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FCPX in action
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[Oliver Peters] ” I realize the BBC actually uses a lot of difference NLE brands in its different units (news, sports, docs, dramas, etc.), but I was curious about the implementation of Premiere Pro versus FCP X”
Its not a case of Premiere versus FCPX, I spoke to my producer and said I wanted to try out FCPX on our show, she said, yes go for it, so we asked the village to set up a suite.
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[Gary Huff] “For your point to make sense to me, I would have to keep every project ever listed in FCPX and on a permanently attached, massive storage RAID system.”
Again this shows how deeply you misunderstand X.
There’s absolutely NO baked-in need to “keep every project … on a massive storage RAID.”
It’s a perfectly viable option – but NOT a requirement.
You can keep your projects on $200 Firewire 800 drives and load them as needed.
You can publish your “live masters” out to Vimeo Pro or YouTube where they’re accessible to the world in the interim.By keeping a simple iPhone size encode of an X project in the Share menu, I can “see and scrub” the latest version of any project with an incredibly small hard drive footprint – and IF I decide to work on it, it takes me about two minutes to load and re-link the high rez version via a plug in drive.
Look, I understand that you decided to stop exploring X. That’s fine. It’s also absolutely fine that you decided to rely on other tools.
What’s NOT fine is to argue about a software’s capabilities from a position of being ill-informed about how it actually functions.
That’s all I’m saying.
“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
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[Gary Huff] “My point was that for me personally, it seems like people who are enjoying using it, and posting their workflow methods, are going to great lengths to trick the program or make it conform to what they need, and, frankly, I’d rather wrangle with the content and the edit itself than fight the NLE to make it do what I want.”
Can you be more specific? Since FCPX doesn’t have tracks like other NLEs, it’s going to work differently. This doesn’t means it’s a work around. I know some folks avoid the primary storyline for some types of edits, but that doesn’t mean everyone does it. What other examples do you have?
[Gary Huff] “Nor will I argue that Premiere is perfect, because no NLE is (just like there’s no one camera that can do it all). But that it works cross-platform is a big plus, that it works with Dynamic Linkage to AE is a big plus (and, frankly, if FCPX/Motion worked in similar fashion, that would be worth a more detailed look), and I love the fact that it works with native media (which FCPX does too, but I’m not sure if it has the same support for everything that Premiere does). I don’t have a massive RAID for all my projects, so I prefer the Premiere method of having self-contained projects that I can work with, instead of the database system that I have to use a 3rd party app to turn projects off and on in the list (thus making FCPX’s keyword organization system of no value). I think most of those who are blown away by FCPX are going from FCP7 to FCPX, not from Media Composer 6 or Premiere CS5 and up over to FCPX, though if someone is, I’d be interested in hearing their reasoning.”
There are many advantages for any NLE. If working native is an advantage to you, then yes, no question Pr takes the cake. If Ae integration is an advantage, then yes Cs6 is a logical choice.
There are things you have to do to make any NLE run the way you need it to run. If buying a $4.99 application that helps keep your Events and Projects organized is too much to ask, then FCPX is not for you. There’s no doubt about that.
My point is that without really using it, it’s hard to see the benefits when on this forum there are a bunch of complaints from people that disagree both with the theory of FCPX, and disagree with it from a cursory level. As an example, as I’m sure you know that when you import and XML in Pr CS6 it creates duplicate copies of media in your project (just in the project, not in the finder). If you accidentally delete the wrong copy of media, that media is physically deleted out of your timeline with no record of it ever being there. To me, this is a catastrophic failure. As you say, nothing and nobody is perfect. This represents a limitation of the CS6 interface. As a shop that shares a common media and projects, this tends to make Pr projects a total and complete mess without exacting and careful measures. Since you can’t have more than one Pr project open at a time, tracking all of these changes becomes fairly difficult rather quickly to keep track of it all. I haven’t had any data loss problems with FCPX like this, and there’s also methods in place if you DO have a SAN that tracks Events and Projects quite nicely.
It’s all relative.
Jeremy
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[Gary Huff] “(and, frankly, if FCPX/Motion worked in similar fashion, that would be worth a more detailed look)”
Me too. The relationship between the two in Studio was terrific. If I needed to do a matte, all I had to do was toss the shot to Motion. One of the big sells for me picking up X, would be reestablishing that relationship.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “If you accidentally delete the wrong copy of media, that media is physically deleted out of your timeline with no record of it ever being there. To me, this is a catastrophic failure. As you say, nothing and nobody is perfect. “
I should add to this.
If Pr’s relative advantages to MY workflow are such that working and knowing exactly how Pr fails and what I need to watch out for (i.e. workarounds) is enough to allow me to leverage what is great about Pr, then that is all that matters. This is the same for FCPX. You sometimes have to know what to watch out for, but once you do, the strengths of the program are enough to be a logical choice of NLE.
