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Apple Patents
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“But at some point, all of us have had to say, “Ok, I can’t keep working on EOL stuff forever, Avid is basically the same so I’m good there, Premier is never gonna happen, so I might as well start tinkering with this thing…”
Premier is never gonna happen?
I really must get one of these iCrystalBalls that are going round.
And yet again with the ‘gotta use FC10 or I’m a dinosaur nonsense’. I truly doubt I’m ever going to use FC10, just can’t see it as to me it seems change for changes sake in more ways than the good parts of it offer something of value to me. There is nothing in it that makes me think ‘damn, i wish 7 or CS6 had that, and Plenty that makes me snigger at the thought ofnusing it. Doesn’t make me a dinosaur. Never will. Won’t hinder my career. Never will. Makes me have a different opinion from you and yours, but maybe that is the problem. Unless everyone agrees that FC10 IS the future, is it?
Well, no. It is part of the present. It will remain so until Apple can it and everything goes tablet. But it isn’t the future in that sense of ‘oooh, jhc, that is the future.’
It’s different. But then again, so was new coke. And bet you some people swore it was far superior to old coke. Probably still do. Doesn’t necessarily make it so though, does it.
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So, are you suggesting that by having FC10 as your soul editing expertise you are in a better position than if CS6 was?
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I agree with your suggested intent of patents.
I agree that there should be a limited term for patents and that at some point they should expire. I thought that’s the way patents were working. Isn’t the limit something like 17 years? Which is probably a very long time for some industries, but might be justifiable for others.
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[Kevin Patrick] ” Isn’t the limit something like 17 years? “
I don’t know what the current limit is, but frequently companies get extensions, mainly as a way of protecting turf.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Nicholas Kleczewski] “Not correct actually. While you can read in footage from any source, you can’t save events or projects to anything but internal or traditionally set up SANs”
The only thing FCPX doesn’t seem to work on is NAS. Our SAN has Ethernet only protocols and it works with FCPX San Locations. Oliver does work in a facility that has a Volume based SAN and it “works” but not with SAN Locations.
There’s no question that there needs to be more broad support, but on the same token, the current FCPX structure is deliberate. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be complete. This patent does seem to point to how FCPX wants to work, but who knows if it will ever make it in to the software and when. Perhaps Apple was developing this “patent vision” and didn’t want to release anything until it was granted. Perhaps it might explain for some of the weirdities that currently exist in X.
Yes, X only allows one SAN Location per user at a time currently, but the separate Project and Event structure allows passing of disparate “project” elements to be fairly easy if you follow the FCPX file structure. I’m not saying its perfect, or even particularly flexible in its current state. We are super lucky in that our SAN seems to work well with FCPX. I think that passing databases around is easier in some ways then before, and with SAN Locations, you don’t even have to leave the FCPX app. I’m not trying to oversell this. There is work to be done, but unusable is a very strong word. While X isn’t all there yet, it’s rather usable in its current form despite some current “limitations” that are present in any NLE besides a full ISIS system. You do need a managed file level SAN, it seems.
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[Oliver Peters] “I don’t know what the current limit is, but frequently companies get extensions, mainly as a way of protecting turf.”
You can calculate the current time limit on copyright by taking the age of MIckey Mouse and adding roughly 15-25 years. Such is the power of Disney’s lobbying efforts. I’m not sure if there is a similar rule of thumb for calculating how far afield from the Framer’s original intent patent expirations will stray.
Best,
Andy -
[Nicholas Kleczewski] “While you can read in footage from any source, you can’t save events or projects to anything but internal or traditionally set up SANs. This eliminates systems like Final Share and others which are quite prevalent in post houses from any use which is a huge stumbling point for post houses.”
Don’t forget locally-attached disks, which are far and away the most widely utilized method for sharing work among editors. Yes, NAS shares do not work as SAN Locations. So if one method of sharing files isn’t working that means FCPX has no ability to function in a collaborative setting? It isn’t as wide-open as FCP Legend, but it does have facilities for collaborative editing.
Apple never supported editing over AFP for FCP Legend, it just happened to work once there was enough muscle avaiable in NAS servers and their back-end storage to overcome the limitations inherent to Ethernet-based media sharing. NAS systems like Final Share were always guerrilla shared storage vis-a-vis FCP. Just because your particular shared storage setup isn’t supported doesn’t mean FCPX has no collaborative features to speak of.
