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New blog post from Philip Hodgetts. Worth the read.
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[Steve Connor] “Good or bad, Apple are in the business of re-inventing conventions, someone has to at least try and shake things up a bit.”
This whole “shake things up a bit” argument has always sounded a little silly to me. If you want to shake things up I would suggest a good wood roller coaster – the Cyclone in Coney Island would do nicely for that.
Successful companies seek to make useful products, and if they’ve made a useful product they try to make it better. I don’t think Apple was trying to shake things up – they already knew what they had, they had tested the UI on Imovie. They were simply trying to redefine their market – out with the upper 5%, in with the theoretical hordes of new users for their simplified workflow.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Christian Schumacher] “our conventions that agreeably have endured over a hundred years. “
Uh….
I’m confused as to which “conventions” your talking about?” TV was only developed in the late 40s’ early 50s. Are you talking movies? Are you saying that somehow “cut on the action” or “dissolve implies passage of time” traditions that might have vaguely sorta been around since the magic lantern era can’t be done with FCP-X?
Heck, I’ll spot you 70 of those 100 years. If you can name an edit function that’s been around for even that long that FCP-X can’t do quite handily, I’ll bow to your wisdom. But I don’t believe you can. So your original post was simply more hyperbole, IMO.
“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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[Herb Sevush] “I don’t think Apple was trying to shake things up – they already knew what they had, they had tested the UI on Imovie. They were simply trying to redefine their market – out with the upper 5%, in with the theoretical hordes of new users for their simplified workflow.”
First, I think you nearly totally misunderstand the target market for FCP-X.
It’s popular to think it’s aimed at the iMovie crowd, but if you’d have spent any serious time with it, you’d know how silly that sounds.
iMovie folks do not need a complex database in their NLE. They don’t need 32 bit floating point math accuracy. They don’t need or want clip collections, I/O paths to Motion or XML interchange.
And if you think the X interface is “simplified, you really haven’t used it much. I’d argue that it’s significantly more complex than Legacy ever was. Not because the structure is currently “built out” at the same level Legacy was after a decade of development, but because at it’s core – it’s a whole lot more “extensible” than Legacy ever was.
The truth of X is that it sequesters assets upon import – then allows the editor to affect them by the application of robust metadata to represent clip change states in ways that allow the user to preform countlessly more complex operations than Legacy ever did.
The reason is that the timeline in legacy was a dumb beast. It was a fixed container that “learned” from nothing and “informed” nothing in return.
X, on the other hand, is an agile data container (one type of which can be video assets, but can equally be fixed graphics, motion graphics, sounds or whatever) that can be affected by other data (and can in turn reflect it’s internal states via data export) in ways the Legacy was simply never built to do.
As robust as it became over time, FCP-Legacy was a pretty DUMB construct (if often operated by many, many very smart people.)
X is a much smarter design – and when it grows more, you’ll be seeing whole new possibilities emerge from that intelligence.
Every month I learn more about it as a user, I’m more and more comfortable betting my whole business model on my growing certainty that time will prove this view to be accurate.
And the “it’s dumbed down FCP-Legacy” to be totally discredited.
We shall see.
“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] “I’m confused as to which “conventions” your talking about?”
Tracks, Bins, Sequences and Source/Record monitors.
Src/Rec is from TV, but the others are much older than that.
Not a 100yrs old exactly, but old enough to become deep rooted conventions. -
[Bill Davis] “It’s popular to think it’s aimed at the iMovie crowd, but if you’d have spent any serious time with it, you’d know how silly that sounds. “
Odd…seeing the two very recent posts saying how useful FCX was in furthering projects started in iMovie. It is for the crowd that wants just a little bit more than iMovie allows.
*snicker*
Seriously…to have it “import from iMovie,” and be so close to how iMovie looks and feels…I hardly see how that statement is “silly.” It was made by the guy who made the most recent version of iMovie. So it was made by the guy who makes stuff for the iMovie crowd…and it even acts like iMovie.
