Risk and failure

[David Roth weiss]

[Gary Pollard] “”May” is a word with very clear meaning in the English language.”

And is often used by those unwilling to commit unless questioned. You’re waffling Gary, one minute you’re not certain and using “may” and the next you’re suggesting that your meaning is clear. That’s all pretty confusing…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

Don’t miss my new tutorial: Prepare for a seamless transition to FCP X and OS X Lion
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POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.

[Walter Soyka]

There’s one other strawman argument I want to make sure we stay clear of: I’m not suggesting that FCPX will fail.

I believe that FCPX will be wildly successful in the market, but that the market will look very, very different than it used to.

If you carry a cell phone in your pocket everywhere you go, chances are you are carrying a little video camera in your pocket everywhere you go. That will generate a lot of video that will need editorial.

Literacy used to be limited; now it’s expected that everyone can read and write. Likewise, more people will be editing video tomorrow than ever before — and that trend will only continue. FCPX will help make it happen.

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

[Gary Pollard]

I said exactly what I meant.

Of those actually trying out the new working methods, many are liking them and seeing their function. If you don’t that’s fine. That really doesn’t justify the personal nastiness seen here over the past two weeks.

It “may” become a new paradigm.

But then, heck, I’ve been known to edit programmes for broadcast on Vegas.

[Chris Jacek]

[Paul Dickin] “I expect the launch, like Edsel or New Coke, will feature in the syllabus of most Business Schools marketing courses for the next half century or so.”

Yay! Somebody else making an Edsel reference. It makes me proud to be “Imported From Detroit.”

Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee

[Peter Corbett]

[Douglas Morse] “I HAVE switched to Adobe as of today and Adobe is ahead of Final Cut X in the race. They have all of the professional features, tight integration, and native DSLR support. Apple cannot catch up. (But I’d love to be wrong as more is better) But the switch is a lot less painful than I thought it would be. In fact, it’s pretty awesome as the Adobe suite is fantastic.”

I think you will find the Titler in Premiere so far ahead of the FCP7 version, it’s not even funny. It was ported from the Inscriber CG guys years ago when it started as a broadcast online title generator.

Plus the import of layered PSD’s as “sequences” and the tight integration with Photoshop will save you more time than you ever imagined.

It’s not perfect but it works. If you map navigational controls to the left side of the keyboard (for righties), it is very fast.

Here are some speed shortcut remaps for my Mac Pro;

Previous edit point: Command-Q
Next edit point: Command-W
Ripple delete: Command-1
Apply default video transition: Command-A
Apply default video transition: Command-S

It’s not difficult. I had to switch two years ago to FCP to fit in with agencies, but I’ve been back using CS5 for some time now. It’s just faster and more powerful.

I do hope the situation improves with Final Cut X but I strongly disagree with Chris’ optimism and seeming apologia for Apple. Competition is good for NLE development and that competition just got a whole lot shorter.

Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au

[Andrew Corneles]

I took a week off to actually get some editing done (in fcp)
and it seems like the same fcpx champions are out in full swing… I’ve gotta say some of the defending that goes on here is just amazing.

In other threads, even calling out people that dare recommend
someone go to a different suite if they need certain workflows,
totally ignoring the fact that PP is less of a paradigm shift
than going to FCPX.

Personally, can’t wait until it’s 79 bucks like aperture.
I’ll give it a shot then.

I really love when they talk about how apple isn’t abandoning
pro apps, when it’s SO obviously true. like BLATANTLY OBVIOUS.

for YEARS.

We should all just buy fcpx and like it, I suppose. To utter
any criticism of apple will just entice long winded doubleplusgood
applethink.

[Robert Brown]

Nice rant and totally agree. And to the apologists: I don’t think anyone is saying X doesn’t have it’s merits. I’m sure it does although I haven’t used it and don’t know what they are but the fact is; if you make your money as an FCP editor or as owner of an FCP facility then you’ve got some problems. Maybe some more so than others but software programs are linear sorts of things. FCP has just entered the beginning of the end.

It’s as if the entire FCP team was killed in a plane crash but on the same day another company introduced this kind of odd new product with a “magnetic timeline”. Who cares about a magnetic timeline? If you know your software you can get it to do what you want.

As a former linear editor my desire for FCP was a decent DVE on par with what AE had more than 10 years ago, EDL export on par with what Avid had 15 years ago, frame accurate import and export to tape, a decent keyframe editor, good chroma keying, and yeah 64 bit, better GPU integration, more formats blah, blah, blah. Instead they said loud and clearly “your needs are not important”.

Apple may not need the “pro market”, they have more money than God so they probably don’t but they managed to change their image practically overnight to where many no longer get that warm fuzzy feeling when we see images of Steve Jobs on another stage introducing another product.

Maybe in the big picture none of this really matters but if you are one of the people with years of experience with FCS and who’s livelihood depends on it, it’s a pretty big deal. The “merits” of FCX don’t change that in the slightest as it’s a totally different product from a totally different company.

[Richard Boyd]

Chris:
That it’s unfortunate that Apple has temporarily placed a small number of people in awkward situation, but that it’s unlikely to have the sort of wide impact on the future of the NLE market that people keep claiming it will.

