Learning to love FCP X

[Ben Scott]

i find many things are significantly faster or at very least something I don’t need to think about like I did in the past.

transcoding and linking media is the main timesaver and not needing to patch.

some things I have found buggy (skimmer that flies off screen when zoomed in) or not to my liking (color board for colour balance)

but I can see how much easier things could become once the broadcast monitoring out arrives, lets hope getting out to tape is just as easy as whats been released so far

[Paul Dickin]

[Ben Scott] ” I can see how much easier things could become once the broadcast monitoring out arrives…”
Hi
Why do I keep getting this sinking feeling that what Apple means by ‘broadcast monitoring’ may not be at all what people in this forum mean by the words…?

…that what they mean is that OSX 10.7 will be upgraded to 10-bit API capability – so we’ll be able to connect 10-bit Colorsync LCD computer monitors to our Radeon graphics cards to get 10-bit monitoring capability with Colorsync accuracy (= broadcast)!

Please tell me I’m wrong ;-(

[Steve Connor]

[Paul Dickin] “Please tell me I’m wrong ;-(“

i’m pretty sure you are wrong

“My Name is Steve and I’m an FCPX user”

[Erik Lindahl]

This would be awesome! But please include normal output over a videocard as well.

Building support into OSX would have all kinds of benifits for other apps in both cases.

My experience with FCPX has been head-bashing in my testings. More will come when we actually have true broadcast output howvever.

————————
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Paul Dickin] “Please tell me I’m wrong ;-(“

I think you’re wrong, but if you’re right, it’s pretty much the nail in the coffin for us.

I can’t run client monitors off of your proposed setup.

[Gary Huff]

[Paul Dickin]OSX 10.7 will be upgraded to 10-bit API capability – so we’ll be able to connect 10-bit Colorsync LCD computer monitors to our Radeon graphics cards to get 10-bit monitoring capability with Colorsync accuracy (= broadcast)!

I think you might be wrong as well, but only because I don’t see a reason Apple would fool with this considering that 10.7 is more than likely going to be the end of OSX, with everything merging to the iOS platform and more iPad/iPhone like devices.

[Don Scioli]

No, sorry, it’s gotten worse. I spent an entire afternoon with that piece of S@#$t trying to retime a HD clip from from 100% speed to 3 % speed for export back to FCP7. First it wouldn’t render, then it repeatably crashed, over and over on the same clip, so tried another approach, it crashed again.

So no, I thought I could use it for very specific things, like optical flow retiming, but it is not primetime ready.

[Mitch Ives]

[Paul Dickin] “Why do I keep getting this sinking feeling that what Apple means by ‘broadcast monitoring’ may not be at all what people in this forum mean by the words…?”

While no one knows, I have the sinking feeling that there is an element of truth to what you suspect. Most people I talk to are expecting to be able to get the signal out through existing hardware like K3’s DeckLink, etc. What I’m afraid of is that their definition of “Broadcast Monitoring” will be through Thunderbolt only, and that will require everyone to buy dumbed down hardware in order to use it…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com
http://www.insightproductions.com

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Mitch Ives] ” will be through Thunderbolt only, and that will require everyone to buy dumbed down hardware in order to use it…”

How so? if you have a Thunderbolt expansion Chassis and a Kona card, is that dumbed down?

The AJA ioXT is far from dumbed down, and it’s Thunderbolt.

Jeremy

[Mitch Ives]

Jeremy,

Let’s keep this in context, shall we? First, you talk about these expansion cages as though they exist. They do not, as of yet. Furthermore, please point out a single external card cage that has ever worked well? Yes, none of them have in the past. They were a complete PITA. Will the Thunderbolt version be better. Probably… but we’ll have to wait and see what tradeoffs are involved, won’t we?

As for the Io, I’ve had them since the beginning (version 1). They are a nice device but have had issues maintaining continuous connections and can suffer from IO bottlenecks. None of this has occurred with the card based products. Show me one person who prefers any IO product over a Kona3, and I’ll show you someone that doesn’t have a K3. K3’s are like anvils… you can pound on them all day without any issues. Premiere had the good sense to realize that and so has Avid. The one thing Apple had as an exclusive is now gone. The real question is will they even be able to match Premiere and MC6 and support one. Personally, I think it would be a brilliant stroke of genius if FCPX supported the K3 inside the machine. That would take care of the whole “Broadcast Monitoring” issue wouldn’t it? I’d bet that a whole raft of people would convert to FCPX if that happened.

Does this mean I don’t like the Thunderbolt concept. Not at all. A laptop with an external TB device would be handy, but that doesn’t mean that it’ll be superior, does it?

TB is like firewire. The theoretical spec and they real world performance don’t match. TB says up to 10… so far it’s 6 realistically. I try to keep a big picture view. The DisplayPort guys are screaming that DisplayPort had a throughput of 20, and are unhappy to see TB throttle them to 10. The truth is, we haven’t had a chance to see what performance issues exist when there is a display (or multiple displays), an IoXT, and a RAID all attached at once. Will things continue at full speed or slow down like every other daisy-chain technology? Yes it’s all exciting, but we operate in the real world, not the theoretical world don’t we… so a healthy wait and see attitude is probably a well advised choice.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com
http://www.insightproductions.com

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill