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After a year has perception of FCPX changed?
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[Michael Gissing] “Please don’t confuse their combined reticence as a failure to embrace change. It just isn’t in spite of your constant harping that it must be the reason.
“Then let me be specific.
I do NOT believe that editors who don’t like X are in any way “resistant to change.” Far from it. In order to be a modern editor of any quality, the singular attribute I’ve witnessed is curiosity and agility of mind.
You can’t do the work without those qualities. So I’m NOT dissing editors who don’t like X.
I’m arguing that the pace of overall technological change in society is so rapid and so pervasive, that it’s simply too easy to overlook wider forces that might be harbingers of change that will affect our industry like they are affecting all others.
My “harping” as you put it, is a reaction to the many, many people who show up here (like the post that started this thread) that PRESUME that the change to X was some kind of disaster and can only be seen as such.
I think that’s rubbish.
It’s only a “disaster” if it didn’t work for a particular editor.
And I firmly believe that MOST editors fall outside the class for whom it’s fatally flawed.
NOT most professional “seat in a post house” editors. For that class, it’s a major issue, and I’ve acknowledged that many times here.
It’s probably a “world view” thing – similar to the recent stories about how self-described republicans and democrats look at the same facts and come to startlingly different, and mutually inconsistent conclusions.
If ones “world view” is that editing is what happens in a Seat at Bunim Murray – then X can easily be seen as a big step backwards compared to Legacy.
If one’s “world view”, however, is that editing is how you get your vision in front of the largest possible audience regardless of the fact that you don’t have a 100-seat post house at your disposal, it might be the finest editing tool the world has ever seen.
BOTH these subjective views can be argued against intelligently – and that’s the whole point.
I argue most often for the “non facility” view, in part because the former views is extremely well represented here and that’s where most of my personal experience is.
I’m not employed in a big shop. And X has been a great tool for me and is getting better month by month.
I’m admittedly ‘invested” in it’s success for very personal reasons. I want to see it grow and succeed because it’s working really, really well for me.
So I feel it’s appropriate to push back when I read something that besmirches it from someone who doesn’t actually USE it on a day to day basis, as I do.
It’s a great and very unique editing tool. It’s not prefect. It’s not for everyone. But it’s excellent editing software for most editing purposes right now.
That’s the truth of it.
And it’s a truth I’m willing to stand up for.
Nothing more than that.
If I get passionately “heavy handed” in my arguments, everyone here must expect some of that from me by now. And at least I’m consistent! ; )
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Jim Giberti] ” because it defies reason that Apple would develop this whole new FCPX paradigm and not sell hardware that runs it optimally.”
Apple might just change their mind. They have done that in the past, or so I’ve been told. It is not beyond believing that they might decide to dump any part of the pro app business if it doesn’t suit their unknown and unknowable purposes. It’s hard to plan when only they know where they think the puck is going.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Jim Giberti] “I would say because it defies reason that Apple would develop this whole new FCPX paradigm and not sell hardware that runs it optimally.”
Apple might have a different definition of “optimally”. 😉
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Hi Walter!
I remember the UVW 1800! One of my early clients gave me one so that I could narrate their local Real Estate show for local TV show using it. I remember it was very finicky as to Sync, and it took me a week to figure out a way to fake a black burst signal so the damn thing would record as a standalone unit!
I haven’t really had time to say hi since we got to spend some time together at NAB, but the whole show experience was much more fun by virtue of getting to meet you and the other guys from here and getting to chat without a keyboard in the way.
As to this thread, overall, I think FCP-X is getting over it’s freshman slump very nicely.
People who don’t use it still don’t “get it” very easily, but I’ve come to expect that.
It seemed so simple and “dumbed down” at first, and here we are a year later, and editors with decades of experience often still can’t see it’s particular forest for the trees, irrespective of whether that forest is anyplace they’ll ever want to live or work.
And all I want to see is that those who argue against it, do so from a position of understanding rather than one of ignorance. Understanding has been a clear hallmark of your contributions, here which is probably why we get along so well, even tho we still often diverge on our opinions of X’s attributes.
