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Can Apple Be Trusted Ever Again?
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[Herb Sevush] “Explain to me just where AV Foundation made a “drop in replacement” impossible? Just saying, well it’s AV Foundation, doesn’t explain anything. I don’t see what the nature of the video file has to do with the design of the timeline. Does it contain video and audio. Can the tracks be separated and moved separately. So where’s the special magic?”
Hi
Does it contain video and audio? Yes but no but! 🙂 (British TV catchphrase).
It also contains metadata.Everything that the Project in FCP 7 would have contained is rolled into the AV Foundation assets you are editing with, and this metadata is stored by the OS as part of the movie file.
AV Foundation uses compositions to create new assets from existing pieces of media (typically, one or more video and audio tracks). You use a mutable composition to add and remove tracks, and adjust their temporal orderings. You can also set the relative volumes and ramping of audio tracks; and set the opacity, and opacity ramps, of video tracks. A composition is an assemblage of pieces of media held in memory. When you export a composition using an export session, it’s collapsed to a file.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/AVFoundationPG/Articles/00_Introduction.htmlSo in the old FCP 7’s terms FCP X has no Project – ie no core of XML.
There is just metadata saved in a CoreData database, that relates to the ‘mutable compositions’ that your timeline GUI is concocting as you edit…Something like that – I just read about this stuff, others far cleverer than I write this sort of ‘special magic’ 🙂
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“Even if attempts were made to make it slavishly similar, any ground-up rewrite would have had too many subtle inconsistencies … for it to drop into established workflows without a bunch of testing and transition time.”
OK, so now we’ve moved from it couldn’t be done, to it would have been hard to do. As though FCPX isn’t going to need 12-18 months of testing and transition time – only in this case after 18 months it still won’t recognize legacy projects.
I don’t know why you insist on trying to distort the obvious. You have a perfectly good argument to make – “FCPX is the wave of the future and in the next year or so will have a lot of the functionality of FCP7 – and if you don’t like it, piss off.” That’s Apples (unspoken) argument and it might even be true. But to repeat ad nauseum that FCPX had to be written this way, and that anyone who is thinking of migrating away from Apple is basically an idiot are statements totally without merit.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
OK, so instead of FCP7 where the timeline is a pointer to quicktime clips residing on a hard drive, a FCPX project is a pointer to a composition which is a collection of assets held in memory, a metadata database. Fine. It sounds like it should be very flexible, much more so than FCP7, so I still don’t see why that makes creating timeline based editing impossible. Which is what my previous post was about. Why does AV Foundation rule out assignable audio tracks or a Viewer Window – which is Chris Kenny’s argument.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Ronald Lindeboom] “Seriously, Chris, did you listen to John Chay’s remarks before you replied?
It wasn’t the release of FCPX that caused the pros to lose hope and start looking elsewhere.
It was the killing of FCP7 and the removal of FCS3 from the Apple Store that fomented all this backlash.”
That’s inconsistant with a great deal of what has been posted, and doesn’t make a lot of sense. I mean, yes, Apple has made is harder to get an additional copy of FCS3, but it’s still easier to obtain a copy of FCS3 than to switch to another editing platform. Many of the people saying they’re switching are citing FCP X’s initial feature set and what they believe it implies about Apple’s priorities and future actions, not Apple’s discontinuation of FCS3.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[John-Michael Seng-Wheeler] “But that’s exactly what they have done.
They EOL’d FCP, added some features to iMovie, and then gave it the FCP name because it’s got marketing power. “This is simply false. There are some UI similarities. But iMovie is not based on the same rendering engine or media framework as FCP X.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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In many respects a Secondary Storyline is like a track (with some notable differences.
Have you tried adding Connected Clips and selecting them and converting them to a Secondary Storyline? You can add transitions between clips on a Secondary Storyline and move them around relative to each other and add more Secondary Storylines above them. A couple of the notable differences is that they still connect to the Primary Storyline at one point and they can contain the media audio that’s part of the video.I think people who keep using “trackless” derogatorily may not have explored the difference between Connected Clips and Secondary Storylines.
Just because it doesn’t have “V2” or “V3” above it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have similar uses and functions (sorry for the double negative).
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[Herb Sevush] “I don’t know why you insist on trying to distort the obvious. You have a perfectly good argument to make – “FCPX is the wave of the future and in the next year or so will have a lot of the functionality of FCP7 – and if you don’t like it, piss off.” That’s Apples (unspoken) argument and it might even be true. But to repeat ad nauseum that FCPX had to be written this way, and that anyone who is thinking of migrating away from Apple is basically an idiot are statements totally without merit.”
Huh? I said myself it didn’t have to written this way. Apple did this because they think it’s better. They think it will get them more users in five years than implementing the standard generic muti-track timeline and bins approach. I think if they play their cards right, they might be correct.
My argument in this subthread is merely that even had Apple made FCP X more conventional, it still wouldn’t have been a drop-in replacement from day on, so a lot of the complaints to the effect that it’s not a drop-in replacement from day one are fundamentally unreasonable.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I don’t understand why expecting a drop in replacement is unreasonable.
I’m working with Photoshop and After Effects right now. Both are 64 bit CS 5.5. Both can open legacy projects. The platforms are the same as the originals. If Adobe did what Apple did, there would be a full blown riot. I don’t know how anyone can defend Apple.
We get it. You like them. I like Apple. But my brand loyalty only goes so far.
Editor/Videographer
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[Chris Kenny] ” I mean, yes, Apple has made is harder to get an additional copy of FCS3, but it’s still easier to obtain a copy of FCS3 than to switch to another editing platform.”
Chris: Apple is NOT issuing new licenses for either FCP7 or for FCS3. They are giving RMAs to dealers and will not activate new licenses for anyone that were not already activated.
What part of that do you not understand?
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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[John Chay] “I’m working with Photoshop and After Effects right now. Both are 64 bit CS 5.5. Both can open legacy projects. The platforms are the same as the originals. If Adobe did what Apple did, there would be a full blown riot. I don’t know how anyone can defend Apple. “
Merely moving to 64-bit doesn’t constitute a rewrite. PS and AE also moved from Carbon to Cocoa with CS5, but while that would normally require a rewrite it didn’t really in that case, because Adobe’s apps are mostly implemented on top of Adobe’s own internal cross-platform API, which has as few hooks into the system as Adobe can manage.
Adobe’s last real rewrite, I believe, was Premiere Pro 1.0. I think it could open Premiere projects, but on the other hand Adobe abandoned an entire computing platform for several years during the transition.
[John Chay] “We get it. You like them. I like Apple. But my brand loyalty only goes so far.”
This statement implies that brand loyalty is causing me to defend something I otherwise wouldn’t support, but one of the reasons I like Apple is that they’re willing to do things like this. In my opinion, for instance, Photoshop has badly needed a serious UI overhaul for about the last eight years, but I doubt Adobe will ever have the guts to do one. And Avid… Media Composer’s UI looks like its from 1995, and while the Avid fans can defend that choice until the heat death of the universe, I have no doubt it’s a very large part of the reason Avid has been losing market share for years.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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