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Email Exchange with Randy Ubillos, FCP X Designer
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[Michael Pierro] “Yeah, but working in a company that does a lot of broadcast and has for years, I’ve had to open up older projects, from FCP 6 or 5. Being able to do that is critical. I may not use that feature everyday, but being able to do that has been essential. The fact that I wouldn’t be able to now is a huge deal breaker.”
But this is alleviated by being able to install FCP X side-by-side with FCP 7.
[Michael Pierro] “Obviously if I had FCPx I would start new projects on it, but that doesn’t alleviate the need for legacy compatibility. Say whatever you want about the lack there of, but frankly it seems pretty obvious to me, as I’m sure to a lot of people here, the people who created FCPx MUST HAVE INTENTIONALLY left out the functions that would make this app useful to any pro user. The things that are missing are just too blatantly obvious to just leave out…”
See my post here. The importing issue is not straightforward.
And I agree that certain features were deliberately left out… of the first release. I don’t agree that this implies Apple isn’t working on these things or doesn’t recognize that some people need them. It makes a great deal of sense to structure releases to focus on mainstream features first, then start selling a product suitable for most users while you continue working on features for the higher end segment of the market.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Pierro] “That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In the end, regardless of whatever is going on inside the editor’s head, the clips in a timeline always relate to eachother by at timecode. Clip A starts at x and ends at y clip B starts at y and ends at z. That is not that hard to get your head around. If they wanted to implement that, I can’t imagine it being particularity hard.”
This is not how clips outside of the primary storyline work in FCP X. ‘Connected clips’, for instance, have no direct, fixed relationship to each other, but only to storyline clips they’re attached to.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Pierro] “That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In the end, regardless of whatever is going on inside the editor’s head, the clips in a timeline always relate to eachother by at timecode. Clip A starts at x and ends at y clip B starts at y and ends at z. That is not that hard to get your head around. If they wanted to implement that, I can’t imagine it being particularity hard.”
This is not how clips outside of the primary storyline work in FCP X. ‘Connected clips’, for instance, have no direct, fixed relationship to each other; only to storyline clips they’re attached to.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Apple doesn’t understand business? I’d love to have their $65,000,000,000.00 and no debt position.
Jerry
Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things. I ski. My Blog: https://blogs.creativecow.net/Jerry-Hofmann
Current DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/81/jerry_hofmanns_final_cut_system_setup8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX – Cinema Displays I have a 22″ that I paid 4k for still working. G4 with Kona SD card, and SCSI card.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “What other piece of software for general use requires the end-user to understand how and why the code has been written the way it has in order to be able to use it properly? I think the answer is “none” and I think you’d have to agree. “
It’s not that knowing changes the utility of the program, it’s that it changes the whining into understanding. The posts here are tantamount to saying, “why can’t the car eat hay since my horse does?” One might still opt for the horse and there may be very sound reasons currently. It’s the lack of understanding that’s resulted in a lot of “unproductive” posts.
I’d like to see more real critique of faults as well as advantages. Some that’s in this forum but there’s an overwhelming of “car doesn’t eat hay” kind of posts.
Expectations become realistic and decision making becomes more informed.
For example, the whole database/metadata methodology needs to be understood, in my opinion, so people grasp why Apple went with that. It might help people understand the Event, Project, Storyline format. Why what people call a “sequence” (Storylline) behaves the way it does. Certainly that doesn’t mean people will be happy with and certainly people may move to other NLEs . . . but it may stop the outcry that Apple should “fix or bring back” something that can’t really happen. The car does not eat hay nor would it make sense for auto-manufacturer to build in or even simulate that feature.
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[Joe Campanale] “On the other, Randy Ubillos states legacy support wasn’t a priority because, get this: they didn’t think anyone was going to switch in the middle of a project. “
I agree that this was truly thoughtless. It’s not only about switching mid project. It’s about what happens when a client wants to do revisions on a project a few years old.
I regularly have clients coming back to make a few changes or rebranding on 5 year old cable spots. FCP7 will only live so long with new OSs and machines. Am I to maintain a collection of old machines with old OSs for my clients? Must I start each old project from scratch in FCPX even if it’s just changing titles and logs?
