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New blog post from Philip Hodgetts. Worth the read.
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The editing software that works best is the one you know best. I used FCP for years. I have moved on. I am now using Adobe Premier Pro.
I would like to say that I wasted my time learning FCP7. Every plugin, script and trick. Apple took everything I learned and made it worthless with the release of FCPX. I will not fall for that again. Years and years of learning and work gone, useless.
Do you trust Apple? Will they change everything again? Will they make it better or just make it different? I made the mistake of taking over the San Diego Final Cut Pro User Group the month FCPX came out. Most of the group doesn’t even use FCPX. I may change the name of the group so we don’t have to advertise FCPX. UCSD where we hold our meetings stopped teaching FCP7 and won’t be teaching FCPX. UCSD now only has classes on AVID and Adobe. It over, FCPX is a looser.. You can wait for FCPXI but I won’t.
There are lots of people on Creative Cow that make lots of money selling stuff for FCPX and I wish them good luck, their going to need it.
I would just like to make Apple feel the way I feel about their betrayal. I have some ideas. Maybe a t-shirt for NAB… developing.
James Daugherty
President SDFCPUG.com -
[James Daugherty] “I would like to say that I wasted my time learning FCP7. Every plugin, script and trick. Apple took everything I learned and made it worthless with the release of FCPX. I will not fall for that again. Years and years of learning and work gone, useless. “
I would hope your skill you have learned as an editor remains. PPro is a relatively easy transition for an experienced FCP editor.
“My Name is Steve and I’m an FCPX user”
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[James Daugherty] “I would like to say that I wasted my time learning FCP7.”
Was FCP the first NLE you edited on? Just curious?
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[Shane Ross] “That shows how little you know about our world. The editor needs to be a skilled storyteller too. It is a collaboration. The director isn’t in the bay just telling us what to do. We edit the footage without them there, and then they come in and give us notes.”
But Shane,
That’s just your experience.
Personally, I’ve seen so many possible permutations of what a client considers “an editor” or “a director” or “a producer” that I gave up on a single, easy to categorize definition decades ago.
It’s anything from a deeply experienced pro who understands the possibilities and limitations that makes them effective in whichever hat they’re wearing at the moment – to the idiot nephew of the financing party – who’s given the “title” to keep them out of the way.
I’ve seen “editors” who are truly just button pushers who look to the director for approval every 5 seconds, and editors where it’s obvious after 2 minutes in their suite that by far the best “direction” you can give them is to leave for a 4 hour coffee break to get out of their brains and let them do what they do really well.
The real issue, is that while good ones (most likely like you) are a joy – the reality is that with the economic downturn and gutting of the ranks of developing talent (everyone who was filtered-up out of the newbies and given raises to keep them around were also the first ones the “cost cutters” booted to cut costs) has caused a BIG gap in talent in the entire industry.
Want to find the experienced 45 years olds in this market who WERE the soul of creative industries like ours? Order a pizza. The chance is it will be delivered by a guy in that age group who can’t find work in whatever they’ve been getting good at for the past 20 years.
That, IMO, is the hidden crisis in our industry. That original vision of a cadre of “pro editors” in shops all around the planet ready to help the newbies and provide the wisdom to run the new tools? D-E-C-I-M-A-T-E-D.
I’d actually be interested in hearing from the facility guys here. Ignore the “boss” and the managers and just look at the guys in the seats that comprise your editing crew – now estimate their median age. I’d be curious as to whether it’s greater than or less than the average age of pizza delivery guys today.
Weird world we live in.
“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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[Christian Schumacher] “Where were you in the last six months? When Apple’s new paradigm was introduced, even a cat sleeping on a couch has become a “storyline” and it is considered an “event”. Want to add a dream sequence over it?
That’s on a “secondary storyline”…And so on…Forget any titles though, better add them on youtube.”I guess you’re not quite over the “let me be clever and wrap some ill-thought dismissal in poor argument” era.
Can I join you and be equally dismissive of the conventions that, in Avid (or Vegas, or Legacy) everything is reduced to being a “track?” (A thing that shows something has passed by learning nothing save an impression in the dust – and certainly nothing of value — behind?)
