-
So has the 10.3 Update calmed your fears on the Future of FCPX?
-
[Brett Sherman] “Which doesn’t exist anymore. But that is an extremely limited application of what I’m talking about.”
Actually Avid recently announced they purchased the IP for Nexidia’s engine for media applications.
An updated announcement related to ScriptSync and PhraseFind in Media Composer is due by the end of the year. So yes, it very much exists. However, I agree, that I would envision something updated and modernized as it relates to FCPX.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Brett Sherman] “Which doesn’t exist anymore. But that is an extremely limited application of what I’m talking about. It seems like those who work primarily on scripted pieces have trouble imagining anything outside of that.”
Avid recently signed an exclusive license with Nexidia’s for their speech tech so presumably ScriptSync and PhraseFind . ScriptSync is amazing for unscripted/documentary work as well (honestly I think it’s probably more of a boon for that than for scripted, but that’s just my opinion).
https://www.avid.com/press-room/2016/10/avid-acquires-exclusive-licensing-rights
SpeedScriber is a new (still in beta I think) cloud-based transcription service that is looking to eventually have ScriptSync-like features inside of PPro (among many other features).
And Microsoft’s R&D wing has a speech recognition system that can be as accurate as human transcribers.
Many companies seem to be making inroads down the path you are describing, though I wonder how much metadata current video codecs can handle? I.e. can scripts/transcripts be saved and used reliably as metadata inside of video clips like you are describing. For a ScriptSync-type situation (where the text and video are ‘married’ inside of the NLE) I think a lot of what you mentioned sounds feasible by just adjusting existing tech. And maybe instead of highlighting a Word doc you just highlight the text document from inside your NLE.
-
[Charlie Austin] “Well, maybe the MBP release/FCP X Summit was the deadline, that seems logical. I really doubt it was held back for that at all. I’m speculating though…”
So, if there was no new MBP, FCPX would have been released on the same day?
They are intrinsically tied. X is being used to market the MBP and my guess is, rather it being a surprise to the FCPX team, they know what was coming.
-
[Andrew Kimery] “SpeedScriber is a new (still in beta I think) cloud-based transcription service that is looking to eventually have ScriptSync-like features inside of PPro (among many other features).
https://www.speedscriber.com/
“SpeedScriber is, even in beta, amazingly good, and really inexpensive compared to the established services. Combined with Lumberyard it is an enormous timesaver. Ran a few interviews through it recently… blown away.
————————————————————-
~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~\”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.\”~
~I still need to play Track Tetris sometimes. An old game that you can never win~
~\”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented\”~ -
[Charlie Austin] “SpeedScriber is, even in beta, amazingly good, and really inexpensive compared to the established services. Combined with Lumberyard it is an enormous timesaver. Ran a few interviews through it recently… blown away.”
Agreed. I think martin is heading up a ‘must have’ product when it comes out of beta.
-
[Tony West] “It’s going to come down to how many people are using the program”
Dude, you did NOT just say that Apple will keep something around just because it’s popular. In THIS forum. ?
The fact is that Apple is built on killing popular products. To name one early example, the Apple II had 50% market share when Apple started sidelining it for Mac, with, explicitly no intent to have a market share to ever approach it again.
The fact that Shake was a niche of a niche wasn’t the issue. Steve bought it because he needed it for Pixar, and the price was trivial relative to its value. He rolled the tech into other products, and put the people on other projects. Classic Steve. He did that all the time, often putting people onto projects that had nothing to do with their old roles, just because he felt it was a better fit.
I still think that his primary management style was somewhere on the spectrum between sociopath and psychopath (I say in all sincerity as a former clinician and current inhabitant of that very spectrum myself), but that was pretty slick.
And Steve’s most adamant point was that listening to customers is always the wrong call. Always. He aggressively mocked his competitors for their customer focus, and said it was responsible for everything that was wrong with those products. lived by that code, and demonstrated it time after time. As he put it in Forbes in 2008, customers can’t see around the corners ahead, so they can’t possibly know the right things to ask for.
Tim Cook is a nicer man, and I think a better CEO in every way that matters, but that heritage is still built into the company. That attitude is going to be driving development for as long as Jony Ive is anywhere near the tiller.
That’s why Oliver’s point remains the salient one for me. We barely know what it would look like for Apple to keep an application alive for more than 10 years, because they’ve only barely ever done it before. Yeah, FCPX is technically FCP, but Motion is more zombieware than not, so whether or not Apple will say anything about reaching the end of X until after the fact, what’s the basis in Apple’s actual history for not having a firm belief that there IS an end?
I don’t think that’s a cause for panic. In retrospect, exactly as I predicted would happen, the panic over X dissipated, and people either adopted it or didn’t. The same’ll be true next time too.
But whatever Apple’s gonna do, it’s not going to be driven by popularity. It’ll be driven by what Apple wants the future to be for Apple, not its customers. Customers will either come along or they won’t. It’s hard to argue that this strategy hasn’t worked out pretty well for Apple and the customers who decided to stick around.
-
[Tim Wilson] “Dude, you did NOT just say that Apple will keep something around just because it’s popular. In THIS forum. ?”
hahaha indeed I did Tim.
I don’t doubt Steve Jobs made those comments and I’m sure he believed he knew better than most people.
