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Email Exchange with Randy Ubillos, FCP X Designer
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[Michael Pierro] “The things that are missing are just too blatantly obvious to just leave out…”
Or more difficult to implement. It’s a work in progress and as someone who works with developers, there’s a lot that goes in to prioritization of feature implementation. It’s a lot more than “importance” unfortunately for some users. In fact when you look at the whole of the 2 million users they got most of the basics done.
Most of the FCP world is not broadcast and XML and OMF is not live or die.
On the other hand even the wedding videographer and the kid doing the music video of their band may use multicam.Apple could have waited another 9 months to get all this done. In the meantime the “Pros” would be screaming about how FCS is such a low priority as the lack of any update slipped into a third year.
Despite the product name similarity, this is a ground up creation and it’s not complete but personally, I’m glad I have something to play with now. In fact I’m glad that rather than a dog an pony show, I actually have a usable thing showing me where Apple is headed. You may or may not like the direction but at least you have a TANGIBLE to judge from. That’s a lot better than words and webpages IMHO.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “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 ;-)”
But it’s really the people who refuse to understand who wont shut up. Some simply don’t want to understand it. They should move on and stop cluttering the forum.
There are others though who genuinely don’t understand things who have been negative. I think it’s far better to give that portion a helping hand then lump them in with those who don’t want to learn.
People have different ways of learning.
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My biggest issues with FCP-X is that for all intents and purposes, it is an iMovie update not FCP, and that it does not fit into any professional workflow with ease. Unless of course, you color corrected and mixed from within Final Cut (which I used to do), in which case this is not an issue. Attempting to change the paradigm of video editing is all well and good, and I wish them luck although I think this effort is doomed, but I don’t think it’s fair to characterize negative reactions as whining when a professional’s tool of choice is changed so dramatically with no hope of backwards compatibility (except with iMovie). You might shoehorn FCP-X into a workflow, but it is not designed to do that. FCP-X is the workflow, and a fairly limited one at that. No secondary color correcting? No multitrack recording and mixing? Fine, but no other way to do that? Or to even view your video on a broadcast monitor? Poor.
I say that it is an update to iMovie simply because of the fact that you can open old iMovie projects, but not FCP projects, that FCP-X and iMovie share many of the same interface features and nomenclature, and that the paradigm is an extension of the iMovie paradigm. Maybe they didn’t work off the iMovie codebase. But who cares? They removed interoperability and added extremely gutted versions of Color and Soundtrack Pro (which was already hobbled), and this is a good thing? Yes, if you cut with iMovie, then it is a very good thing. In any case, you can call this FCP-X 1.0 but it isn’t. It is supposed to be Final Cut Pro 10 and it only works with old versions of iMovie, and in all practicality this makes it an iMovie update.
As far as the backwards compatibility thing goes, allowing us to operate FCP7 on the same machine is a weak compromise, because eventually FCP7 will not work on the MacOS. Then what? Sorry, sir, but you’re screwed. At least when OSX first arrived, there was a way to operate all the OS9 applications from within OSX. Not FCP, though.
Robert Womack
Creative Bridgekeep
http://www.CurrentMarketing.com
“Louisville’s Leading Interactive Marketing Agency” -
[Chris Messineo] “We never expected anyone to switch editing software in the middle of a project, so project migration was not a priority.”
And what if someone wants to open a project to revise it?
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media -
[walter biscardi] “And what if someone wants to open a project to revise it?”
I mentioned elsewhere that this is one of my concerns. Often enough I have clients asking for revisions on projects going back a few years. By then there may be yet another new OS and new Macs here. I don’t expect to have any method to open an FCP7 project.
One might interpret
“We never expected anyone to switch editing software in the middle of a project, so project migration was not a priority.”
As something that might not be implemented for some time but if it’s “not ever” that’s going to be a serious problem. This is an example of something we need to know ASAP because we don’t want to dig ourselves into a hole. The risk is that a project you start in FCP7 today due to feature necessity may not be retrievable at all in two years short of keeping a Mac and FCP7 alive on one system (for how many years).
If they tend to have an importer eventually (just not know) they should make that clear. All in all, I think Apple’s poor communication is a bigger issue the feature sets in an app which most know is not ready for many post workflows.
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Maybe the missing “Pro” features are waiting for Lion and new Mac Pros with Thunderbolt(for hardware I/O).
Therefore Apple marketing think: everyone will have to buy a new Mac Pro anyway, so they can keep their current Mac Pro running Snow Leopard for FCP7.
It’s a way to guarantee new Mac Pro sales…
Just a thought
Chad Wilmoth
Visual Reality Studios
http://www.visual-reality-studios.com -
“FCP7 projects do not have enough information in them to properly translate to FCPX (in FCP7 all of the clip connections live in the editor’s head, not in the timeline). ”
This is a BS remark. The relationships exist in the timeline, not the editor’s head. How do I prove that? Anyone in the world can open my timeline and play back my edit. I don’t need to be present.
