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Large projects
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Honestly Oliver, I’m not sure this stuff was ever their bag? They paid a fierce amount of attention half a decade ago – but do you think there is a worldclass pro-video coding group in Apple? Honestly?
there were rampant rumours here a few months ago that the FCPX software coding got hived off to the itunes team for gods sake.
they fired most of the pro-apps team in early twenty ten?
I.. just don’t think there is the makings or numbers for a pro editing app in Apple full stop?
like its going to be a slow grind to halt over 24-48 months aperture style.
..Do you think there are two people in apple that care about aperture?Put it this way – this X application say is motion right? but with no bought in FCP ecosystem to back it up. stands or falls on its own.
As in FCPX is, intellectually, as a choice – motion, on its own, with no industry standard like FCP7 to underpin it. that is how weird FCPX is.
As buggy as motion, as weird as motion relative to the target market, possibly as under resourced as motion.Apple, in ten years, have no signature professional software to their name, in ten years they have created – none – they bought in some, and then they just killed all of them.
Why is FCPX different? Its just as buggy, just as glommed in chrome, just as obtuse relative to industry practise – how did motion throw behaviours get on?
they killed after effects right?Primary storyline is a world beater. Oh no wait – its not. Its just some useless stuff Apple came up with all on their own that the entire industry is going to completely ignore – because it is a useless conceit in a buggy chrome heavy application that apple is, like clockwork, going to forget about in three years time.
Again – Randy. Ubillos.
Thanks for this. no really – thank you for making January Learn Avid month. This is all – just great.http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “FCPX software coding got hived off to the itunes team”
I don’t think that’s a fair statement. Apple uses certain software engineers who touch various unrelated products. For example, there are UI designers who have touched all of these. I think you have to differentiate people doing the nuts and bolts coding from those that conceptualize features in the product and how it should work.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “they fired most of the pro-apps team in early twenty ten”
I doubt that’s true. Supposedly 40 QA or support staff were let go. That’s hardly “most” of ProApps.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Do you think there are two people in apple that care about aperture”
Actually yes, because it helps to drive iMac and 27″ display sales and is part of the Photostream ecosystem now.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Again – Randy. Ubillos”
I have no issue with this. Right or wrong, he’s developed 3 (or 4 depending on your POV) NLEs from scractch – Premiere (original), FCP, iMovie and FCP X.
[Aindreas Gallagher] ” January Learn Avid month”
Good move. MC6/Sym6 is very solid in spite of a few .0 bugs. It’s the industrial-grade solution.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
sure what is “most of pro apps team” tho?
they used to run a ton of apps – now its a lone editing app built out of imovie and legacy motion – sure isn’t the point we have no idea what is left in there?
and.. I read some reasonably persuasive stuff that the QA line was a tad PR driven, given where, geographically, people got fired, and where the relative departments were.
Also I’m leery of the notion of Ubillos as the godfather of editing. the version of premiere he developed was crazy. I had to use it at college. if you look it up, there are some insane comments he made defending its short comings at the time- seriously google it, its also waay down the comment thread, but he really said whacky things way back when about availability of plugins and stuff (I’m iffy – look it up!).
Surely Randy Ubillos is ultimately a guy in a job, a brain heavy industry high profile job sure, but its job, he’s not a pope, and he just drove an industry standard software platform into a wall at 85kph.
Discovery has dropped FCP, CNN has dropped FCP, the BBC has dropped FCP, a whackton of third level has dropped FCP. Isn’t there a limit to this?
positing that some mythical new entrants will upend the market with this weird buggy software does. not. hold. water.Ubillos wrecked the house. He wrecked the FCP house. He actually trashed it.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
I have had a similar experience with a 50 minute SD project. Broken into 4 separate projects to manage. See below for where 300 markers in the wrong place can get you:
Long post here: https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/344/5732 if you want the details.
There’s a lot of clever thinking gone into FCPX. I think the much maligned Randy has looked at everything from iMovie to SGO Mistika and arrived at a product design that, once you wrap your head around it, can really speed up workflows.
The execution is atrocious. How is my iTunes database file (.itl), that references 20 000 + items and 150GB of data, kept to only 6MB when my humble fcpx project referencing a few hundred items and about 8GB can balloon to 1.2GB?