I currently have 55 seats of FCS7 in 2 different editing labs for my students. I was planning on updating this fall to the new version of FCP that we have been anticipating. Aside from all of the other issues, attempting to set up 55 different I-Tunes accounts so that we can individually download 55 different copies of FCX is absurd beyond the ken of mortal man.

So, we are considering our options – best guess we will probably move to Adobe PP. And guess what – our students will train on Adobe, buy Adobe, use Adobe, convince their friends to use Adobe, etc. We train 200 or so students a year. Multiply us by dozens of different schools and a few years, and you know what – you have a pretty wide impact on the future of the NLE market.

[Ben Holmes]

Complaining about the edit paradigm misses the point. Had the features been there, or more importantly had 7 still been there for now, we would be having an informed discussion about whether or not we liked the new interface. Some would never like it (like yourself) and move on – others (possibly like myself – I still haven’t had enough time off to make a decision) would hail it as the future and embrace it. Over time, more and more doubters would come on board as, safe in their FCP7 bubble, they learnt the ‘new way to edit’.

Cutting the old software is what caused this mess, cutting 7 without already having every feature in X. You may never like X. A lot more people will never take the time to decide if they do – and my gut feeling is that’s a shame.

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “Any one of the things I mentioned may be reasonably explained — but the pattern, taken all together, is alarming to the professionals using these products and may show that Apple is not well-focused on professionals’ needs.”

But you’ll notice I didn’t have to explain your points with ad-hoc one-off explanations. I agree there are systematic explanations. I just disagree about what they are.

[Walter Soyka] “And how can you put important in quotes? Without external video monitoring, FCPX is appropriate for web video only. If you could currently get data out of FCPX, you could make the argument that it’d be a nice offline editor, given its new timeline and audition features, but that’s not an argument you can make today. “

“Important” is in quotes because people treat these features as critical, yet somehow Apple products without them seem to sell just fine.

[Walter Soyka] “Why is Apple discouraging the use of a media format it disfavors? That may benefit them, since they distribute content electronically — but it doesn’t benefit me or my clients who want Blu-ray. A developer builds products that its core audience needs. If pros need Blu-ray, and Apple doesn’t care to provide a serious solution, are they a serious, professional-focused developer?”

Where is Avid’s Blu-ray authoring tool? You can be serious about the NLE market without caring about disc authoring.

[Walter Soyka] “Intel’s Xeon update schedule is beyond Apple’s control — but Apple skipped speed bumps and USB 3.0. Adding some more slots would have been a nice Mac Pro update, too.”

Apple skipped USB 3.0 because they’re trying to push Thunderbolt. More slots? The current Mac Pro has as many as any Mac has had since the PowerMac 9600 had, and it shipped in 1997. This does nothing to demonstrate a recent de-emphesis on the pro market.

[Walter Soyka] “Even when Thunderbolt devices become common, PCIe 4x at 10W won’t help with GPU co-processing.”

Err… ExpressCard is PCIe 1x.

[Walter Soyka] “Apple chose not to include NVIDIA’s drivers in 10.6.7, and 10.6.8 broke existing and otherwise functional CUDA drivers.”

10.6.8 had a bunch of OpenGL changes. Apple makes pre-release software available to developers to test with, and the quick availability of updated CUDA drivers suggests NVIDIA was not caught by surprise upon release. What was Apple supposed to do? Hold the release of an OS update for tens of millions of users for this?

[Walter Soyka] “You say that glossy displays have higher contrast — I’d add that it’s artificially high contrast and an artificial saturation boost. The point of a glossy display is to make images pop. Professionals would largely prefer their images to be accurate.
“

There’s nothing ‘artificial’ about it — you’re just seeing something closer to the native capabilities of the panel, because there’s not a piece of diffusion on front of it as with a matte screen.

[Walter Soyka] “That’s actually exactly my point. Apple may like pro users, but I think that if they were focusing their business on pros, they would change some of these practices which work well in the consumer space and poorly in the professional space.
“

These things have alleged downsides in the consumer space as well. Pundits are always pointing them out. If you ever take a look at Mac vs. Windows forums, many people even present them as major reasons not to choose Apple products. Apple gets accused of neglecting pros and not consumers not because pros are treated any ‘worse’, but merely because accusing Apple of neglecting consumers isn’t credible because they’re such a huge market.

[Walter Soyka] “I salute you for your tenacity, Chris, but I honestly don’t understand how you can’t see that there’s room for reasonable disagreement on some of these points. I don’t care if I sway you on your position about Apple’s focus or lack thereof on the professional market, but I do hope to show that it’s not unreasonable for pros in a niche market to be concerned about a niche product in the hands of an increasingly mass market-focused developer.”

My response to this argument is that I agree FCP X is designed with crossover appeal, and is not as strictly a niche product as, say, Avid Media Composer. I just think that if you look at the history of technology products, this is probably a good thing in the long run.

And I’m also not at all convinced that FCP X is targeted at a different market from FCP 7. Apple has always been primarily targeting the larger market of people who get paid to edit video, not just the broadcast and post production markets whose needs we’re mostly discussing here. FCP 7 had just been around for long enough that Apple had had a chance to add more niche features.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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