Film School Secrets: Insider Advice for Aspiring Filmmakers Learn Filmmaking as Creative Professional, Not a Starving Artist It’s no secret that the cost of getting high quality digital images has dropped faster than Superman in the past 10 years. Remember back in the 90s when the Panasonic DVX100 was the pinnacle of digital video? That camera cost $3,000 to $5000 and got basic SD resolution picture. Nowadays a good DSLR gets many times that resolution for a quarter of the price.
Software costs have dropped too. Back in the late 90s when I was in film school an AVID workstation with software could run upwards of $25,000. Nowadays you can get Media Composer for $2,500.
But still, software is expensive. And while Adobe’s mainstays of digital effects and editing, After Effects and Premiere Pro, are great and relative cheap, they still cost a pretty penny. Premiere Pro CS6 is around $800 and After Effects is around $1000 by themselves.
The Creative Suite CS6 is anywhere from $1500 to $2500 depending on where you buy, and includes all of Adobe’s graphic and video software.
But still that’s a few thousand bucks. What if you’re in high school and can’t afford all that software? To date you’d either need to get the software through black hat means or hope your school had it or someone would buy it for you.
But recently Adobe launched it’s Creative Cloud service. This is so freaking awesome. It basically allows anyone to install all of the Adobe Creative Suite CS6 applications, from Photoshop to After Effects to Bridge, Premiere Pro and more… for a low monthly fee. With a year contract it’s about $50 a month and if you want to go month to month it’s $75 a month… but that is still many times more affordable than paying for it outright.
And it really levels the playing field and makes film schools even more irrelevant.
One of the reasons that film schools used to be a good idea is because students could get access to expensive and hard to film film equipment. Back in the day this meant Steenbeck editing machines, Arriflex film cameras, etc. After the first digital revolution this meant access to digital video cameras and expensive editing software and computers.
Mac has already paved the way with Final Cut Pro, a $300 piece of software that is being used by Professional Video Editors in Hollywood.
But now PC owners have a whole new access to the most cutting edge software. $50 a month is insane, when you consider that many film students are paying $42,000 a year to get limited access to computers with the very same software. They are practically giving it away.
Click here to check out the Creative Cloud offer:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html
Now there’s really no excuse to not be making a movie. All of the same tools being used by film students at fancy schools and many professionals in the business are available for everyone. The question is, will you take advantage of it?