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Final Touch
Now that Apple has Final Touch does anyone have any idea what they are up to with it? Will it be rolled into studio? Will they sell control panels to go with it? Will they incorporate auto null?
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12 Replies
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Many people who bought it, including myself, have it sitting on the shelf. With a very few exceptions, it is not usable in a production environment.
Chris Tomberlin
Editor/Compositor/Owner
OutPost Pictures -
All this and more.. much more
NAB April
Xraid-Xserve-Xsan-Xeverything
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[Dave Allen] “Now that Apple has Final Touch does anyone have any idea what they are up to with it? Will it be rolled into studio? Will they sell control panels to go with it? Will they incorporate auto null?”
The only thing Apple might roll into studio will be Final Touch SD which is only $995 as of right now (though you can’t buy it).
Doubtful Apple will sell control panels unless they make a deal with Tangent to sell theirs.
Nobody knows anything about Final Touch except I can tell you personally it does not work correctly with Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 right now and we have our $5,000 copy of Final Touch HD sitting on the shelf. My guess is Apple will demo Final Touch at NAB in April, though it’s very doubtful it will be ready to ship at NAB. There’s a LOT of work that needs to be done with the XML transfer back to FCP.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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I’ve been using FInal Touch now to do SD and HD documentaries and reality shows, and there is a lot of prep you have to do to get it to work, but it can work very well it just takes a while to get through all the glitches that are there, but it is a pretty amazing system if you get it up and running properly.
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[Pizmomac] “I’ve been using FInal Touch now to do SD and HD documentaries and reality shows, and there is a lot of prep you have to do to get it to work, but it can work very well it just takes a while to get through all the glitches that are there, but it is a pretty amazing system if you get it up and running properly.”
Way too glitchy for us coming back from Final Touch. We have no problems getting our shows to FT and grading them, it’s the XML coming back to FCP that does not work. We had to manually replace all the shots for 8 episodes here and that’s when we parked Final Touch. We’ll wait to see if Apple can fix the XML issues before we put it back into production. The software cost us about $10,000 in one job alone.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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The trick is to turn off render for XML, then render the project then turn it back on and export the XML. This should work everytime.
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[Pizmomac] ”
The trick is to turn off render for XML, then render the project then turn it back on and export the XML. This should work everytime.”Not here.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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What has happened is that FT engineering got caught in transition. Apple changed a bunch of things in FCP and Quicktime. Silicon Color had to change things quickly between versions 2.5 and 2.6, and in the process it looks like a few interchange items (like XML) got broken. Then Apple bought Silicon color, lock, stock, and we got the two smoking barrels. Because there is in practice NO support at the moment, and version 2.7 is a RELEASE CANDIDATE, not a RELEASE, and is not really approved for production (although there a few things rumoured about it that I would like to try out), we as a user community are our own support and frtunately there are still people who are having success with it and are willing to help out those who genuinely feel that it can be made to work.
It is not a toy. It is like a racing car that you a) know how to drive, and b) are a mechanic. If it were a Ferrari, at this point lei ha besogno parlare italiano. But even if you don’t speak the language, a clever person could figure it out.
Yes, I know XML import/export doesn’t work perfectly. It can be made to work, but you aren’t going to ‘no-brainer’ it.
I would’t use SHAKE, either, if I wasn’t prepared to do some prep and climb the learning curve. Not much is explained (very clearly) in it either, and results don’t come for free.
Joe
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The important thing with Final Touch is to make the sequence so it has absoloutly not a single attribute on any clip at all. Any filter, basic motion, speed change, anything has to be “baked” into quicktimes in order to work. After i make a sequence before exporting an XML I always select all and say remove attirbutes to check to see if there are any in the sequence at all. After that when you render, make sure you unclick render for XML export. Then render your media, then click it back on and export your xml. Since I have been doing it this way I haven’t encountered a single XML issue.
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[Pizmomac] “The important thing with Final Touch is to make the sequence so it has absoloutly not a single attribute on any clip at all. Any filter, basic motion, speed change, anything has to be “baked” into quicktimes in order to work.”
Absolutely true and this was explained during our training session with Bob Sliga. We got Final Touch to work flawlessly during our first production run with FCP 5.0.4. By the time we got to the second run of the series, FCP had moved to FCP 5.1.2 and that’s where we ran into the problems.
[Pizmomac] “After that when you render, make sure you unclick render for XML export. Then render your media, then click it back on and export your xml. Since I have been doing it this way I haven’t encountered a single XML issue.”
Yep, that was the first thing we tried when everything started going bad. Still could not get it work on any of our three systems. That’s when we hung it up and are simply waiting to see what happens with the product.
In the meantime we’ve been grading with Apple’s 3-Way CC and now Magic Bullet Colorista.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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