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FCP X – food for thought
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[Jim Wiseman] “Software companies have got to come up with a way to release great software without relying on the coercion of rental and disappearing projects or the dumbing down of tools to appeal to the mass market. It is going to affect the pro market more than any other. I would be happy topay outright or buy hardware to get perpetual licenses.”
I can only imagine the uproar if Adobe announced that its software would only run on Adobe brand computers or required Adobe brand I/O cards to work. I certainly do not miss the days of closed ecosystem hardware. I have Avid, PPro, FCP 7, FCP X and Resolve 11 installed on my Mac and they can all use the same I/O hardware. Wouldn’t have been possible even just 5yrs ago and I say good riddance to those days (though I am forcefully tied to BM I/O as long as I want to run Resolve).
I do agree that it would be to the benefit of all of us if the software industry can turn around the race to the bottom that’s already started.
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Where Adobe and Avid score points all over Apple is communication with the community. That’s quite obvious in this link Dennis posted about Murch at IBC.
https://www.tvbeurope.com/walter-murch-talks-premiere-pro/
It goes to your point about Al, too. This is something that the FCP team had in the early days and lost over the subsequent years. The “tablets from on high” attitude tends to alienate users who might otherwise be happy to deal with various issues within the product.
The fact that what should be public events, when a group of editors meets with Pro Apps in Cupertino, is shrouded in secrecy and most of the participants quake in their shoes to reveal the details, says a lot.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Lack of anything interesting going on within the app itself. It is a great cuts, dissolves, trimming app, but there just isn’t any effects. You can get some free generators and transitions with Universe free, but there aren’t any text animations not even a way to build text animations. The transitions included are blah and there aren’t any effects or generators worth noting. Fusion looks very powerful, but its not it integrated into the app like motion or AE.
So it’s free, and they certainly have a good base plus an overkill CC for most things but all the little extras you get with AE/Premiere or X/Motion are severely missing. And unless you’re a company with dedicated audio and graphics artists you’re going to be renting Adobe anyway for your graphics needs.
And so far I’ve spent hours trying to make sense of their audio tracks/system. I suppose it’s like Premiere because it’s not like 7. Why does everyone need to overcomplicate audio? 7 had it right. None of the multichannel track mess. I prefer 7s straightforward 1 track, 1 channel system where everything was pananble. I can’t speak for Premiere but Resolve’s audio is still lacking and confusing. I’m not a fan of being able to put a 4 channel or more clip on one track. Or not being able to pan a single channel clip unless it’s in a stereo track and the single channel clip itself has been deemed a stereo clip. Its a mess.
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[Bret Williams] ” Why does everyone need to overcomplicate audio? 7 had it right. None of the multichannel track mess. I prefer 7s straightforward 1 track, 1 channel system where everything was pananble. I can’t speak for Premiere but Resolve’s audio is still lacking and confusing. I’m not a fan of being able to put a 4 channel or more clip on one track.”
Agree totally. This was Ppro’s biggest failing when it first came out, and it has since been corrected so that you can force it to act like FCP7 most of the time, but this fascination with “all-in-one” audio tracks still persists and seems to be in the core of Ppro’s DNA.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Oliver Peters] “Where Adobe and Avid score points all over Apple is communication with the community. That’s quite obvious in this link Dennis posted about Murch at IBC.”
This is what I hate most.
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Have you tried Resolve’s? It looks like the same complexity but without the benefit of aux sends and all that. Not a fan of track mixing at all either which might be why FCP X’s system doesn’t give me much of a problem. But for track mixing I’ve always strayed away from the idea because when I moved clips around from track to track, the mix was totally shot, requiring even more upfront organization and more hoops to jump through.
If anyone has made sense of the audio clip attributes / timeline track types where it can at least act sort of normal, I’d love the enlightenment.
I recently thought I’d port of the most basic of edits to resolve. A simple interview shot on 4k utilizing synchronized clips. So audio channels were camera mics. 2 other were linked/synced and were from a zoom or whatnot. I took the 4k and made it look like 2 angles, panned them, zoomed in, etc. and that all worked pretty well. Keyframes were retained as were speed changes but sizing was not. I guess you shouldn’t use “none” in X as spatial conform attributes. It doesn’t come across. But the audio was a complete mess. In fact, in some places the wrong audio was connected. In other places it seemed like the right audio was connected, but there were multitudes of connected audio tracks nested together. A mess.
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[Oliver Peters] “Aperture was originally developed by a pro design team that’s no longer in place at Apple. Same for Motion to some extent. This was all before the iPhone. With iPhone and iCloud, photography creation, sharing and archiving has become a basic component of the iCloud ecosystem. When that was fully in place – and without internal champions for Aperture as a pro tool – Photos became the more suitable and streamlined app to replace both Aperture and iPhoto.”
Photography is becoming more of a niche market. I know our organization rarely hires photographers anymore and we used to hire them all the time. I think Apple rightly predicted there is an increasingly small number of professional photographers out there. Now, there still remain a lot of hobbyists that would use Aperture. And whether Apple was wise to give up this market is subject to debate.
I just don’t see this happening to the video/audio world. Why? Because these things are just simply a lot more complicated than photography is. This is not to take away from the artistic skills of professional photographers or say there is never a use for a professional photographer. But, if you’ve ever tried sending out a camera with a non-professional (I have) you get somewhat salvageable photos, and totally useless video. Photographers often only need one moment to capture something. As a videographer, you need, at a minimum, dozens of shots plus interviews because you have a narrative to build.
What the future holds is hard to say. Certainly a concentration of more tasks on a single video professional (of course, I’m already there). But I don’t see it on a parallel track with photography.
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[Herb Sevush] “Agree totally. This was Ppro’s biggest failing when it first came out, and it has since been corrected so that you can force it to act like FCP7 most of the time, but this fascination with “all-in-one” audio tracks still persists and seems to be in the core of Ppro’s DNA.”
I’m not a fan of how PPro or Resolve do audio. One of the first things I find myself doing with new PPro jobs is setting the audio configuration of source media BEFORE ever editing them to a timeline.
Like others, I find this less problematic with X, mainly because it’s easier to deal with on the timeline than it is in PPro. I like the FCP7 and Avid MC way of dealing with it, but I like submix busses that PPro offers.
Overall, the big selling point of X’s approach to audio is that you collapse complex audio into a container to hide the complexity. If others could figure out how to do something like that with a cluster of 8 mono source channels within a track-based architecture, for example, you might have the best of both worlds.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Brett Sherman] “What the future holds is hard to say. Certainly a concentration of more tasks on a single video professional (of course, I’m already there). But I don’t see it on a parallel track with photography.”
Agreed. This would also explain why there’s still Garage Band and Logic Pro X. More complex and a different mindset on the creative side of things.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Michael Phillips] “What if Adobe and FCPx worked equally well as Media Composer on ISIS and/or Interplay- how committed would Avid be to its own NLE? “
Under the bus in a heartbeat….IF they were to become profitable in the way you describe.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter
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