(Incidentally the iTunes XML is 4x the size of the .itl database) -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Also I’m leery of the notion of Ubillos as the godfather of editing. the version of premiere he developed was crazy.”
It’s good to mention that Randy has had nothing to do with Premiere Pro in a very long time. Premiere Pro was a complete re-write. CS3 went back to the Mac and CS5 was 64-bit. The A/B Roll methodology of the old Premiere is long gone with V1 of Premiere Pro.
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This seems related:
https://fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/655-apple-made-a-64bit-final-cut-pro-8-and-then-decided-to-kill-it
Rich is a stand-up guy, but this data point isn’t really verified anywhere else. Nevertheless it gives credence to the claims that FCP X was intended as an FCE successor.
My guess is that FCP X was released in its current form with the idea of buying time to continue rewriting a more “pro” version that still fits this design. I have heard from other folks close to third party developers about two versions in development. Might be BS or might be part of the same rumors. In any case, no matter how skilled we think the Apple coders are or aren’t, it takes time to make the sort of about-face that they had to do.
Plus, the OS team is equally compartmentalized. Since FCP X is so tied to components in the OS (unlike Avid or Adobe), there are certain things FCP X simply can’t do until that portion of the OS is ready for the FCP X team. All of this leads us to a lot of anticipation for the Q1 2012 update. If that doesn’t show significant core improvements beyond just multicam and broadcast output, then we’ll know Apple isn’t all that interested in our world anymore.
Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Timothy Payton] “I have several large mySQL databases that run web sites on my web server. The hardware is 2.1 GHZ, Dual Core, 4 MB of Ram, and a regular old 200 GB sata internal drive. Typically the database files are small, about 2mb. But I have a very large site with a 67MB database, 168,683 records. Does the size of the database effect the speed? Not that I can tell at all. Typically my queries to return a hundred or so records are less than .5 seconds. Adding a record to the database just took 0.2085 seconds. Just as they are on a site with a small 2MB database.”
I don’t think the sheer size of the database is the issue, but rather the volume of queries (and possibly the nature of the queries). How would your mySQL database fare if it were getting hit with tens or hundreds of concurrent queries? Even if you could assume your performance wouldn’t suffer under many concurrent queries (it would), your .5 and .2 second benchmarks quickly become whole seconds, and that’s going to feel slow. If every little thing FCPX is doing is being logged in a database, we can expect a lot of transactions to be taking place virtually constantly. Spinning disk is going to struggle with that no matter how it is connected to the host.
[Timothy Payton] “Now I don’t know alot about SQLLite (which as far as I can tell is the structure of the FCP X project and event files) but I did a quick Google and found this: (it may or may not be relevant) Basically it says “As you can see, most operations are slower on SQLite3 and “write” operations (create/update/delete) are really bad.””
FCPX is calling CoreData, and that is what uses SQLite3. Maybe CoreData isn’t up to the task of the kind of strain an NLE like FCPX places on it, or maybe the schema implemented in FCPX is to blame.
[Timothy Payton] “So there are two issues here. 1) project databases has unbelievable bloat. 40 units of bloat for every 1 unit of real data. 2) database access is incredibly slow, which seems to get worse with size.”
The level of detail in FCPXML is clearly much lower than in an actual project. FCPXML doesn’t even retain audio levels. The telling thing to me is your original project was three times bigger than the one that resulted from importing the XML. We don’t know what is getting stripped out along the way from FCPX Project to FCPXML to AAF to FCP7 project, so judging them strictly by file size isn’t really telling a complete story. Maybe it is bloat, maybe CoreData is inefficient given that it is an abstraction layer between the app and the actual SQLite database, maybe it is bad design, or maybe it doesn’t matter much because the real bottleneck is the IOPS performance of the storage that hosts the database.
[Timothy Payton] “I would conclude from this that the database format that we currently see in FCP X is horribly flawed. If I were a project manager, I would get as many programmers as possible and set this as the top priority. Either scrap it completely or do a rewrite. Although a complete rewrite sounds like a big deal, and I can’t dream of working on a large project like FCP X, I have done smaller rewrites of database structures and it is often needed during the coarse of a project. It is going to be what determines if FCP X flies or not. No amount of hardware you throw at it can help.”
