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San Fransico FCPUG drops final cut from name
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[Craig Seeman] “There will be another round of assessment between catchup features and features that might put it ahead of other NLEs. “
Craig, where were you when ITV was looking for a replacement for Formula One’s Murray Walker. It would have been so much more entertaining than those years with that other guy who was slavishly devoted to Ferrari and M$chumacher. Wait a minute…
jPo
You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?
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Quoting Walter S. via iPad.
I’m curious, Bill — I’ve read many of your arguments here as essentially populist, stating that it’s a waste of Apple’s resources to develop the features needed only by the broadcast niche in the face of so much demand from larger market segments, and yet here you’re talking about how FCPX would be a good fit for the broadcast niche.Do you expect that Apple will double back and fill in the gaps for the markets they left behind last June, or do you expect that they’ll continue developing solely for the broad middle? If the latter, do you expect that the overlooked niches will drop some of their requirements in order to be able to use FCPX?
Close quote.Walter.
Have thoughts but am on location for two overnight shoots with 5 am pickups on another project in between. Will respond, hopefully by Wed. (this kind of schedule was fun in my 20’s. Now, not so much!)
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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The SF Cutters, a group that I co-founded, actually did have “Final Cut” in name at one point. In a vote by the group, we decided to call it “The San Francisco Final Cutters”.
That didn’t last long, though. People naturally shortened it to SF Cutters, because it was faster to say, and it stuck. I’m probably the one that did it first!
This was before many of you got into Final Cut Pro, though. Probably around 2002.
I’m glad the Final Cut in our name was dropped, however. We are one of the first to show other platforms. We showcased After Effects many times in our early incarnation. In fact, the SF Cutters continues to meet at the Adobe Offices here in San Francisco to this day.
Kevin Monahan
Sr. Content and Community Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
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[Bill Davis] “Have thoughts but am on location for two overnight shoots with 5 am pickups on another project in between. Will respond, hopefully by Wed. (this kind of schedule was fun in my 20’s. Now, not so much!)”
Overnights are no fun. I hope they go well. I’ll try to be unreasonably argumentative when you return.
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 -
[Chris Harlan] ” in reality it is like saying that cocaine and voting are the same thing because they both involve lines.”
Post of the week. Still a little time left in the month, but I’ve made my nomination.
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[Tim Wilson] “[Chris Harlan] ” in reality it is like saying that cocaine and voting are the same thing because they both involve lines.”
Post of the week. Still a little time left in the month, but I’ve made my nomination.”
Maybe it’s because I’m involved in politics but they are the same to me.
I look at how much money both the coke head and the candidate spend to get their lines and the rush that comes with it. -
Not sure who said lafcpug changed it’s name, but it wasn’t me. lafcpug is still lafcpug unless someone hacked the web site.
Michael Horton
lafcpug
https://www.lafcpug.org -
[Bill Davis] “Quoting Walter S. via iPad.
I’m curious, Bill — I’ve read many of your arguments here as essentially populist, stating that it’s a waste of Apple’s resources to develop the features needed only by the broadcast niche in the face of so much demand from larger market segments, and yet here you’re talking about how FCPX would be a good fit for the broadcast niche.Do you expect that Apple will double back and fill in the gaps for the markets they left behind last June, or do you expect that they’ll continue developing solely for the broad middle? If the latter, do you expect that the overlooked niches will drop some of their requirements in order to be able to use FCPX?
Close quote.Walter. “
OK, Had some sleep, and wanted to address this.
As to my arguments being “populist” I guess there’s a mild component of that – but I don’t see it as a central one. There are true “populist” video tools that much better meet the needs of the “citizen editor” types. iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, et all, are designed specifically for that purpose.
To the extent that back in the day, the traditional editing system was something that only “corporate budget” types could afford, then FCP certainly helped “popularize” video editing, but I’m still comfortable in a world where only a relatively small percent of the whole pool o editors will take the time to invest in and learn the skills and use the tools of “professional editing” – and I’m fine with that.
One of the true charms of FCP-Legacy – from my view, is that most of us who initially popularized it (and I was there virtually from day one!) didn’t come from the “top down” tradition of editing skills, but rather trained ourselves from the “bottom up.” I think X will follow that arc very closely.
The big “hate” is coming from those at the top – who keep yelling about what it doesn’t do that they need. It’s fair, but just like the same contentions levied at Legacy in V1-3 – it largely misses the point.
Legacy started at the lower middle – but didn’t serve the top. And here we go again.
In the three days between the start of this thread and now, the second contention has kinda been answered. The vast majority of features announced yesterday in 1.0.3 is aimed pretty clearly at the upper end of the editing spectrum. There is still lots of missing stuff, but clearly the target is to build a tool that works UP as well as DOWN the production spectrum.
And finally, no. I don’t expect anyone to drop any requirement. If you need to do something that X don’t do – then you shouldn’t use it.
But that’s not the problem that interested me much. Because I don’t think “feature parity” is the path to success for X. In fact I think a race toward that is a race toward failure. That market is pyramid. It gets narrow at the top.
I think the path to success for X is to follow where the “new video” markets are emerging.
Video is increasingly consumed in new places, by people who have widespread needs.
Broadcast and Motion Picture needs are well documented and very specific.
But looking exclusively at that misses GIGANTIC parts of the real world spectrum.
What?
Imaagine X with it’s data management pedigree in some of these areas. (Niche work in Sports broadcasting, and similar data pool search specific tasks, so I’ll leave that off the list.)
But just consider how well it’s toolset matches…
Digital Signage
Web video.
Training Videos
Corporate Communications
Advertising
Law Enforcement & Legal
Pay per download content…I could keep going with dozens of others but you get the idea.
