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Can’t open earlier FCP projects?
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Its new code. I doubt it will overwrite fcp 7 cause its not upgradable.
If it does than dual boot is a solution. -
[David Roth Weiss] ” just by way of comparison, when the good folks at Adobe began their major move a few years back with a total rewrite of their entire suite, which became CS4, they ushered in much more robust XML functionality, as well as greater interoperability between apps with their “dynamic linking.” And, backward compatibility with previous projects didn’t suddenly go missing after the rewrite.”
Just by way of accuracy the big re-write for Adobe was between Premiere 6.5 and Premiere Pro 1.0 and the latter couldn’t open the former’s projects. I would nevertheless expect that Apple can use XML to open most of what’s in a 7.0 project. The only gotchas may be ones where parameters can’t carry over into the new interface.
With Adobe the move to 64 bits was probably foreseen well in advance…possibly as early as 1.0 (2003)
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[Andy Mees] “We know that iMovie can export projects in FCP 7 XML format”
It’s only fair to say of course that XML export from iMovie is very, very limited indeed and rather suggests how at the point in time of the release of iMovie 11 at least, they haven’t resolved the issue of how to deal with exporting the Magnetic Timeline. Only the sync audio tracks can be exported and a single layer of video and everything else is unsupported – as explicitly mentioned in the export dialogue. This is not to say that the issue is unresolvable, but rather that it’s probably not the simplest thing in the world!
But hey, just playing Devil’s Advocate again here, sorry 😉
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi
I’ve spent a while going through Philip Hodgetts’ blog, and his linked blog/presentation by Chris Adamson about AV Frameworks (Apple’s QT replacement methodology), most of which is above my head 😉 but some sentences in Apple’s developer pages about AV Framework are written (more or less!) in clear English…Quote:
“The primary class that the AV Foundation framework uses to represent media is AVAsset…
AVAsset is not tied to particular data format. ……such as a QuickTime movie file or an MP3 files (amongst other types).Each asset contains a timed collection of tracks that are intended to be presented or processed together, each of a uniform media type, including but not limited to audio, video, text, closed captions, and subtitles… Assets may also have metadata.
In a complex composition, however, there may be multiple overlapping tracks of audio and video.Editing.
AV Foundation uses compositions to create new assets from existing pieces of media (typically, one or more video and audio tracks).
To assemble audiovisual constructs from one or more source assets, you can insert assets into instances of AVMutableComposition…. offering insertion, removal, and scaling operations…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.”
That’s all (cut/pasted) from:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/AudioVideo/Conceptual/AVFoundationPG/Articles/00_Introduction.html%23//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010188Chris Adamson has a slide that summarises that:
AVAsset
A collection of time-based media data
Sound, video, text (closed captions, subtitles, etc.)
Each distinct media type is contained in a track
An asset represents the arrangement of the tracks. The tracks
represent the traits of the media’s presentation (volume, pan, affine
transforms, opacity, etc.).
Asset ≠ media. Track ≠ media. Media = media.
Also contains metadata (where common to all tracks)
https://iphonefall2010.crowdvine.com/system/talks/presentations/000/014/595/chris_adamson.pdf?1289428982That description of ‘how the new way works’ seems to me to correspond pretty much with what we saw happening on the sneak peek timeline, the various clips on the timeline GUI representing what’s being described in my quote.
That means a FCP X ‘project’ is just a database document, and all the ‘editing’ is going on in the continuing creation of new complex AVAssets.
So to import a FCP 7 project is going to require a mammoth reconversion process to create the new AVAsset ‘compositions’ needed to work with the old FCP 7 project converted into a FCP X database.
I would guess this will be best handled by a new transitional point version of FCP 7 to handle the conversion procedures, to be distributed after FCP X is made available?
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Very fair point Simon.
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Yes Paul of course that’s true.
However, we’re discussing whether FCP X will be able to import a FCP 7 project and whether the project they showed in the sneak peek was imported or recreated. What are you discussing?
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[Bret Williams] “we’re discussing whether FCP X will be able to import a FCP 7 project… What are you discussing? “
Hi
I was speculating that rather than FCP X being lumbered with extra bloat to enable the ‘import’ of the XML (or native code or whatever) from an FCP 7 project it might be more elegant to put the burden of that export onto an ‘enhanced’ FCP 7 – given that it seems in all probability to require a major media asset repurposing.And given the likelihood in future of huge additional FCP X sales to non-FCP 7 users. And the fact that under an App Store download distribution model it would be of benefit to minimise bloat.