Leaving aside the myth of the man-month, I don’t agree that we have any kind of conclusive evidence this is strictly bad software and that hardware has nothing to do with it. There probably is lots of room for performance tuning with respect to how FCPX is calling CoreData, and there is probably also room for improvement of CoreData itself. No software is perfect and can always be improved upon. However, dismissing the role of hardware out of hand when database performance is in question is simply incorrect. IOPS matter a ton for busy databases. Contemporary consumer SSDs at their worst will deliver about 100 times the IOPS performance of a typical SATA HDD. That kind of gap absolutely matters in this analysis.
Storage requirements are a well-known factor when it comes to streaming video for an NLE. If you don’t have the bandwidth, you are going to drop frames. Period. The same thing holds for databases. If you want to go fast, you need high IOPS storage. The net benefit of using storage that is hundreds or even thousands of times quicker than spinning disks is going to deliver a much higher return than software tuning.
It’s fair to criticize Apple’s decision to go with an auto-saving-persistent-database model instead of a volatile-memory-to-flat-file model like they had in FCP7, especially in light of the problems it introduces. Both approaches have their plusses and minuses. I just don’t agree that there is nothing we can do about it, such as it is, out here in deployment-land.
Best,
Andy -
[Oliver Peters] “It’s quite possible that too much of the database handling came over from FC Server. It’s not a particularly good asset management tool and when it works well, it’s running under Mac OS X Server usually on an Xserve. If that’s the case, then there are some built-in design problems.”
FCSvr ran on top of a PostgreSQL database that was being queried directly by the Java front end. FCPX calls CoreData to transact with SQLite databases (that’s all CoreData uses). Perhaps there are some schematic similarities between the two, but probably only at a high level (if at all). There are virtually zero architectural similarities given the technologies each uses.
I also disagree with your opinion of FCSvr as an asset management tool, but that is another discussion for another forum.
Best,
Andy -
[Andrew Richards] “I also disagree with your opinion of FCSvr as an asset management tool, but that is another discussion for another forum.”
Thanks for the clarification. My perspective is strictly as a user. The comparison of DAMs was as compared with Avid Interplay or CatDV.
I like a lot of the functions the FcSrver does. Just not fond of how it works as purely a DAM tool.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Rich is a stand-up guy, but this data point isn’t really verified anywhere else. Nevertheless it gives credence to the claims that FCP X was intended as an FCE successor.”
One of Philip Hodgetts’ recent podcasts (I forget which one) put forward the idea that FCP7 was going to be the 64-bit FCP, but Apple’s about-face on 64-bit Carbon scuttled that. The FCP team were supposedly forced to start over and took it as an opportunity to really start over. Richard’s aside about there being a 64-bit FCP they had to abandon (regardless of version number) aligns with that.
[Oliver Peters] “My guess is that FCP X was released in its current form with the idea of buying time to continue rewriting a more “pro” version that still fits this design. I have heard from other folks close to third party developers about two versions in development. Might be BS or might be part of the same rumors. In any case, no matter how skilled we think the Apple coders are or aren’t, it takes time to make the sort of about-face that they had to do.”
Maybe at some point prior to FCPX’s release there were two products in the pipeline, but I’d be pretty surprised to see something beyond FCPX coming down the pike. Maybe they merged the products and the heavy duty stuff is what is being added in incrementally. With all the NDA sidestepping any of this info would need to navigate to get to us, there is plenty of room for a lot of truth, even if the details are muddy.
[Oliver Peters] “Plus, the OS team is equally compartmentalized. Since FCP X is so tied to components in the OS (unlike Avid or Adobe), there are certain things FCP X simply can’t do until that portion of the OS is ready for the FCP X team. All of this leads us to a lot of anticipation for the Q1 2012 update. If that doesn’t show significant core improvements beyond just multicam and broadcast output, then we’ll know Apple isn’t all that interested in our world anymore.”
This is a very important point. I’ll bet you a fiver that broadcast I/O absolutely depends on a new API in Lion (CoreMediaIO). I really hope we get a successor to the cheese grater Mac Pro to go with it. The hardware is a bigger indicator for where Apple wants to be- that is where they make their money. Software isn’t a profit center.
Best,
Andy
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