-
FCS3: new features vs. more refinement, missing the boat on integration
-
[Dave Jenkins] “Let’s hope there is more than what where seeing now. Something under the hood.”
hopefully. Multicore support….anyone?
Right now it looks like Alan is right. There’s going to be a lot of unhappy people with this release. the only compelling changes are the upgrades to Color… I don’t see anything about FCP I couldn’t gloss over in about 2 minutes.
smells like vaporware a little, eh?
-
[Alan Okey] “Someone needs to bring the entire FCP development team to Autodesk’s headquarters for a Smoke demo so that they can see what a truly integrated toolset should be. “
And then FCP would end up costing as much as Smoke, right? How do you think they can make something that costs $1000 into something that costs ten to twenty times that? There is a reason Smoke costs more. FCP shouldn’t try to be Smoke….Smoke is Smoke. If you want what Smoke does…get Smoke. How many TV shows are EDITED on a Smoke? Documentaries? Indie Features? Narrative shows? Feature films?
You want to compare apps you need to compare FCP to Avid and Premiere. Does Premere integrate After Effects? No…round trip. Does Avid integrate….oh, wait. Avid doesn’t have anything like AE or Motion. And DVD authoring software on an Avid? Very basic and PC only.
[Alan Okey] “Final Cut’s entire UI is painfully outdated.”
To quote something I said on LAFCPUG…Have you seen Avid’s interface? It has gone virtually unchanged since version 7. They have added a few more buttons to include the new features…and yes they added the ability to make custom colors (a bit silly if you ask me, but people like it)…but the basic layout has been the same as it has for years.
WHY? Because editors who have worked for a long time with applications develop patterns and habits that make them fast editors. Change something, even small, and it throws them off their game. A button isn’t were it was before, a menu moved….wrench in the works.
[Alan Okey] “I’ll believe the statement “Improved media management” when I see it for myself. There’s a reason so many people refer to it as the Media Mangler. “
It hasn’t been the media mangler since FCP 6 came out. I use the Media Manager for all sorts of things and have had only two minor issues come up, and that was due to footage not having a REEL number. It is pretty darn solid now.
[Alan Okey] “Motion should have had shadows and reflections in 3D space in the last version. I can’t believe they’re trumpeting this as a “feature” when it’s taken for granted in just about any real compositing application”
Motion is still young…it takes time to grow up. How long did it take AE to implement those features?
And if the FCP interface starts looking like COLOR…I’m switching back to Avid. That is NOT a user friendly interface…just like Premiere isn’t. TOO many options…ugly.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
This all feels like a solid .5 update but not a full blown version update which might be why Apple dropped the price from $1399 to $999 (raise your hand if you purchased FCP stand alone for $999 back in the day). After 2 years I’m a bit underwhelmed especially given the advancements that Adobe and Avid have made in the same timeframe. Don’t get me wrong, there’s new stuff that makes me go “Oh, cool” but it’s stuff that could’ve been rolled out in a point update, IMO.
-A
3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1) -
I’m with you on all points Shane, although I’ve been too scared to use Media Manager since FCP4. I am glad that they have at least attempted improvements on it.
Winston A. Cely
Editor/Owner | Della St. Media, LLCMac Pro 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
4 GB RAM | Final Cut Studio 5.1.4 | Aja Kona LHe“If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling allusion it has been mastered.” – Stanley Kubrick
-
[Shane Ross] “How do you think they can make something that costs $1000 into something that costs ten to twenty times that? There is a reason Smoke costs more. FCP shouldn’t try to be Smoke….Smoke is Smoke. If you want what Smoke does…get Smoke. “
You completely missed my point. I’m not saying that FCP should be Smoke. I’m saying that Apple could learn a lot from the integration of tools in Smoke. Smoke is just an example, not a panacea. You’re right, Smoke is a much stronger finishing tool than it is an editor, and its editing interface is bizarre if you’re not familiar with it. I’m not holding Smoke up as the Golden Standard or the shining example of a perfect product, I’m just using it as an example of the benefits of having a wide and deep toolset in a single application versus round-tripping between poorly integrated separate apps for everything. I would like to see Apple take the opportunity to integrate some of the new tools that they’re developing for their companion apps into FCP itself rather than always insisting on this stupid round-tripping workflow that is anything but seamless.
[Shane Ross] “You want to compare apps you need to compare FCP to Avid and Premiere. Does Premere integrate After Effects? No…round trip. Does Avid integrate….oh, wait. Avid doesn’t have anything like AE or Motion. “
I don’t need to compare FCP to anything from Adobe. I’d much rather hold FCP to a higher standard like Smoke than to compare it to Adobe’s lackluster video products. I don’t care if Premiere isn’t integrating AE. I really couldn’t care less what Adobe is doing. There has to be a better way to integrate tools into FCP to make it a revolutionary, not evolutionary product that creates a new standard for how a software-only editor should work. No one else is currently doing that, and Apple is in a better position to do it than anyone else. Apple is in a prime position to push forward with something new, not merely to continue incremental development in a suite of separate apps.
[Shane Ross] “Motion is still young…it takes time to grow up. How long did it take AE to implement those features? “
The Motion developers ought to know better, because many of them came from the Combustion development team. AE is hardly a benchmark product for anything. All AE has going for it is its ubiquity, which translates to lots of third-party plugin development and user group support. Trying to do just about anything interesting in AE requires a third-party plugin. Zaxwerks, Mocha, etc. You still can’t actively work in the node/schematic view, it’s just there for show. The interface still sucks, but at least it’s not bright platinum like FCP.
My beef with FCP’s interface is primarily its color and its tiny buttons and widgets. A UI should ideally be unobtrusive and get out of the way. It should be color-neutral and dark enough to reduce eye fatigue and not influence color perception. A bright platinum UI is unprofessional and gaudy. Tiny buttons and widgets are cumbersome. I think some simplification is in order. Combustion and Toxik are fantastic examples of a task-based UI. The UI changes according to the selected task at hand, and it stays out of the way. Using a million palettes is not the answer to streamlining an interface. That’s why AE’s UI sucks so much, and FCP isn’t far behind. Color’s “rooms” are a welcome relief – they focus the user on the task at hand rather than trying to pack every single tool onto the same screen.
-
Alan, i agree, the FCP interface is awful, the KFE is industry worst, and integration could be a lot better. Too much iphone on the brian methinks.
Motion templates in fcp still cannot use a timeline as a source clip, cannot use another motion clip as a source clip, so you have to render bits out and then import separate files to apply, and if the client makes one change…
Motion Keyframe Editor, its still next to impossible to select the Y position bezier handle when X is visible because X gets in the way all the time. Surely if one is selected, you should be able to grab that parameter’s bezier handle first, by default? (but this keyframe editor is still 1000 times better than FCP’s)
Till later
Mark.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up