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New FCPX user, what’s all the hate about?
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I’m sorry, Tim. FCP never was a FireWire only NLE. FCP was hardware agnostic from the beginning. It was even possible to use Media100 hardware with FCP. As for FCP with TargaCiné — it was a complete disaster until FCP v.4.5. Pinnacle kept screwing up the drivers royally and blaming it on Apple. FCP v.4 being buggy didn’t help too. You should remember that the first thing Blackmagic Design did was offering all hardware manufacturers to write drivers for their iron because those manufacturers proved they cannot do it themselves. Grant made a lot of friends with that announcment.
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Tim, I think the Waitresses had the better FCPX theme song in terms of pegs, holes, and industry cliquishness….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAcmh0-5nYU
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[Michael Aranyshev] “FCP v.4 being buggy didn’t help too. You should remember that the first thing Blackmagic Design did was offering all hardware manufacturers to write drivers for their iron because those manufacturers proved they cannot do it themselves. “
You make my point for me. It took many years for Apple to create a stable environment of both software and third-party hardware. Not that it NEVER happened. That its failure to happen from day 1 kept it from being taken seriously as a potential solution for anyone working with SDI. It doesn’t matter who was at fault.
You and I agree completely except for 1 thing: I said that FCP 4 was the release that allowed Apple to turn the corner and have FCP accepted as a fully capable solution, and you say it was still buggy! LOL
Also, FCP was never, ever hardware agnostic. Its hardware requirements were very specific. It was also NOT hardware independent UNLESS you were doing FireWire. What it DID offer was more than one vendor for I/O, with the tradeoff that, in the beginning, as you point out, none of it worked very well.
NOW, as long as you choose from one of a very small number of vendors, those third-party solutions work well. This was simply not true for the first couple of years, when solutions required considerable effort. We at Creative COW humbly thank Apple for this. LOL Our archives are full of many thousands of posts testifying to the difficulties.
But none of this changes my first point. FCP did not START as a fully capable end to end system. It was simply not a realistic option for a wide variety of mainstream workflows It BECAME an option.
Likewise there are many FCP diehards for whom FCPX did not START as a viable option, but it BECAME a viable option.
My SPECIFIC point is that the viability of FCP and FCPX happened on a very similar timeframe — depending on your needs, it was roughly 3-4 years after their introduction.
But Final Cut Pro never worked properly with Media 100 hardware. If you found that it had, I wish you would have posted on the many threads in Creative COW where people tried and failed.
Here’s one that notes that it ONLY worked on the already-discontinued Media 100 qx card using Adobe Premiere drivers, and NOT the then-current Vincent card with Media 100 drivers — and it would ONLY work for playback, and NOT for capture.
You can read the 2004 thread yourself here, but I’ll quote the venerable Phil Hodgetts:
…The qx model was never developed for G4 nor updated for later OS revisions. If you create a FCP sequence to match your media 100 media settings it will play just fine with the media 100 hardware….
But capture doesn’t work, it’s not terribly stable; media is not managed the same way and a whole host of other issues basically makes it an unworkable solution.
Other threads note unusable color shifts when trying to use media captured in one application in the other, if the formats were even compatible — and they often were not.
ALL of which supports my first point: FCP did not BEGIN as a completely viable solution for somebody working ONLY in SDI, but it BECAME one.
And likewise, FCPX did not BEGIN as a viable solution for quite a few mainstream workflows, but in many cases BECAME one.
We may debate many things, but I doubt we disagree on this: both FCP and FCPX BECAME far more capable than they were at release.
We may disagree with this additional point, but I believe that members of Creative COW were unambiguous: neither FCP nor FCPX reached critical mass until they became ABLE to reach critical mass, roughly 3-4 years into their growth. The X uptake curve WILL increase because it CAN increase.
This has nothing to do with the delusions of dinosaurs or the neighing of naysayers, and EVERYTHING to do with changes that Apple ACTUALLY MADE, and made SPECIFICALLY to address those EXACT concerns.
In fact, in a number of key instances, with absolutely unprecedented candor, Apple revealed that they KNEW that certain key features were missing, but said those features would be coming. Never happened in Apple history, which underscores just how seriously took these deficiencies.
