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Learning to love FCP X
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[Mitch Ives] “Let’s keep this in context, shall we?”
Absolutely. Let’s keep exploring the truth.
[Mitch Ives] “First, you talk about these expansion cages as though they exist. They do not, as of yet. “
And neither does monitoring in FCPX, so can’t we all jump to our own conclusions at this point? In context?
Magma has announced one as well as Sonnet. Who knows who else is going to release one, maybe the capture card companies themselves, who knows?
[Mitch Ives] “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?”
Yes, we will. I will say that with a release of current Kona drivers, in the very bottom of the release notes, they say that all Kona cards are now “Thunderbolt aware”. So, there’s some real context.
[Mitch Ives] “They are a nice device but have had issues maintaining continuous connections and can suffer from IO bottlenecks.”
You mean like 400 or 800 mbsit/sec firewire? You do understand the Thunderbolt is a PCIe protocol, correct? This isn’t firewire anymore, it is spec’d @ 10Gb/sec.
[Mitch Ives] “Show me one person who prefers any IO product over a Kona3, and I’ll show you someone that doesn’t have a K3.”
I cannot take my K3 on set, but I can my ioHD or Express. Have you worked with an ioExpress that runs on PCIe? Do you find it “bottlenecks”? Contextually, I would be able to being a K3 on set and run it from a MacBook Pro in a thunderbolt cage. I have no idea if this is going to work or not, but again, I have higher hopes than “Apple is going to force us to buy a thunderbolt display”. If that’s the case, they really don’t want us. That’s fine, I’ll move on.
[Mitch Ives] “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.”
I think people would start to take X more seriously if it had broadcast out, yes. To me, broadcast out is baseband video, not a Thunderbolt display. So far, Apple has set told us what’s coming with FCPX, and delivered on those prmoises. They wouldn’t say broadcast out if they meant a thunderbolt display setup to “broadcast colors”. I know that Apple has created a huge swath of uncertainty, but they haven’t lied quite yet.
[Mitch Ives] “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?”
It’s not superior to full lane PCIe. Thunderbolt is 4x PCIe for now + Display port.
Have you taken a good look at the ioXT specs? It bests a Kona 3 in certain respects (but certainly not the Kona 3G). It does a lot of things in a very small package.
[Mitch Ives] “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. “
That’s Gigabits. Firewire was megabits. Even if it’s 6 Gigabits, that’s a huge wad of data. It could certainly handle compressed 444 video and above.
[Mitch Ives] “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.”
OK, then we can all agree to wait and see what Apple means instead of saying we are all going to die?
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[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…?”
1. Because Apple isn’t telling.
2. Because you’ve been burned by Apple before.
3. Because they claim “broadcast quality” – and that seems to leave possibly just enough semantic wiggle room.
4. Because broadcast video seems to be an afterthought to AV Foundation.
5. Because it might end up that you’re holding it wrong.Franz.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “5. Because it might end up that you’re holding it wrong.”
Best line of the week.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Ben Scott] “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”
Just for kicks, let’s break this down.
“Broadcast monitoring” was created by engineers to address the grim realities of a pretty terrible system of shoehorning color information into a sliver of the broadcast television signal. It’s the “NTSC actually stands for “never twice the same color” deal.
Now we’re in a different era.
Most video is never broadcast. But sometime it is — and when it is, it’s often critical that color accuracy is maintained.
So I think the real question is that as we move towards a “post-NTSC video world” (and computers ARE post NTSC since they could care less about dumbing down a digital video signal in order to conform to an arbitrary broadcast standard) will new tools become possible that insure not so much “broadcast compatibility” but color information accuracy – luminance information accuracy – and even resolution information accuracy within a file as it’s passed around and manipulated between acquisition and viewing.
As I understand it, the migration from legacy Quicktime to AV foundation and Core Vdeo is already helping in that. The fundamental math is better (floating point and all) as I understand it. And the very fact that once you have a fully digitized signal (and nearly all acquisition has already moved there) error correction is not just possible, but widespread – then it may turn out that the old “holy grail” of maintaining arbitrary broadcast standards simply fade away.
And not because the accuracy part of the equation isn’t important – but because it universally comes along for the ride with good digitization and file handling — sorta like fat comes with hamburger — inescapably part of the deal.
Just thinking out loud.
“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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[Bill Davis] “Just thinking out loud.”
Except I can’t string or patch a DVI/Thunderbolt/displayport signal in to the machine room for dubs (digital ones, not necessarily tape), or to other monitors for clients, or to other computers for capture.
This theory falls down very fast. if Apple doesn’t give us baseband video out, then it’s truly game over for a lot of people.
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Except I can’t string or patch a DVI/Thunderbolt/displayport signal in to the machine room for dubs (digital ones, not necessarily tape), or to other monitors for clients, or to other computers for capture.
This theory falls down very fast. if Apple doesn’t give us baseband video out, then it’s truly game over for a lot of people.
Jeremy
“Jeremy,
I feel your pain. It’s the result of many people doing important work being stuck in situations where they are surrounded with gear that requires adherence to standards that are rapidly changing.