Look at it this way: you can’t just hook Avid up to a beefy NAS server and expect it to work collaboratively either- does that mean Media Composer isn’t built for collaborative editing? Of course not- because Avid and later some third parties brought to market a solution for multiple users to share their bins non-destructively from the same sort of strict database-style project store. Avid has its storage-related limitations for shared storage and collaboration, so does FCPX. Granted, SAN Locations don’t let other users read from projects or events the way Unity allows other users to read each other’s bins, but neither methodology is nearly as unregulated as sharing is for FCP Legend.
[Nicholas Kleczewski] “Also with the new database style of saving, there’s great potential for project and event near real time collaboration but without a system in place of knowing if someone is currently altering an event or others could be locked out or notified of other user status it’s far too dangerous to have the “always on” approach in place.”
Well, yeah, and that is exactly the kind of thing this patent seems like it could address. The technical hooks are already there in FCPX to permit that kind of thing being built. The question of course, is if.
[Nicholas Kleczewski] “So in a sense it’s completely unusable.”
I’m not saying I disagree that the more restrictive shared storage capabilities in FCPX aren’t a deal-breaker for a lot of facilities, but I don’t agree that this makes FCPX “completely unusable” in a collaborative setting. More limited? Yes. Unusable? Far from it.
Best,
Andy -
[Jeremy Garchow] ” Oliver does work in a facility that has a Volume based SAN and it “works” but not with SAN Locations. “
This is correct. While we found we *could* leave the Projects & Events on a SAN volume, we ran into “beach ball” issues when doing that. Our current SOP is to leave all media on the SAN for common access and have Projects & Events on a local drive. So far the actual sharing has been minimal. I’ve had other editors cut interview selects sequences for me on projects that I was editing. They could do this completely independent of my Projects & Events. We each had the same linked source media in an Event, but the Events were not copies of each other.
When it came time for me to import their sequence into my production, I simply copied their Project to my local folder. Relaunch FCP X and relink the media. This works well and is somewhat analogous to how Avid editors share bin files in a non-SAN-based collaborative effort.
In the past, I have also worked on FCP 7 with Xsan. Although it is possible to work with FCP 7 project files and renders on the Xsan drives, it is not recommended. You often have permission conflicts. So a workflow with media on the SAN and Projects & Events (and renders) on local drives, works well for FCP X and isn’t all that different from FCP 7. Neither is as good as Avid Unity/Isis, but hopefully Apple will get somewhere with a similar (or even better) approach.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jules bowman] ” I truly doubt I’m ever going to use FC10,…
There is nothing in it that makes me think ‘damn, i wish 7 or CS6 had that, and Plenty that makes me snigger at the thought ofnusing it.Well, no. It is part of the present. It will remain so until Apple can it and everything goes tablet. But it isn’t the future in that sense of ‘oooh, jhc, that is the future.’
Well, FCPX has A LOT that I missed in FCP7 (but that were in other NLEs already) and a lot that I didn´t even wish for, but when going back to FCP7 I am screaming at it for being the clunky piece of software that it is.
FCP7 does some things right and good, so does PP6 and MC does a lot right and FCPX. They all have their strengths and weaknesses (well FCP7 is by far the weakest as of now, starting with the 32-bit foundation). Yes, FCPX has strengths. It has some holes still, but they will be filled, and it might have some weaknesses in current workflows. But for those of us who had and have the luxury the switch to a new workflow, because we are smaller units/groups, there is no way back to track based editing. Not the way PP6 and MC do it.
The future? We have no idea. I guess 30-inch retina-iMacs with 32GB RAM, 7770 4GB GPUs will make for a monster machine editing 5k like it was DV50.
In software I guess it will work like the google-office, where several people can work in a spreadsheet with different rights (read, edit etc) and one can see which cells are blocked, because someone works in them. In editing this could mean we can use the same event and I can give different rights (via the roles-model??!!) to different editors. So the sound guy can work on all clips that are music/dialogue/atmo and the graphics guy can use everything that is a still or Motion-based.The very distant future might be that we don´t record in camera, but in the cloud and while we shoot the editor picks the shots already in the studio……..
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Aren’t you (we) mixing copyright with patent?
I can understand Disney wanting to keep control of what they created, Mickey. Copyright or trademark? But not a patent.
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