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Apple gives up another network client
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Transcoding and Re-wrapping are a pain. A few months ago I was given 10 TB of H264 rushes for 2 spots for a sportswear company. FCPX would have been a big help on this project allowing me to sort, tag, mark, organize and just get to know the footage in my editing tool. Then I could have left the machine running overnight and it would have transcoded away in the background.
As an aside, I think Smoke has this down pat, it transcodes your footage even if you’ve quit the app.
So I think for shows with large amounts of data, X can really help. However if you have a problem with the actual cutting experience (which I think is what you really dislike in X?) then it’s all moot.
Hopefully some of the cool organisational stuff in X makes it across to the other NLE’s as well, so that editors across the board can enjoy some of the benefits. For eg, Skimming in the Filmstrip View has practically eliminated the need for me to click on clips in the Event Browser, and that has really helped my fingers. On large projects that’s a considerable benefit. Smart Collections and Keywords are another.
I like Media Composer, but AMA dodginess holds it back for my workflow as I too have a large amount of ProRes material that comes in. Premiere seems cool, but I haven’t spent anytime on it yet and I have heard some horror stories about its Media Management so am holding off for a bit.
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[Herb Sevush] “I use it all the time, my compositing needs are modest and AE is a full course meal, but other than fade outs I almost never use the behaviors – like most people I use keyframes because it turns out that this old way of doing things is actually necessary. As a revolutionary compositor Motion is an utter failure, as a simple editor’s compositor, titling and masking tool it’s great.
“Yes and no, for me. Behaviors can be interesting to start with and most of them can be instantly converted to normal key framing. Things like gravity and repel are a little different, but can be very interesting to use. What was really revolutionary about it at the time of its introduction was that it used VRAM heavily, which created instant previewing. Nothing else was doing that at the time, and it put it miles ahead, in certain areas, than even AE. That’s easy to forget now that everything has caught up or passed by. At the time, though, it was pretty cool!
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Nice list. I agree with a number of the things you say. I can see why you might prefer it, though for me its missing quite a lot still. I would say there are three things that I would need to see before I could see it as being better than 6/7.
1: A mixer with Master channels. It would also be nice to see them take it to the level of Adobe and include busses and subs.
2. Support for Control surfaces.
3. Some sort of organizational device that allows me to see at a glance the position of all my audio types. Right now, in all other NLEs that is track position. In the case of X, color-coding of roles would probably be sufficient.
Sync info is also important, but maybe not directly related to the “better-ness” of the audio component.
So, yes–I agree there have been some improvements, and maybe this next round will take it the whole 9 yards, but right now Audio in X is, overall, a step backwards for me.
[Charlie Austin] “In 7, I move the second clip off the track, follow the track I want to solo all the way back to the beginning of the sequence, solo it, move back to the clip and play it. Then I want to hear the second clip too, so I either un mute the track I moved it to, or move it back to the soloed track and play it. Then maybe I want to hear the FX under those clips too… back to the head, un mute that… etc. click click move click click on and on.
“In 7, I just un-enable the clip I don’t want to hear. As you say, click, click.
[Charlie Austin] “In X, I hover over the clip I want to solo, press C to select it and option-S to solo it. To hear the other clip I right click it and “add to soloed clips”. Same for the FX or anything else. Or just select of bunch of random clips wherever they are relative to other clips and solo ’em. It’s really nice.
“That sounds cool.
[Charlie Austin] “-The Audio filters in X are better, many of the Logic plugins are there in addition to the usual AU stuff. Things I might have had to round trip to STP I can do right in the timeline. Faster.
“Agreed. Much better.
[Charlie Austin] “-The “Audio Enhancements” inspector tab for each clip in X is awesome, especially the “Loudness” settings. I don’t know about you, but in 7 I often have to double/triple/quadruple, or throw the DynamicsProcessor filter on quiet audio clips to get them to the right level for a specific mix. Not in X. Open the tab, make a couple quick adjustments, done. The Hum and BG Noise removal adjustments are nice too. 3 common audio fixes in one place, easy. Also available for compound clips, so you can put all your crappy dialog in one clip and effect it all. Faster.”
