Screenlight: Will Accounting Woes at Avid Spark Big Changes or an Acquisition?

[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Harlan] “This is an absurd argument. You are treating these NLEs as if they existed in a parallel Universes, and that has no bearing to reality. In my country, everybody drives on the right side of the road. That’s our workflow. It’s been that way for nearly a century. All the lines and turn lanes are painted to facilitate that. All of the drivers muscle memory is all about driving on the right. All of the steering wheels and control panels are designed for driving on the right. Driving on the left presents an equally valid workflow. If we’d been driving on the left for nearly a century, our workflows would be constructed around that. But, so what?! Fortunately for X, it isn’t THAT different. But that is the argument you are making.”

The driving analogy doesn’t map. There isn’t one standard workflow in the industry, which apps need one standard feature to support, and which FCP X doesn’t implement the same way as everything else.

Rather, the various NLEs have a myriad of features, which provide varying levels of support to various different tasks. These are combined in different ways on different projects to produce a diversity of workflows almost as numerous as individual projects themselves.

With respect to a particular project, you may be able to accurately make the statement “FCP X doesn’t offer a workflow for this that’s as fast/robust/affordable/whatever as [Other NLE]”. However, with respect to all projects, you cannot accurately make that statement. Consequently, you cannot make a general statement that FCP X is worse than other NLEs with respect to workflow. It depends on the project and the other tools being used.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Chris Harlan]

[Chris Kenny] “The driving analogy doesn’t map.”

Sure it does. Good play on words, though.

[Charlie Austin]

[Chris Kenny] “There isn’t one standard workflow in the industry, which apps need one standard feature to support, and which FCP X doesn’t implement the same way as everything else.”

I get your analogy, but I think Oliver/Chris etc also make a valid point. In the grand scheme of things, yes, there are perfectly valid, perhaps even more efficient workflows with X. But… The reality is that in a fairly large segment of this biz, one still needs to deliver an EDL, OMF/AAF etc. It probably would be easier for Post Houses to have the latest version of Smoke/Resolve etc and just suck in fcpxml. But right now, they can’t. And right now is what matters for “high end pros'” – and I use that term very loosely 🙂 – when deciding whether or not to adopt X.

I really enjoy cutting in X, it productive, fast, and weirdly, fun. The only thing keeping me from doing everything in it, and pushing everyone where I work onto it, is the lack of “legacy” features. I need to be able to easily swap sequences with other editors. I need to spit out EDL’s that are accurate (which EDL-X does really well) and have notes about opacity/effect names etc (which EDL-X doesn’t currently do), so online editors can easily recreate what i’ve done. OMF would be nice, X2Pro works great, but not everyone mixes in Pro Tools, and FCPXML is still a moving target, which causes issues now and again.

Like Oliver, I still use FCP 7 as a conforming tool, and I wish I didn’t have to. We often get features and separate stems, which I need to combine and export as split masters so we can cut with them. It’s still easier to do this in 7.

So… while in theory, hell even in practice, there are valid, efficient workflows that can be used with X, it can’t exist as an island *right now* in the crazy quilt multi-platform, multi-application, “professional” finishing and delivery world. Apple needs to either add internal tools to make it play nice with all the creaky, old fashioned workflows still extant, or offer much stronger support for those developers making the tools to do so. I get why they didn’t focus on that out of the gate. And I don’t care if i need to spend a few bucks to be able to interact with other workflows.I just need it to work. Because I like cutting it. Especially the sparkly eye candy. ;-P

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Oliver Peters]

[Charlie Austin] “It probably would be easier for Post Houses to have the latest version of Smoke/Resolve etc and just suck in fcpxml. But right now, they can’t. And right now is what matters for “high end pros'” – and I use that term very loosely 🙂 – when deciding whether or not to adopt X.
“

Let me bring the discussion back to sort of the original intent of this thread and away from the head-butting-features arguments.

This all gets down to critical mass. Post houses that service outside editors and clients for online editing/finishing/grading will adapt to the bulk of material coming in to them. Right now that’s largely FCP 7 and Avid-edited content and lists. If tomorrow that shifted to 100% FCP X and everyone started sending only FCPXML, you’d probably see a change to accommodate these clients. But it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

In my market (cen Fl) I am one of two working pros that I know of (including editors, shooter/editors and director/editors) who are even using FCP X at all. I’d bet that’s largely the case in most markets. I suspect the folks on this list are a huge exception and definitely not the norm. Schools are a huge wild card, but even there, I don’t know that the vast majority are adopting X. A lot are (more than in general “pro” use), but plenty are still working with FCP 7, PPro and Media Composer. When you look at how that affects finishing shops, it really means that it will be a long time before they need to change.

The other part of this is that the top shops have the top talent, who have their own choices of gear. That means they are the ones calling the shots on workflow, not me as the creative/offline editor. If my client wants to work with Mr.A-List colorist and he requires EDLs, you better believe I’m going to figure out how to get him an EDL instead of complain that he can’t work with FCPXML. For that matter, the same is true of trying to provide AAFs out of Avid.

So in the end, there’s a lot more that goes into these choices than whether Apple has re-invented editing software or not. Or that Media Composer is perceived as “long in the tooth”.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[David Cherniack]

Yes, I didn’t realize that you were discussing ancient pre-history. Wow. I do remember vaguely Premiere 4.2 through dim shards of memory.

As for PPro CS4 it was the last 32 bit version. Memory issues had plagued Premiere for larger projects since its introduction and with CS4 they attempted to portion off separate functions into separate dlls running in their own memory space (in a 64 bit OS). It helped a little but not enough. 5.0 was the watershed 64 bit release though no one outside of Premiere users noticed until Apple did its dirty.

David
AllinOneFilms.com