Not enough information? BS. Put in default information. Sorry – metadata….
Just an excuse for poor planning.
Patrick
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“This is a BS remark. The relationships exist in the timeline, not the editor’s head. How do I prove that? Anyone in the world can open my timeline and play back my edit. I don’t need to be present.
Not enough information? BS. Put in default information. Sorry – metadata….”
I am as frustrated as any by the missing features and the inability to open legacy projects. But I think you misunderstood what is meant here. It’s not about being able to play the edit (that’s trivial) but translating it from one language to another yet retain the intent behind the clips position relative to each other. That is non-trivial because FCP 7 is implicit about the intent while FCP X makes it explicit.
You can’t watch a video and know what the editor’s timeline looked like exactly: you can only make an educated guess. An algorithm can’t read your FCP 7 timeline and guess what your intent was: it could generate 100 different timelines that make different assumptions about your intent yet that would all play the same. In each alternative, your elements would be connected differently Should this sound effect be connected to this clip or that one? Does the music relate to this or that clip? Or maybe the music is the backbone and everything else is connected to it.
None of this matters if all you want to do is play the timeline, but it does matter as soon as you want to move things around. The reason the magnetic timeline is a big deal is this: since all connections are explicit, the software can be smart about keeping everything in order. But it’s more than that: it means that an FCP X timeline contains more information about the INTENT than a traditional timeline ever could. That means that a second editor can look at the timeline and actually gain more knowledge about what the original editor intended, just by the way elements are connected to each other.
FCP X forces you to be explicit about these things, but in a way that doesn’t require any extra effort from you. Have you never moved an element in your timeline but forgotten that another should have been moved along with it? Sure you caught it as soon as you played back you edit, but you still lost 20 seconds figuring out what the hell happened there. This is unlikely to ever happen with FCP X. But it’s about a lot more than preventing mistakes, and it’s not about holding you hand either. It’s about giving you the power to explicitly define your intent within the timeline and let the software work for you.
I know I must sound like an Apple shill, but I just happen to be impressed by the possibilities offered by this timeline. I still think Apple should provide a conversion tool, maybe one that proposes alternative translations or maybe allow you to set rules for translation.
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“You can’t watch a video and know what the editor’s timeline looked like exactly: you can only make an educated guess.”
But we’re not asking FCX to infer the timeline from the video out. The relationships between the Audio and Video are explicit in the FCP timeline. Either the audio is linked with the video, or it is free floating. That’s how it should be carried over. There’s no need to look for further “intent”. And if you want to, you can always link them after the fact, can’t you?
Unless you’re saying there’s no way to put audio in a FCX timeline without linking it to some video. This is not my perception of how FCX works.
Some translation problems are probably inherent in FCX’s design flaw/limitation of no Audio/Video tracks (Yes, it’s a limitation… I use Tracks for a reason. They are not something I was saddled with and looking to rid myself of – I don’t find timecode pesky either).
Do I sometimes grab a section of my FCP timeline and miss a bit of audio? I suppose, but it’s pretty rare. I usually lasso the section I want to move and slide it where I want. On my list of Annoying Problems Manipulating The Timeline, that doesn’t even make the top 20. To redesign an entire paradigm to remove that problem seems misplaced in the extreme.
Patrick Sheffield
Sheffield Softworks -
To stay for a bit on the technical side, because of the AV foundation discussion:
Let’s not forget that it’s also possible to go from iMovie to Final Cut Pro 7 (apparently, I never used iMovie). So it does create an XML/EDL in some way for FCP 7 to reference the files from.
Now FCPx timeline is much more complex than iMovie, but still it does not seem like something that’s impossible to do. Except that it seems only export the basic video and audio clips are ‘easy’ ( what about Motion projects in the timeline?), but basically that would be enough for most professionals. So I don’t buy the ‘not enough information’ remark for Randy Ubillos.
There’s an article on DVcreators.net https://www.dvcreators.net/what-does-the-guy-who-led-the-original-final-cut-pro-revolution-think-of-the-final-cut-pro-x-release/
Which tells that iMovie 08 was originally destined to be some pre-final cut application called First Cut. So again going between the two applications with different frameworks is not impossible. The process of bridging the gap between iMovie and Final Cut was already laid out on the roadmap for years. Basically they have done the same thing before with Logic Pro and GarageBand.
Personally there are some aspects that I like about FCPX and I think we will see some updates soon, but I truly dislike the way the app has been presented and the lack of a roadmap with stuff that will be added soon. Unfortunately I think that most people on this forum have already bought this app (including me) and probably also a lot of iMovie users might have already made purchases so Apple is already cashing again…
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