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AE drives the NLE decision
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[Andrew Kimery] “Do you have an HDTV in the living room?”
I wouldn’t mind having one. But my wife doesn’t feel compelled to get one since the 13″ MacBook is good enough for her (and for most of the TV shows and movies we watch together it is good enough unfortunately). When I am watching obscure European films or whatever I am banished to my office… which I don’t mind as it has better audio in there anyway.
Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice” or Wender’s “Wings of Desire” can really use an HDTV (since I cannot yet afford a movie theater in my backyard). But something like the TV show “Midsomer Murders” or “Doc Martin” is fine on a 13″ MacBook.
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[James Culbertson] “I wouldn’t mind having one. But my wife doesn’t feel compelled to get one since the 13” MacBook is good enough for her (and for most of the TV shows and movies we watch together it is good enough unfortunately). “
Statistically speaking I was certainly in the latter half of American’s to get an HDTV so I’m not a home theater junky or anything like that but it is nice to stretch out on the couch to watch a show or fire up the 360 (yes, getting an HD game system did impact my decision to make the jump to HD).
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If you use FCPX, you must use Event Manager X—it’s great, it’s cheap, and it hides events and projects exactly as you would like to.
Regarding AE driving NLE decision, for our company, we switched to FCPX about a year ago from FCP7. But nothing has changed in terms of graphics: for small-scale stuff, we use the NLE or Motion templates. For bigger, more creative/involved/3D, we hire a dedicated graphics person. They use whatever they use (typically AE) and send us .MOVs over the inter webs with Alpha channels. Works for us. Been doing it that way for the last 10 years.
AE does not drive the NLE decision. Editing drives the NLE decision.
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[Greg Andonian] ” You can copy and paste between them, and you can import a Premiere project into Ae- either the whole thing or specific sequences.”
Certainly copying and pasting has some advantages, but I can import fcpx sequences to Ae via XML just like I did with automatic duck and fcp7 (now built in to Ae).
This is what I’m saying, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of difference, and while the game has changed with the death of fcs3 and a massive effort from Adobe to try and get Pr tuned up, using fcpx isn’t going to stop you from using Ae, or if you like fcpx, Ae won’t necessarily push you to Pr and Pl.
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A few random responses to some of the posts in this thread…
First, I’m not sure why some of the posts went off on a tangent about demographics and the future of broadcasting. That’s completely irrelevant. For what it’s worth, most of the users I see in these departments are clearly “20-somethings”. They have a far better grasp of AE than I do. When I teach students, they all aspire to high production values, not to create the proverbial YouTube cat videos. “New media” content producers often have bigger and better infrastructures than many TV stations, if not some TV networks. Tablets are already 2K (and better) media delivery devices. If anything, these points underscore my argument.
I am describing what I witness, not whether it is right or wrong or pro or anti FCP X. The young editors are often hired because of their digital media skills, not because they are “editors”. They often work cheaper than their older “editor” predecessors and are generally more software savvy, but in ways that err towards graphics. Many stations’ creative departments also service their own and their clients’ web outlets, so some of these teams also handle website creation.
Personally, I find it interesting in deconstructing some past projects, that all the heavy lifting of supers, design, etc. has been done in AE, when it’s often a bad place to do it. It’s hard to time things out to audio in the way you can in an NLE. As an editor, my first choice is do it in the NLE and then go to AE, when it needs more.
I agree about the transitions and that’s one of the cool aspects of X that has me hanging around. It’s actually quite amazing – as I deconstruct these older AE comps – to see the lengths someone has gone to to create a glow-dissolve from scratch. Sheesh! Drop it on the NLE timeline!!!
FCP X can work in a multi-user/multi-seat facility, but it’s really ill-suited to do so. Event Manager X is an essential tool, but to say that it provides the same ease as clicking a single-self-contained project file is a joke. It’s not. And navigating your way through sparse disk images or SAN locations is an equal kluge.
The Events/Projects approach is simply bad UI design that was copied from Avid without the elegance of Avid. In a typical Xsan situation I see, let’s assume 30 ongoing clients with 3 years’ worth of past projects. If the station created only 1 project file a year per client with 5 sequences inside each, that’s 450 edits you have to deal with. Simply no elegant way to do it with X and Apple continues to be mute on this issue when pressed. Their current “fair haired boy” is Cantemo Portal.
