They told me I knew too much. It’s probably a very long time, they said, since you were a beginner. Our marketing people have researched the mindset of the beginner, and what the beginner needs is something easy and simple. Chris, you’re just too much into computing to appreciate what our product is designed to do. We’re going for quick, easy, simple.
I’ve had this conversation many times before over the past couple of decades with dozens of companies. This time it was at the launch of Corel’s Digital Studio 2010, a combined photo and video editing suite that also chucks in functions for watching movies and burning DVDs. Sixty quid’s worth of software aimed at that majority of users who – marketing research has discovered – take photos and videos but never bother to edit and share them because, well, it’s all too complicated.
Daniel Weisbeck, Corel’s vice president of global product marketing says “I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and haven’t been this excited about a product for years”. He thinks he’s discovered a gap in the market, and is salivating over the prospect of roping in those millions of computing neophytes who find existing software for handling, editing and sharing multimedia data outside their budget and/or their capabilities.
Well, I’ve been in the industry for a long time too, and I’ve seen this all before many times. A company runs out of ideas, so it bundles together a bunch of disparate applications, in-house or bought in, simplifies it and packages it as a quick, easy, simple ‘suite’ for beginners. “Truly integrated, intuitive… designed for everyone regardless of their software experience…” are phases that echo down through time from the late ’80s, when a deluge of now long-forgotten ‘suites’ with names like Jazz and Symphony marked the ebbing away of that first tide of standalone personal computing.
Speaking of networking, Corel Digital Studio 2010 hasn’t heard of it. Once inside the suite you’re looking at your local files and nothing else. The argument, I suppose, is that these ‘beginners’ don’t have local area networks. No? They don’t have families? Every PC sold this century comes with an Ethernet connection, and it’s there because most households that have PCs have more than one of them. The advent of wireless has made it even more of a no-brainer.
Research tells Corel that the average family takes about 100 videos a year, but fewer than 7 per cent of the users edit those clips, because it’s too complicated for them. So the Corel package includes what was described at the demo several times as a simple and easy ‘frame-by-frame’ video editor. I agree with Corel that full-function video editors like Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premier are too convoluted for the beginner.
The solution, though, isn’t to dumb down your application to the level of idiocy. The minimum requirement, once you’ve developed any kind of a feel for video editing, is to be able to find the frame you want to cut on. The Corel suite can’t do that. Far from being ‘frame-by-frame’ (‘frame-accurate’, in professional jargon), Corel’s editor can only make cuts on what the industry calls ‘key-frames’, which typically occur only once in every 300 frames. So, at 25 frames per second (the PAL standard) you can only cut within 12 seconds of your preferred edit point. In movie terms, this would be like slicing film wielding an axe while wearing boxing gloves.
I’m not having a go at Corel, but this is definitely a lesson that should have been learnt by now. The cash and time Corel has spent researching ‘the mindset of the beginner’ will have been wasted if it hasn’t realised that everybody is a beginner only once. The second time you use a package you’re getting to know it, and the third time you’re starting to understand its capabilities. Those holiday snaps your sister took – they’re on her machine, and although Windows can see them from your machine, the Corel suite can’t. Duh!
I appreciate that an absolute rookie won’t want to be confronted immediately with all the functional possibilities, but this problem was done and dusted years ago, filed under the heading ‘Information Hiding’. You don’t chuck away functionality like frame-accuracy that rookies are certainly going to need once they are up to speed. And please don’t tell me that frame-accurate editing is only the province of costly consumer products. The entry-level VideoReDo (like Corel, another Canadian offering) has been doing it for years. Or if you want it for free, Avisynth with associated open-source products like AvsP do it beautifully.
The bottom line is that quick, easy and simple doesn’t have to mean dumb.
