fyi FCP X and pricing

[Marcus Moore]

Pixelmator is regularly featured on the appStore, and was one of the apps on the MacPro test page.

I’d like to see X get support for one of these alternatives. Keep Adobe support definitely, but a non-subscription option would be great too.

[Bret Williams]

Pixelmator rocks. You can save layered ps files. Not sure why they wouldn’t work in X. I haven’t tried.

As for Illustrator, I think for most things Inkscape seems to be coming along. It’s free. I just use Illustrator to open, convert, and make simple shapes so it’ll probably do for my needs. I’m going to cut the Adobe cord in a few months when my contract is up and see how it goes. I can always send them a monthly subscription if I’m in a jam. I also own the CS5 master collection. Probably enough for PS and Illustrator. But AE has progressed a bit too far to go back to that. I’m gonna try to do more motion.

[Charlie Austin]

[Bret Williams] “Pixelmator rocks. You can save layered ps files. Not sure why they wouldn’t work in X. I haven’t tried.”

Just tried, it works. 🙂 I wonder if there’s a difference? do psd text lakers show up as editable text, or just comps? (they’re comps lxm files saved as psd)

[Bret Williams] “As for Illustrator, I think for most things Inkscape seems to be coming along. It’s free. I just use Illustrator to open, convert, and make simple shapes so it’ll probably do for my needs. “

Actually, Pixelmator’s Vectormator mode is really nice (CMD-SHFT-V) I’m fairly clueless using it (or Illustrator for that matter) but it seems to work well…

————————————————————-

~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Bret Williams]

I think a lot of things get rasterized or ignored between the two apps. But still, for the most part layered PSD works. I don’t know about the vector mode, but it needs to open and save illustrator to be a replacement for me.

[David Mathis]

I do like Motion, really solid piece of software for the price. There are times After Effects is a better tool. Expressions and the ability to use Trapcode Particular inside After Effect is nice. For more basic work, no doubt Motion is a better choice. Photoshop is great for doing layout of graphics to bring into AE or Motion, might look at getting the CS6 version, with Photoshop at least. If, for some reason, Black Magic acquires After Effects, that would be awesome! I can do without Premiere Pro, it is nice but to be honest I think FCP X is better. Really beginning to like it.

[Robert Gilman]

I’m finding iDraw to be a great alternative to Illustrator. Opens .ai files and saves vector PDFs and SVG.

[Bill Davis]

Meh,

the whole discussion can be reduced down to one concept.

If it takes one woman 9 months to have a baby – how long will it take six women?

There are things where large teams matter – and there are things where tossing a dozen people at a problem will generally just make everything more difficult and confusing and frustrating.

I can see the point of wanting lots of smart brains around the table when you’re deciding what features you want to implement – so long as there’s LEADERSHIP so the team doesn’t pursue 8 directions at once.

Then after the discussion point – some INDIVIDUAL is going to have to write the code to DO what the team has decided. Now they may well collaborate with others, bounce ideas off others, and even revise and re-code on the advice of others – and the head of the coding team might have better ways to optimize the code and spruce it up – that makes lots of sense – but it’s NEVER going to work that if you have 10 coders working on a project and you add 10 more – you get the code written twice as fast.

And only a knucklehead thinks like that, IMO.

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.

[Charlie Austin]

[Bill Davis] “And only a knucklehead thinks like that, IMO.”

What are talking about?!? As an editor, I’ve always found that when more people are involved in the process, the more efficient it is! 😉

————————————————————-

~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Bill Davis]

[Charlie Austin] “What are talking about?!? As an editor, I’ve always found that when more people are involved in the process, the more efficient it is! ;-)”

Of course. Just as we all know that things only get REALLY efficient if the group also has access to the opinions of the spouse of the highest ranking decision maker in the room.

You want some top notch decision making – you NEED to have the husband or wife of the person who actually knows something about the topic at hand to toss in their two cents.

This provides a nice infinitesimal size sample consisting entirely of someone who has EXACTLY the same lifestyle as the principal contributing the notes – yet far, FAR less actual knowledge – and is therefore exactly the type of independent “perspective” that leads to planetary class decision making.

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.

[Marcus Moore]

It does make me curious about the makeup of the FCPX dev team.

10.1 was certainly a bit of a restart, changing some very low level ideas around the file structure. If they decided that the new Library structure had to take priority above anything else (you have to do the foundation repair before you renovate that kitchen or add that den), then how many of those 20 people were involved in those code changes? How many of those people are UI designers, audio specialists, etc.. What were they doing during the last year? Did their work need to be held back until those Library changes got out the door in 10.1?

While Apple has updated FCPX the week before NAB for the last 2 years, neither of those updates (10.0.4 and 10.0.8) have been “feature” releases. So we’ll see what happens with 10.1.2- of course, I’m hoping for another feature update.