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RedShark News: Opinion: Which are the best NLEs right now?
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FCP Extreme???
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[James Ewart] \”FCP Extreme???\”
An extremely (pun time!) old and, IMO, unfounded rumor about Apple creating a $10,000 super duper high end version of FCP. It sits on the shelf of improbability right next to the Phenomenon rumor (totally re-imagined, high end, next generation version of Shake).
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[James Ewart] ” And I guess for finishing Symphony is perhaps a front runner? Does Adobe have the same capabilities as Symphony in this respect? (Anyone can answer please).”
Symphony’s big advantage over MC for finishing is its color corrector, and really Symphony’s color correction workflow is more interesting than its toolset. With relational color grading, Symphony can apply color corrections based on sources (i.e., fix the white balance on all media from a single camera) as well as program (i.e., add a creative look to an entire segment). This is great for churning out high-volume work like, say, reality TV, because you can work on similar content very quickly.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I think Adobe punches well above their weight with respect to finishing. With Premiere Pro as a hub connecting dynamic media from specialist tools After Effects, Audition and SpeedGrade, as well as static media tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, Creative Cloud has an incredibly broad and deep finishing toolset.
[James Ewart] “And nobody seems to mention Smoke much as a potential competitor to the Big Three although I recall it being talked about a fair bit a couple of years ago or so. (Looked at it myself in fact but decided it was too complicated for me)”
Smoke is really nice, but it’s very much a jack of all trades and master of none.
I did some training on 2012 and then bought in when the price dropped for Smoke 2013. I’ve done a bunch of comp-heavy work with it, and while I love Action and the Smoke/Flame philosophy, I do not actually like the feel of the NLE. Also, Smoke has some frustrating limitations from a designer’s perspective that make Ae a continuing necessity, so I have found myself gravitating back toward Ae/Pr lately. I miss the immediacy of Smoke versus the Ae/Pr tango sometimes, and I miss the nodal workflow sometimes, but then again I do find that no matter what app I’m using, I miss a feature from another.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] \”Symphony\’s big advantage over MC for finishing is its color corrector, and really Symphony\’s color correction workflow is more interesting than its toolset. With relational color grading, Symphony can apply color corrections based on sources (i.e., fix the white balance on all media from a single camera) as well as program (i.e., add a creative look to an entire segment). This is great for churning out high-volume work like, say, reality TV, because you can work on similar content very quickly.
I\’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I think Adobe punches well above their weight with respect to finishing. With Premiere Pro as a hub connecting dynamic media from specialist tools After Effects, Audition and SpeedGrade, as well as static media tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, Creative Cloud has an incredibly broad and deep finishing toolset.\”
Another plus for Symphony is that by having it basically be an add-on to MC you remove many of the pitfalls that happen when trying to take an edit from offline to online. No need for an XML/AAF dance between the NLE and finishing system and the learning curve is much lower since Symphony is MC with some more features. The downside is that Symphony\’s toolset won\’t be as feature rich as say Resolve\’s.
With Adobe I really like what they are doing with PPro and SpeedGrade. They are making the sort of seamless back and forth that I always wanted FCP Legend and Color to have. A downside to Adobe\’s approach though (and same for the old FC suite) is how does it all come together in an actual production environment? For a smaller shop where people wear multiple hats are they going to dive into Audition and SpeedGrade or are they going to look for solutions that can work w/in the NLE? For projects that hire specialists at every position how easy will it be to find specialists that work with Audition and not ProTools or SpeedGrade and not Resolve? AE, PS and Illustrator are already very widely used (if not de facto industry standards) but Audition, SpeedGrade and PPro are still carving out their territory.
That seems to be the back and forth of NLE software in general. How many audio editing, finishing, compositing, GFX, etc., features do you put into the NLE? What is the proper balance between generalized and specialized?
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[Andrew Kimery] “[James Ewart] \”FCP Extreme???\”
…. unfounded rumor about Apple creating a $10,000 super duper high end version of FCP. It sits on the shelf of improbability right next to the Phenomenon rumor….”That’s the app, but I’m not so sure the rumor is unfounded. For every outlandish rumor, there’s a kernel of truth at its core.
Extreme was supposed to combine Motion and Color capabilities into FCP. This is essentially what Smoke is now and in a very different way, exactly what FCP X is, too. Although I don’t know anything in particular, the comments I’ve heard told from folks close to the inside (but not Apple staff) is that the FCP team was on the way to developing a complex version of FCP that would become FCP 8. It wasn’t turning out well and Jobs didn’t like what he was seeing and that set the path to change course and develop what has become FCP X. Maybe the truth or many just urban legend.
As far as Phenomenon, that’s a bit less unfounded. The Shake designers left to work on Nuke and on the way out posted some comments on line expressing their disillusionment with lack of development on the next-gen Shake. I think what they had in mind for Phenomenon worked its way into Nuke.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Thanks Tony!
