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AE drives the NLE decision
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Both of my adult college students have televisions but they do not receive terrestrial broadcast or cable television. They instead use their game consoles or laptops to watch entertainment. My home theater does not utilize a broadcast signal or cable transmission. Apple TV, Panasonic DVD player with HDMI up-conversion, Xbox and VGA for laptop or other device. Once a year I pull out my El Gato for a Super Bowl party. The other day my wife pulled up the CW on her Xbox, the programs included commercials, but it was free, up-to-date programming … A La Carte entertainment is here. My youngest daughter has grown up without cable in the home–She’s my iDaughter.
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[Christian Schumacher] “Apple can do better in the Pro Apps department, namely FCP X, Motion, Compressor, Aperture and Logic all working together in tandem. “
I wholeheartedly agree. My personal top pie-in-the-sky feature request is some kind of Event or even Project sharing for shared storage. Round-tripping is probably more compelling to more FCPX users though.
As WWDC approaches, I’m once again interested in what legacy stuff that apps like FCP Legend and QuickTime Pro 7 (like the old QuickTime APIs that have been on deprecated since Snow Leopard) will be outright dropped from OS X in 10.9.
Best,
Andy -
So if it’s a tiny screen future…
How much of an investment do you make in 4K resolutions? I realize there are a lot of sides to this question. It’s been many years since I last shot something in SD, yet I’ve NEVER burned a Blu-ray disc for any of my clients. Never even been asked.
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Hey Greg,
Again I have to agree. I was lucky enough to attend the San Diego Premier User Group last month and it featured a speaker from Adobe to discuss the changes to the next version. I was very happy to see that they are adding in a lot of small features that will speed up the workflow. Simple things like making the icon for a transition larger so I don’t have to zoom in to select it. Those types if simple workflow fixes might not be the sexy stuff, but they make my life a hell of a lot easier. At the meeting I happened to be sitting next to an editor friend of mine who is also a long time Avid and FCP Classic guy and we both found it amusing that this release seems to be taking things that come directly from the Avid and FCP Classic world and implementing them.
It’s apparent that Adobe is listening to the customer base and implementing their requests, and that is a good thing. As I said in a previous post Adobe is now firmly entrenched in my workflow so I m happy to see the changes they are implementing, and the attention to the customer base that they are practicing.
Michael W. Towe
President M2 Digital Post
http://www.m2digitalpost.com -
Yes, the Events/Projects organization in fcx is unelegant as hell. It is even worse than what you described, Oliver, if you work with compound clips, since these are now stored not within the projects but within the events. What’s the point of using projects then? I’ve no idea. I now use events exclusively, never projects. One event = one project, as in fcp7. These can then be stored and organized much like you described, with “just” the inconvenience that to open them you have to move them to the events folder first and then move them back afterwards. It’s ugly, yes, absolutely, but it’s not so different than using fcp7 or PPro.
In my opinion it’s proper tools for multi-user cooperation what FCX, as a professional tool, is sorely lacking. Even more than the integration with AE or the Events/Projects organization. -
Het Erik, The hit on one of the issue I have with Premier. There is so little support for third party effects an transitions out there. And the ones that do work either have some archaic way of implementing them, for instance the FX Factory Pro transitions, or they just take forever to render. The later of those two problems should have a solution coming down the pike as Adobe is going to give developers the ability to access the Mercury playback code.
Specifically on the color correction side of things have a look at Colorista II from Red Giant. I use it all the time for correction in PP and in FCP7. It’s way beyond what you can do with the built in CC effects and you can do it directly in the timeline.
Michael W. Towe
President M2 Digital Post
http://www.m2digitalpost.com -
[Oliver Peters] “FCP X’s method of Events/Projects is cumbersome at best. In nearly every other NLE, I can select a single project from which to continue my edit. In X, I have to use a number of workaraounds or a third party app to select the proper Events/Projects to load.”
What I can’t fathom is what kind of thought-wave they were riding when they designed it this way. What were they thinking? Better yet, who were they thinking about? Was this inspired from iMovie? (I ask because I don’t use either product). I’ve never been able to understand the design team’s reasoning behind this choice of architecture.
David
https://AllinOneFilms.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Probably the real fault here is less FCP X and more the fact that Motion was never seriously pushed to compete with AE. I don’t see this changing. FCP X will likely get used in broadcast islands, but I really don’t see it as a viable core application in most TV stations or networks that are heavily invested in After Effects.”
Couldn’t you have said the same about fcp7?
What makes X different besides the obvious of needing to use xto7?
What if, someday, Ae imports FCPXML? Would that change things? I’m just playing devils advocate.
I don’t see a big difference between getting edits from FCPX vs FCP7 to Ae if that is what is required of you.
Also, how hard have you pushed dynamic link?
If a particular outfit sees advantages to fcpx then getting to Ae isn’t the obstacle that’s going to get in the way of getting work done.
Jeremy
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[Oliver Peters] “I edit and do training from time to time at broadcast facilities… In the workflow that I see, AE is almost more important than the NLE used. “
The conversation seems to have veered off a bit at the mention of “broadcast” so I’ll add that this is true with what I’m seeing in non-broadcast work, too.
After Effects is a big part of most (nearly all?) design-heavy production pipelines, as is Photoshop and Illustrator.
The NLE is much more easily replaced than Ae, because there’s nothing else really like Ae. FCP7/Pr/MC and even FCPX all have more in common with each other than Ae/Smoke/Nuke. Smoke and Nuke are also both fantastic applications, but if we did Venn diagrams of all these applications and their capabilities, we’d see a lot more convergence on the NLE side and a lot more divergence on the design/compositing side.
My anecdotal experience is that editors who do not also produce motion graphics themselves are vastly more open to FCPX than those who do. I have no idea how true this may be elsewhere.
[Oliver Peters] “Probably the real fault here is less FCP X and more the fact that Motion was never seriously pushed to compete with AE. I don’t see this changing. FCP X will likely get used in broadcast islands, but I really don’t see it as a viable core application in most TV stations or networks that are heavily invested in After Effects.”
Or design agencies.
I wish Motion were stronger. If I didn’t feel like I was in a straightjacket every time I used Motion, rigging and publishing to FCPX could be a fantastic way for design and editorial to collaborate.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
I actually like the Event/Project Structure what I feel is lacking, though, is way to hide Events or Projects from within the software. I prefer this over FCP7, there’s less reconnecting and troubleshooting in FCPX once you get used to it, in my experience, now, if you break the rules you will have issues, like the FCPX hater editor I dealt with recently who claimed to know what he was doing and pulled files out of the events folders instead of calling me, and instead of admitting the mistake complained about X.
I believe that the way FCPX is structured it should work well with shared working environments. One centrally located Event and each editor with his/her own Project. But I don’t have any experience setting up shared storage, so I can’t tell.
I am getting tired of FCP7, though. At one of the postproductions I work for we get crashes on a regular basis, especially when using XDCam and if someone is grading on the Resolve suite. 2 corrupted Projects per day… And the time it takes to render stuff… And once you start working with titles in FCPX smoothly, you forget how clunky and slow FCP7s title tool really is. And people can complain all they want about keyframes, but what FCPX has to offer is way better than FCP7, and a major improvement…
By the way, I think big screen TVs will continue to thrive no matter what happens to Broadcast. It’s more about video on demand and not being limited to certain schedules, why do I need to make time at 8pm if I can watch it whenever I want. Currently I use my TV as my laptop monitor when I’m in the living room, and am thinking about buying one as a second monitor for my iMac to use as control Monitor as well, switching between the HDMI channels as needed.
“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python
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