FCPX from an Editor who used it on Iditarod 2012

[Chris Harlan]

[Bill Davis] “Not out of FCP-legacy you didn’t. Unless you spit out a standalone file, opened up an email app, used the finder to navigate to that file. attached it to the email , and sent it on it’s way. then navigated back to FCP.
“

You make it sound so hard, Bill. All that “navigating.” And, here, all I thought I had to do was click a few things. So, with FCP X, what happens when you want to use something other than the couple of bundled services? I guess you’ve got to get your parka on and set forth navigating.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “Not out of FCP-legacy you didn’t. Unless you spit out a standalone file, opened up an email app, used the finder to navigate to that file. attached it to the email , and sent it on it’s way. then navigated back to FCP.

Now al that is in a simple menu directly inside the X interface. And along with email, you get a nice choice of other “publishing” options including easy access to YouTube and Vimeo – complete with the ability to tag your output with search terms for basic search engine optimization.”

You’re moving the goal posts, Bill. In your previous post, the one Chris and I commented on, you said that now that you have FCPX you can upload for client approval instead and no longer have to make DVD screeners and FedEx them out. The uploading method is not unique to FCPX, which was your implication from the previous post, but I agree that it can takes a few less mouse clicks in FCPX than it would in other NLEs.

And, like Michael said, basic tapeless archiving can be as simple as a mirrored pair of HDDs and a spreadsheet tracking what’s on each one. I’ve been doing this for personal & small side projects for years (as well as at the ‘zillion dollar’ company I used to work at). For my own things I recently got CatDV to replace my spreadsheet as I started to want more info at my fingertips than what is practical to put in the spreadsheet.

I’m all for giving FCPX credit where credit is due, but there’s no reason to go for an infomercial style, over the top hard sell.

-Andrew

2.9 GHz 8-core (4,1), FCP 7.0.3, 10.6.6
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (7.9.5)

[Bill Davis]

[Michael Hancock] ” am curious, can you set up your own template to compress to a particular file type then immediately upload it to an FTP site? I’ve played with FCPX some but I haven’t messed with the publish features. Are they customizable, and if so to what degree?”

As with most Apple software designs, you’re given basic capabilities inside the program that fit the most common export profiles – particularly if those are satisfied by technologies that Apple owns and don’t have to license from outside.

I suspect that the X designers felt that FTP will be dying out since there are so many more “user friendly” choices every day ala YouSendIt and Dropbox – the kind of services I see creative pros using today instead of the somewhat arcane FTP utilities.

So inside X, you get a menu of sixteen primary choices.

The first 4 are Media Browser, Apple Devices, DVD, and BlueRay.

(the Media Browser, btw, is very interesting to me – as it allows you to “publish” your video in various Apple friendly sizes (iPod to “Mac and PC” that are accessible to you regardless of whether the source media is present. It’s a “published final” state. truncated from the original file, if that’s what you need – very much like an “export” in Legacy – but one that the program indexes and manages from an internal media browser, rather than just randomly plopping it wherever you have the finder currently saving things.

Ignoring the podcast producer (since I don’t do that), you arrive at email, this is a single choice interface that combines significant compression, and a message creation interface so you can shoot out approval copies via email simply and easily from within the program.

The major services block comes next. YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and CNN’s iReport. These all allow you to store your account settings and do one click publishing to sites you choose with your account settings and passwords stored and auto-inserted to make recurring “publishing” easier.

Next is the big one, IMO. It’s Export Media and lets you do limited customization of a standalone output file. Admittedly it’s pretty Apple Centric centered on ProRes and H-264 – but that makes sense since these are all codec choices that Apple has the rights to use without further licensing arrangements. This is also where you can use Roles to create audio and video stems for some forms of collaborative work.

Exporting from Export Media is also the gateway to creating files that I pull into Episode if I need to transcode to something like WMV, FLV or SWF for older style corporate servers, etc.

There are also images sequence options for animation work, HTTP streaming, etc.

All in all, its a pretty modern array of choices centered around Apple’s licenses that reflects their view of how people will generate and share work in the “connected” future.

FWIW.

