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Info from Thursday 6/23 London FCPUG re:FCPX
Might find this interesting and informative. Just passing it along. Not my post. See link.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15474464#15474464
The London Final Cut Pro Usergroup was held earlier today. As someone who was, shall we say, “somewhat disappointed” by the latest release, I was eager to hear what others thought, and whether or not there would be any word from Apple as to the future of Final Cut Pro.
During the second half, Larry Jordan took the stage. One of the first things he asked was how many people were pleased about the direction Final Cut Pro had taken with the new release (I’m paraphrasing here). Out of about 300 people, maybe a dozen raised their hand. He then went on to give a bit of a tour of the new version, in an effort to dispel some of the misinformation circulating about the release. He also explained that while he isn’t directly affiliated with Apple, he had been in contact with the development team (if I have some time tomorrow I will try to post a transcript of the email he read out from them).
I will try to summarise the main points below:
Audio cross-fades can be done, but the process is ugly. Probably will be fixed soon.
Media does not have to be copied to the local drive.
Plugins will work, but the developers need to recode them.
Keyboard shortcuts are same as FCP7
It will be down to blackmagic et al. to get SDI out monitoring
Apple Color is dead
Audio mixing is not very good at the moment
The magnetic timeline will grow on people, as will the skimmer
You can do versioning by duplicating projects, otherwise everything is saved as you go along (my own guess is that this will tie in to OS 10.7’s autosave and versioning functionality in the future anyway)
Markers are still supported, with a new type of marker (a “to-do” marker)
There’s no way to have a separate viewer and sequence window like in FCP 7
Dual screens can be used, in a limited sense
There should be a major update within 4 months
There’s no way to work collaboratively right now
It’s mad that it doesn’t import FCP7 projects
It will be down to third-parties to create support for EDLs, XML, and decks (Apple is not interested in any of these).For me personally, it’s the last point that kills it for me. Everything I do in post revolves around interchange. EDLs are 30 years old, but they work because they are incredibly simple. It should be so trivial to code EDL export for Final Cut Pro that I’m actually looking into doing it myself. But to “outsource” FCPXML -a specification created by Apple, no less – to third-parties, will just not work in the long term. Who will decide how the format grows (and unlike EDLs, it must grow)? Autodesk, Adobe, and others actively support the FCPXML format. That Apple are effectively abandoning it is bad news for the post industry.
Anyway, I hope that’s food for thought for some of you. I’ll update this post tomorrow if I think of anything else I’ve missed.
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3 Replies
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[Brian Mulligan] “For me personally, it’s the last point that kills it for me. Everything I do in post revolves around interchange. EDLs are 30 years old, but they work because they are incredibly simple. It should be so trivial to code EDL export for Final Cut Pro that I’m actually looking into doing it myself. But to “outsource” FCPXML -a specification created by Apple, no less – to third-parties, will just not work in the long term. Who will decide how the format grows (and unlike EDLs, it must grow)? Autodesk, Adobe, and others actively support the FCPXML format. That Apple are effectively abandoning it is bad news for the post industry.”
If they’re outsourcing even XML, this means they pretty much have to be panning some sort of API to allow third-parties to access sequence and event data in FCP X. They seem to have used the word “API” when talking to both Philip Hodgetts and David Pogue as well. This is potentially much more powerful than exporting a static XML representation, but it will require some rethinking of workflows.
I doubt we’ll see some third-party try to create a ‘standard’ interchange format around this. Instead, I think third parties will either modify their apps talk directly to FCP X via the API, or they’ll write plugins for FCP X that can export data in formats their apps can read.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Just looking at the Metadata aspect of FCPX, I can see that there is a lot there. It will be some time before 3rd parties decided that it’s worth it to invest in developing something that the target audience for FCPX might not care about. But all of that metadata can be very powerful.
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Also from that post it says apple has abandoned DVD and Blu-Ray support.
-Grant Gomm
http://www.blacklionproductions.com
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