I guess I’m not PRO, and where’s my Jet Pack.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

I’ll eat my cocky little hat if I’m wrong on all this but:

DVD’s : keep using encore, its better than DVD studio pro anyway

SHAKE: yep, thats a total pisser. there is a corpse there to steal organs from – probably too late now tho. so yes – wanker’s there.

COLOUR: it’s not gone – Apple basically said they just haven’t released the other software yet – I’m willing to bet colour is there. As is Motion.

TAPE LAYOFF: its there there’s even an icon for it. You can still master to tape, you can still control a tape deck via rs 422.

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Mark Suszko]

If I had a dollar for every guy that has posted sturm and drang and “woe is us this is only imovie, re-skinned” and will have to eat his words after June, I will have one heck of a summer vacation this year.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

The one cool thing about all these pickle suckers who would rather blog’n whine than cut, is after FCP X comes out this blog will turn into a useful place.

Well who can blame them? Isn’t whining something editors do when they don’t have deadlines to meet?

As for me, I’ve cut on everything from a Movieola, to a flat bed; from Quad tape and a razorblade to Betacam and CMX. And I believe what Apple is doing could very well simplify the whole workflow in a wonderfully revolutionary way.

And yes, Apple snuck out a new editing interface called iMovie as a little test of simplifying workflow. So what? The trolls are making it out to be world war III and it is nothing more than a test of an atomic reaction.

I can understand the problem here. I’ve never paid any attention to iMovie. Till now. I was so bored Saturday that I pulled out my iPhone 4, shot some spring flowers and downloaded all the footage of my grandchildren I’ve taken over the past 11 months onto iPhoto, downloaded iMovie and decided to see what I could do. Within a half hour or so all the families had full resolution movies with music and sound effects downloaded their computers. It was certainly heck of a lot more fun trying something new than doing it the boring old way on Avid, Premier or FCP. Kind of like the first time I used a faltbed.

I wanted some more fun so I cut a music video of my 60’s rock band from the stuff I shot on stage with my iPhone and sent the full resolution version out to the group. Unfortunately two of the guys are on memory leaking windoze machines. I simply did a couple of mouse clicks in iMovie and sent them a higher compressed, lower resolution version for their machines with DOS DNA. Regardless of resolution, everyone was blown away. They had no idea what I was doing pointing my phone at them the last four gigs.

After the music video I was bored again and decided to mow my half acre of lawn. Emptying the last bag of clippings I remembered the 5D test footage I shot of my property with a steadycam over a year ago. What would iMovie do with H.264? After a cold drink I slapped that H.264 into iMovie. Using 32 bits and way too little memory iMovie converted it to something more useful than H.264. I cut it, did a little color grading, added some sound effects and music and sent it full resolution to someone who wanted to be reminded that the Rocky Mountains turn green and lush in the summer.

So after trying out an editor that some seem fully convinced is the new Final Cut Pro X, I’m looking forward to June when I’ll plop down $299, pull out the Red and shoot a story, then fire up the 12 cores and see if the bloggin’ nay sayers are right about FCP X being nothing more than iMovie with a couple more lines of steroid code.

And if you think I’m just some ridiculous old man who wants a fight, let’s get a pile of footage. I’ll simply take iMovie and you take AVID, Premier Pro or whatever you want. In short time we will see if it’s the software that makes the editor.

Sorry for hogging the bandwidth because it is all meaningless anyway. You know the story… arguing about software we have never seen or used makes as much sense as giving a girlfriend or wife a year long pass to Weight Watchers.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Dennis Lisonbee] “I wanted some more fun so I cut a music video of my 60’s rock band from the stuff I shot on stage with my iPhone and sent the full resolution version out to the group”

You had an iPhone in the 60s? Cosmic. 😉

[Chris Kenny]

[Dennis Lisonbee] “And if you think I’m just some ridiculous old man who wants a fight, let’s get a pile of footage. I’ll simply take iMovie and you take AVID, Premier Pro or whatever you want. In short time we will see if it’s the software that makes the editor. “

Yup.

Truth is, video editing in pro apps like Media Composer and FCP presently involves quite a lot of tedious, noncreative nonsense. Eliminating some of this does make software more accessible to consumers… but it also makes it more useful to professionals. It’s kind of silly how much handwringing there has been over the former issue, when the latter is clearly all that actually matters.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

We sure did have iPhones in the 60’s. It was made by AT&T right in the US of A. There was a problem with reception so in stead of a bumper AT&T gave you this long antennae that you plugged in the wall and it worked fine. The audio workflow was typical. You recorded the audio with a little suction cup onto a Nagra, then transcoded it mag stripe via a resolve plug-in. And no 2 gig limit! As much bandwidth as you wanted. AT&T had problems with the video portion. We wanted a Pro application and all they had was an expensive black and white, interlaced low rez picture so Kodak introduced a super 8 film unit but we wanted more resolution and color depth. It created a firestorm because a bunch of tech geeks thought the new negative 35mm film stock was simply super 8 on steroids. I liked the 35mm prosumer technology because I could edit it on the prosumer moviola technology.

Workflow was slow. The picture had to be transcoded to workprint overnight in a dark lab, put in sync with the mag stripe, then edge coded. And the interface? The tech geek critics said too many lever clicks and tape tears. So it never caught on with wannabes who thought AT&T, Kodak and movieola was pulling something over on them. They stayed with holding the picture up to the light bulb, cutting it with scissors, taping it and running it on a projector. And the geeks finally gave up because no one would hire them but people wanting cheap wedding films.

The band is happy I’m an early adopter of technology. They don’t have to help me lift a B3 and Leslie on stage cause of digital sampling perfected by the Japanese and the 35mm blimped camera has been replaced by the AT&T high rez picture and sound device designed by Apple and made by the Chinese. And there is no long antenna, just a rubber bumper that fits tight around the phone.

Of course it is all going to change next week when I take the RED onstage with me. I’m getting complaints that 1980 resolution is bush league; you can’t be professional unless you are shooting on RAW 4K and editing it on AVID or Premiere.