FCP 10.1.2 Where are you?

[Marcus Moore]

I don’t see control surface support being out of the question.

[Charlie Austin]

[Mitch Ives] “Worked perfectly here… for years. Everybody loved it. Hell will freeze over before we ever get anything like that in FCP X… too bad.”

Don’t get me wrong, it worked perfectly. I just find it faster to stay in the TL and adjust the clips using KB volume adjustments and crossfades etc. rather than switch focus to the faders, software or hardware. It really is just my preference. I think it’s be great if X had control surface support of some flavor. I probably wouldn’t use it, but clearly some folks would. 🙂

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Richard Herd]

The audio solution in X (without leaving X) is easy. Apple just needs to listen (hahahaha)

From an audio mixing/mastering point of view, Treat Roles as inputs*.

Create a Roles inspector with the following grid:

Role name | Solo switch | Mute switch | Volume | Pan | Effects Loop | Auxiliary Send | Send

That’s the basic signal flow direction also (left to right); all of this entails the existence of a Master Fader (which is the default Send).

By using Compound Clips to do these things, X gets pretty good, but the organization is not as flexible (and less complex) than an actual mixer.

*Please note engineers have been mixing audio way before DAWs; that is, the familiar-waveform-track is not required in audio, but an input into the mixing board is required.

[Charlie Austin]

[Richard Herd] “The audio solution in X (without leaving X) is easy. Apple just needs to listen (hahahaha)”

I just sent this to Apple (someone there foolishly gave me their contact info), minus the snark. 😉 They may not listen, but it can’t hurt right?

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Richard Herd]

Cool!

I’ve already sent it about a dozen times 🙂

[Marcus Moore]

I agree it is. But I think that it may be expanding it market in lower tiers, people who may have found Legacy FCP daunting. Certainly coming from a current version of iMovie, FCPX is a easy stepping stone.

I’ll be perfectly honest that I believe FCPX will continue to shed some higher-end marketshare and build a bigger base in the bottom half of the market for another couple of years.

But as the feature set continues to grow it will be applicable to more and more workflows.

The only way FCP goes away is if Apple decides to walk away. They certainly have deeper pockets to spend on this horse than anyone else. But everything I’ve heard is that the team is very committed to the product.

[Marcus Moore]

Audio MUST be high on the list. Besides “Send to Motion” it’s probably one of the most requested features I can think of (besides overall stability and performance).

Besides that, there were job postings for audio positions on the X team early last year.

[Richard Herd]

That’s good to know.

[Charlie Austin]

[Marcus Moore] “Audio MUST be high on the list. Besides “Send to Motion” it’s probably one of the most requested features I can think of (besides overall stability and performance).”

I really think what Apple is doing now is trying get the core of the app rock solid. That’s probably (hopefully) why the next update is taking a while. As we’re all aware, there are lots of little bugs introduced with 10.1, as well as others that have been hanging around for a while. I hope they fix it all before they start bolting on all the bells and whistles we all want.

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Richard Herd]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I’m sure that there are engineers that use faders (duh) but also there are engineers that don’t, or don’t as much.”

If I were at a engineer’s mixing/mastering session and he was on the faders, I would have very specific questions about dynamics. And if the answers were wrong, I’d leave.

Simple off-the-shelf compressors are measured in milliseconds. That’s 1,000 keyframes per second. Engineers and techs talk about serial and parallel loops, gain staging, and dynamics. All that mastered into a stereo pair mp3 for earbuds. It’s an amazing creative skill they have.

But really…do we need that kind of audio detail in a video NLE?

A little more mixology and that’s probably enough.