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Final Cut Pro user… considering FCP X… do I upgrade?
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[Herb Sevush] “Considering that the entire article is devoted to ingest and organization and not a single sentence to editing, finishing and delivery, I don’t think that article will do for an answer. Unless your an assistant editor.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions”Yup. Cuz it’s obvious that if X gains a substantial foothold on sets doing all the ingest and key wording – theres NO chance that as its edit tools continue to develop beyond where they are right now anybody would at some point say, “Ah, screw it. we’re already processing the whole front end in X, lets just finish there too since the new 2.0 version (or whatever) now has all the high end workflow bells and whistles as well.”
What exactly is the issue now that X can’t EASILY address with simple, continued development?
The truth is it’s a GREAT editing platform right now. Today.
And the group of potential users who have a specific need that it can’t address is getting smaller and smaller.
Apple is building a new box perfect for it. And if that box is at all affordable, they can transform yet another industry.
Or do you really think that the Hollywood pros will buy and use X because it drives huge costs out of ingest and organization and then Apple won’t be able to leverage that lead into finishing and distribution? Apple? Really?
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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No of that in no way invalidates my point. First of all, what did JJ mean when he said, “24fps”? Playback? Transcoding to ProRes HQ? Because if it’s just playback, then whoopdeedoo. If it’s transcoding, that’s fine, but it’s still real-time (more or less, not counting slo-mo), and I said “serious”…yeah, it’s nice when you can start your transcode and leave it while you go off and do something else, but when you’re on set and everyone’s waiting to go home while you transcode the last full mag that got dropped off to your station right after wrap, then 60fps vs 24 or less starts to look damn good.
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[Craig Seeman] “It seems RED may be moving to GPU support as an alternative to Rocket.”
I’ve been under a rock today. Any new news here from IBC?
More specifically, will GPU support be limited to REDCINE-X, or will other apps be able to use it as they can use the ROCKET?
What would the performance penalty be for using the GPU(s) to decode/debayer/dewhatever R3D while also using the GPU(s) for grading?
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 -
Back to your original question before the answers drove off the Mac Pro cliff. Are you fast, skilled and comfortable in FCP7. If so, X will frustrate you at first until you unlearn a lot of ingrained habits. You might want to take Abobe Premier CC out for a 30 day free spin as well. If familiarity, comfort and speed are what you are looking for. It may be a great fit. It has been for us.
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[Bill Davis] “Apple won’t be able to leverage that lead into finishing and distribution? Apple? Really?”
First of all Bill I wasn’t commenting on X, I was commenting on the article. Someone was offering it as an answer to the question “should I or shouldn’t I” and I merely pointed out that the article only covered ingest, hardly the only thing to consider when choosing an NLE. As opposed to that article, there have been many well written posts right here at the cow that covered the question more completely. You might have even written some of them.
As for the rest of your post – many X users often point to a workflow in which they use Legacy to handle various export limitations that X currently has. How is that different than an Avid user devising a workflow starting with X ingest?
X as an ingest tool does not necessarily lead to X as the main editing tool – especially not on features where the division of labor is quite specific.
As for Apple leveraging that situation into something more significant, you have spent the past 2 years claiming that feature film and broadcast editing is a tiny niche and one that is rapidly dying out. Why on earth would Apple care what happens in a market that you have been so deliriously happy they have left behind.
If Apple cared about holding onto that market, one would have thought they would have handled the release differently.
[Bill Davis] “Apple is building a new box perfect for it. And if that box is at all affordable, they can transform yet another industry. “
If by affordable you mean Apple is practically giving them away, then yeah, that would be something.
But assuming that they are not willing to loose money on each sale, then there is nothing about either the Tube or X that is or will transform anything. Both might succeed in their markets, but nothing about them enables users to do anything they can’t already do.This is not 12 years ago when FCP plus DV allowed editors to lower their cost of entry almost tenfold. The cost savings on ingest mentioned in that article, even if accurate, are a drop in the bucket when considered next to the complete post budget of even a small feature. There is at this time no proof of any other cost saving to using X in this market.
Transformative – you’d have to explain that one to me. Unless you think one click posting to Vimeo is transformative. In that they seem to have the market sown up.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “Someone was offering it as an answer to the question “should I or shouldn’t I” and I merely pointed out that the article only covered ingest, hardly the only thing to consider when choosing an NLE.”