“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’Connor

[Walter Soyka]

[Bill Davis] “I suspect that the X designers felt that FTP will be dying out since there are so many more “user friendly” choices every day ala YouSendIt and Dropbox – the kind of services I see creative pros using today instead of the somewhat arcane FTP utilities.”

“FTP is dead” is the new “tape is dead.” Like tape or even the 40-year-old EDL, sometimes good ol’ FTP may be a better fit for a specific workflow. Although I have subscriptions to both YouSendIt and Dropbox, I still must use FTP extensively for moving image sequences or large single movie files that are impractical for the newer browser-based cloud storage services.

You know what? I’m totally ok with my creative apps not having an FTP utility built in. I need them to let me create. I have other applications for the backend workflow stuff.

Bill, I think the reason you get a lot of pushback on examples like this one is that there’s a perception that FCPX makes easy things easier, but also sometimes makes hard things harder — and you’re only highlighting the easy stuff.

Personally, I’m most interested in FCPX’s success stories where it has made a hard thing easier.

I do agree with you that FCPX has enormous potential; I’m just not sure I can agree with you that it will live up to it. I also believe that the Internet and mobility are not changing media production fundamentals any more than the dot-com boom and crash changed business fundamentals. For these reasons, I don’t think that talking about what FCPX might someday allow is as beneficial as talking about what it can do today.

For now, I’m very interested in the practical benefits of FCPX. I’d love to hear about how people are working around the scary reliability and performance concerns on big projects so they can take advantage of features like the cool built-in DAM. I’d love to hear how people are using FCPX and collaborating with others.I’d love to hear how people are staying organized better with project duplication, or speeding up their work with keyword ranges, or making better cuts (or getting faster approvals) using auditions, or building and using rigged Motion templates for graphics.

One-click upload doesn’t impress me, because the manual process isn’t daunting at all. Native no-transcode editing doesn’t impress me, because both PrP and MC (to an extent) can do it. Portable editorial doesn’t impress me, because you could do it with FCP1 on a PowerBook G3 twelve years ago.

Once we look over these, I think there are many real cases where FCPX can win because of a specific advantage no one else has. I’m sure you have some of those stories to tell yourself. Those are the ones I’d love to hear about and learn from.

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

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “One-click upload doesn’t impress me, because the manual process isn’t daunting at all. Native no-transcode editing doesn’t impress me, because both PrP and MC (to an extent) can do it. Portable editorial doesn’t impress me, because you could do it with FCP1 on a PowerBook G3 twelve years ago.

Once we look over these, I think there are many real cases where FCPX can win because of a specific advantage no one else has. I’m sure you have some of those stories to tell yourself. Those are the ones I’d love to hear about and learn from.”

Walter,

I get your perspective. But in this, your view and mine simply don’t dovetail. I wrote for so long for a general video editing audience, so I tend to try to “universalize” what I post. While I know it’s going to be read and critiqued by you and many other working professionals here, it’s also going to be read by a large audience that isn’t working at the top level of production.

My writing orientation has always been not to get so caught up in my interest in the “high level features” that I forget that others might not know as much about the software’s more basic capabilities as you and I.

And if other packages have similar capabilities so what? Does that make a discussion of how they’re implemented in X less useful in a forum where the Software’s name is right up front?

Let’s not forget that these basic capabilities are often precisely the ones that make a particular software approach more productive for a particular user.

X is a program for a LOT of different kinds of editors. And for every one of you who is only marginally interested in Share – I bet there are a large number of people reading here who knew very little about that particular capability in X before my post – and will be a bit more able to see if the tool might appeal to them if they can better understand what X offers in this area.

I get that you and others here are at a level where “share” represents a lot of duplication of what you already do in your sophisticated workflows. And if “top level pros” was the exclusive target audience for X, I’d agree with you. But its not. Just like Legacy, X has, from the beginning, been promoted by Apple as a “general purpose” professional video editing tool for the modern editing era. Not one exclusively built for large shops with traditional model workflows.

I suspect that as many come here to explore what FCP-X can do as continue to come here exclusively to crow about what it can’t. And particularly, since this forum seems to keep getting almost weekly “promotional announcements” about it’s competitors capabilities, I think providing the audience with discussions about what it can is every bit as germane to these discussions.

