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FCP X and the “industry”
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[Andree Franks] “Isn’t a professional a person that can take anything and through at him and he will make something out of it”
Maybe. Buddy Ebsen (yes Jed Clampett, and Barnaby Jones) defined a “professional” as someone who did their job without making everyone else’s lives more difficult.
jPo
You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?
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[Andree Franks] “Why does everybody argue about what format and what tool is professional?
Isn’t a professional a person that can take anything and through at him and he will make something out of it that worth awhile? Because of his experience in the field.
iPad camera with celluare uplink? Cool”If this were true, why would professional products exist at all? We shouldn’t need fancy broadcast or digital cinema cameras — we’ve got iPads!
Professionals may outperform less-experienced amateurs on the same same sub-par tools, but I’d argue that part of being a professional is choosing the right tool or material for the job. This is precisely why you’ll never see a professional build a deck from balsa wood with a Swiss Army knife (as Chris so brilliantly pointed out): pros know that these items are not well-suited for the task.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Liam Hall]Though, I can’t work out why people are getting so hot and bothered over what Apple has called certain functions in FCPX. Language evolves. So do editing systems.
Because it was change merely for the sake of it.
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But Walter,
This is to argue that FCP-X is an fatally limited or insignificant tool in and of itself. Something that it a LONG way from being proven. Don’t forget that a swiss army knife, in the hands of one of the last generations “slicing block and razor blade” editors could undoubtedly edit a world class motion picture – no problem. Because the central necessary process – cutting celluloid – could be done with many, many different tools.
And since the vast majority of motion picture style editing is fundamentally knowing how to place cuts – your analogy only holds up if FCP-X can’t do that. But it most certainly can. A Swiss army knife can’t functionally build a deck. But once upon a time all decks were built with hand saws. Today, virtually NONE of them are. The power saw changed everything.
The current debate is whether the 10+ year grown ecosystem of enhancements, bells and whistles which have been appended AROUND the FCP central editing system has been functionally lost in the move to FCP-X. And the clear answer is that a good measure of that has.
But that’s not the end of the story to the chagrin of many of the early voices who seemed pre-disposed to stop the debate at what the software in it’s initial release LACKED.
By way of a cooking analogy, most of the loudest voices here appear to be complaining that they (and by extension everyone else cooking on FCP – MUST have access to a fully equipped “world class” automated kitchen – with dedicated tools for everything from slicing bread to piping colorful rosettes in icing – if that kitchen is to be considered truly “professional.” And further if too many of said capabiiities are missing, professional cooking will be necessarily impossible!
At one level they are correct. For the top flight chef that must turn potatoes into mini-sculptures for 1000 tonight – then pivot and build snap pea castles for 1000 the next – every possible tool and food prep device that can help must be at hand – all a reasonable “workflow”.
But there are also plenty of cooks out there who are willing to work in less fancy kitchens, with more basic tools and can STILL turn out KILLER meals.
FCP-X it seems to me has said, hey, here’s a new cooking machine. It can’t do the stuff your zillion dollar hundred-gadget kitchen can currently do – and you need to spend some time learning how this new gizmo works if you want to benefit from what it can do particularly well – but if you take the time to learn what it can do – you’ll be surprised at how convenient and efficient it can be!
Maybe FCP-X will turn out to be something akin to a brash new microwave oven in a shop full of classic Vulcan ranges.
It is absolutely true that microwave ovens are NOT ideal for all cooking. But I don’t know of a single professional kitchen that doesn’t have them around because what they do well – like softening butter in seconds rather than minutes – is a HUGE improvement over the traditional process of leaving it out on the counter for an hour.
And there are whole very successful restaurants that are based on the modern “commissary kitchen” concept where all they do is essentially heat and serve “dish-out” concoctions – and make a handsome profit by keeping the need for too many in-house “top chefs” minimal. In fact, that’s the typical structure of most Mexican, Chinese, Thai and many, many other types of restaurants. Dish-out rules over “cook to order” – precisely because it’s much, MUCH more efficient and much less labor intensive – so restaurants of that type are typically more accessible to more people than chef-run “fine dining” establishments.
And here’s the big deal, to my mind. When the microwave oven got to a certain stage of development – some smart person noticed that while it heated INCREDIBLY WELL – it had difficulty with browning – so they combined the super-efficient microwave oven with a convection oven in the same device and like magic – people suddenly get the faster cooking times of the new gadget WITH the nicely browned crusts that were missing for awhile.
Times and tools change. So must we. Simple as that.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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Well that’s kind of presumptuous, don’t you think?
You think the FCP development team sat down and said “Hey, lets’ screw with our customers and change what we call things in order to make their lives miserable.”???
The thinking behind their changing naming conventions might not be intuitive to you or to me – but that does NOT imply that it was done without thought or consideration.
Perhaps someday we’ll learn why.
But until then, the contention it was done just to piss current editors off is a pretty massive stretch, IMO.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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[Bill Davis]Well that’s kind of presumptuous, don’t you think?
You think the FCP development team sat down and said “Hey, lets’ screw with our customers and change what we call things in order to make their lives miserable.”???Why does it have to be this particular scenario? Maybe they didn’t think they, maybe they just thought they were being cool.
The thinking behind their changing naming conventions might not be intuitive to you or to me – but that does NOT imply that it was done without thought or consideration.
Perhaps someday we’ll learn why.
That’s being just as presumptuous, and why do you give this almost religious-like power to a tech company…as if everything they do is ABSOLUTELY right and only we need to see it, even if its purpose is not fully understood until due time?
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[Bill Davis] “But Walter, This is to argue that FCP-X is an fatally limited or insignificant tool in and of itself. Something that it a LONG way from being proven.”
Sorry if I was unclear, here, Bill — but I definitely wasn’t trying to argue that. I didn’t mention FCPX at all in my post on purpose.
I was challenging Andree’s assertion that a professional is “a person that can take anything [you throw] at him and he will make something out of it [that is worthwhile].”
I think an important part of what a professional does when working on a job is to choose the appropriate tools and materials for that job. Neither balsa nor a Swiss Army knife are appropriate for building a deck.
Of course, that doesn’t meant that balsa isn’t the right choice for a different project. They used to build airplanes with balsa wood, and it’s still frequently used in composite materials.
So it goes with FCPX.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Because every single person on the FCP development team are among the lucky elites in the software coding industry. They’re working with an industry leading, wildly successful product – and for a company that commands resources that rival any company on the planet.
To accept your view, I’d have to believe that the hiring managers for this team are so fundamentally stupid that they are willing to employ and award access to the code base of this hugely successful product – to people willing to write and install code that allows “cool” to trump functional.
Sorry, but that’s NOT intelligent thinking, IMO.
I base this on KNOWING that while FCP-X works very differently from what came before it – it also works, very, VERY well to do the vast majority of things that the average video editor needs to do – and does a lot of stuff that has formerly been IMPOSSIBLE to do anywhere near as efficiently and easily.
Does it NOT do popular and important things that the earlier verision did? Absolutely. It took 10 years of development to put all those feature rooms under the FCP roof. X is a starter home with a couple of years of development and a couple of months of life behind it.
In presenting this package to the market, Apple elected to lose attributes that smaller segments of the users class have VERY passionate feelings about – but that aren’t CRITICAL for everyone.
I personally think this is going to be a massively winning strategy.
But time will tell.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Conner
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