Hope all is well with you and yours.
And by all means please keep pushing me on the places where you see things differently.
Tested opinions are nearly always better than untested ones.
Between the two of us, perhaps we’ll convince one or two people here that disagreeing and being disagreeable aren’t the same thing – tho I’ll probably need a stream of additional coaching from you if I’m going to get to your level in that arena!
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Bill Davis] “My concern is that the higher up the food chain you go in the realm of design and editing, the less you want to make the entire process accessible to the whole team. One way to do that is to build complex workflows with specialists in-house – and wall off people via access restrictions. The other method is to let the designers “reach in” and apply their expertise directly into the project creation stream.
I’d disagree and say that the higher up the food chain you go the more you need software to be able to talk to each other. Be it all the collaborating editors using the same NLE or using software that understands industry standards like EDLs, OMFs, etc., so that two different pieces of software can at least talk in a common tongue.
And if you opt for the latter, then each contributor using their own tools and methods is perfectly reasonably – rather than making them come into a fixed “seat” and work on only the tools the company provides.A homogenous workflow is inherently redundant which is a must in a collaborative edit because Murphy’s Law dictates at least one person (or one machine) will become unavailable at the worst possible time. If you started editing a long from project and figured you’d need some help for a couple weeks to meet your deadline would you seriously not put any constraints on what the other editor used for his NLE?
I guess I just see more work available in the distributed creation model these days rather than the “under one roof facility” – but I know many others work inside that more traditional model.”Like in my example I gave before you don’t have to be under one roof in order to collaborate and gain advantages by using the same software. For example, take two editors working on different scenes of the same TV show but in different States. They are both have all the media and they both have the same NLE so when they want to compare edit,s and stitch it all together at the end, all they have to do is send a project file. Boom, easy as pie.
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[Bill Davis] ” saw the Bunim-Murray story here too. But I’m not sure it’s fair to say “shops like” B/M. Do you know for a fact that other similar major producers have made the same switch?”
Bill, did you read my post? I didn’t say other facilities have switched. I said other facilities where I’ve worked and have TALKED to, have indicated that FCPX is not even on their radar.
In fact, most places haven’t switched because most places aren’t in the position that B/M was in. And I’m sorry, but citing Bunim-Murray is completely fair (if you were confused about my word choice, “like Bunim-Murray” was to mean “such as Bunim-Murray,” not “similar to B/M”)
I talked personally to Mark R. weeks before he announced where B/M was headed and I could tell which way he was leaning even then. I’ve had similar conversations with other post houses that I’ve worked in that are FCP shops and it goes the same. Most shrug their shoulders and say that they’ll probably go to Avid. Not one has suggested that they’ll even look at X as a possible replacement.
[Bill Davis] “Also, from what I read, B/M was pretty much a specific type of post house dealing primarily with modern reality television production and were expanding incredibly fast with the wave of reality (not sure what noun to use here since I like some of the reality genre and loath other aspects of it!) programming.
I haven’t seen a whole lot of stories where there’s a massive shift in any particular direction in the wider Post industry.
“I find this section extremely funny. You make it sound like B/M is working in some niche market. Do you realize that there is more reality tv being produced than scripted tv? A lot more.
And the “wider post industry?” Well, technically that would be corporate and industrial and individual client based work, not ABC’s Castle.
But the black eye that FCPX took when it was released was not given to it by a few disgruntled wedding videographers and a guy that makes internal corporate videos. The bad press was generated by TV show and film editors and facility’s managers and business owners AND all those other people in the wider post industry.
I’m hoping to try and change the minds of the people I work with about FCPX, but it’s slow going. Most of the people who have bitched to me about FCPX haven’t even tried it. That’s pretty much the definition of a stigma. We just disagree on how fast it’ll go away.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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[Bob Woodhead] “Bill, would you elaborate a bit on your comment below?”
I’ll try.
