Development

[Steve Connor]

[James Ewart] “Is the Architecture actually based upon Imovie?”

No!

Steve Connor

There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum

[Nikolas Bäurle]

FCPX has absolutely nothing in common with imovie, other than some UI elements. FCPX is based on AV Foundation, the old iMovie is Quicktime. The new Mavericks iMove is most likely AV Foundation, not sure. That was actually one of the first complaints against X, since it looked like imovie… I still heard this argument 2 weeks ago:-)))

[James Ewart]

Don’t get me wrong I am a “convert” and the deeper I look the more complex and profound I realise it is. I open legacy and it feels like going back in time so very very far. For me, who used to checkerboard (in dubbing parlance) so much I have realised some clever guys and girls must have looked at how many of us worked and realised the expand audio function solved so may problems. But they have looked so very far and deep into the future the development of the software, it must have cost so much and I started thinking how long would it take and how much would it cost to create software this brilliant and complex from the ground up.

There is so much to it.

Of course here in UK, conservative and resistant to anything new and to change most people still don’t get it

How many years must they have been working on this?

How did they keep it such a secret?

And to sell it for 200 quid?

Wow.

[Bret Williams]

I would assume the idea came across sometime after iMovie ’09, which is when Apple ticked off a lot of people by redoing iMovie and removing a lot of features. FCP was getting long in the tooth and the FCP update that year was barely much of anything. Soon after it was rumored that the pro division had been canned. At the time that was considered a ridiculous rumor, but in looking back it probably had a bit of truth. They probably scaled back at that point to just the core needed for FcpX.

My guess is it was in development for 2 years before it’s release. But that it wasn’t a smooth 2 years. The story is that it started as a logging/metadata app for the front end of FCP called “first cut”, but when Jobs saw it he decided it would be the replacement. That’s probably when he was quoted as saying the next version of FCP would be awesome. I’m sure he was excited in his way. From there my guess is the next year was a push to have something by a certain time and that resulted in the hijacked show and then disastrous launch.

2011 was odd. I felt like everything Apple did was this rush to put things on a specific course before Steve died. Lion, Siri, FcpX (and instantly EOLing the pro suite.

There’s a minor history on FCPX out there I’m sure you can find.

[James Ewart]

FCPX has changed my life. But I am 52 and it took me a year.

but I still don’t like the curved edges and find drag and drop from Event browser a bit clunky still.

Just settling in to watch “The Epic of Everest” from Curzon on demand. if ever you are in the Uk their cinemas in London are wonderful and if you can access watch on demand outside UK I also recommend it.

The best movies.

Have a good weekend all

http://www.jamesewart.co.uk

[Bret Williams]

You don’t think they borrowed a lick of code from iMpvie ’09, which was a complete rewrite? I don’t know if that one was AV foundation or not, but they had to start around then. I’m not a programmer, but I’m sure there are functions and code that can be converted or cross appropriated in some way. Wouldn’t AV foundation just be the part that deals with the media processing and throughput? What about all the basic interface code? Dealing with databases and time code and moving elements around? You can import an iMovie project but not a legacy project. It was obviously built to be an obvious higher end iMovie. The entire convention of how the two apps operate and deal with media is essentially the same. iMovie had much more real time processing power than legacy. It was probably converted to AV foundation before X was released. Gotta think it was the idea, if not a lot of code, that was expanded upon at the time. They probably have two completely divergent paths now with a compatibility set that they adhere to.

[James Ewart]

Well we are all hoping and praying they have committed and this is not an experiment are we not?

I do not want to go to Adobe much and for some reason, having learnt to be multi skilled with FCP 1.2 onwards and being from a producer/director background I cannot get my head round Avid at all.

[Chris Kenny]

[James Ewart] “Can anybody give me any idea how long the boffins Apple will have been working on FCPX. How many years ago will this work have started?”

I would guess Apple started the transition to working on the new codebase as they were finishing up FCP 7, which would have been a couple of years before the release of X.

[James Ewart] “Is the Architecture actually based upon Imovie?”

It doesn’t appear to be. FCP X uses a largely GPU-based ‘float’ processing pipeline which is not the case for iMovie (or at least wasn’t when FCP X shipped) and uses AVFoundation for file access, video I/O and manipulating timed media, where iMovie uses (or at least used) QuickTime. Any superficial similarities between FCP X and iMovie were likely just a consequence of the general direction of Apple’s thinking about editing user interface.

It’s quite likely FCP X borrowed some code from Motion, however. And while I haven’t really been keeping tabs on iMovie, it wouldn’t surprise me if iMovie started borrowing code from FCP X — that would make sense, as Apple seems to be trying to unify its consumer apps more across iOS and OS X (we just saw a big push in this direction with iWork), and that would require the OS X version of iMovie to ditch QuickTime, as it’s not present on iOS.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[James Ewart]

wot no QuickTime?

Weirdly I have been thrown a load of stuff shot in FlipCam SD for a theatre and they have maximum file sizes of 45MB and I am struggling to get them down to his size on Export with FCPX.

“We’ve never had this problem before they say” and of course they are dinosaurs but it can be a challenge as many clients are still a fair bit behind. But it becomes “my problem”.

Thank God for MpegStreamclip..I do not know what I would do.

I have always found Compressor crap.

What they do not think about is those of us “professionals” whose clients are not.

http://www.jamesewart.co.uk

[James Ewart]

And how much did a project like this cost?