I continue to say that Apple was entirely right to ship at the level of maturity (or immaturity) that they did, and that immediately cutting all ties to FCP 7 was the only possible move for them that made the least bit of sense — but please let us not pretend that Apple didn’t ship software that they thought was 100% ready. They did NOT think it was 100% ready. They TOLD us that for SOME workflows, it was not ready at all! The features just weren’t there!
Until they were. Later.
If it was a matter of appeasing the psychology of a bunch of timid old men, Apple wouldn’t have lifted a finger, nor did they. Apple made the changes to FCP and FCPX that those old men insisted on, because those features BELONG in that software.
The supposed dinosaurs were right about an awful lot, both in 2001 and 2011, which is why Apple addressed those exact deficiencies.
And once that happened, the whole idea of “dinosaurs” should have become extinct. It simply didn’t apply to the mainstream of Creative COW’s members, and it never really had.
What DID apply is that mainstream COW users were not free to change their workflows willy-nilly because Apple’s new thing looked neato. They had to wait until the new workflows it enabled were actually helpful.
Once more people COULD use FCP and FCPX for well-established mainstream workflows, more of them DID use FCP and FCPX.
Which brings me full circle. The whole idea of hate was overstated then, and is all but entirely inapplicable now. There were indeed some actual haters, but they have gone their un-merry way. The remaining concerns of the remaining holdouts among us have largely been established as entirely accurate.
And, as little as the “yay”-sayers care to acknowledge it, the debate does in fact change as Apple does in fact do what early “nay”-sayers said Apple NEEDED to do.
It also profoundly disrespects the reality that the overwhelming majority of “nay”-sayers here had already been through this rodeo 10 years ago, and knew better than to say “nay,” as much as they were saying “not yet.”
And they were right.
And Apple acknowledged it from the very first day.
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I didn’t want to argue with your main point. It’s the details that sounded wrong to me. FCP could work with any hardware using QuickTime IO. If it didn’t work, then the problem was with the drivers, not FCP most of the times. If the list was short that’s because the list of IO cards for Mac was short. Still, Targa, Igniter and Digital Voodoo cards were there.
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I’d disagree that you have to be a ‘very low rent’ editor to not go
for CC. Say you are a mostly one person shop. You hire VO
artists when needed and buy music from some of the great new
music licensing sites. You may occasionally hire an assistant but
it’s mostly you doing everything. So in this case, you have to be
‘good’ at a variety of things, but you probably are not ‘great’ at most
of them. Adobe, in my opinion, caters to the bigger houses, agencies,
and teams. People who can make amazing stuff with AE. Because
to me, Photoshop and AE are their ‘crown jewels’. Premiere is fine
but really it’s just another NLE. Nothing revolutionary or special.
But I can’t spend a ton of time learning expressions and complex
stuff with AE. I’ve done all the Meyers books, so I’m adequate in AE,
but for mid level MoGraphics, Motion is just fine and faster than AE to
boot. So given that Premiere is basically no big advantage, and
small, one person shops don’t usually have the expertise to be ‘power
users’ in AE, where is the incentive for me to spend $300 MORE
in a year to ‘subscribe’ to CC when I can own FCP X/Motion? I don’t get
It. FCP X and Motion and Compressor do just enough for the ‘little
guys’ who can’t spend the time to specialize. They can put out
‘good’ work fast. And it’s cheaper. If I can get something that
does all I need cheaper at one place than another, I’m going to do it.
That doesn’t make me ‘low rent’. I’m no big shot, but I’ve had months
where I billed $15k and just did $5k in the last 4 days. So yeah, I could
‘afford $50 a month for CC’. I could ‘afford’ $50 a month for a witch
doctor to shake a bone rattle over my head to keep the ‘creative killing
spirits’ out of my head too…..but that doesn’t mean it would make business
sense to do it. I have absolutely no compelling reason to spend more on
Adobe’s CC than I get with Apple’s tools. And that is why I think Adobe
is more for the bigger specialized houses with ‘AE power users’ or
agencies who collaborate and must exchange files with each other….
so you have an advantage because the photographers use
Photoshop, the design people use InDesign and Illustrator and so on.
