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Off The Tracks review
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[greg janza] “The film also suffers from having a lack of actual diversity. It’s nearly wall to wall white males.”
Yeah, I REALLY noticed that. I believe I counted two females in their entire list of people in the film.
[greg janza] “I’d also argue that a cut-down version of this film (20-30 mins) could get a lot more people to watch it.”
I agree with this too. There are several times I thought it made it’s point, and could have ended, but then went on. I agree, it could have been shorter, and still made it’s point clear.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Shane Ross] “No, it wasn’t funded by Apple or sanctioned by them. That’s not what I meant. it’s like…a “love letter” to Apple about FCP-X.”
Well, I suppose that’s true in the same way Apollo 13 was a “love letter” to NASA –
And The Social Network was a “love letter” to Facebook.
Yet nobody seemed to have a huge issue with those, as I recall.But a young filmmaker wanting to examine the roots of a piece of software in a creative fashion – no patience for that – cuz it’s…different, I guess?
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[greg janza] “But I also think the criticism that has been raised in this thread about the film just being a glorified marketing piece is valid. “
So then it’s equslly fair to slam a film like say, Top Gun, as just a military recruiting effort?
My point is there are hundreds of films upon which we can overlay the criticism that they are just thinly veiled marketing pieces. Hell, doesn’t that describe the ENTIRE DC and Marvel universes, Transformers and the Harry Potter oveure, just to note four out of thousands?
The ONLY reason some of you apparently find this notable AT ALL is that Brads feelings about the topic run – in whole or in part – counter to your own.
Who knows, perhaps there’s someone out there as passionate about AVID or Premiere as Brad became about what he saw in FCP X.
If so, have at it.
????
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Neil Goodman] “Im curious what makes you think Adobe and Avid don’t work well on Macs? Kind of weird since Davinci notoriously takes significant more juice to run smooth than either of the two apps you mentioned”
Mostly just the constant kvetching I see about how Apple needs to beef up their “woeful” hardware in order to efficiently run those programs.
Reading about what seems like constant dissatisfaction on the PC side (let alone the laptop side of things) by others seems in pretty stark contrast to my experience on modest Apple hardware running X.
But I acknowledge it’s entirely anecdotal.
I’d you were to tell me there are legions of editors out there running PPro or MC on laptops as their primary day to day income producing tools, in the same fashion I’ve been successful on MacBook Pros with X — I’d have no reason to doubt you, really.
I just seldom hear that sort of talk. But that might just be me.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Neil Goodman] “what makes you think Adobe and Avid don’t work well on Macs? Kind of weird since Davinci notoriously takes significant more juice to run smooth than either of the two apps “
I haven’t tested Avid performance recently, but I just tested PP 12.1.2, Resolve 15.1.1 and FCPX 10.4.3 on my 2017 iMac 27. Each codec is a different case, but with 8-bit 4k H264 at 100 mbps, Resolve 15 is much faster than Premiere — especially in timeline responsiveness without proxies. It’s nearly as fast as FCPX. Resolve’s “skimmer” is very responsive, far quicker than Premiere’s “Hover Scrub”.
Premiere at long last is finally using Quick Sync for H264 export, so it’s roughly competitive with FCPX and Resolve on that one task. However Premiere doesn’t use Quick Sync for decoding (only encoding), so timeline operations are very sluggish and laggy. It is so slow when doing JKL commands, it feels like the keyboard is broken.
Blackmagic has recently made tremendous progress in improving Resolve performance. It is shocking how fluid and responsive their “skimmer” is — it feels almost like FCPX.
Even though FCPX is a real speed demon, when exporting 4k H264 to 1080p H264, Resolve 15 is actually twice as fast as FCPX, with both NLEs doing single-pass export at 20 mbps. Examination of the final material and studying the file header with Invisor shows Resolve isn’t taking any short cuts — the material is valid, good quality and plays OK. I don’t know how they are reaching that performance level. On 4k H264 export, Resolve 15 and FCPX are roughly equal on a 2017 iMac, and Premiere is a little slower, but much faster than it used to be.
On all three NLEs IF you create proxies, they all feel fast. However both FCPX and Resolve 15 are fast enough on a 2017 i7 iMac 27 to smoothly edit a single stream of 4k H264 without proxies — Premiere is not.
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[Joe Marler] ”
On all three NLEs IF you create proxies, they all feel fast. However both FCPX and Resolve 15 are fast enough on a 2017 i7 iMac 27 to smoothly edit a single stream of 4k H264 without proxies — Premiere is not.