The whole whether-it-will/whether-it-won’t tone of this forum seems scare-mongering and specious to me – the facts as we have them from the sneak peek and Apple’s Developer web site are enough to make it clear that Apple is continuing its Pro Apps commitment 😉
What on earth are consumers going to need Closed Captioning functionality for home movie creation on their iPads for? AV Frameworks enables full functionality for continued professional media creation. IMO… 🙂
Also I am speculating about some of what Philip Hodgetts might have to say in his forthcoming pre-announcement FCP X Webinar, where my reply is OnT I thought – rather than cross-posting all over the forum 😉
Edit: I realise I’m probably not the Paul that Brett’s comment was aimed at – but I was the last Paul to post….
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[Paul Dickin] “So to import a FCP 7 project is going to require a mammoth reconversion process to create the new AVAsset ‘compositions’ needed to work with the old FCP 7 project converted into a FCP X database.”
I have no specific familiarity with AV Foundation, but I do have a fair bit of general programming knowledge, I have written Cocoa apps, and I’ve written quite a few tools that do various things to/with FCP 7 XML files.
There’s nothing being described about AV Foundation that makes it sound like conversion would be especially problematic. Clips correspond to AVAssets. Sequences to AVCompositions. AVCompositions have AVAssetTracks, suggesting the “trackless timeline” is a user interface feature, and internal representation still uses tracks.
There isn’t really a “mammoth reconversion” here. At least, not an extra one. To understand why, one needs to know something that I don’t think would be at all intuitive to non-developers, which is that on-disk representations of data sets are typically independent of in-memory representations of those same data sets. If you have a large, complex data structure in memory representing, say, a sequence, you generally can’t just call a saveToDisk() function on it when you want to save it to a file. You have to write code that sort of steps through it, and says “OK, here’s an object representing a clip, let’s write the XML representing a clip out to this file”, etc. And when loading a file, you have to do the reverse. (There are more generalized solutions to this problem, but they likely aren’t relevant to this discussion.)
So, yes, FCP X, based on AV Foundation, will no doubt represent things in memory very differently form the Carbon-based Final Cut Pro 7. But this doesn’t matter, because FCP X will never see FCP 7’s in-memory representations of anything, only the files it writes out. Sure, Apple will have to write code to read those files in (and to write out XML files, etc.), but there is no unique challenge here. FCP X won’t really be doing anything when reading/writing those files that isn’t conceptually equivalent to what FCP 7 already has to do. And the things represented in those files — clips, tracks, sequences — map very well onto the data structures AV Foundation offers.
I do see two potential issues for file conversion here.
One is that as per my speculation here, FCP X might not even have project files. That’s fine for sequences — it can just ask you what sequence you want to import, and then save it out as an FCP X sequence file. And it’s fine for regular clips. They just like in your footage library. But what about ‘virtual’ clips — subclips, multiclips, etc. that don’t exist as discrete entities on disk? How do those get imported? For that matter, how do they exist at all in FCP X outside of the context of a sequence, if it really doesn’t have project files anymore?
The second is that, of course, some filters present in FCP 7 might not be present in FCP X, or may render a little bit differently. Or take, for instance, the color corrector — it seems to have been totally changed in FCP X. Will corrections from the old FCP come in at all? I suspect you won’t, on complex projects, quite be able to export an ProRes file from FCP 7, then open that project in FCP X and export a second ProRes file that looks frame-for-frame identical. But these kinds of issues across versions are not all that uncommon (page layout software can even reflow text, etc. after upgrades), so while I’m sure there will be a lot of griping at the cleanup required, history suggests this sort of thing is not the end of the world.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “…there is no unique challenge here. FCP X won’t really be doing anything when reading/writing those files that isn’t conceptually equivalent to what FCP 7 already has to do. And the things represented in those files — clips, tracks, sequences — map very well onto the data structures AV Foundation offers.”
Agree absolutely. The import of an FCP Classic project will mean interpreting and writing that data into a new internal data format, in the case of FCP X that may mean populating an FCP X database document … a much more complex operation than any normal FCP update requires certainly, and not all project data may be mappable, but as you say not conceptually different from what already happens.
[Chris Kenny] “I do see two potential issues for file conversion here.
One is that as per my speculation here, FCP X might not even have project files. That’s fine for sequences — it can just ask you what sequence you want to import, and then save it out as an FCP X sequence file. And it’s fine for regular clips. They just like in your footage library. But what about ‘virtual’ clips — subclips, multiclips, etc. that don’t exist as discrete entities on disk? How do those get imported? For that matter, how do they exist at all in FCP X outside of the context of a sequence, if it really doesn’t have project files anymore?”