Or are you suggesting that interface designers must re-tag their interface with precision descriptors like “insert dream sequence” so that the user can comfortably do precisely that?
; )
“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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[James Daugherty] “I would just like to make Apple feel the way I feel about their betrayal. I have some ideas. Maybe a t-shirt for NAB… developing.”
Now THAT made me laugh.
Back in the late 1980s I had almost the EXACT same plan. I was going to get a bunch of T-shirts made up that read “Friends don’t let friends drive PCs” for an early MacWorld. (We were in our early blush of success with the Mac and everything seemed so superior to our untrained brains!)
Considering all the changes in the subsequent years, the Scully/Amelio led downturn in Apple, and the long slog back to relevance, I think if I’d done that in the blush of youth, I’d have not looked back on it as a moment of displaying much sober intelligence to the world…
But that’s the normal province of the young. So rock on, James. Have fun. Just keep your eyes open, dude. A few of us think the long game is far from decided in the NLE evolution wars.
Peace.
“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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[Philip Hodgetts] “Walter, I’ve been writing and presenting on how software will (almost certainly) automatically do some pre-sorting and pre-editing based on metadata… You laugh now, and I expect that.”
Why on earth would I laugh?
Sports highlight reels have been cut automatically based on synced metadata for years now, right? That’s just the beginning.
My point is that the process is still human-bound in that machines can’t structure all our unstructured data yet. Automated transcription isn’t a solved problem. Gleaning context isn’t a solved problem. Identifying visuals and knowing their meanings isn’t a solved problem.
I am arguing that most of the value that an editor adds is in implicitly creating metadata as they review footage, before they manage that metadata while actually creating the cut.
If footage comes into the edit bay with that metadata formalized and managed, and if the editor is no longer expected to review the footage, what’s changed? You’ve time-shifted the creation of the associated metadata (possibly pre-edit, possibly on the shoot) and reduced the editor’s opportunity to add value, making them responsible for assembly while someone else is responsible for selection.
Looking at the whole production process, someone still has to see the footage, whether it’s the editor reviewing it in the bay or a producer annotating it on-set.
I maintain that building an automated system that can be trusted to reduce editorial time by winnowing down footage without human intervention and without discarding useful pieces is a hard problem in the general case.
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 -
[Bill Davis] ” I guess you’re not quite over the “let me be clever and wrap some ill-thought dismissal in poor argument” era.”
Unfortunately, I can’t Bill. So, you have to put up with me. I still have to deal with this poor release from Apple, and also theirs ill-thought-out dismissals of our conventions that agreeably have endured over a hundred years. You can complain as much as you want, but I don’t think that my simple poor argument on a forum could be in anyway, more dismissive -and important- than to what Apple have managed to accomplish to have done to date, specially by attempting to re-invent those very known conventions. You’re looking up to the mothership way too much.
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[Christian Schumacher] “You can complain as much as you want, but I don’t think that my simple poor argument on a forum could be in anyway, more dismissive -and important- than to what Apple have managed to accomplish to have done to date, specially by attempting to re-invent those very known conventions. You’re looking up to the mothership way too much.”
Good or bad, Apple are in the business of re-inventing conventions, someone has to at least try and shake things up a bit.
“My Name is Steve and I’m an FCPX user”
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[Steve Connor] “[Christian Schumacher] “You can complain as much as you want, but I don’t think that my simple poor argument on a forum could be in anyway, more dismissive -and important- than to what Apple have managed to accomplish to have done to date, specially by attempting to re-invent those very known conventions. You’re looking up to the mothership way too much.”
Good or bad, Apple are in the business of re-inventing conventions, someone has to at least try and shake things up a bit.”
Fair enough, Steve. Let’s see if that’s bad or good, then. I wonder how it will turn out.
Let me fix a typo I made:
“but I don’t think that my simple poor argument on a forum could be in anyway, more dismissive -and important-than to what Apple have managed to accomplish to date, specially by attempting to re-invent those very known conventions.”
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