For years I’ve had to purchase and maintain expensive “Q” phosphor color accurate Sony monitors for my studio – and now I have literally no way to drive them to make the same kind of broadcast judgements I could in the past. And it sucks.
It reminds me of many years back when I migrated from analog to DVCAM. All the knowledge (and gear) I relied on for tasks like not “crushing” my blacks and keeping colors legal – ended up getting tossed out as I realized that the analog pedestal levels that were so critical for everything weren’t being digitized in the same way anymore.
The bad thing was that my Waveform monitor lost it’s place in my desktop rack (replaced by the same capability in FCP.) But the good thing is that even on lowly DVCAM – my black levels went from dull grey to ACTUAL black on the screen – RELIABLY!
If the QT to AV foundation keeps evolving – and we learn when to trust that our pictures are what we need them to be (and that they are maintained downstream) then what’s the point of worrying about WHY that is happening?
It’s like a new highway being opened that no longer forces you to drive through a town.
If the point is just to reach the right place, how much does the path we take really matter.
(I guess I still stop in Blythe on my rare Arizona to California drives – but more from nostalgia than need. And so it goes.)
One hand taketh away – and the other hand giveth.
Story of so much of life!
BTW, my real hope is that someone invents a BETTER process than WFM/VS – that lets us somehow “visualize” how our colors and luminance levels work in the new digital space. And prehaps a set of “drag and drop conforms” that simultaneously insure that the output files look precisely like the camera files (or a corrected versions that you trust) and that their levels are legal and appropriate for their intended use. Wouldn’t that be a nice improvement over twisting potentiometers to get the glowing dots back in the little squares on a thing that might not be working right since the tubes aren’t fully warmed up yet?
; )
“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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[Bill Davis] “”Broadcast monitoring” was created by engineers to address the grim realities of a pretty terrible system of shoehorning color information into a sliver of the broadcast television signal. It’s the “NTSC actually stands for “never twice the same color” deal.
“Bill,
As I’ve been telling you for months now, Color is only a small part of the “broadcast monitoring” equation. Correct color is easy, it’s insuring that fields in interlaced video are interpreted properly that absolutely requires proper output to a video monitor or TV. For some reason you keep ignoring that… You simply can’t output to tape or deliver for broadcast with any degree of confidence without the ability to properly monitor a video signal, and it can’t be done on a computer monitor.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’t miss my new Creative Cow Podcast: Bringing “The Whale” to the Big Screen:
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/Podcast-Series-2-MikeParfitandSuzanneChisholm/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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[Bill Davis] “If the QT to AV foundation keeps evolving – and we learn when to trust that our pictures are what we need them to be (and that they are maintained downstream) then what’s the point of worrying about WHY that is happening?”
That’s the thing, though, Bill. We have been a tapeless shop when tapeless was seen as a kludge. We hardly ever deliver tape anymore, and when we do, we send to a local dub house for trafficking.
A modern piece of machine room gear is the KiPro. I use it a lot. It provides one click 29.97 masters in hd and sd from our 24p timelines with proper interlacing and tc. I then take those files and make the proper tapeless deliverable. I can’t do this with displayport. The interlacing is wrong, the colors not true. I am all for ColorSync, believe me. It’s exciting.
But Thunderbolt is displayport and pcie, none of those send a proper video signal on their own, the data is just packaged up and sent down the pipe. As aja, decklink and marox have all shown, they have thunderbolt products that deliver baseband video. Apple is thinking long term here, with fcpx, but if I can’t get a singnal to our rather modern client plasma display, then they don’t want us. It’s OK, there’s others that do. I just can’t bring myself to believe that apple will get rid of external monitoring. I, of course, could be wrong, and my fcpx posts will go down in infamy. I’m ok with that. I’m willing to give it a shot.
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[Bill Davis] “BTW, my real hope is that someone invents a BETTER process than WFM/VS – that lets us somehow “visualize” how our colors and luminance levels work in the new digital space. And prehaps a set of “drag and drop conforms” that simultaneously insure that the output files look precisely like the camera files (or a corrected versions that you trust) and that their levels are legal and appropriate for their intended use.”
By the way, pro media tools does some of this:
https://www.digitalrebellion.com/promedia/
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[Bill Davis] “And not because the accuracy part of the equation isn’t important – but because it universally comes along for the ride with good digitization and file handling — sorta like fat comes with hamburger — inescapably part of the deal.”
Consistency and accuracy aren’t the same. Consistency means your color won’t change unexpectedly through your workflow, and that comes from a good, color-managed pipeline. Accuracy means you know what your colors actually are, and that comes from a good, well-profiled monitor.
Color management is getting easier, in that it’s being built into more of our tools.
Managing color is still hard, though. We used to just have to worry about NTSC video; now we have to worry about the many different combinations of hardware, software, and displays, with varying levels of support for specific profiles or color management.
FCPX with ColorSync is an important new feature, and one of my personal favorites, so I’m not trying to minimize it — but color management starts at acquisition and ends with display, so this is still far from a solved problem.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events
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