I think I’d like that as well. Just FYI, there is a loudness solution in 7 that goes beyond +12db. You access it through Modify Audio and it allows you to by-bass the need for doubling up.
[Charlie Austin] “-In X, you can move audio clips in subframe increments, not just the keyframes, the clips. This makes cheating dialog and cutting music really precise, way better than 7.
“Agreed! No question–an improvement.
[Charlie Austin] “-The fade handles on each clip are awesome. While I am used to being able to just throw a dissolve effect between adjacent audio (and video for that matter) – in X you need to create a secondary storyline to do that, which isn’t that big a deal really – grabbing the fade handles is super fast and gives you much finer control than in 7. Just right click to change the fade type.
“Agreed. I like those.
[Charlie Austin] “-Keyframes in audio clips really are 1000 times better than 7. Really easy to grab/select/add/delete and they move where you want them to. They’re way too fiddly in 7 for me.
“I use the faders a lot, and not the key-framing tool. But I agree, they are fiddly. I prefer a control surface for mixing as you can be controlling several tracks at the same time. I can be bumping DIA and dropping MU simultaneously.
[Charlie Austin] “related to keyframes… In X you can do range based audio level changes. To dip MX under some DIA in 7, you can switch gears, grab the fader and play through the section and mix it, or you need to either create 4 keyframes and then grab the level bar thing and lower the audio between them, or cut the MX clip on either side of the dialog, add dissolves (or not) and lower the section.
“Some nice advantages. Of course, if you want to use a control surface, you are SOL.
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[Chris Harlan] “Nice list. I agree with a number of the things you say. I can see why you might prefer it, though for me its missing quite a lot still. I would say there are three things that I would need to see before I could see it as being better than 6/7.
1: A mixer with Master channels. It would also be nice to see them take it to the level of Adobe and include busses and subs.
Agreed. In my case it’s not an issue since most everything I do gets mixed at a dedicated post facility. Most of what i do is offline, which colors my perception/needs to a great extent. But you’re right. I really think if they can utilize the power of roles with an actual mixer stolen from Logic or something, it’ll be amazing. We’ll see…
[Chris Harlan] 2. Support for Control surfaces.
Would be nice, yes.
[Chris Harlan] 3. Some sort of organizational device that allows me to see at a glance the position of all my audio types. Right now, in all other NLEs that is track position. In the case of X, color-coding of roles would probably be sufficient.
Yeah, it’s real close, and as you know you can see all of one role at a time, but color coding/grouping multiple roles would be (will be??) awesome.
[Chris Harlan] Sync info is also important, but maybe not directly related to the “better-ness” of the audio component.
Agreed, once you break the audio off the picture you need to pay attention. Of course if you leave it attached it’ll never lose sync. I’m just used to breaking it out, but now that I’m more comfortable I’m starting to mess with storylines and other X “innovations” more, maybe leaving sync audio, (usually DIA) attached to the pix might be nice.
[Chris Harlan] So, yes–I agree there have been some improvements, and maybe this next round will take it the whole 9 yards, but right now Audio in X is, overall, a step backwards for me.
Makes sense, as you said, if you need a Control surface you’re currently SOL. My MCU is very sad these days… 🙂
[Chris Harlan]
[Charlie Austin] “In X, I hover over the clip I want to solo, press C to select it and option-S to solo it. To hear the other clip I right click it and “add to soloed clips”. Same for the FX or anything else. Or just select of bunch of random clips wherever they are relative to other clips and solo ’em. It’s really nice.”
That sounds cool.
Yeah, That’s one thing I seriously love. Drives me nuts not having it in 7…
[Chris Harlan]
[Charlie Austin] “-The “Audio Enhancements” inspector tab for each clip in X is awesome, especially the “Loudness” settings. …”
I think I’d like that as well. Just FYI, there is a loudness solution in 7 that goes beyond +12db. You access it through Modify Audio and it allows you to by-bass the need for doubling up.
True. But the cool thing about the X settings is, in addition to cranking the loudness a ridiculous amount, you can select the degree of normalization as well. So a dialog line that’s too quiet overall, and also starts loud and falls off, can be simultaneously cranked overall and normalized. Really useful.