So that I took the time to post about some of the areas where it’s designers built-in some “non-traditional” workflow enhancements purpose built for the new connected era – and that’s worth noting.

Fair is fair, after all.

“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’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Herb Sevush] “On the other hand people praise X for it’s speed. I don’t see how continuous crashing helps your overall cutting speed, even with lossless reboots, but hey, that’s just me.”

It’s because it’s not actually “continuous crashing” at all. It’s more like “situational crashing” – in some circumstances where the database processes get confused because they don’t have time to do their work before the user moves on – you can get into loops where crashes become more common until the software gets its organization sorted out.

When things are properly stored and rendered and where X expects them to be – I can editing contentedly for DAYS without a hint of a crash – moving between projects and versions with speed.

Then I’ll get into something complex, and forget that the engine is chugging away in the background and I’ll keep asking it to keep up with more and more commands until it gets angry with me and demands my attention with a “soft crash.” (I label it that because 99 times out of 100 on re-boot I end up right where i left off.)

So you can call that “continuous crashing” if you like. But if you use the software as much as I do for daily work – you start to get feel for when to keep pushing and when to back off and let X do it’s behind the scenes stuff – and that process alone seems to reduce crashes to a minimum.

Again, it’s a different beast than Legacy. And I suspect there’s a LOT going on in the code behind the scenes that make it work this way.

FWIW.

“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’Connor

[Tony West]

[Chris Harlan] “Yeah, that would be a challenge. Fortunately, I’ve never seen such a thing in the kind of format you are talking about.
“

But what am I talking about? A round table, entertainment show or Supercross that’s not live but needs to be posted for air at a later date.

It all goes to the same point. Complicated audio on multi-cam shoots mixed down before it leaves the truck for post.

Dude wait! Don’t plug all that audio in! People have not seen such a thing!

[Chris Harlan]

[tony west] “[Chris Harlan] “Yeah, that would be a challenge. Fortunately, I’ve never seen such a thing in the kind of format you are talking about.
”

But what am I talking about? A round table, entertainment show or Supercross that’s not live but needs to be posted for air at a later date.”

Tony, I’m afraid I sometimes get a bit lost in conversation with you. You were talking about a hypothetical “job with 20 mics or more without a truck there to mix it,” to which you added, “I wouldn’t want to work that job anyway.” You didn’t specify what kind of job, other than its a remote, so I don’t know why you are asking me to guess.

Whatever format you were or were not talking about, it involved a remote truck, and I was simply agreeing with you that twenty ISOs coming off of a truck without anyone riding herd on them would be daunting, and probably unnecessary, and though I can imagine such things exist, I personally have not seen them.

[Tony West]

[Chris Harlan] ” so I don’t know why you are asking me to guess. “

I didn’t ask you to guess anything. You decided to comment to me.

You assumed those two examples I gave were the only types of events.

I didn’t ask you to assume that.

Big complicated event audio uses trucks for the most part and the sound is mixed down.

I don’t know what’s confusing about that.

[Chris Harlan]

[tony west] “[Chris Harlan] ” so I don’t know why you are asking me to guess. ”

I didn’t ask you to guess anything. You decided to comment to me. “

Yes, you did.

[tony west] “You assumed those two examples I gave were the only types of events.

I didn’t ask you to assume that.”

No, I didn’t.

[tony west] “Big complicated event audio uses trucks for the most part and the sound is mixed down.

I don’t know what’s confusing about that.
“

I’m not confused. I’ve been around big events for far longer than you have. I’ve been in all sorts of trucks. I have a friend who operates his own very nice, very large truck. And, in other parts of my career, I’ve spent quite a bit of time mixing down analog sound myself. I really am not confused about trucks, remotes, or sound mixing. Really.

I’ll tell you, though, what is confusing me, Tony; it is that I haven’t the slightest idea what it is you are talking about. This started as a brief comment about ISOs, and has mushroomed into some sort of conversation that makes me feel like, well, I’m on mushrooms. Any part of the miscommunication I might be responsible for, I’m really sorry.