Jeremy
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Not completely different, but acknowledging the platform specifics wouldn’t kill anybody. Wasn’t CS4 32 bit on Mac and 64 bit on PC? I think if Mac versions had a better feature or system functions tailored to the platform, the nightmare would be specifically for PC people would would either want it desperately or call it a gimmick. For those who really commit to a platform (either way) customized options tailored to the platform would be a good thing. That consistancy across Apple apps is what makes using them so pleasant (and part of why I really dig FCPX).
And you totally busted me on CUDA/GCD. I was reaching, obviously :).
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[John Davidson] ” Wasn’t CS4 32 bit on Mac and 64 bit on PC?”
Premiere Pro CS4 was 32 bit, but it would work on 64 bit systems. PPro didn’t go 64 bit until CS5. I think you may be thinking of Photoshop CS4.
https://www.macworld.com/article/1132810/photoshop64.html
“At WWDC 2007 Apple discontinued its Carbon 64-bit program, which left company’s like Adobe without an avenue to make its current codebase 64-bit.”
“Adobe said that they have been working on the Carbon 64-bit version of Photoshop for some time and had planned on releasing a version for Creative Suite 4 (CS4). However, with the changes at WWDC 2007, that is not going to happen.”
“Our feeling has been to deliver 64-bit on both platforms for this release,” said Nack. “We could hold back the Windows 64-bit version until we could catch up on the Mac, but that didn’t seem fair to those customers.”
Shawn
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[John Davidson] “Not completely different, but acknowledging the platform specifics wouldn’t kill anybody.”
You can’t accommodate all the platform specifics of Windows and all the platform specifics of the Mac without breaking Adobe’s own internal consistency. Instead, they’ve chosen to essentially create a platform that’s neither Windows nor Mac, but is still sensible on both.
[John Davidson] “Wasn’t CS4 32 bit on Mac and 64 bit on PC?”
Yes, but as Shawn detailed, that was absolutely Apple’s fault. Apple had talked up Carbon 64 in 2006 and even seeded beta versions of Carbon 64 to developers before abruptly pulling the plug in June of 2007.
That left Adobe in a bit of a pickle. They could skip CS4 on the Mac, they could hold back CS4 on the PC, or they could release CS4 on Mac as 32-bit only and work toward rewriting their wrappers in Cocoa for CS5. I think they made the best choice.
From Apple, it would have been far friendlier to developers to have either not committed to 64-bit Carbon in the first place or to have launched and then deprecated 64-bit Carbon gracefully.
[John Davidson] “I think if Mac versions had a better feature or system functions tailored to the platform, the nightmare would be specifically for PC people would would either want it desperately or call it a gimmick. For those who really commit to a platform (either way) customized options tailored to the platform would be a good thing.”
Well, what if the PC versions had some better features or system functions tailored to Windows — but different ones than the Mac? Or what if you like the Mac feature set on Photoshop, but the PC feature set on After Effects?
If you consider Adobe Creative Suite itself to be a platform, creating host-specific features destroys its value.
Imagine if you couldn’t guarantee that your version of Photoshop would render a file the same way as the person who sent it to you, because you were on different platforms. Imagine if some files became essentially read-only because you were on a different platform and relied on a feature you didn’t have. If they’re not exactly the same app, they may as well be totally different apps (see Microsoft Office).
I am sympathetic to your point — it’d be nice if the apps felt more like other apps on the platform — but it’s a slippery slope from there to pandemonium.
[John Davidson] “That consistancy across Apple apps is what makes using them so pleasant (and part of why I really dig FCPX).”
I’d say the same thing about the Adobe apps — their consistency across apps and platforms is a plus for me.
I could also argue that Apple is among the worst UI-consistency offenders on the Mac platform today. OS X, the bundled apps, and the Pro Apps are all just a little bit different. Ironically, full-frame apps like Motion and FCPX are more traditionally PC-like than Mac-like, which has, until recently, encouraged separate floating windows.
[John Davidson] “And you totally busted me on CUDA/GCD. I was reaching, obviously :).”
The technical minutia aside, your larger points stands. There are a lot of great features on the Mac platform, and I do understand why you’d want a set of fully-native-feeling apps that can exploit those features. It would make your experience better, and thus the Mac platform as a whole more valuable.
I just think that those benefits are far outweighed by the negatives of splintering a fully cross-platform suite into two platform-specific suites.
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
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That logic is why Adobe programs on mac are limited and built for PC’s. That dog will only go as fast as its slowest leg.
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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The underperformance of Adobe on Mac is largely an Apple problem. To be fair why should Adobe give as much effort to develop software for a minority hardware/OS platform. I think that the long association for many of us with Mac hardware & Apple software has made us forget that most people use Win software and hardware.
Hard to fault Adobe’s logic. The fact that they do try to keep software parity shows they are keen to woo disgruntled FCP Legend users. Seems to be a good business strategy. Bitch to Apple about graphics card availability and cost.
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