“I dont get into measuring such specifics like this. Im an offline creative editor at the core and rendering/exporting/codecs and all that dont mean a thing to me. I get handed a project – I edit the media in whatever form its given to me in, and then upon completion I hand it back to someone else and they do what they got to do to get it delivered. I pay no mind to what codec it is.
What I do know is that all 3 NLE’s work damn near flawlessly on a 2010 Cheesgrater that I have at work and just as flawless at home on a 2017 peced up Imac. Things are quick snappy as as much as real 1:1 feedback as Ive ever gotten from software when I input commands. Thats what I consider fast. Software stays out the way while I make shit.
I understand everyone has different things they need to do but getting caught in these – my NLE can render this .2 seconds faster than yours stuff is toxic and at the end of the day is really meaningless when it comes to getting content out the door.
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[Neil Goodman] “…Davinci notoriously takes significant more juice to run smooth than either of the two apps… I pay no mind to what codec it is…all 3 NLE’s work damn near flawlessly on a 2010 Cheesgrater that I have at work and just as flawless at home on a 2017 peced up Imac….
NLE responsiveness can be very affected by codec and resolution. Using a low-compression all-intraframe codec at 1080p, almost any NLE on any hardware will feel fast.
Unfortunately lots of material today is shot on interframe 4k H264, and that is often difficult to handle. If you have the time to transcode all that to a mezzanine codec or proxies, it works well — on nearly any hardware & NLE, including Premiere. Likewise if you’re dealing with modest amounts of scripted narrative material, then playback performance when scrubbing through that may not be vital. But with high shooting ratios on large-scale field documentary, or news gathering, transcoding everything is not ideal.
Adobe realizes this so their Premiere intro video says: “allows editors to work with 4k and beyond, without time-consuming transcoding…whether it’s a mobile device, action camera, DSLR or almost any other source”, and “never needing to render until your work is complete” : https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/what-is-premiere-pro-cc.html?set=premiere-pro–get-started–overview
Unfortunately Premiere does not handle 4k H264 “like mercury”, at least on Macs. The playback engines in Resolve 15 and FCPX are much more responsive on the same hardware.
[Neil Goodman] “….but getting caught in these – my NLE can render this .2 seconds faster than yours stuff is toxic and at the end of the day is really meaningless…”
It’s not about 0.2 sec render time difference. On my top-spec 2017 iMac 27, Premiere’s viewer update rate when fast forwarding 4k H264 (at 1/4 resolution) can degrade to once every five seconds. Both Resolve 15 and FCPX update over 20 times per second, or 100 times faster. This is for various 8-bit 4k H264 material I’ve tested, including from the Panasonic DVX200, GH5, Sony A7RIII and DJI Inspire 2.
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[Joe Marler] “It’s not about 0.2 sec render time difference. On my top-spec 2017 iMac 27, Premiere’s viewer update rate when fast forwarding 4k H264 (at 1/4 resolution) can degrade to once every five seconds. Both Resolve 15 and FCPX update over 20 times per second, or 100 times faster. This is for various 8-bit 4k H264 material I’ve tested, including from the Panasonic DVX200, GH5, Sony A7RIII and DJI Inspire 2.”
Yea thats cool, whatever gets your motor humming. Just trying to put it out there that “fast” is relative to the user. While you may consider things like scrubbing footage with the least dropped frames and which NLE does it better, this is something thats never even crossed my mind.
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[Shane Ross] ” I will hazard that most of the users of FCP-X aren’t professional editors, but hobbyists, or even those who are content creators for things that do make money, but they themselves aren’t only editors, but have multiple hats.”
I think that mostly has to do with changes in the market place. In my opinion you need to “have multiple hats” to stay marketable out here these days.
I think many people on here are as old as me and know how things were in this biz back in the day.
Clients came to the production houses for 3 main things 1. shooting 2. editing 3. writing
They needed shooting because cameras were expensive and so was editing. I can still remember the first time I was working for a production house and a producer broke out his laptop and adaptors and wanted the footage brought in on the spot after the shoot.
He said he was going to cut it “himself” on this program called FCP. I saw the writing on the wall right then and there. Many people were not going to need the production house for editing in the future. I wasn’t going to lock myself into one job in this industry.
Soon camera prices dropped also and many didn’t need the production house for anything.
People I remember cutting in FCP early in those days weren’t folks who didn’t know what they were doing. They were people who had been working for years in the biz that saw a way to cut cost. That’s it.
Not needing “external monitoring for example. ” to me is a result of people not having the client in a big room so they can watch. People just cut in a small room on their own these days. Even on feature films. It’s been years since someone sat next to me.
Apple put people in their homes to cut with FCP a long time ago. X just took it to another level.
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