Actually, not really. The article also discussed the end to end creation of secondary uses such as production dailys and the turnkey EPK material – which I presume would include final output of beneficial work in usable form. So that’s far beyond just “ingest.” While this particular production might not be doing the editing of their MASTER directly in FCP-X, Sam mentioned elsewhere that after a 3 day layover in NYC, he’s headed out again, and this time the motion picture project he’s slated to work on is scheduled to do their final edit in X.
I don’t know him personally nor would I ever I presume to speak for him or anyone else, but, but it sounds like he feels that X is very much an underrated technical solution for high level content creation in a pretty wide sense.
I’m sure the discussion will continue and we’ll know more as time goes on. But what is indisputable is that the “re-imagining” of editing around metadata manipulation that forms the very core of X – appears to be starting to yield benefits across and wider and wider range of production types – feature films being one of them.
Which is good for all. It will keep AVID and Premier on their toes if they come to feel that the concepts built into the core of X are useful and they they need to elevate their game beyond the “this is the way we’ve always done it, now just everyone do it faster and in a cloud” mode of thinking.
Honestly, that WILL work perfectly well for some editors. All they want is to be left alone with the tools they’re already comfortable with and see continuing progress. But thats not the path for all.
AVID has the hollywood rep. Premier has an amazing product depth with what sometimes seems like a zillion moduels many of which work in in concert to meet the needs of a whole range of creative professionals, video editors being just ONE small part of their company focus.. And X is a new kind of editorial and content management construction concept for a new era. Room for all these and more, in my book.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Herb Sevush] “Transformative – you’d have to explain that one to me. Unless you think one click posting to Vimeo is transformative. In that they seem to have the market sown up.”
One point about the one click Herb, it’s just another example of X simplifying the process.
Compressing video for the web used to be kind of a knack on to itself. You had to get the compression right so it wouldn’t be buffing on and on for people with slower connections. You had to strike that balance between nice quality and the speed in which it would play for most people that would see it.
Now folks don’t have to know much about compression. They can just click that one button.
Is that a big deal for people who already knew how to get video up there? No. But for some folks it maybe is.Apple is smart. They still have the compressor program for folks that want to do their own compression so they can reach the advanced and the not so advanced at the same time.
What I like about that button is that, while Chris pointed out it may not be faster, but I can send it up there and leave and run errands and when I come back it’s up there. Not a super big deal but I like it.
It makes me more productive. There is not enough time in the day for me.This guy is really enjoying using X and is out there advocating for the product more effectively than Apple is hahahaha
Clearly he loves what the program can do for him.
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[tony west] “One point about the one click Herb, it’s just another example of X simplifying the process.”
[tony west] “Now folks don’t have to know much about compression. They can just click that one button.
Is that a big deal for people who already knew how to get video up there? No. But for some folks it maybe is.”I never use Vimeo or Youtube for posting, my clients want me to send them files directly, so once again X has this great feature that means nothing to me.
In FCP I export with Quicktime Conversion generally using a very specific set of options. Takes me 30 seconds to set up, I checked with a stopwatch. If I do another export today or use one of the default settings it will take 5 seconds. Uploading a file to Vimeo is literally child’s play – children do it all the time. Is a single “click” more convenient – well yes, as long as your using Vimeo. And quite honestly, touting it makes X sound like it’s designed for morons – which it isn’t. But nothing makes it seem more like an iMovie ap than bragging about “one click” publishing to Vimeo. That’s what you get with an iphone ap.
If the market decrees that this is a big deal, I will expect to see it on Avid and PPro real soon. This is not one of Bill’s meta-data enriched features and it doesn’t seem to require a magnetic timeline.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “I never use Vimeo or Youtube for posting, my clients want me to send them files directly, so once again X has this great feature that means nothing to me.”
Probably because you continue to misunderstand it.
When I send a file to a client via Vimeo Pro – I’ve turned off any Vimeo branding stuff and what they see is simply a URL link that if they click on it, presents a nice, clean, playback (and/or download) window.
It’s a link. They click on it. They can watch or download. It’s NO different from sending them a file directly from their perspective. It’s private, direct, optionally passworded if thats important, and transparent to the end user. AND it’s a LOT simpler for me. (that one-click thing)
They don’t even know that it’s Vimeo unless you tell them.
What Vimeo does (and brilliantly) is do all the transcoding so that a client that logs on with a tablet, or smart phone or desktop machine automatically gets served the right file version to optimize their viewing experience. And I don’t even have to think about that back end stuff.
Plus, the moment i hit send, I can go back to work on other projects.
Honestly, it’s really nice.
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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Bill, your making Vimeo Pro sound very attractive. I’ll have to look into it, even without “one click.” Thanks.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf
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