They are not in business to go out of business. It would matter to them if nobody bought their products and they went under. So I don’t buy that they don’t care at all about customers. That doesn’t even make sense to me. Them thinking they know better than you and not caring at all, are two different things I would say.
There are just too many people out there who want to edit video and they are gong to step to that in one form or another. Will X become Y or Z in 5 years? Maybe. I just think they will be a player in the field of editing for a long time.
At the end of the day, neither you or I have a crystal ball. We are just guessing. I made my guess and you yours. We will have to wait and see who comes closest : )
-
[Andrew Kimery] “SpeedScriber is a new (still in beta I think) cloud-based transcription service that is looking to eventually have ScriptSync-like features inside of PPro (among many other features).”
Regardless of how good it is, it’s functionality will be limited until text recognition is completely ingrained in the editing software. That’s not saying there won’t be good reason to use something like SpeedScriber until that happens.
[Andrew Kimery] ” I wonder how much metadata current video codecs can handle? “
I’m thinking it would be some sort of text document (like an SRT file) that is married to the video clip within the software. Since I like open source, I’d say put it in the same folder as the media and give it the same name so it lives there with or without the editing application. It wouldn’t actually be in the media file itself.
————————–
Brett Sherman
One Man Band (If it\’s video related I\’ll do it!)
I work for an institution that probably does not want to be associated with my babblings here. -
[Tony West] ” Them thinking they know better than you and not caring at all, are two different things I would say.”
Quite so, and poorly stated on my part. They most definitely DO care, which is one reason they so quickly responded to what I am officially naming The Connector Disconnect with their recent rollouts by lowering prices. They CARE that people were upset.
And as I noted, I believe that this is a hallmark of Tim C’s management style….but you’re right about the distinction, and you’re right that I muddled it.
[Tony West] ” I just think they will be a player in the field of editing for a long time.”
I’m positive they will be. Just not necessarily with X. While it obviously built on FCP, I think it’s also not accurate to say that it’s NOT a different product.
Likewise, Apple is still a key player in computing even though they killed the platform with the biggest market share they ever achieved, and likely ever will in Apple II. THAT’s what I meant when I said that popularity has never driven their strategies. Yes, they’ll kill something unprofitable, but they’ve killed profitable things too!
[Tony West] “At the end of the day, neither you or I have a crystal ball. We are just guessing. I made my guess and you yours. We will have to wait and see who comes closest : )”
While we generally agree that Apple will still be in the game for the foreseeable future, my record on predicting Apple is horrible! I’ve always been WAY too enthusiastic.
My biggest howler was my adamant assertion in 2011 and 2012 that Apple SURELY sold AT LEAST 10 million copies of FCPX within the first few months of release, and quite likely many more, since of course Apple would never settle for selling “only” 10 million of anything. Here’s one example among many threads where I said that, from 2012.
Frankly, I doubt that it’s as little as 10 million, but I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. It’s certainly closer to the kinds of number Apple looks for from software — but even there, still short of Apple-like numbers for anything.
I also said that if I were in charge and discovered that as FEW as 10 million copies were sold in the first year, I’d fire everyone in the marketing department.
Oops. Turns out that it took them THREE years to sell ONE million. ?
But what does it mean for X’s future if my predictions are consistently too rosy? ???
-
[Andrew Kimery] “ScriptSync is amazing for unscripted/documentary work as well (honestly I think it’s probably more of a boon for that than for scripted, but that’s just my opinion)”
Avid’s opinion too. ? At least when they rolled it out under that name.
Indeed, one of my last major tasks at Avid before I left to come to Creative COW was the Avid Interplay rollout at NAB 2006, which VERY prominently featured ScriptSync, and our ONLY demos were of unscripted TV. The story being that these are the kinds of projects where you have the most stuff to sort through, and it’s the least organized. We demo’d the heck out of that feature, and the response was HUGE.
That said….
[Brett Sherman] “I’m talking about text data integrated into the clip itself. So no matter where you are in the clip, it knows what is being said. “
I’m completely with you on this Brett.
At the risk of setting off a firestorm of controversy for saying anything nice about Adobe, did you see their demo at Adobe MAX of VoCo? It’s a technology demo, not a product demo, and as presented here, a feature applied to audio only — but it’s pretty close to what you’re talking about.
They play a clip, and it creates text in a little box under the waveform. To edit the speech, instead of digging into the waveform, it shows simply cutting and pasting the TEXT, in real time. It’s off the hook.
The next thing would ONLY apply to audio-only…at least as demo’d…and that’s a case where the narration was missing a couple of words, so they just TYPED THEM ON SCREEN, and VoCo SYNTHESIZED THEM based on what it had learned about the speaker’s manner of speaking. The demo is very clear that it takes a good bit of speech being entered into the system to provide enough reference material to pull that off (20 minutes for now)….but it’s so completely magical that their next text is to make it easily detectable at the file level.
That is, it’s not detectable AT ALL at the auditory level, but there HAS to be an indelible watermark of some sort to establish that the clip has in fact been tampered with, to prevent chicanery if some baddie tries to make it sound like somebody said something that they didn’t.
Check out the first 5 minutes of this clip, and I promise you’ll be blown away that there’s somebody out there who’s thinking this far ahead, even if for audio only. For now. ?
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up