Apple’s tools will appeal more often to small shops who do end to end stuff
with very small teams.Gabe Strong
G-Force Productions
http://www.gforcevideo.com -
[Gabe Strong] ” Adobe, in my opinion, caters to the bigger houses, agencies, and teams. People who can make amazing stuff with AE.”
I don’t know, Gabe. As a one man band myself, I don’t feel that way at all. The Adobe tools seem to be really accessible. I can get a lot done with minimal effort, yet they’re scalable enough that I can go as far as my abilities will take me, and that’s kind of the cool thing about AE IMO. I have have friends and coworkers who only use the software for simple things, but I also have friends and peers who use it for high end work. If Adobe was mostly interested in their upmarket users (like AutoDesk is), you certainly wouldn’t be seeing guys like Kevin Monahan hanging out at The Cow.
[Gabe Strong] ” Premiere is fine but really it’s just another NLE. Nothing revolutionary or special.”
What about the Warp Stabilizer or the Mercury Playback Engine, are those not unique or revolutionary?
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “I don’t know, Gabe. As a one man band myself, I don’t feel that way at all. The Adobe tools seem to be really accessible. I can get a lot done with minimal effort, yet they’re scalable enough that I can go as far as my abilities will take me, and that’s kind of the cool thing about AE IMO. I have have friends and coworkers who only use the software for simple things, but I also have friends and peers who use it for high end work.”
I agree. The Adobe toolset is both broad and deep. For design-led projects, the Adobe creative toolset is really compelling, and I think Adobe CC punches above its weight and offers editors a really affordable, accessible and capable finishing system.
Adobe CC is far from perfect, but I see it as appropriate for both individuals and teams. I’ve grown my business from a one-man band to a team, and the Adobe toolset was a big part of that.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Hmmm…..maybe what I was trying to say came across wrong?
AE IS scalable. It’s just that for simple to mid range stuff, Motion
seems faster. AE can do more, but it takes a lot of time to learn the
advanced stuff that Motion can’t do (like expressions). Who knows,
I very well might consider YOU an AE power user! (that’s a compliment
by the way 🙂As for Premiere, Warp Stabilizer is cool….but FCP X has the very similar
‘Stabilize’ (with optical flow). As for Mercury Playback Engine, that is
great if you have the right video card, but again FCP X does much the same
thing as far as being able to mix frame rates, video codecs and so on
on a timeline, and play them all back in real time. As a matter of fact, last
week I was out of town on a shoot and had to hire my (once in awhile) assistant
to shoot a multicam event. He didn’t check frame rates and I had 1 cam at
24p and another at 30p. FCP X multicam synched them by audio, and I could
cut between them in realtime, all the frame rate conversion stuff was ‘invisible’,
it just worked. And this is on a 2009 MacPro. FCP X is every bit as fast as Premiere in
my experience, Don’t get me wrong Premiere is great. I just don’t see any big advantage
it had over FCP X, other than being able to exchange files with other Adobe apps easily
(well and that track thing, I have a soft spot for tracks).So if I do ‘end to end’ work where clients are not dictating what I use or insisting that
I accept CC files from them, I am not a motion graphic expert who does extensive AE
stuff, and I don’t work on a PC, I just don’t see any advantage to going with CC, when
I can use FCP X, Motion, Compressor, and Resolve light for a fraction of the cost.
The money I save is enough to buy an A7s for a third camera after a little more than 3 years.
Now some people are AE whizes. Some have team members they need to exchange Adobe
files with. Or agency types that all must have the latest version so they can work with
their clients. But for small guys like me, who just have a client come to them and say
‘We want an epic promo video….can you make us one?’…well I just don’t see a compelling
reason that I must use Adobe products to do this. So I’ll save money and use FCP X
and the associated software. Just my opinion of course.Gabe Strong
G-Force Productions
http://www.gforcevideo.com -
For all the things I like about FCPX, one thing that drives me nuts is the poor support for formats that are not Quicktime based. You can throw almost anything at Premiere, and that has been the case for many years. FCPX is very picky. I have these five year old files that were 1080i 29.97 fps in MPEG2 with ac3 audio, with .mpg extension. The import window will not let you import something as simple as that. The mpg files are grayed out, you can’t even select them. Dragging and dropping onto the browser window doesn’t work. Obviously I threw the same files into Premiere, After Effects (Mac & PC), Edius and Vegas, all of which took them without a problem and scroll through them happily.