[Chris Harlan]
I use the faders a lot, and not the key-framing tool. But I agree, they are fiddly. I prefer a control surface for mixing as you can be controlling several tracks at the same time. I can be bumping DIA and dropping MU simultaneously.
…
[Charlie Austin] “related to keyframes… In X you can do range based audio level changes. To dip MX under some DIA in 7, you can switch gears, grab the fader and play through the section and mix it, or you need to either create 4 keyframes and then grab the level bar thing and lower the audio between them, or cut the MX clip on either side of the dialog, add dissolves (or not) and lower the section.
”Some nice advantages. Of course, if you want to use a control surface, you are SOL.”
Yep, though the fact that you can do range based keyframing, and the fact that the audio level slider moves as you play through volume changes, gives me a little clue that mixing of some sort is coming. With roles, it seems like you’d be able to “assign” a specific role(s) to a specific fader(s) or buss or whatever.
There’s a bunch of other stuff I left out… Compound clips and the ability to add effects and/or keyframed levels to them, sort of like a mix group/buss. The dynamic waveforms I really like. And the fact that I can cut clips, extend, move, change levels, solo, mute them etc., with out ever stopping playback is really really nice.
Oh, and the evil magnetic timeline. Just cut stuff in, move it, copy, paste etc and never have to worry that i’m gonna write over something I don’t want to. It took a while, but letting go of traditional fixed tracks has made editing way easier for me. All i need to think about is “I want this clip to go here” and put it in. No patching or rearranging beforehand, just make the cut and move on…
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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Craig,
I certainly agree that many things are changing and new areas of video production are rapidly growing (though when you start from zero it’s very easy to show year over year growth 😉 ). For instance, I think we are entering a new age of corporate video where companies can talk directly to customers or other businesses like never before. A trend now seems to be companies making pseudo-documentaries about themselves or their brand and ‘airing’ them the company’s official YouTube channel. So, they’ll still work with ad agencies and buy airtime for their 30sec spots but there is a flexibility in corporate communication now that wasn’t really there 5-10yrs ago.
I spent the better part of the last six years editing (among other duties) in house at MTV producing mainly original web content for a variety of MTV properties (Gametrailers.com, Spike.com, ComedyCentral.com etc.,) so I feel like I have a good idea of the highs and lows of trying to produce ‘broadcast quality’ content for the web in a sustainable and profitable fashion. While it’s impressive, and something new, to see YouTube stars making 70 or 100 grand a year they are usually solo talents with little to no overhead which is a business model that doesn’t translate into the kind of work I do (and I imagine it doesn’t translate well into the kind of work the vast majority of people in video/film/tv production do).
There are certainly more options today than ever before but how many of those options are sustainable from a business stand point (at least currently)? I think there will always be outliers and one-off success stories, but for the most part I don’t think the fundamental way the vast majority of our motion picture entertainment is made will change very much. Today content creators bang on the doors of CBS or HBO to get their projects made and tomorrow they may be banging on the doors of Netflix or Hulu but the act of a content creator that has an idea but little else looking for a ‘benefactor’ that has money and/or distribution won’t change a whole heck of a lot, IMO.
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Just to follow up, the YouTube revenue rates are between 80 cents to 2 dollars per 1000 views.
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Definition of “success” changes/grows.
Communication becomes more fragmented but there’s much more content being produced and it’s more targeted. This is both corporate and entertainment. -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “FCPX, a year and a half in, has all the industry presence of its effects backbone motion. motion that no one ever cared about outside of ripple training. Which is to say, utterly none. “
Motion — the fast, easy-to-use motion graphics application — is a very interesting example worth studying in this discussion.
I’d encourage anyone to go back and read the Motion launch press release [link], and then ask themselves if Motion “redefined motion graphics,” or if it did “what Final Cut Pro did for non-linear editing — bring the ability to create pro-quality results to the masses.” So, keeping in mind that Motion was not always positioned as FCP’s titler, why hasn’t Motion made a run at After Effects, the product that actually defined desktop motion graphics?
I’ve made my “Motion has a high floor and a low ceiling” argument here several times before, but let’s go into a little more detail on that.
The biggest structural decision that limits Motion’s flexibility is its one-project, one-timeline structure. Layer groups and clone layers are nice, but they are not substitutes for precomps. There is no way to organize assets within the project.