I acknowledge that other editing software can prepare content for these perfectly well – but – in my opinion, they don’t have as targeted a feature set that makes them as well suited for these “not for broadcast” markets.
I think X will ROCK these industries. And as it does – it will get stronger and smarter and more capable, and eventually could land is WAY more than the 2 million seats that legacy earned in it’s lifetime.
I don’t think it’s “democratization” as much as it’s “industry-fication.” Or maybe “niche-ification.”
And that’s where I see the larger opportunities for the future.
Hope that makes sense.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Caution: long post ahead.
[Bill Davis] “The big “hate” is coming from those at the top – who keep yelling about what it doesn’t do that they need. It’s fair, but just like the same contentions levied at Legacy in V1-3 – it largely misses the point. Legacy started at the lower middle – but didn’t serve the top. And here we go again.”
Let’s roll back to the introduction of Avid. There were two schools of thought:
A) This thing is the future!
B) This thing is unusable! The image quality is terrible!
Which one do you believe?
History shows the correct answer was C) Both of the above. How can that be? The first statement is forward-looking; the second statement is grounded in the present. They are not mutually exclusive.
Avid offline changed the industry, but it took some time to mature and didn’t upset traditional online for years. (Funny story from a recent Editor’s Lounge about an early Avid offline. The editor was cutting a scene with footage of an actor who was supposed to be dead; because the resolution was so poor, they couldn’t see the actor breathing in the shot until the online, then had to scramble in a very expensive room to find a usable shot. Oops.)
There may be some hate coming from the top, but I think the bulk of that is really displaced love for FCP7. Since FCPX met your workflow needs straight out of the gate, you may have a hard time understanding the frustration that others who can’t rely on it yet are feeling.
I don’t think the FCPX 10.0 / FCP 1.0 comparison holds true. Apple disrupted Avid with FCP. Industries are used to new competitors launching disruptive products. What they are not used to is a market-leading competitor disrupting itself. That may be great business for Apple in the long run, or it may be a misguided consumer move in a professional market segment — but that’s immaterial. The thing that some people are so upset about is that on June 20th, Apple was selling them a product that had met their needs for eight years. As of June 21st, they do not sell such a product.
No one is holding FCPX wrong. It just really didn’t work for some people.
FCPX might be cheese that someone moved, but no one in this forum is Hem (the mouse that stayed, waiting for his original cheese to return) anymore — those who were have left. There are quite a few Haws (who initially yelled about missing cheese, but have since gone off in search of new cheese), but I don’t think there are very many Sniffs or Scurrys here who actually foresaw that the cheese would disappear. There may be none of them at all.
You mentioned “the top” hating on FCP1-3. That’s fair. FCP4 introduced XML, and FCP4.5 introduced DVCPRO HD, so I’d argue that’s as good as place as any to mark the acceptance of FCP.
FCP4 was launched four years after FCP1. Even if Apple halves that time to get FCPX ready for the “the top,” it’ll still be two years of abandonment from the customer’s perspective — maybe more if you count FCP Classic’s slow development over the last couple versions.
This is where the “skating where the puck is going” analogy fails. It’s all well and good to think about where the puck is going, so long as you can confidently continue doing your work today. If FCPX works for you today, I can understand how you’d have that confidence. If it doesn’t, maybe you can understand how it’s hard to be excited about the future when you’re not even sure about the present.
Gretksy could skate to where the puck was going because there was someone else who had control of the puck now. Here’s a zen meditation for you: what happens when everyone leaves where the puck is now and skates to where the puck is going? Will it ever reach them?
[Bill Davis] “Imaagine X with it’s data management pedigree in some of these areas. (Niche work in Sports broadcasting, and similar data pool search specific tasks, so I’ll leave that off the list.)
But just consider how well it’s toolset matches…
Digital Signage
Web video.
Training Videos
Corporate Communications
Advertising
Law Enforcement & Legal
Pay per download content…”I think the toolset works well for small data. I’m really concerned about how it would work for big data. Imagine yourself five or ten years from now, and think about all the footage and data you will have amassed by then.
IBM sees three dimensions to Big Data [link]: volume, velocity, and variety.
Volume means we’re amassing more data than ever before. Velocity means we’re amassing it faster. Variety means our data is not all neatly structured as an individual datum we can stuff in a spreadsheet or database; assets like text, graphics, audio and video are totally unstructured.
FCPX starts to treat variety, creating some structures that the user can apply to their unstructured data. However, as long as this is a manual process for humans, the twin threats of volume and velocity threaten to overwhelm our ability to keep up on variety.
I suppose you could argue that FCPX is starting to treat velocity, with native format support, but that’s still far from perfect [link].
FCPX offers no tools at all for managing volume.
You wrote a great line about FCPX and metadata a couple days ago:
[Bill Davis] “And what sets X apart from the competition? The elevation of data handling into a role arguably equal to image manipulation.”
I think this is true, but Apple needs to push very, very hard to make sure that the tools they’re providing for data handling are as suitable to the task as the tools for image manipulation.
If metadata is going to be a true advantage for Apple and for FCPX in ongoing projects versus one-offs, they must really innovate that toolset.
Maybe they will — after all, they do have Final Cut Server in their back pocket. Or maybe they won’t — it just might not be the sort of feature they’re interested in providing.
Regardless, it may not be a sustainable advantage. For FCPX to see big acceptance around big data, I think it will have to be pretty open (via XML or otherwise) for third-party extension. As soon as they open up, they essentially grant competitors compatibility (like Premiere Pro reading FCP7’s XML). If everyone has the same plumbing, then we’re right back where we started — competing on editor preference and user experience.
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
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