It also doesn’t take .ts (transport stream) files, which all the other NLEs do without a hitch. And while it takes m2ts files, you almost hear it complaining about, like “Why are you throwing this at me? I want Quicktime, man!”, and of course it’s a day at the beach judging by the amount of time the beach ball is spinning, which depending on the length or amount of the footage, it can be between one and several minutes. When it finally imports, working with m2ts video in FCPX is far from easy, the beach ball shows up very often. Obviously I threw the same file into Premiere and I was editing fast as I could be with no problems.
What makes this irritating is that it leaves place to crooked companies to post these “blogs” and do a very good SEO so that when you Google something like “How to load mpg files in FCPX”, you will get all these fake blogs near the top of the results which show you how to convert an mpeg file to Prores using their software. Try it yourself, and you’ll see, EasyFab, Brorsoft, and many more, all pretending to be some helpful guy writing a tutorial when it’s the companies trying to cash on people gullible enough to buy that software when you can find many free ways to re-wrap a video to a format that FCPX will take. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have a beef with these companies if they would just straight up advertise their software, everybody has a right to make money even if there’s another software that does the same thing for free, what I can’t stand is the dishonesty of trying to pass themselves as colleagues helping colleagues that irritates me.
Rant aside, Apple has to start catching up on format support. Gone are the days of transcoding to an I frame only codec to be able to edit, today’s computers, Macs or PCs, are fast enough to ingest most of the footage as it comes out of the camera and start editing, even on codecs with lots of B frames, and they have been for years (unless we’re talking about those uncompressed 4k formats used in Hollywood movies, of which I have no experience with, but I’m sure they are probably much more demanding). Interestingly enough, FCPX can’t import something as simple as MPEG2/ac3 with mpg extension, but it handles my UHD GoPro footage just fine, in its original mp4 60 Mbps as it comes out of the camera, without using GoPro Studio to transcode to Cineform. So why can’t it take much simpler wrappers like mpg, m2ts, which require far less CPU cycles to decode?
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[Gabe Strong] “AE IS scalable. It’s just that for simple to mid range stuff, Motion seems faster.”
Not for PC users. 🙂 Kidding aside, I’ll have to take your word for it as I’ve never used Motion. For those of us on non Apple platforms, there isn’t much of an alternative, unfortunately… well, maybe Hitfilm is, but I haven’t used that either, so I couldn’t say for sure.
[Gabe Strong] “As for Premiere, Warp Stabilizer is cool….but FCP X has the very similar ‘Stabilize’ (with optical flow).”
Fair enough, but was anyone doing rolling shutter repair+stabilization before Adobe – does that not count as being revolutionary?
[Gabe Strong] ” As for Mercury Playback Engine, that is
great if you have the right video card, but again FCP X does much the same thing as far as being able to mix frame rates, video codecs and so on on a timeline, and play them all back in real time.”MPE is a combination of technologies like; multithreading, 64bit architecture and GPU acceleration of some effects and operations like scaling, deinterlacing and blending modes. I believe the difference is that MPE will perform on a wider variety of hardware configurations without the need to transcode media. MPE can also perform in software mode if no suitable GPU is available. If I’m not mistaken, FCPX operates differently.
[Gabe Strong] “So if I do ‘end to end’ work where clients are not dictating what I use or insisting that
I accept CC files from them, I am not a motion graphic expert who does extensive AE stuff, and I don’t work on a PC, I just don’t see any advantage to going with CC, when
I can use FCP X, Motion, Compressor, and Resolve light for a fraction of the cost. The money I save is enough to buy an A7s for a third camera after a little more than 3 years.”It sounds like you’ve made some great business decisions then – respect. It’s always good to see creative people succeed. I’m just suggesting that there may be similar stories to be told by CC users. 🙂
[Gabe Strong] “But for small guys like me, who just have a client come to them and say
‘We want an epic promo video….can you make us one?’…well I just don’t see a compelling reason that I must use Adobe products to do this.”To be honest, I don’t either. 🙂
Shawn
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