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Looks like Quad G5 wasn’t that bad after all.
The numbers I’m seeing so far indicate a very modest increase in performance
with the new Mac Pro. Some numbers, like encoding H.264 are actually worse.
I was hoping for two things come WWDC:
A new Intel box that would allow FCP to do almost all work in “Real” real-time.
And a new version of FCP (we are now very late with that from Apple)
that would give us parity with AVID in media management and allow any codec
in the timeline to playout in realtime. Neither of those things happened this week.This causes more facilities like ours, (where there is an AVID faction) to say
I should give up my experiment with FCP and go back to the “Real
Professional” editing system, Media Composer.
I’m disappointed I don’t have an argument to convince them they are wrong.You cannot go from an offline project sequence to an uprezzed sequence
in FCP without all kinds of hassles. It’s not even close to how easy it is
with AVID. Why aren’t more people trying to get Apple
interested in making this work flawlessly? I can’t be the only one that
hates the extra hours I have to work to find and replace still frames,
speed changes, key effects, and let’s not forget….NO NESTED SEQUENCES.
This is a promoted benefit of FCP, yet you can’t use it if you are
doing a rough cut at DV, that you intend to uprez to uncompressed.Would it make more since for me to realize FCP just isn’t the tool for me:
situations where large, multiple reels and 30 or 40 hours of material
are edited down to a 30 minute show, then uprezzed to a higher
quality codec for outputting to DigiBeta or now, D5 ?Let the responses begin.
Dan -
27 Replies
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I can’t argue that. I have the “Avid Faction” here as well and there are just some things that Avid is superior at. There are many places where FCP shines, but there are sadly a number of places where it falls flat on its face.
Hopefully someone somewhere will kick start FCP once again and get it moving along the path to true professional editing. Price withstanding, it does have it’s shortcomings. I still like it however. Kind of like the friendly, loyal dog that poops on your carpet every once in a while. You know that its just not right, but it’s hard to get too mad.
Tom -
I love it too Tom. I can cut faster on FCP than I ever did on AVID.
And I LOVE the camaraderie of FCP users like this one.
These very good things about FCP and the Mac in general. I just wish
I could have my cake and eat it too, so to speak.
And AVID really doesn’t won’t your business. That’s the way that act anyway.Dan
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Last time I checked FCP and Avid are competitors. They work differently. The are not the same even though they perform the same overarching task of editing. Use the tool that you are most comfortable with. If you can’t figure out FCP, then so be it, have fun spending money on Avid. A new version of FCP just came out with the advent of the intel laptops mere months ago (5.1.1). Apple designs computer hardware and software, and now that the transition to intel is ‘complete;, look for them to bring their software up to spec with the new computing hardware. FCP already runs on an intel, does Avid? Sure the media manager in FCP is not the best, and the lack of multiple codecs in the same timeline sucks at times, but if you know how to use FCP then you learn to work with this situation. Avid makes their own codecs that are hardware accelerated, and they better for all the dough they charge.
As far as processors go, the Quads are nice, but for someone like me who will be upgrading from a dual 2.0, the intels will be a blowout. I’m psyched.
Jeremy
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I still have to give it to Avid for the offline/online workflow. They have that down. The beauty of FCP is that I don’t work offline. Well, DVCPRO HD is my acquisition format and offline format, and onlining that either consists of upconverting on the fly out of the card to D5 or uprezzing it via software by dropping it into an uncompressed HD timeline and rendering.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Dan,
Everything you said about the shortcomings of FCP is the God’s honest truth. There are many things that should be working better, and onlining is a big one. FCP is just not a 100% reliable professional tool in the same way we’re used to in online bays, with Avid, with Discreet Edit, Smoke, etc. The low cost of hard drives has enabled me to work around most of the issues simply because I refuse to offline at low rez — in the old days that would have made it impossible for me to run a business. Nowadays, it seems that unless you’re doing anything other than 10-bit or uncompressed HD, there is no good reason to offline, however, if your business relies on the traditional offline – online workflow, then I can see heading back to the old pasture for sure.
DRW
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The performence gains you speak of will happen. The table has been set. You gotta understand that Tiger was not designed for the Intels. Leopard will be.
Additionally, FCP needs to be re-worked from the ground up. It’s based on old code.
And most importantly is GPU rendering on a machine that uses a PCI-express graphics card. When FCP can take advantage of this, I really believe we will have our “Real” real-time and then some.
Sean
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As someone mentioned above, if you aren’t doing the offline/online thing,
then yes, FCP is a breeze. If I’m only producing a 2min spot
loading in a couple of reels at 10 bit and finishing that way, it’s so nice.
But since most of what we do is half hours, it’s not that simple.As for the new Intel box, I’m just a little disappointed it wasn’t as
kick ass as the Macbook Pro was. That was quite a bit of speed up there.
I figured the Intel Mac Pro would be so fast, it would allow FCP to move into
more realtime and more timeline flexibility. Perhaps as someone said,
when OS 10.5 is released and we have 64 bit processing all the way through,
then maybe FCP see nice speed gains.Dan
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Well the new MacPro is as fast as it can be bearing in mind the available processors! When FCP6/Leopard comes out we are going to see the real speed gains we need. I just hope they fix the Media Mangler too.
Avid does work better in some areas, but bearing in mind the price it should. If FCP hadn’t come along we’d be paying ever bigger $$$ for Avid systems.
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Well the MacBook Pros we’re jumping from G4 processors to Intels. Not G5s to Intels. The max performance gain on the Book jump was 4x, while the max gain on the G5s to intel is 2x. Seems pretty decent to me.
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[JeremyG] “FCP already runs on an intel, does Avid?”
Avid runs on intel since 1998. Albeit under Windows. Avid already runs on Windows, does FCP? 🙂
It’s been so many years since I’ve done Avid now. I don’t know if it runs on OSX intel yet or not. I would assume not since there really was no reason to have a version that ran intel (OSX) until Monday.
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