Final Cut Pro X Pro Users Only??

[Walter Biscardi]

[Craig Seeman] ”
If you’re basing your business success on how much you “invested” in gear then you’ll tank because you’re not managing your ROI and look at future purchases based on industry trends.”

Well at $299 and the cost of a MacBook Pro, there’s really not going to be much of an investment necessary. Everyone can now truly be a professional editor.

It’s going to make it a LOT easier for me to hire freelancers at a much lower rate now because instead of maybe 200 editors in Atlanta to choose from, I’ll have a couple of thousand. My ROI will go up ten fold.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Craig Seeman]

[walter biscardi] “It’s going to make it a LOT easier for me to hire freelancers at a much lower rate now because instead of maybe 200 editors in Atlanta to choose from, I’ll have a couple of thousand. My ROI will go up ten fold.
“

But this isn’t something new. When I started there was no hope of buying a CMX340 and three 1″ machines, CDL or GVG switcher, one of those now primitive FX boxes in my house and starting a facility meant some capital risk for investors, bank, etc. Then Avid brought it down from millions of dollars to $100,000 or less. Some people began to buy their own systems and open small facilities. Final Cut once again further facilitated that for $1000, computer, BetaSP deck.

Keep in mind that the best of your freelancers may open their own shops both using other freelancers as they expand and also tugging at the client pool. If you underpay your top talent you may cause them to jump sooner.

ROI definitely should go up when equipment costs drop, but if you drop what you pay your talent, whether individually or collectively as an industry, that will come back to bite you at some point.

[Neil Hurwitz]

[Neil Hurwitz] “1.There is no resale value for FCP software, when you bought it
it was an expense not an investment
2. You have the option of staying just as you are
3.Switching to Avid is going to cost you more
So Suck it up, don’t worry about your INVESTMENT (not)
You blew the money the second you bought it
Buying software is not like buying a FDIC insured CD
YOU ARE IN BUSINESS, SUCK IT UP
JEEZ”

Matt Callac
“You’re totally wrong. Purchasing FCP, while being an expense, it’s also an investment.” .

You’ve Got To Be Kidding
Let me educate you just a bit, Here we go to “Accounting 101”

When you write out a check you Credit Cash
and Debit either an EXPENSE Account OR an ASSET Account
Your cash goes out the door and it’s classified as either one
Not booth. If your accountant (you’re in business, so you have one)
lets you or tells you to capitalize a 1000.00 disbursement for software, Please get another one, you are getting bad advice.
What the hell are you gonna do, capitalize the 1,000.00 bucks and take a 200.00 per year depreciation expense against it for 5 years? By the way classifying a disbursement as an Asset buy and not an expense is one of the ways large corporations lie about their
P&L and Balance sheet. Hey we really didn’t pay the phone bill
we made an investment in telecommunications. This has the effect of
understating expense, therefore increasing profits and overstating
assets on the balance sheet, therefore making the company appear
more healthy. Think Enron
Your money is gone the second you tear the shrink wrap off any software, This is especially true for software costing what FCP does. Thinking that it has any monetary value ie:an asset, after that is just not good thinking. However it still might have some non-monetary value in the fact that it allows you to sell your time working with it to make some money.

[David Roth weiss]

[Chuck Sunset] “Hello again AVID, been a while.”

Bye!!! Aloha!!! Au revoir!!!

Hope your crystal ball is one of the more accurate models.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Paul Jay]

Your fcp7 will run for a long time.
Even fcp 6 runs great on snow leopard
Fcp x is a new piece of beta software with huge capabilities.
Test it , use it. Then judge it and come to conclusions.
In that order.

[Joseph Owens]

[Paul Jay] “Fcp x is a new piece of beta software”

Well, at least this much is true and completely unarguable.

So I’m blowing the day reading all this sshh! (ain’t that some stuff?) and realizing that there is probably not much point. No ROI, that’s for sssh!
We do owe it to ourselves to stay open to all the possibilities. At this point, because a number of my clients are AVID-oriented, it seems like a perfect opportunity to at least add it to my system. The Baselight plugin (will it work with FCPX?) seems like a fun thing and pretty cheap — why shouldn’t I buy every bloody thing on the floor? The price of these things, although there may be some hardware ramifications, makes it difficult to resist.

As far as “looking pro” to your clients with this cheap software, we probably don’t have to worry too much about that. There are ways to look pro that have nothing to do with the clicking and dragging sssh!

The other thing is they probably won’t be clients anyway — not when they can do the whole job themselves and write-off the laptop they did it on.

If what we saw on Tuesday is to be taken away as “work to date”, then I have to wonder just what the resource commitment is from within the Apple empire. More questions than answers, for sure. I have over the years become very concerned with the core media-processing of Final Cut, and it would have been enough for me if FCP7 functionality were to somehow become core-aware, and could actually handle different framerates, codecs, field dominance, and intra-frame cadences that would meet broadcast QA. But it didn’t, doesn’t and mightn’t still. Such a pity, but hey, those are just technical sssh! that apparently has nothing to do with editing.

Where does this version seem to fit and who is the prime beneficiary out of the gate? Apple is going to record some big numbers in downloads. At $299 a pop, its a no-brainer to load on whatever portable device might conceivably be appropriate. FCPX on the iPad, anyone? Why not?

Its “iPhoto” ingest (as the images are analyzed and tagged for content) makes it very attractive for editors to start working and making decisions with media that they have never seen before. For unplanned, unscripted, unslated production, this will be a boon — think rapid turnaround news clips, or every student film ever made, every birthday party, wedding, frat kegger or cat-falling-off-a-tv-set YouTube upload. I’m sure that recorded media post production is entering a new golden age.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Gary Askham]

I’m sorry to break this to some people on here… the world of post production is changing. In fact it has been for some time.

Where I work we have been catering for some time to clients who edit in their office on their iMacs and then bring their final projects to us for finishing. There’s no way to ignore that this is the way the industry is going. You can’t force people to hire facilities for hundreds of pound (or dollars) a week to use a piece of kit which isn’t that much different to the laptop they use for sending emails.

There are just too many of us around now and although there are more media channels out there than ever before there has to be some balance. I believe FCPX is just the next logical step.

If you’re an editor then your assets aren’t the kit you own – but the skills you have… and that’s the way it should be.

————————
FCP and Avid Technical Support
Air Post Production
Shoreditch – London

[Jason Chong]

I’ve been messing around with using a program called BetterTouchTool that lets you map custom gestures to a Magic Trackpad.

I’m finding it very intuitive and fun to use.

Here’s a video I made with more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWcqxfxDl04

Cheers,
Jas

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