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10.3.2 Is out – WOW review from a huge X facility in Europe.
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[Bill Davis] “But Herb, what I have keeps getting better and better and better.”
Good.
[Bill Davis] “Why the hell would I want to give that up?”
Who’s asking you too? I have no doubt that you have found the best of all possible tools to do your work with — a software marriage made in heaven.
But when someone else, even someone well practiced with X, asks for what they see as improvements, your knee jerk reflex is to say – ” I don’t want developers wasting time with bringing back the old, let’s push on to the new.”
And I think that’s silly. What was the roles re-build but an innovative way to bring back the old – in this case “visual organization.”
Perhaps some of these ideas, from editors with differing backgrounds, might make X even more useful to you and help it to keep “getting better and better and better.”
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf -
[Bill Davis] “Well, just to be contentious, Randy U created Premiere YEARS before he created FCP X.
So the original statement is accurate in that case.
Also Adobe did the big Premiere Pro reboot years ahead of the FCP legacy to X reboot.
So the Premiere team had way more development time there as well. “[Andrew Kimery] “You both (Bill, Oliver) are a bit off the mark.
Pro came out in 2003 and the first movie to grace the silver screen from it, AFAIK, was Dust to Glory in 2005. I…
…Next notable release was…”You are both right, depending on how you want to argue the timeline. And so is Scott. However, just to clarify my point, I was really comparing the relative starting points of Premiere Pro CC and Final Cut Pro X.
Premiere/PPro has gone through numerous iterations in 25 years. The version that Randy developed was a completely different animal. It was largely a multimedia editor and not an NLE, per se. Think PowerPoint/Keynote for a/v files. IIRC, that ended at 4.2 and after that he was out of the development team. The subsequent versions were Premiere 5-6, which were an awful lot like FCP 1.0, without Randy’s participation. Although many would consider that a crude application compared with Media Composer at the time, I actually onlined/graded a 1-hr PBS documentary in 2003 that had been offline-edited by a station editor using Premiere 5.5. I conformed/tweaked/graded it in Avid DS and audio post was in Pro Tools, so even in that form, the hooks to the outside world were there. Then came Premiere Pro, CS and CC.
I would consider Premiere to have gone through four major iterations to date:
Premiere up to 4
Premiere 5-6
Premiere Pro up to CS6
Premiere Pro CCLikewise, I would consider Final Cut to have gone through four, as well:
FCP 1-7
FCPX 10.0
FCPX 10.1-10.2
FCPX 10.3These are somewhat arbitrary divisions, but they are based on significant architectural and feature changes that make each change a very different application from the previous version. It could be that there were really more iterations within FCP 1-7, but I’m not counting feature changes/additions. I’m just thinking of changes that fundamentally altered the application or how it was/is used.
Regarding feature films and Premiere Pro in recent years, Fincher’s team shifted to Premiere Pro for several reasons:
FCP7 was dead
Kirk Baxter had already been cutting on Premiere Pro
Tight integration with After Effects
Adobe’s willingness to embed software engineers within the productionJudging by things I’ve heard on and off the record, the most pain-free feature film experiences with Premiere have been the work the Bandito Brothers have done, as well as with the Coens’ team on “Hail, Caesar!”. Of course, the teams behind the films that have been cutting on FCPX (“Focus”, “Whisky Tango Foxtrot”, “Voice from the Stone”) are also happy with using X.
So ultimately, it’s tough to call true bragging rights for any of this. All productions have pain-points and the teams somehow make it work regardless. Each company can legitimately point to successes and we users benefits from the challenges encountered and fixed along the way.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Andrew Kimery] “If we were to start the clock with Dust to Glory ….
…If we start the clock on PPro with Gone Girl …..”That’s part of the problem. We view these timelines based on Hollywood releases. This is a skewed perspective, but one that everyone can easily recognize. And so we continue to use these benchmarks. In fact, in all of these cases, someone, somewhere has been cutting an international feature, long-form TV documentary, or indie feature way before any of these highly visible titles. Heck, I cut an indie feature on FCPX 10.09 before “Focus”, but it has yet to get distribution. Such is life.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Michael Gissing] “But X has been the most problematic. Sometimes it comes down to users not understanding why they have to be responsible for buying X2Pro or worry about how they have organised files and file naming protocols. But this happens in all NLEs.”
Agreed. This is why brain-dead list formats, like EDLs still exist. They are the easiest for humans to decipher when things go wrong and make the requisite fixes at the online edit stage. I realize offline-to-online is not where Apple’s thinking is these days, but it’s still very much a part of many daily workflows, even though tape is generally no longer in the picture.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “This is why brain-dead list formats, like EDLs still exist. “
But they don’t describe much of what is going on the timeline, therefore create even more work.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “But they don’t describe much of what is going on the timeline, therefore create even more work.”
While that’s true in principle, it’s not much of a factor in most commercials and long-form shows. There, the timeline is usually cuts & dissolves and effects are outboarded anyway as completed VFX elements. So, unless you do something stupid, like a build a timeline out of all compound clips, EDLs are just fine. Try going through a shop like Company 3 for grading without one. ☺
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Places in Chicago, including co3, will take xmls. Maybe it’s the cold weather.
Sending me back a bunch of graded clips with an EDL isnt helpful, especially if I need to go to another NLE.
With EDL I lose everything about the edit, including positioning, filters, speed decisions and ramps and layers (tracks). EDL’s make perfect sense for a linear environment.
xml retains a lot more information.
I also don’t work for a studio, so the workflow is mine to wield.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Sending me back a bunch of graded clips with an EDL isnt helpful, especially if I need to go to another NLE.”
I completely understand that. However in the old (6 years ago), FCP7 days (cough, cough) you’d send an EDL and clips. When you got the graded footage back, FCP7 would relink (often a forced relink) to the new media clips. Worked like a charm. Company 3 told me the reason they wanted an EDL is because they were using the Linux version of Resolve. Their internal system was set up to parse the EDL for this system. Hence no XMLs. In the case of Company 3 LA, this was also true for Avid edits, which I found quite funny at the time. FWIW – I also sent projects to LA Baselight houses and they were fine with both XML and AAF files.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I also don’t work for a studio, so the workflow is mine to wield.”
I don’t work for a studio either, but I am expected to have my edits be compatible with others. I just find that harder to do with FCPX than with FCP7, Premiere Pro or Media Composer. And yes, I have all the various in-between tools. The most reliable seems to be X2Pro. XtoCC, in spite of IA’s best efforts, still seems to have issues with complex FCPX projects.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “With EDL I lose everything about the edit, including positioning, filters, speed decisions and ramps and layers (tracks). EDL’s make perfect sense for a linear environment. “
PS: also true. However, most of this doesn’t translate correctly anyway, even with an XML. So you end up rebuilding, no matter what.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Your contention was that it took Premiere a long time to be ready for long-form, yet in the examples cited, “Gone Girl” and “Focus”, it was the film that was using Premiere that was in post ahead of the one using FCPX.”
I think my point was more that Premiere was around a lot longer before anyone trusted it for feature work, correct?
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter
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