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Remaining enhancements
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[Paul Dickin] “4.1.1 actually, which came Dec 2003”
OMG! Four versions in 4 years. How could that possibly be without the App Store ;-/
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
I would agree to disagree. The common language is time and layer order.
I understand what you’re saying, but they won’t be that dramatically different, in my opinion.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “The common language is time and layer order. “
Which is absolutely non-existant in FCP X, especially with audio.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Oliver Peters] “[Jeremy Garchow] “The common language is time and layer order. ”
Which is absolutely non-existant in FCP X, especially with audio.”
I’d say this was definitely one of the biggest issues. Automatic Duck for FCPX had a big problem with detached audio (which never got resolved) and it’s clear that the biggest issues with Xto7 are audio related and reflect the utterly alien paradigm and what needs to be circumvented to translate it properly.
My acccount of my experience with Xto7 and audio is buried in another thread on the Techniques forum so I hope you don’t mind if I repost here as it’s germane to the discussion:
A fairly straightforward sequence over just over two minutes duration, these are some of the problems:
1) All the video came through more or less OK but one clip (no different in source from various other successfully transferred items) was one frame long and used only the very last frame of the source video – not correct in either case.
2) A lot of the source audio was from an 8-channel source of which I only used one mono channel in the edit. These mostly came through as 32-channel clips – yup, that’s right 32!!! The FCP7 sequence had 99 tracks and would doubltes have had more if it had been capable of seeing them.
3) Wherever the audio had been detached from the video (a necessary step in this instance), it did not get translated.
4) The biggest problem however was that the majority of the audio came from two separate non-sync sources, both of them stereo AIFFs/WAVs. Quite a few of these clips didn’t make it through the translation process at all. Of those that did, all of them use the first frame of the source for the first frame of the edited clip.
Just to clarify all of the non-sync audio (i.e. from any audio source that wasn’t tied to video) came in using the first frame as the source timecode in each case.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Apple’s versioning system is different now. Two of the three .0x updates have introduced new features. Of course one can say the App store is just a variant on Software Update but major changes that resulted in authoring and shipping disks make distribution more cost effective for Apple and possibly more time effective.
The question is could the major features .01 and .03 have been rolled out in the old Software Update method or would they have been held cumulative for an author and ship update. It’s personal judgement but it would seem to me that it would have closer to a year for those (and possibly additional features) to have been rolled into an FCP 2 release. At the time I remember 1.25 followed by 2 being the first two subsequent releases. I think they took a bit longer than FCPX going to .01 and .03.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “This the way it’s always been. Remember when that QT/iTunes update caused all that pain a few years ago?”
Oh man, memories of that still make me a bit sweaty. That, and the Night of the Murder of the eSata Cards.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “This the way it’s always been. Remember when that QT/iTunes update caused all that pain a few years ago?”
[Chris Harlan] “Oh man, memories of that still make me a bit sweaty. That, and the Night of the Murder of the eSata Cards.”
Going even further back, remember the iTunes 2.0 installer that erased hard drives [link] from 2001? That was an unpleasant surprise…
The advantage of single-vendor support is a nice idea, but no one catches everything in testing.
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 -
Agree to disagree.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “Phil Hodgetts I think said that writing the 7oX translator was like translating from English to Spanish via Mandarin, or something like that. That’s what’s of concern to me here. The levels of complexity are many orders higher than developers have been used to in the past and I think the ride is going to be rough for some time to come, at least in terms of translators.”
There are some incredibly smart and talented people out there in the developer realm.
I have faith that it will get better through hard work and letting Apple know what is needed.
It is up to Apple to care, but from what has been presented, it looks like they might be giving this a bit of a shot.
I agree that things are more complicated. We are ever increasingly more dependent on specialized technology. Even though things are getting “easier to use” from a user stand point, that means much more complexity behind the scenes. This is true of most technology and not just NLEs.
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Interesting thread.
All good points.
Here some points from me as I am one of those 3rd party guys who fixed some of the lacks of the old versions with some custom tools.
All over the years FCP existed there had been problems, sometimes massive ones, sometimes frustrating one, sometimes missing ones (cause the world changes all time).Version 4.1 changed the world because of the XML introduction. But it was a really buggy version and XML was very basic. But it opened the app (and interaction with it) to a lot of people/developers around the world.
I had been the first who published a public version of an XML based app.
Because of my work with BWAV files since FCP version 1 which used Batch Lists for metadata (anyone remembers?) or EDLs (what’s that?)and ALEs to import files I was introduced to Helana Ju at Apple. She was head of development for XML all over the years and she was very responsive and a good friend for several of us. That helped the developer community to grow and helped FCP sales to grow as well.
A lot of third party stuff changed the way of communication between apps and collaborative workflows.Preparing for X there was a more or less different development group who had to follow this new kind of paradigm of X, which was (and still is) a challenge. They are very busy and less responsive therefore.
Even though XML seems to affect only a hand full of users it’s a good example to learn about FCPX’s internal structure and as Simon mentioned it’s damn complicated – far away from the way his Spitfire can be handled.
There is finally a lot of house keeping to be done by the Apple guys to bring the parts together into a working interchange format.Take an example which was mentioned above by Ben Scott:
subtitling workflow from STL files and improvementsWhen XML import/export was supported by X it took me 3 days to publish basic solutions for that, they are free because they don’t make sense in a professional way and they can’t make sense until a massive change within the XML handling will happen (or there is an API for the project structure).
I know several developers who gave up for now to create workflow apps – I didn’t, but it’s a kinda frustration here.
Several of the developers complaint about missing Apple Events which formerly made their apps working seamless with FCP. This doesn’t exist anymore and won’t exist anymore, because it doesn’t match with the Sandbox stuff Apple requires (that was posted by Greg who works with Philip on all the cool IA apps).Another problem is that good old QT is dying and AV foundation is not really there , this makes it even more complicated.
So currently all you can do is to use X, if it works it’s fine – if not write a bug report (not a feedback). For a bug report you need to be a developer – that’s free. But writing a bug report is handled different from feedbacks, you get a ticket ID which can be tracked.
And even if people complain they have to pay 299 bucks for a beta – it’s way cheaper than the mxf4mac/P2Flow bundle 3rd party stuff Jeremy used to use with FCP 🙂
Andreas
Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools
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