Smoke is a good creative solution for this world, EXCEPT it has the same sort of problems getting to a wealth of old spots. Plus there simply is no talent pool to speak of in most markets. The compositing is awesome, but learning curve is steep. The effects UI is very inconsistent, since there are about 4-5 variations of how you handle effects (each with different UIs).
While I personally like many aspects of X, I simply don’t see it gaining traction in this market. These are the same reasons that the Premiere Pro “switchers”, like the editor at Rock Paper Scissors, or SNL or Conan’s crew have mentioned. They use AE and PPro as natural companions – with or without Dynamic Link. I see X possibly gaining better penetration with program creation folks – TV shows, films, etc. – even hard news – as these are less graphically oriented. All I can say is that if you think the majority of multi-seat/multi-user facilities will migrate to X instead of PPro, you’ve got blinders on.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “I am describing what I witness …”
Oliver,
Thanks both for your original post, and following up with this thoughtful response.
I think one thing you may want to elaborate on is the scope of what you’re commenting on – numbers of facilities or editors, and generally where or what environments.
Franz.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “I think one thing you may want to elaborate on is the scope of what you’re commenting on – numbers of facilities or editors, and generally where or what environments.”
Fair enough. My direct experience related to this specific situation (TV station creative services departments) covers several local market stations in Florida. However, the decisions involved cover their whole broadcast group, so by extension this actually covers stations in many other markets. The broader perception of Premiere Pro as the “front runner” includes direct contacts at major corporate facilities and at least one network facility in NY.
The total number of editors is quite small, though. Less than two dozen. Obviously I’m extrapolating from a small sample, but I haven’t seen or heard much to contradict that. The one caveat I would offer is that many facilities are also moving to Avid where they have a good relationship with Avid. Naturally the vast number of FCP 7 based facilities are still just sitting on their hands.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
It’s interesting – in your broadcast experience you’re seeing facilities moving toward AVID – in my broadcast experience, I see them moving away from AVID to Adobe CS. My guess here is that we are all working in “micro-climates” of experience and choice.
The facility I worked at here in NH, as Art Director and senior motion graphics designer for 14 years, was part of a 28 station group owned by Hearst Corporation (at one time Hearst-Argyle). We started out more or less self-contained, as far as equipment decisions went, and were gradually strong-armed toward AVID by the corporate engineering department of Hearst (although we had strongly suggested that they look at the Adobe CS product). Our graphics department, however, was using Photoshop and Illustrator as our main design tools, before the advent of the Creative Suite. At that point is was Photoshop, Illustrator, Combustion, and 3DS Max. When the problems with the AVID systems far surpassed their promised efficiency and time-savings the AVID reps had assured us of, Hearst put a hold on further AVID purchases (which were huge up to then – think of 28 stations, each with several AVID NLE seats, and a Unity storage system), and set our station up as a test site for the early CS products, most specifically, Premiere Pro, since we were already based around Photoshop and Illustrator.
We started running circles around the AVID workflow (mostly due to constant technical glitches with the mass storage, and time lost due to constant re-linking – and they had also cheaped out on the training necessary to get the editors up to speed), and the AVID suites were relegated to tape capture, with each producer/editor having his own CS Suite on his desktop machine. Corporate engineering loved it, and the station group was migrated to Adobe products:
https://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/casestudies/creativesuite/production/hearst-television-inc/pdfs/hearst-television-inc-casestudy.pdfIt was an interesting saga – being forced into AVID by management who obviously didn’t ask the end-users what we thought – then turned around and put us to work testing the products we had asked for at the beginning of the process…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
[Oliver Peters] “When I teach students, they all aspire to high production values, not to create the proverbial YouTube cat videos.”
A director I collaborate with and I were in NYC for a screening of our work over the weekend and yesterday we spoke to friend’s new media class at SVA. The students are learning a range of skills in digital media arts including 2D and 3D animation, animation, programming, and interactive design. The lab has both Macs and PCs. They are heavily invested in Adobe tools. The work they showed and their aspirations are for the highest possible production values they can achieve.
I spoke about NLEs and when I asked what they use, the all said FCP 7. They also said they had zero interest in FCPX. This was an admittedly small sample, but if it’s like this in many other schools, then Adobe is well positioned for the future. I don’t think Apple can count on FCPX growing by “attrition”.
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
I just don’t see this as news that Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator are being taught to students and students are using them to get high quality work done.
Hasn’t it been this way for some time now?
Out of all the video tools I’ve used, After Effects is the one I’ve been using the longest.
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