[Bill Davis] “iMovie folks do not need a complex database in their NLE. They don’t need 32 bit floating point math accuracy. They don’t need or want clip collections, I/O paths to Motion or XML interchange.”
Some do. A lot do. I have seen many many people move to FCP from iMovie because they want more than iMovie can provide…and then are lost because FCP doesn’t act like iMovie. Well, now it does! WIN!
*snicker*
Yes, I am trolling now. I’ll be honest.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Bill Davis] “It’s popular to think it’s aimed at the iMovie crowd, but if you’d have spent any serious time with it, you’d know how silly that sounds. “
So true! So silly! Where on earth could that idea have possibly come from?
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David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
Bill –
The last line of my original post to Steve was “And even Bill Davis agrees with me on this”, so I guess it was better that I cut it out.
[Bill Davis] “First, I think you nearly totally misunderstand the target market for FCP-X. It’s popular to think it’s aimed at the iMovie crowd, but if you’d have spent any serious time with it, you’d know how silly that sounds.”
I never said it was meant for the Imovie crowd, I merely said that they had already tested the UI in Imovie and knew what they were trying to do.
Over and over you have stated that X is not meant for the top “whatever” percent of workfolows but for all the other professionals that make up the majority of video editors. You don’t want it to handle too many cameras in multicam, you don’t care if it can’t handle markers without bloating file size, the list goes on and on about all the things you don’t want Apple engineers to bother with because it will take time way from the features that suit you, and by extension, the vast majority of professional video editors. I was merely agreeing with you here by saying Apple’s marketing is aimed at editors like you and away from editors like me. Are you now in a position where you will disagree with yourself in order to disagree with me?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “You don’t want it to handle too many cameras in multicam, you don’t care if it can’t handle markers without bloating file size, the list goes on and on about all the things you don’t want Apple engineers to bother with because it will take time way from the features that suit you, and by extension, the vast majority of professional video editors. “
Well, there is some truth in this, Herb.
But it misses the larger point. Which is that the features that will satisfy the larger and wider video production world of tomorrow, simply may not be the ones that satisfy the needs of guys like you today.
I’ll grant that editing itself – at least as you currently practice it – might not need to change for quite a while. But whether that’s a broad trend or a calm island in the midst of a storm is increasingly open for debate. I still think there are massive shifts taking place out there. One of which reflected by the X rebuild is the “datafication” of nearly everything.
Internet search used to be the province of university folk. Today it’s something grandmothers regularly do to find recipes. That’s powerful change.
FCP-X “fits” that because I see it as an alternative we didn’t have before that’s more closely targeted towards a new world where video is just another form of data. And organizing it, searching for it, and manipulating it, may actually become as important as “editing it” a process that used to be the end of the manipulation chain, but that I think is moving more toward being one “state” of the data grouping that increasingly is expected to evolve over time.
I embrace that concept since it means I may be called upon to constantly monitor and update work, rather than just delivering it and that’s the end of the process. I think that may turn out to be a better sustainable revenue model in the future for content creators – but we’ll see. It’s never really been possible to look at “deliverable work” as a fluid thing before this internet connected era. But look at how “refreshing content” streams like RSS feeds and site updating increase SEO rankings because a site is in constant change and that is reflected by the web crawlers.
In a “pull” centered world. That’s valuable. If some future rev of X can help me leverage SEO results by making it easier to refresh my published video content – goody.
Just thinking out loud here.
“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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it doesn’t really matter how fast you are when the director and the continuity can’t even do their job. lately i have been appalled at the number of big shows with basic continuity errors..you know the kind…glass in the left hand on the close up. then half full glass in the right hand on the wide shot. shirts open, shirts closed..it doesn’t matter what you edit on if the material is flawed. why don’t people ever bitch about that.
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[Bill Davis] “world of tomorrow”
[Bill Davis] ” If some future rev of X can help”
[Bill Davis] “I still think there are massive shifts taking place out there”
Can you feel it, Bill?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A08_nlku8kc
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