000, which was common industry practice at the time.