Looks like Quad G5 wasn’t that bad after all.

[Bret Williams]

Well, a lot of people think Avid’s EDITING interface is at best, inelegant and annoying. Unlike any other editing app and reqiring 40 keystrokes when one mouse click would do. But, that’s just their opinion. Which is more important, the editing interface, or the online issues?

Hey, Media 100 was a breeze for uprezzing. Easier than Avid. But I’m not going back there!

[Bret Williams]

Well, in the coming years one of two things will happen. Apple will start producing apps for the windows platform or it will open OSX to run on all intel platforms.

Personally, I think either make a good back up plan for a company. Apple holds all the options. If they don’t cut it as a hardware manufacturer they can certainly be an awesome software manufacturer and compete in the Windows world no problem. I mean, their software is so incredible that people will purchase Apple hardware just to run it.

But the more likely growth potential is for Apple to compete with it’s OS on all intel hardware. They can still have strict hardware requirements and increase their potential market by 1900%. Gotta be tempting.

[Sean Oneil]

I think I’m the only person alive who actually likes Media Manager. I think it’s great. Yes, various versions of FCP have had bugs (like when you couldn’t “delete unused media” from offline clips). But I’ve always liked it. It’s pretty straightforward. Copy, Recompress, Make Offline – these are all great, useful tools. They help you and force you to stay organized.

Back in the Media 100 days, it was much, much easier to up-rez. But that wasn’t a good thing. You had no control. You couldn’t even reconnect media.

MM aside, I’m actually getting really fed up with FCP and I totally understand some of the complaints. This past month, for the first time ever, I’ve wondered if going with FCP instead of Avid was a mistake. It feels like a snail now. In fact, the whole Macintosh experience just crawls. Everything is slow and unresponsive. 1-2 years ago it seemed pretty fast. But it hasn’t kept up. And FCP is the worst. Rendering is bad enough. But I even have large projects where the actual project takes 3-4 minutes just to open and 30 seconds just to do an autosave. This is totally unacceptable.

I hope the Mac Pro and Leopard will get things back on track.

Sean

[Dan Riley]

Bob,

Your #2 and #3 are great ideas/tricks which I will most certainly try.
I don’t do many nested sequence stuff anyway, but the still frame thing
is killing me in uprez.

As for just editing in the original resolution, I’d love to, and I do that
when it’s a small project with only a few hours of footage.
However most shows I do have 40 hours of raw material. If I put that in at 10 bit
uncompressed, that would be 4000 gigs. I have a nice SATA RAID
but it’s only 2000 gigs. Even if I did double the storage, I still would
only be able to have one project on the drives at a time if I loaded it
all in at high res. And now with the camera I really want to start using,
the XDCAM HD which automatically makes low res files for offline,
I really want to use those files, so FCP’s MM is still an issue.

But your solutions above are great ideas and I will
definitely see what happens in about three weeks when I uprez
my current show.

Thanks,
Dan

[Blub06]

When Apple was going from the G4 to the G5 IBM and the other design partners were told by Apple, we want speed, give us horse power!. IBM said, we can give it to you but that means we will essentially be designing a chip that can not be reworked for a laptop. Apple said give us power and the G5 was born.

For the last few years it has been the laptop that has offered the most profit for computer companies, while Apple makes great laptops the speed difference between the top of the line Apple G4 laptops and the WinTel laptops has expanded so much that Apple feels it is losing huge amount of sales because of it. So Apple went with Intel, they have horse power for both desktop and laptop.

10 Months ago or so, Intel announced that its next iteration of chips will not priorities speed but power savings. Apple gets in as Intel gets out of the speed business. For the last year or so the stock of Intel has had the snot kicked out of it, because, they don

[Annaël Beauchemin]

[Bob Flood] “4. never had a problem with speed changes.”

Version 4.x was definately broken. Especialy with quicktime files (without timecode). I’m surprised to hear it has been working for somebody. I always had to verify media managed projects or EDLs against a reference video to readjust every speed change.

At least they fixed it in version 5…

But it would be so much better to be able to “consolidate” a project without having to copy it and put every masterclip in a single “Master Clips” bin like it does now. It’s a mess. Why can’t the MM just delete the unused media and keep the original masterclips and sequences intact? (This is a rhetorical question… the media manager cannot because it wasn’t designed properly at its core level).

[Alexander Serpico]

>to do a proper online with FCP you really have to be a creative-workflow-jimmy-rigger and super quick on your technical feet.

you speak the truth. its never straight forward and always complicated, but in some strange way i get personal satisfaction from being able to perform that balancing act…