Apple was so obsessed with making animation easy via behaviors that making it powerful and flexible via keyframes took a back seat. Of course, Motion has support for keyframing; unfortunately, Motion keyframes are simply painful to use. There are no keyboard shortcuts for setting keyframes, navigating keyframes, or filtering keyframe views. On the subject of views, the graph editor is nice enough, but a keyframe-only (no curves) view is sorely missed.
Motion has no support for expressions or scripting, meaning that automation within a project is impossible.
Third-party support is less than robust. There are no Motion plugins that extend the UI, and only a few which add any generative effects. The bulk of third-party effects for Motion are either relatively simple image filters (which are no doubt necessary but sadly insufficient) or template-based.
Motion has steadily added features in every release since its launch, but it has never altered its core philosophy, so these structural design decisions continue to restrict its potential.
This is not to say that there weren’t good ideas in Motion, too — Apple did GPU acceleration before it was cool in 2004, the UI was kind of a playground for future Apple products, the particle systems and replicators were always nice, and behaviors suddenly sound like advanced computer graphics if you call them simulations.
So that brings us back to FCPX, and whether it will be successful like FCP Legend or successful like Motion.
In some ways, this is a difficult comparison; design applications like Ae/Motion have more of an impact on their output than NLEs, on account of what their different toolsets make easy, difficult, or downright impossible. You can argue that there are animations you can make in Ae that you simply cannot make in Motion; I think it’s a losing argument to suggest that there are cuts you make in FCP Legend that you can’t make in FCPX.
That said, is Apple repeating mistakes it made with Motion? Does it matter that the interface and philosophy is so different from the norm? Does it make easy things easier and hard things harder? Does it fail to provide fine-grained controls in critical areas? Does it matter that you can’t extend the UI? Does it trade away a lower ceiling to get a higher floor?
Personally, I think FCPX’s success will look like neither FCP Legend nor Motion, but something completely new — a much broader play at a larger (and more forgiving) market.
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 -
Walter I agree with pretty much everything you are saying here. I would mention, however, that though Motion started as a stand-alone, it did not stay that way for long. The Studio concept came pretty fast, and I tend to think of FCS as being a single loose unit. I think the majority of hopes for FCP 8, was that Soundtrack Pro, Color and Motion would be welded into one super unit. Some of that happened with X, but not enough. Its sad, now, to see Motion and X even further apart.
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First, I’m not a motion graphics expert (or Motion or Ae), so there’s the caveat. I have been using Ae longer than any other video tool, though.
[Walter Soyka] “So, keeping in mind that Motion was not always positioned as FCP’s titler, why hasn’t Motion made a run at After Effects, the product that actually defined desktop motion graphics?”
It’s easy. It wasn’t that good. If I remember correctly, simple things like the interaction of layers with differing opacity didn’t behave like they should, and perhaps transfer modes were weird. There was lots of crashing.
Motion is great for a lot of things. I don’t think it’s an Ae replacement and honestly, I don’t think it’s trying to be.
Since that original announcement, Motion now has cameras, lights, and 2.5D perspective, and the UI is pretty useful to use.
The latest version of Motion (the one that now costs $50 on the App Store) has a really nice skin. I like it. The rigging capabilities are pretty damn cool, and although it’s easy, it’s not easy. It should be just the right amount of geek to get some pros interested. Other pros will wait and buy a plug in that might do similar things. The UI compared to FCPX is very similar. If you could open Motion from FCPX, this could almost be a plugin or “room” of FCPX (is Logic next?). Will FCPX and Motion be more connected one day? Maybe. I don’t know. With this redesign of both applications, I would think that they might be. Effects are already “connected” so I could see Apple taking it further if they wanted to.
The rigging is already eons more useful than some behaviors and keyframeless animation.
Motion is one project at a time just like Ae is one project at a time. You can literally drag one motion project in to another, though.
The Finder is Motion’s organizer.
There are (a few) keyframe commands. See here:
There is a keyframe view that’s not the editor. See here:
I’m not saying this is better or worse than Ae, but they have made significant improvements in Motion.
I still use Ae, it’s where I am most comfortable.
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