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Is Oliver Peters wrong?
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[Oliver Peters] “This doesn’t get mentioned a lot in all the pro-con threads, but that is the fundamental change Apple has made to how FCP X interacts with projects. In the case of FCP 1-7, you had many, individual project files that contained all your edit decisions. Under FCP X, the entire system is one big project file.”
Don’t you mean the opposite?
With FCP Legacy, you had to open a project in order to get anything out of it. In FCPX, you can open a project, an event, or both. The application is just the application. You can’t do this with FCP7. You have to open the project before you can export a timeline or have access to your organization.
[Oliver Peters] “For example, creating new “roles” means these additions are there for EVERY production from then on. So think before you make any changes. For instance, you may want to create a Role for VO, but not Joe’s VO.”
Not if you quit FCPX, take the project out of the Final Cut Pro Project folder and reload. In my testing, Roles are project specific, if the project isn’t loaded upon FCPX launch, then that Role isn’t loaded. The Roles that aren’t loaded or assigned, go away and come back when you load the appropriate project. This makes the $5 Event Manager X is well worth it if you need separation of church/state (and roles). 🙂
Jeremy
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[Oliver Peters] “If you look at the VTR handling in Media Composer for instance, it’s a pretty good bet that no utility will match it, though. There simply is no overwhelming need to put a lot of development into such a tool today.”
Blaspheme! Every NLE should be good at everything, especially when it’s not needed!
I’m being facetious. I think it would be in capture card company’s best interest to make a really nice capture utility so they can sell capture cards to the people that need them. It is exactly this kind of development energy that is better served for the people that develop it, and not Apple who is building the infrastructure. Time will tell if that infrastructure is any good and developer friendly.
[Oliver Peters] “One of the things people are having a hard time coming to grips with is the fact that FCP X has a much narrower and locked down focus. FCP Classic evolved into a great freeform Swiss Army Knife that fit many diverse workflows, from simple projects to features to large integrated facilities.”
I guess I see it completely opposite. You buy what you need, and don’t buy what you don’t. If you need an MXF Exporter/Importer, buy it, if you don’t you don’t. I worked that way with FCP Legacy for a long time. It was a relatively expensive per machine plug-in as well, but I have been working with native MXFs for years. You need a “complicated” EDL or film match back system for FCPX, you will buy it from someone who will develop and support it and will spend way more time than Apple will on it, which means it will hopefully be better than what Apple could do. This is what I believe will be the true calling to FCPX, even though it doesn’t appear that way right now. Yes, we have lost dedicated audio, color and DVD apps, but aren’t there better apps out there that were offered in the FCP suite?
Jeremy
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[Herb Sevush] “It was understood that you had to clean up your timeline to prepare an EDL when you needed one, and of course with FCPc (Classic) it was easy enough to do. Are you saying FCPx is more limited and can’t be cleaned up for EDL prep?”
Not at all. It’s the same process, really.
I was just going off Rafael’s example of a word doc to simple text. A modern timeline to EDL does not fit that analogy, and just like you said, you don’t do it without some major work first.
Jeremy
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[Herb Sevush] “Of course you might want to ask why creating a capture module was so daunting for Apple, since every other NLE I ever worked with could manage this quite well. “
Name them. Did they include third party hardware support? If so, who wrote the drivers?
[Herb Sevush] “I also simply don’t like having to deal with digitizing as something outside of the basic program – if they create a third party digitizing plug-in I’d feel much more comfortable with it. This might be irrational, but it still makes me feel like I’m buying a car without a carburetor and they tell me to go buy one at AutoZone.”
Seriously? So that window that opens in FCP can’t be looked at as a whole ‘nother interface? What if a capture system plugged right in to FCPX? You choose it from an FCPX menu and it opens a capture utility? Wouldn’t it be the same thing? You could assign the event, the role, the audio channels the keyword collection all right there. Once it’s done, all media is in place. Doesn’t that sound feasible? Forgive me for actually being excited about this stuff, check it:
https://www.aja.com/news/index_article.php?id=157
Jeremy
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“I was just going off Rafael’s example of a word doc to simple text. A modern timeline to EDL does not fit that analogy, and just like you said, you don’t do it without some major work first.”
I thought his point was that once the editor has done his prep, it should be as basic as .doc to .txt. An EDL is still a viable tool in certain situations and the fact is, alone amongst Mac NLE’s, FCPx can’t make one or import one (yet.)
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[David Roth Weiss] “And, the point I made is that examples like it do not exactly breed confidence that FCP X will ever get all the fixes it requires.”
But if you changed “DV50” to “DVCPro 50”, wouldn’t it stand a chance to break all your legacy projects that are looking for “DV50”?
Now apply that to all the little things that FCP Legacy had in it, and maybe it isn’t as easy as it seems.
