this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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Again… So much proprietary software is the industry standard, particularly Adobe, and much of it is Linux-compatible, making it not so easy to make the switch as a freelancer
You’re right but not correct due to that’s not all the time. With my partners/clients I was able to use affinity and/or Davinci Resolve. Also Avid has Linux VM support which is nice. Also you can import a lot of modern adobe formats these days and also universal formats between the two. If you say “that’s a lot of work”, know your software more= write scripts and/or actions. It’s all automated now, just have to set it up once.
There are more hoops involved—stuff Windows 10 with your Adobe software in a VM with no Internet connection and you should be okay even after Win10 stops getting security updates—but it isn't quite impossible for you to migrate everything else and have one or two specific Windows programs too. Granted, you may not have the time and energy to go that route.
Why would a freelancer need to follow an industry standard? Do you have to share project sources with clients in proprietary formats rather than just the final output formats?
The entire reason why standards exist, that’s why. Generally when you make something for a client they want to be able to hand it to anyone else in the industry to be able to also work on it.
A freelancer who doesn’t use industry standard stuff generally isn’t going to be freelancing for very long.
I see. Surely that means that the source files have to be structured in a certain way then. If a design for a piece of print media was flattened to a single rasterised layer, or a video project had all the effects baked into the clips, a freelancer could deliver in the right format, but that file would be much less useful than if every operation was preserved non-destructively. I would think some artists wouldn't want to just give away how they achieve certain effects.
I don't know if that's much of a thing in creative fields, or if there are conventions on things like keeping text as text, not editing it as vectors or pixels.
It's more about ingesting their house design guide in proprietary formats. But you will also be contractually obliged to deliver back working files along with the final deliverables, and they will specify formats and versions.
Ah, I see. I guess that varies by client but you wouldn't want to limit the work you take like that. That's a difficult situation to change.
It doesn't vary by client much, there's a baseline of expectations that what you deliver can be further worked on by anyone using the software that 95% of the industry is using.