Regarding ‘virtual’ clips of any description and how mapping those might be handled … actually I’m thinking FCP X should excel here. Apple appear to have really embraced the power of metadata in this rewrite, and as such it would seem that any virtual clip (which inherently exists physically only as metadata) should be quite easily mapped to new metadata sets. “Sublips” (as in FCP 7 for instance) seem to have been replaced in FCP X by “Ranges” … a simple range based keyword would certainly seem capable of describing what was previously the virtual representation of a subclip, so I could see them being mapped as such. Multiclips … thats harder to make a guess at exactly how it might be mapped as we’ve not seen if or how FCP X 1.0 will handle that functionality … but personally I’ve found FCP 7’s current multiclip implementation to be somewhat fragile ( especially when compared to the multiclip handling offered by other platforms ) and I would hope to see it largely rewritten perhaps dropping the “virtual clip” aspect altogether. That said, perhaps an existing FCP 7 multclip might be mapped as a unique FCP X sequence itself, the collapsed multiclp in the master sequence as a clip collection (nest) … then again, Apple being Apple, they’re probably wrapping the whole thing up as something far more complex and clever, so get ready for “Dynamic Auditioning” (you heard it here first folks, lol).
[Chris Kenny] The second is that, of course, some filters present in FCP 7 might not be present in FCP X, or may render a little bit differently. Or take, for instance, the color corrector — it seems to have been totally changed in FCP X. Will corrections from the old FCP come in at all? I suspect you won’t, on complex projects, quite be able to export an ProRes file from FCP 7, then open that project in FCP X and export a second ProRes file that looks frame-for-frame identical. But these kinds of issues across versions are not all that uncommon (page layout software can even reflow text, etc. after upgrades), so while I’m sure there will be a lot of griping at the cleanup required, history suggests this sort of thing is not the end of the world.
“Yeah, I think we can hope for effects to map if and where they’re specifically present in both versions of course, but where not (or where significantly changed) then I think folks will have to live with some degree of manual cleanup (and that seems fair enough). Going into slightly unhinged speculation mode, whilst it seems unlikely, we may yet discover that some of the really pervasive “Effects” from FCP Classic (like the 3 Way Color Corrector, that would appear to have been wholesale replaced in FCP X with the Color Board ) may yet also have been ported as “Effects” in FCP X, strictly to provide such compatibility (and familiarity). Ok yes, padded cell moment perhaps.
As ever, time will tell.
Andy -
[Andy Mees] “That said, perhaps an existing FCP 7 multclip might be mapped as a unique FCP X sequence itself, the collapsed multiclp in the master sequence as a clip collection (nest) … then again, Apple being Apple, they’re probably wrapping the whole thing up as something far more complex and clever, so get ready for “Dynamic Auditioning” (you heard it here first folks, lol).”
I agree that tagged ranges essentially eliminate the need for subclips. But multiclips and, particularly, clips created by merging dual system audio and video, seem like they’d need somewhere to live other than within sequences. I mean, say you’re editing a feature film shot dual system. You might have thousands of merged clips. I don’t think you can just dump all of them in a sequence and work from there. You have to be able to work with them the same way you can work with standalone clips, prior to editing them into a sequence.
Apple has to have some solution to this. The most obvious is that I’m wrong that virtual clips can’t exist in the Event Library. People have noted the odd icon in the “Phantom Ahead” clip that appears in various released screenshots. Perhaps it’s an indication of a virtual clip. In fact, now that I think about it… that’s a Phantom clip. The Phantom doesn’t record audio, and that clip has attached audio. It has to be some sort of merged clip. Unless Apple went and embedded audio in the ProRes transcode before importing, but that seems a little nuts.
[Andy Mees] “Going into slightly unhinged speculation mode, whilst it seems unlikely, we may yet discover that some of the really pervasive “Effects” from FCP Classic (like the 3 Way Color Corrector, that would appear to have been wholesale replaced in FCP X with the Color Board ) may yet also have been ported as “Effects” in FCP X, strictly to provide such compatibility (and familiarity). Ok yes, padded cell moment perhaps.”
Apple has always been pretty aggressive about ditching backwards compatibility. I doubt they’ve done anything that elaborate. I suspect they make an effort to translate applicable settings for filters that have a corresponding implementation in FCP X, but this is probably like Color’s ability to import 3-way correction done in FCP: a starting point, but not even really trying to be an exact match.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.
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