I mentioned in another thread that why spend a whole ton of time fixing stuff that you know is going to be obsolete? Apple has probably known that FCP Legacy’s days were numbered for years, why go through the effort of fixing every little thing when that will have been for naught?
Jeremy
PS Sorry for my barage of posts today, just catching up from the last few days.
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[Herb Sevush] “I thought his point was that once the editor has done his prep, it should be as basic as .doc to .txt. An EDL is still a viable tool in certain situations and the fact is, alone amongst Mac NLE’s, FCPx can’t make one or import one (yet.)”
Maybe I misunderstood. I apologize if I did.
Foolcut can get you to an app that will make an EDL, and that’s kind of a hack made before the official FCPX language was released. I am sure the tools will come. Someone will develop it as someone will pay for it. Do you think all FCP Legacy users use EDL? Film out ones do, but how may people is that? Why would Apple waste time on an EDL exporter when there’s so much more work to do first? Even a company as huge as Apple has to allocate their resources.
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“Name them. Did they include third party hardware support? If so, who wrote the drivers?”
EMC2 – proprietary capture card,
*edit – both pinnacle and matrox cards
Media 100 – wasn’t my system, don’t know about drivers and cards.
PPro – used it only as a firewire editor, Adobe wrote the drivers, I think
Avid – well, you know.
FCP – blackmagic cardYour point being what, that blackmagic’s drivers are at fault? Don’t know what your getting at.
“Seriously? So that window that opens in FCP can’t be looked at as a whole ‘nother interface? What if a capture system plugged right in to FCPX? You choose it from an FCPX menu and it opens a capture utility? Wouldn’t it be the same thing?”
As you already quoted me as saying “if they create a third party digitizing plug-in I’d feel much more comfortable with it.” So yes, as I already said, I would be quite happy with a third party system that plugged into FCPx – that’s what a plug-in means, unless I’m having a hard time understanding English.
As for the AJA capture system, first off I didn’t see where it says it will open from within a FCPx Menu. Second, being a Blackmagic card owner, i don’t know that it applies. I also don’t like the idea that different systems will have different capture utilities based on the I/O card your currently using. Again, that might be a misplaced anxiety, but I’d prefer a program to have a unified capture module no matter what card I happened to be using.
But more importantly I’d just be happy to have any system that actually worked across time code breaks properly and that could handle batch-recaptures from the project I was working on.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
“Why would Apple waste time on an EDL exporter when there’s so much more work to do first?”
That’s the question isn’t it? What are the priorities? Apparently EDL exports, multi-cam and video monitoring weren’t, while Imovie importing and presets for Youtube were.
And broadcast editors weren’t supposed to infer anything from those choices?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
Isn’t this the crux of the whole thing, Herb? You’re bound and determined to see it in light of X being a “replacement” for Legacy.
And many, many editors are still trying to compare and contrast the old with the new.
Others are doing what I think is more natural. Let go of what FCP was. Look at the new possibilities of what will be. And change ones thinking accordingly.
Once I did that, I could start to see where the new software will “fit” in a world that’s changing so rapidly.
Mobile, agile, flexible, less focused on “traditional” workflows – and more focused on what the new tools allow and what the entire new world of global, accessible, massive and constantly changing information requires in terms of a tool to ingest, manage, search, sort, aggregate, assemble and re-transmit visual information in a world awash with more of it than ever before.
Those who need to continue to work in the classic mode, are the ones rationally looking to switch to those classic style “monolithic editor” platforms. I get that.
But now everyone else has a whole new tool that is excellent for one new way of working.
I spent my weekend in San Diego and it took me about 5 minutes to set up my “editing bay” on the 32nd floor of the Grand Hyatt with nothing more than my MacbookPro and a small Firewire 800 drive.. FCP-X did an amazing job of letting me tag and start assembling selects out of 64 gigs of field data generated in a full day of DSLR shooting.
The footage looks wonderful. The travel gear profile made it possible to avoid excess baggage hassles (tho barely!) and I’m much, MUCH more effective for my clients than I’ve ever been before.
That’s the game changer, IMO. Not what this will do for the “studio-style” traditional work process.
I’m now confident that I could have done a very respectable “first cut” of the entire project had the client requested that. As it is, this will likely be my first “full FCP-X project” since I’m comfortable enough to feel like I can manage actual work with it now.
For fun, I’ve attached a 5d. still that I took Sat night in the wee hours of the view from my temporary “Thurs-Sun” edit suite.
Times have changed – and it’s increasingly clear to me that’s why FCP had to change as well.
(I could have sent this picture – OR an FCP-X cut of the days video – ANYWHERE on the planet in seconds. That is the game changer. Good and NOW will increasingly trump perfect and later for some kinds of work in some circumstances. And the world will move on…
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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