So curiosity took me through Ars Technica’s look at the Romney campaign’s technology – Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends- and got down to the heading Picking a few things up at the Apple Store and see that Apple picked up a decent customer in the campaign.
However, what took my eye was when I stumbled over “Crumplepop” in the list under ROMNEY CAMPAIGN’S SOFTWARE AND SOFTWARE SERVICES EXPENSES because it’s not a word that often comes up in campaign technology lists. That lead to a closer scan of the list and yes, Final Cut Pro X is listed as being another purchase. (Obvious because Crumplepop now only do Final Cut Pro X plug-ins and add-ons.) That’s roughly six seats with a Motion and Compressor included. Nice going Crumplepop guys.*
Queue the comments associating that purchase with the campaign result. Please don’t bother.
Now to read about the IT of the other campaign: 40 Engineers Worked 14-Hour Days, 7 Days A Week To Get Obama Reelected—Here Is Their Story from The Atlantic (via Business Insider). A quick scan suggests it contains no references to Final Cut Pro X or Crumplepop.
* I so want to make a joke about giving footage that 50’s look, but I fear what is purely a joke, will be interpreted as something political.
6 replies on “Romney’s campaign used Final Cut Pro X, with help from Crumplepop”
They are probably tools that are reasonably well suited to the work.
It’s one of those situations though that makes me wonder. Politics (especially US politics) is such a divisive issue and Crumplepop is a small business. How divorced can you make your work from your beliefs/politics?
I know nothing about the politics of the people behind Crumplepop, but if they didn’t agree with Romney I wonder how they would feel about his campaign’s use of their products.
It’s interesting to think about where your skills and knowledge get used once you put them up for sale like that.
As for Obama – no idea there. They were putting out a LOT of video content though (hundreds of videos on their YouTube channel). Whatever they were using they were certainly getting some good value from it.
These days Crumplepop products are sold through Red Giant, so they likely didn’t even know about the sale. It did make me wonder about our won position but again likely we wouldn’t know until after the sale was complete, and serial number issued (or through the Mac App Store where we never know who purchased something).
Dylan, I’m not quite sure how one can assume that a company, large or small, knows who is doing the buying and with what intent.
Even political extremists (however you define the term) use Cameras and NLEs and FXs. Short of getting a Purchase Order with letterhead, or a company identified when making a purchase, it would be burdensome for companies to do political research on every purchaser.
Certainly those of us involved in Production and Post Production can choose our clients (and even then sometimes not) but I don’t think it’s something software and hardware manufacturers can do easily.
Hey, Gabe from CrumplePop here. Philip, this is an amazing find! I don’t want to make a political statement, but we’re always entertained by where our plugins show up. We once spotted an effect of ours used in a video by Anonymous, so our users seem to span the political spectrum.
Putting the politics aside, it would be interesting to know why certain software choices were made.
I can’t help but wonder that they chose FCPX because of the fast turnaround possible and critical to political video. That they chose CrumplePop because they had to make certain older video clips look like 8mm home movies. Likely we’ll never know.
This reminds me of people I work with; they walk around with MBPs and they think it – therefore – makes them look clever and smart. It doesn’t…