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10.2.3 Update is here
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[Andrew Kimery] “But if it lost what you needed then it doesn’t really matter what it added.”
It totally does if A) what you thought you needed, turned out NOT to actually be what you needed as much in the new system – or B) if your sense of “loss” was more emotional than practical.
I freely admit that I underestimated the HUGE sense of betrayal that many experienced NLE operators from the days before X was an option – FELT when it changed.
But a surprisingly large number I’ve talked to over the years, who HAVE made the change, have released what they used to think they wanted – in the face of new adds they now realize are actually MORE critical to productivity and ease of getting the same work done faster and easier.
And if an editor decided NOT to adopt it, for whatever reason including the ones you innumerate above, that’s fine. But it’s NOT fine to argue that it was somehow BROKEN at day one, when lots and lots of guys like me had success with it even in it’s earliest incarnations.
You could, for a short while, say it was “broken” for an editor like yourself, who needed to do multi-cam every day – until it re-imagined multicam in 10.0.3. And then it wasn’t. And provided those same editors a clever new, easier and more fluid way to do multicam than the industry had seen before. Did that stop the complaining? Hardly. The haters just moved on to some other aspect. Again, and again, and again.
Look, X editors aren’t any better or smarter or more skilled than anyone else. The ONLY difference, is that we became X editors because we eventually accepted the program the way it ACTUALLY was – rather than focusing all our energy on to how it COMPARED to where we were coming from.
The earlier each of us did that, the better it seems to be for us now.
20/20 hindsight and all.
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[Andrew Kimery] “I had to guess I’d say that people that switched from FCP 7 to Avid or PPro are less likely to switch again so soon to another NLE.”
I have always thought that Apple really didn’t care about “switchers”. X was just too different to count on a bunch of old guys/gals (me being a member of the former) to learn a really new way to do things. If they got em, great! If not, well, they will be out of the business in a decade or so. It’s the new breed of editors is what they were/are after. Just my humble opinion.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
“[Andrew Kimery] “I had to guess I’d say that people that switched from FCP 7 to Avid or PPro are less likely to switch again so soon to another NLE.””
Except there are some houses that have gone FCP7 to PPro and then to MC because of issues with PPro in a shared environment. For all it’s clunkiness, MC still rocks in large collaborative workflows. And yes, people have developed workarounds with FCPX and PPro, but it simply isn’t the same.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Bill Davis] “It totally does if A) what you thought you needed, turned out NOT to actually be what you needed as much in the new system – or B) if your sense of “loss” was more emotional than practical. “
And if my aunt had a penis she’d be my uncle (or my transgender aunt). 😉
We are talking about similar yet different things (actual needs vs perceived needs). Both are certainly part of the ‘problem’ though actual needs need to be addressed externally (Apple adds the functionality, a third party adds the functional, the editing situation changes and a need is no longer a need, etc.,.) while perceived needs can be addressed by the individual (they learn there is a different way to skin the cat).
[Bill Davis] “And provided those same editors a clever new, easier and more fluid way to do multicam than the industry had seen before.”
Did it? I know PPro and X’s multicam functions similarly though I don’t have the timeline for both memorized.
[Bill Davis] “The haters just moved on to some other aspect. Again, and again, and again. “
And they always will which is why I question why you keep trying to apply logic to an illogical situation and then wonder why you aren’t getting the results you think you should be getting. For many people it boils down to the mindset of “it’s *not* the product I’ve chosen to support therefore it most certainly is inferior to the product I *have* chosen to support.” Just the other day on a FB group some asked about PPro vs Avid for an upcoming project and it didn’t take long for the discussion to go the way of “Premiere sucks. It’s unfit for professional use. Just go with Avid.” The timing was unintentionally hilarious considering Deadpool and Hail, Caesar just game out (Deadpool is very entertaining BTW).
But it is what it is and, like the law of the conservation of energy, it’s just going to morph into different things but it will never go away.
[Bill Davis] “The ONLY difference, is that we became X editors because we eventually accepted the program the way it ACTUALLY was – rather than focusing all our energy on to how it COMPARED to where we were coming from.”
Same can be said for any NLE or piece of software for that matter. When I help move people to new NLEs my first piece of advice is to pretend you’ve never used an NLE before. If you bring previous NLE baggage with you it’s just going to make the switch harder. I think learning your second NLE is harder than learning your first, but after you know two learning 3, 4, 5, 6, whatever is much easier.
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[Scott Witthaus] “I have always thought that Apple really didn’t care about “switchers”.”
I don’t think Apple cares about anybody. 😉
I agree that Apple obviously wasn’t shooting for the demographic of ‘dyed-in-the-wool, been editing 60hrs a week for the past 20 years’ editors, but there are a lot of people that had to edit as part of their other duties and things like FCP Legend or Avid weren’t designed with them in mind. When X came out I think many people in that situation were like “Oh, God thank you, this is so much better for me than what I have been using.”
