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FCPX and college students pro cons?
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[Gary Hazen] “begin rant
Unfortunately the schools don’t spend any time teaching the boring stuff. I once asked a professor if they taught the students how to read a scope and he said, “No we don’t have time for that, we teach em’ Media Composer and Final Cut – that’s about all the time we have.” The primary focus of a course on TV/Production should be on the fundamentals rather than a specific NLE. Editing platforms come and go, the fundamentals are constant.
— end ran”I actually agree with this rant. It is unfortuante in our school this is also the case, not having enough time. But “lucky” for the students who work for me I cram this stuff down their throats. I can tell those that actual learn the technicle stuff and the “Whys” are the ones who end up getting better jobs or move through the ranks of their jobs quicker. The age old qoute is true Knowledge is Power.
Mike Jeffs
Video Coordinator
BYU-Idaho -
There’s another point to consider: at this time there’s no guarantee that FCPx will be around in a couple of years.
I know that many here will find this an outrageous statement but it’s clear from Apple not touting sales figures that X has not exactly been flying off the virtual shelves. We could hazard a guess what the paid base so far is. Thousands? Probably. Tens of thousands? I’d wonder.
In any case that they, who love to tout impressive new release sales figures, have been silent, is telling that they’ve nothing to tout about.
It’s also clear that their vast majority of sales and profits are coming from consumer products. If they’re willing to abandon their entire high end user base then how easy will it be for them to let this product, that’s cost them so much in development and prestige, slip beneath the waves to oblivion.
Now before anyone starts citing the announcement that there’ll be multicam and support for third party monitoring by early next year I think it wise to both remember that the same has been said about many products in the past that were shortly thereafter EOLd – and to read between the lines – ‘support’ means an API – the third parties still have to write working drivers and that will take a while. So maybe by 3rd or 4th quarter 2012 if my experience with third party IO drivers is any judge. And even then, FCPx will still not be a mature NLE with a complete ecosystem. That takes a minimum of 3-5 development cycles. Then there’s the magnetic timeline which appears so far to be unsuited for complex, high end work. And with Avid and Adobe clearly positioning themselves to vacuum up the users who are fleeing from FCP they’ll be adding whatever is good about X to their own arsenal of tools. So how many shops will consider returning to the X ship if and when Apple ever gets it up to speed?
All these factors will be weighed by the marketing boys in Apple who control the development purse strings. Judging by the past it’s not inconceivable they’ll kill it. So, as far as the future maybe the best policy is to hope for the best and not be surprised if the worst befalls.
And lest anyone think I’m a happy Cassandra about this, far from it. Even if X is presently something of a marketing disaster, it’s caused many of us to re-think NLEs and to question what we’ve assumed is their most efficient architecture. Nothing is so perfect that it can’t be improved so I’ll continue to read this forum and be delighted when people here push it as hard as they can to discover its limits.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Cherniack] “Even if X is presently something of a marketing disaster, it’s caused many of us to re-think NLEs and to question what we’ve assumed is their most efficient architecture.”
Absolutely agree – whatever our individual conclusions it’s been a fascinating eye-opener and has brought forth some genuinely insightful commentary on a huge range of related topics from some very clever people!
Maybe FCPX should be taught exactly because it is such a challenge to accepted ways of doing things – it certainly seems to get people thinking 😉
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Mike,
I work at Western Colorado Community College in Grand Junction, Colorado. We’re a branch of Colorado Mesa University here. WCCC has been using the Production Premium Suite for five years and the University switched over to the Master Suite this year.
One thing to consider is that as the world starts going transmedia, Adobe provides affordable products that can be used as curriculum changes.
We not only teach video editing, but use the suites in combination with 3D animation programs to create content that goes not only on television, but the web, print, tablets, phones and so forth.
Another thing to consider is that while you may thinking about just video editing, consider that in the Master Suite your students will be learning industry-standard programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign, Acrobat, Flash (and soon HTML5), and Dreamweaver. That’s what convinced us over just buying Avid or FCPX. For a reasonable price, we obtained programs that not only fulfill current needs, but future needs.
“Sometimes Life Needs a Cmd-Z!”
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Granted this was an exceptionally talented kid,”
Thanks for sharing Simon. I stand by my statement that students should learn a traditional track based NLE first, then if they can handle it, be introduced to FCX. I’ve seen people struggle with learning curves, and you can’t start learning something new if you haven’t gotten ahead of the curve on the first thing.
I believe you in the capacity for younger kids to quickly learn and master the software. It’s not just FCX however. I’ve seen most of my kids opening up FCP6 on the G5 they inherited from me, and start doing basic editing without any input from me at all.