The irony is the very market FCPX is suited for, so people claim, it still has serious failings. In my tapeless world of local cable spots and corporate, clients sometimes want to revise projects going back a few years.
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[Craig Seeman] ” It might help people understand the Event, Project, Storyline format.”
I think if you’ll forgive me, you are “flogging a dead horse” as it were!
I sense that anybody who is serious about moving forward with the product has moved quickly past the point of being confused by any of this – they’re quite clever people at a guess and can read a manual.
Meanwhile those who don’t want to learn have far bigger – and to be honest more problematic – issues that are discouraging them from even bothering. For better or worse.
But I know I won’t convince you so I’ll shut up now 😉
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Douglas K. Dempsey] “Do you imagine FCP7 will run flawlessly on Lion and beyond, while we keep our fingers crossed that 2 or 3 years from now, FCPX will “go pro” and open our archived FCP7 projects — projects that we now open, modify and cut & paste from all the time, as we evolve and update projects for clients, or re-purpose footage for new projects?”
This has been on my mind. Why rush out FCPX so quick? Is it perhaps because Lion is coming in a month, and FCP7 wont run on it very well, so you punch FCPX out quick and discontinue FCP7 before people can scream about FCP7 problems under Lion? Could be just coincidental, but the timing my not be…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com
http://www.insightproductions.com -
[Walter Soyka] “FCPX is introducing some new editorial and organizational concepts, and it’s using a modern framework for media creation and playback, but I don’t see why they are as inextricably linked as you suggest. AV Foundation contains the tools used to build FCPX, but AV Foundation doesn’t strictly define the FCPX feature set.”
Yes, but we need to understand the influences based on the underlying technology. AV Foundation is one of them. There are certainly others. It doesn’t define/limit the entire app. It’s one key element though.
[Walter Soyka] “For example, I’ve seen you suggest that gaps must be added because AV Foundation can’t have a hole in a composition. Even if that were the case, FCPX could hide that unnecessary detail from the user. Don’t you think it’s more likely that gaps are there to make connected clips behave consistently in the UI?”
That’s the kind of critique we need to see more of. It’s an example of why the “wonderful GUI” still has some issues. Why can’t the end user pull apart things and have the Gap inserted invisibly for example? I believe AV Foundation uses the “sequence” (Storyline” as a kind of file a little bit differently then the old style sequence which was just a series of pointers. The new thing (looks like a sequence but called a Storyline) can’t have holes in it but why does this “working” have to be visible to the user?
My own gut is that Apple changed a lot of the nomenclature because they wanted to make intuitively clear (without explaining why) that things “things” that look like things you saw in FCP7 were only superficially similar and are, in reality, quite different. That this may not clearly come across may be another critique. Do the new names for things clarify or confuse? Maybe sticking to conventional would have actually helped people’s understanding.
It’s almost as if a “first tutorial” now needs to be a glossary of “this is called this because of that” It might be a more colloquial way of explaining AV Foundation without getting too technical.
Maybe, “A Storyline looks and works like a sequence but it’s really a container. It can’t have holes in the container so we have to have slugs to file holes. A “Gap” is a slug but that name was used because we want to make clear it’s necessity to fill the hole,” or whatever.
That a “Project” has one sequence is another good example of some of the confusion and frustration going on. In this case a “project” in FCPX is confusing because the word is what would use in FCP7 but it’s really not the same thing at all.
Basically there’s some serious confusion in the naming and that plays in to confusion about certain functions being there or not. All this frustrates people.
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[Craig Seeman] “A Storyline looks and works like a sequence”
No, I think the renaming of things is confusing even you, Craig. A “storyline” is the last vestige of what we used to know as “tracks”, hence the “primary storyline” (the nature of which is to always ripple the timeline events, whereas the “secondary storylines” don’t). This much is clear from the manual.
Also I would suggest that the “mystery” of “gaps” is just down to the design of the primary storyline which is meant to ripple everything as a default behaviour – this being the case you obviously need a mechanism like gaps to enable removal of material from the primary storyline in such a way as to keep the overall timeline duration the same, i.e. if you don’t want rippling to take place.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
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