In X. the Event Library is persistent across all of your “loaded” projects. So work you do there in terms of tagging, color correction, pre-editing, etc can be applied to as many Projects as you like.
Notice the word “loaded” above. You can load and unload ranges of projects, even without any LAN or SAN construct simply by locating Project and Event folders on external Firewire drives. Those projects “auto load” upon drive connection and appear in your Event Browser as soon as X sees them.
With this understanding in mind, you can create Events that hold persistent assets – logos, clips, titling, etc, that become available to any and all projects that you might have on line.
The Project Library is also pretty special in my thinking. It’s a place that expresses the “live state” of your projects. With a thoughtful strategy for making the clips in your projects persistent (typically via the Share menu) these won’t go “off-line” unless you wish them to. So it starts to act like a library (hence the name) of your work that you can revise and re-export at will.
I combine this with Vimeo Pro and YouTube accounts to distribute work for both client approvals and for actually client deployment for public consumption. Since these projects are “live’ in my Project library, and editing them is no more difficult than double clicking on them to make changes, I don’t think of them as “cutoff” masters any longer, but as assets that are a part of my live video database.
This has been a fundamental shift in my thinking.
With Legacy, a “video” was something I cut off and put somewhere when it was done.
X encourages me to think of my videos more like word processing documents, stored in a particular state now in the Project Library, but ready to use, combine, deploy, or change later as needed.
Thats the best “top of my head” overview I can come up with on the fly.
Hope it helps.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Andy Neil] “I’m hoping to try and change the minds of the people I work with about FCPX, but it’s slow going. Most of the people who have bitched to me about FCPX haven’t even tried it. That’s pretty much the definition of a stigma. We just disagree on how fast it’ll go away.
“Ok,
Fair enough.
We’ll leave it at that.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Andrew Kimery] “For software like CatDV it’s in their best interests to use open standards and make CatDV as compatible w/as many NLEs as possible so that makes me more comfortable when I think about the process of building an asset library that will live and grow with me for years, and hopefully decades, into the future.”
Nothing wrong with that view.
X is perfectly suited for what I need. Which is a tool I can use to learn the ropes and develop personal strategies and habits with regard to metadata and tagging.
I don’t have sophisticated needs at this point, just a desire to learn the new language.
I honestly hope CatDV turns out to be just what you’re looking for.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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[Bill Davis] “But if you don’t understand the qualitative difference between X and Legacy as a mobile editing platform, then you’re NEVER going to get this point.
“And, maybe there is no point there. No, wait. Not maybe. There is no point there.
[Bill Davis] “Legacy on a laptop, cut off from the “home base” assets of network and storage was an exercise in diminished capacity. X on a laptop is EXACTLY the same as X on a desktop. It’s a seamless experience.
“Mumbo jumbo. I can carry around four TBs or more and often do. 2 TBs easily accommodates a full season of an American TV drama. The home base easily comes with you if you want it. There is nothing about mobility that X has over FCS. Nothing. Nada. If FCS experiences any diminished capacity on a laptop, it is only diminished to the level of X.
[Bill Davis] “If you haven’t used X enough to experience that, then please don’t keep coming back to the “mobile editing was “possible” in Legacy.”
“Stop hiding behind “If you haven’t been there… …you just can’t understand.” The same argument can be made about Heroin. Give me something concrete. I bet you can’t find it.
[Bill Davis] “It’s also possible to drag race with a Volkswagen. But few do that seriously.”
I so agree. Which is why I’m impressed with your tenacity in continuing to try it.
[Bill Davis] “It’s a very, poor tool for that purpose, while X is an absolutely superb tool for mobile editing – perhaps the finest out there from what I’ve both experienced and heard.
“That is ridiculous. I’ve been comfortably editing ProResHQ @1080 on a Macbook Pro for years now. It isn’t sloggy. It isn’t slow. To say that it is a “very poor tool” is an assertion that I can personally and very vehemently deny. So give me a couple of real life examples of why one is a poor tool and the other is superb.
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