I’m struggling with the merits of teaching some co-workers FCP since it’s EOL’d. Is there a whole lot of point to that especially considering all of us on the staff are old enough to remember dial phones and pagers.
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FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com -
[Mark Morache] “I stand by my statement that students should learn a traditional track based NLE first, then if they can handle it, be introduced to FCX.”
It’s funny because I used to train editors all the time. Most of the hires I made were kids just out of school. They hated the fact that their first two weeks were spent on a DVCPro deck to deck machine cutting linear tape.
You see, all these kids already had FCP or Premiere on their computers and had effectively (if not EFFECTIVELY) been non-linear editing for years. Some of them had FCP in their elementary schools, but they all seemed to have had it from high school on. College was their first real training, but they had already built bad habits and colleges are more concerned with the student’s overall knowledge of editing rather than reversing bad practices.
I mention this because I suspect that the next generation of kids will already have a working knowledge of FCPX before they get to college. The $300 price tag, and lack of serious software security will probably ensure that. So colleges who teach Avid, or Premiere, or Media 100 will end up having to teach them about bins and tracks and such, not the other way around.
Whether that poses more of a problem or less of a problem is unknown. It probably won’t be a problem at all. A lot of the students I teach editing to these days are also in Maya and After Effects classes. Those are completely different programs that are extremely deep, but it doesn’t seem to faze my students in the least. I can’t imagine trying to pick up a 3D modeling app at this point.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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I’d say that the poor students might be better off with a student version of Production Premium CS5.5. The whole package is about 400 euros and has anything one would ever need.
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[David Cherniack] “There’s another point to consider: at this time there’s no guarantee that FCPx will be around in a couple of years.”
But Apple, with their billions of dollars in profit is the most stable company with an NLE than any other company that exists.its competition are only millionaires. A slight change of hand, lost sales, marketing palugue, hack can easily put them out of business. But with Apple, the most valuable company in the world, its pretty hard. So in this regard, you can feel more secure that this company is the more reliable option.
Yes massive changes were made, but have’nt we learned anything the past decade?! This is Apple. That’s their thing. They make things infinitely better, they do things right. Sometrimes they do it so fast that we are initially caught stunned for some period but eventually realize that its the most awesome thing ever. It happend over and over again from the iMac G3, the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad…Everybody cried foul and doomed it to fail but meh, it ruled the world. Do you really think FCPX is any different.
Next year the two last requirement for full broadcast integration will be fixed, third party APIs will have completed the plug-ins. FCPX will have been faster and more stable, and every other editor who have just invested thousands into other “traditional” NLEs will look in envy as the el-cheapo guys, kool aid drinkers, Apple sheeps makes awesome stuff on their macbook airs on coffee shops on breaks, docking it into their thunderbolt monitors daisy chained to TB raids and accessing centralized data thru iCloud.
This is the future, It would be fit if you prepare your students for it.
Quobetah
New=Better -
[Gerald Baria] “But Apple, with their billions of dollars in profit is the most stable company with an NLE than any other company that exists.”
Apple, with their billions of dollars, released FCPX and immediately ended sales of FCS3. FCPX is not a replacement for FCS3, so they proved that despite their money they are the least stable of all the NLE producers. They killed Color, Soundtrack and DVDSP overnight and offered no replacement. They proved that pro apps aren’t important to their bottom line, so trusting that they’ll make the greatest NLE and stick with it in the long run is naively optimistic.
[Gerald Baria] “Sometrimes they do it so fast that we are initially caught stunned for some period but eventually realize that its the most awesome thing ever. It happend over and over again from the iMac G3, the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad…Everybody cried foul and doomed it to fail but meh, it ruled the world. Do you really think FCPX is any different.”
Those are consumer products, not professional level apps.
FCP became very popular but was far from the best NLE in the market, as your statement implies. Apple markets well. FCP was woefully lacking in many ways compared to Avid and Adobe and Media 100 and Edius (think camera support, media management, and realtime playback). But people love Apple and are very, very loyal to them. Well, Apple killed a ton of that loyalty with the release of FCPX, hence the popularity of this forum.
Just because it’s made by Apple doesn’t mean it’s the future way of editing, and it certainly doesn’t mean they can regain the ground they’ve lost in the pro market. I would never build an entire business around them – they’re not a dependable supplier for the work we do. Use some of their products? Sure, but not rely on them for everything hardware and software.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
[Gerald Baria] “have’nt we learned anything the past decade?! This is Apple. That’s their thing. They make things infinitely better, they do things right. Sometrimes they do it so fast that we are initially caught stunned for some period but eventually realize that its the most awesome thing ever.”
To answer the question you ask in the first sentence, as judged by the following sentences, apparently not.
David
AllinOneFilms.com
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