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[James Ewart] \”Clearly you are an Avid MC user but also something of a fan of FCPX? \”
Just to be clear, I\’ve personally worked on probably about a dozen different linear and nonlinear systems on billable projects since I started editing. If I add to that the systems that I work in conjunction with (as a client, post supervisor, online editor) as well as those I worked on for reviews but not on billable sessions, then the total number is more like two dozen. I started on Avid around 1991/92. When I went freelance in 2002, the market was starting to shift to FCP \”legacy\” and by about 2003/2004 most of the work I was doing was entirely on FCP. When X came out I shifted to a lot of FCP X work on a wide range of jobs. I really like aspects of X and other parts drive me up a wall still. Right now, my NLE use, from most to least, would be FCP X, PProCC, FCP 7 and MC/Symphony.
[James Ewart] \”In terms of editing applications what do you use for what? By which I mean upon what criteria do you decide to use (or advise the use of) one of the three (or four if you include 7) current main applications for a project?\”
I freelance mainly at other facilities and use what they have. I do a few projects on my home system, where I have a choice. I also work for one client who\’s pretty adventurous with systems and has been supportive of using X. He also bought Smoke. So when I work there, it\’s generally X with a little PProCC and FCP 7. Even MC. We have yet to use Smoke on a real job. Another client (TV station) has completely shifted to PProCC. They are big AE users, so every edit is a combo of PProCC and AECC. If you don\’t understand AE, you don\’t work there. Most of the companies in my market who have shifted from FCP have shifted to Adobe CC. I still do some MC work, but it\’s usually for outside companies that hire a local editor or for companies where I edit on the road. A lot of these are still Avid users and they need Avid editors. So for me, it\’s a mix.
When I have the choice on what to start with, I\’ve generally started with X (when available). I like the organization features and the fact that I can skim through my raw clips as filmstrips (in the list view). This part makes it a very fast system by which to get to a first cut. The part I dislike is the way the timeline works when things get very complex. In general, I think the performance is still not up to par, even on the newest hardware. The RAM leak issue is inexcusable at this stage in its development.
[James Ewart] \”And I guess for finishing Symphony is perhaps a front runner? Does Adobe have the same capabilities as Symphony in this respect? (Anyone can answer please).\”
Symphony is a good finishing tool, but with limitations. It\’s ideal for TV show finishing, where deadlines are tight, because color correction is built in. It also includes tracking (OK), stabilization (OK), built-in paint effects (OK). If you add BCC or Sapphire filters, you get a good system that fits the general TV post pipeline in many world markets – especially if the offline edit was done in Media Composer. The downside is relinking. The sort of easy manual relinking that FCP 7 does and that PPProCC does, too, is nearly impossible and a bit of a black art with MC/Symphony.
As far as shared projects with multiple editors, the Avid environment (really the core concept of \”Avid Everywhere\”) is great for those projects where several editors are working simultaneously on one production. However, where sharing simply means the ability to share centralized media and be able to move a project from one room to the next, then FCP 7 and PProCC are fine. I do that regularly these days with PProCC, but the biggest downside is Adobe\’s need to write local cache files. This slows you down each time you open a project in a new room for the first time. FCP X is also OK, but in my experience X\’s performance on a SAN is not as good as when media is local.
[James Ewart] \”But I think you have also mentioned a liking for Resolve as a potential editing application even though I always have thought of it as a grading tool.\”
Resolve is a great grading tool with acceptable editing features. It\’s editing performance – especially once you start adding correction to clips and then go back to re-edit the timeline – is painful. You could edit a project from scratch on Resolve, but I don\’t think it would be a pleasant experience if you expect fast response. I think there\’s not enough there yet for it to be a full-featured finishing tool. That might change if somehow we see hooks to Fusion down the road.
[James Ewart] \”And nobody seems to mention Smoke much as a potential competitor to the Big Three although I recall it being talked about a fair bit a couple of years ago or so.\”
Smoke has a big learning curve, but Smoke 2015 allows you to do plenty without ever getting into nodes. To a large extent you can run it just like you would run FCP 7. Autodesk has shifted Smoke to a pricey subscription model, so I\’m not sure how that will work for them.
Sorry about the long-winded nature of this post, but I hope I have answered your questions.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “That’s the app, but I’m not so sure the rumor is unfounded. For every outlandish rumor, there’s a kernel of truth at its core.”
Unfounded might have been too strong a term, but the FCP Extreme and Phenomenon rumors were undoubtedly based on such extremely early ideas/concepts that saying Apple’s working on a self-driving car probably has the same level of validity. I mean, the rumored price of FCP E was $10k and there would be a hardware I/O to go with it running Cell processors. Is there some rough idea of this thing on a shelf (virtual or physical) in Apple’s basement? Probably. Did it ever have a chance of seeing the light of day as shipping product? I’m gonna go with a big, fat No. 😉
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[Andrew Kimery] “Unfounded might have been too strong a term, but the FCP Extreme and Phenomenon rumors were undoubtedly based on such extremely early ideas/concepts that saying Apple’s working on a self-driving car probably has the same level of validity.”
I would agree. I think another way to look at this might be as an evolution of Steve Jobs’ thinking. If you look at his views towards computing hardware with NeXT and even Pixar (initially a computer vendor), it was decidedly high-end workstation. My gut feeling is that he may well have carried these ideas with him upon return to Apple. Once there that thinking changed towards one that was more design-focused than even the first Mac days. This was probably a many-year-long change. In that time, video-centric technologies were acquired and I’m sure a lot of interesting things were tried in the back rooms. Most were harvested for technology that made its way into more egalitarian products.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Thanks Oliver.
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