But on the flip side there are certainly features that have been added to X that are aim more towards the ‘dyed-in-the-wool, been editing 60hrs a week for the past 20 years’ editor than the person that just edits occasionally.
All in all, in true Apple fashion they do whatever the hell they want and if you like it you buy it and if you don’t you don’t.
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[Oliver Peters] “Except there are some houses that have gone FCP7 to PPro and then to MC because of issues with PPro in a shared environment. For all it’s clunkiness, MC still rocks in large collaborative workflows. And yes, people have developed workarounds with FCPX and PPro, but it simply isn’t the same.”
Certainly if you switch to a product that doesn’t work well for you you’ll most like switch again as soon as possible. My meaning was more along the lines of people that switched and were generally happy with where they ended up.
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[Andrew Kimery] “In my case, when X launched I did a lot of multicam work”
This take always stuck out to me early on.
The thing is, “everybody” that edits for a living does multicam work from time to time. It wasn’t anything unique and it wasn’t something that you couldn’t do in X
In fact I found it rather easy and faster to do in X even “before” they added that new system that rocks.
You could synchronize clips through the waveforms from the very beginning and the whole point of synchronizing clips was to do………….multicam edits : )
Instead of having to match frame by eye or by TC in a matter seconds X already had all the clips ready for me.
I would just go along and blade the clips hitting ‘v” and blading it was fast and simple. I would fine tune with the trim tool. Many of us did it.
It was a different way of doing it and I liked it. Nobody made me like it. I just did.
I didn’t mind doing it differently because it was already faster for me having it do all the syncing than me doing it.
Folks were like “I can’t use it because I need to do multicam”
I was like “this makes short work of multicam”
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[Tony West] “In fact I found it rather easy and faster to do in X even “before” they added that new system that rocks.”
You mean this is the way you cut 5 camera multicam shoots for half hour shows? Or is this the way you cut a five minute talking head with 2 cameras?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf -
[Tony West] “The thing is, “everybody” that edits for a living does multicam work from time to time. It wasn’t anything unique and it wasn’t something that you couldn’t do in X”
The thing is for me it wasn’t multicam from time to time though. It was multicam on nearly a daily basis. It was color grading for broadcast in the NLE or round tripping to Color on a nearly daily basis. It was laying off 30min shows to tape on at least a weekly basis (many times within hours of the east coast airtime). Look, I know you and Bill are used to dealing with annoying naysayers that like to stick their fingers in their ears and go “nah! nah! nah! nah! nah!” but I’m not that type of person, and you’ve got to believe me when I say I know my workflows better than you know my workflows (and X was just not a good fit for my workflow at that time).
Like I said before, there were new things that I liked in X, and would have improved our workflow, but in the early days it was missing too many features that were mission critical for us. The scales were not balanced out by the new features it had. I’ll be super, exceedingly generous and say in the best of best case scenarios it would have been a wash. So why would we invest the time and money to R&D new workflow and retrain two dozen editors and producers on those new workflows if the best we are going to get is a wash?
Just to finish the story out, at this particular company (which was almost all FCP 7 though they did have a dwindling number of old-ish Avids) as soon as X launched they started researching Avid and PPro. X just had too many question marks around it and they needed to make a move sooner rather than later because FCP 7 was really showing its age for them. They eventually went with PPro. If X had launched with the features it ‘got back’ over the next 18 months or so it would have been in the running.
[Tony West] “I would just go along and blade the clips hitting ‘v” and blading it was fast and simple. I would fine tune with the trim tool. Many of us did it.”
This sounds similar to the less than stellar workaround we used for doing multicam in FCP before FCP had a multicam feature. In pretty much any NLE you can find a workaround to almost any situation but just because it can be done doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it (or even a comparable way to do it).
Can I pound a screw in with a hammer? Can I drive a nail with the butt of a screw driver? Can I run a 100 yard dash in flip flops? The answer to all of those questions is “yes”, but “can I” is the wrong question. The right question, is “what’s the best tool I have for the job at hand”? If the choice is between hammering a nail with my forehead or with the butt of a screwdriver I’m going to chose the screwdriver. If the choice is between a screwdriver and hammer I’m going to chose the hammer (especially if my income depends on my ability to build structures using nails as fasteners).
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[Bill Davis] “And if an editor decided NOT to adopt it, for whatever reason including the ones you innumerate above, that’s fine. But it’s NOT fine to argue that it was somehow BROKEN at day one, when lots and lots of guys like me had success with it even in it’s earliest incarnations.
“Why on earth is it NOT fine to argue this? FCPX when released was a best a beta and occasionally not even that! The fact that it was functional in some form doesn’t mean that in many was it was ‘broken” I started using it as early as you did and some of those early versions had real issues, there was a period where autosave randomly didn’t save!
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