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The Macintosh – Is it a Time Bomb for the Hard User?
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Geez,
If you wasn’t so committed in backing them up maybe, just maybe…
You could have noticed that there are many creative content production areas.All of them have been loosing ground on the Mac, lately.
Audio and moving picture production are just next ones in line.I’m sorry if I can’t be specific when talking about a general idea.
Go figure.I did outline earlier why FCPX is closed…
(and also how it will be even more)
And you have promptly responded to that earlier.
A lot of postings lately, eh?Cheers,
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[Christian Schumacher] “If you wasn’t so committed in backing them up maybe, just maybe…
You could have noticed that there are many creative content production areas.”There’s no question I want to watch where FCPX goes. I have had a lot of success with FCP and Apple hardware, I would like that to continue. Maybe I’m too loyal, a “flaw” for sure. I see some great things in FCPX that no other NLE that I know of is attempting, so maybe I’m “backing them” or maybe I want “them” to succeed, I don’t feel bad about that. I can use PPro, the shop is not interested in Avid, and Lightworks is still vaporware on the Mac. There’s no way we can leave OSX. We have a windows SAN controller, and that’s about all I want to deal with on Windows. Probably stupid, but that’s the way it is. Our shop is sticking with Macs until we can’t.
[Christian Schumacher] “All of them have been loosing ground on the Mac, lately.
Audio and moving picture production are just next ones in line.”FCP was certainly the most popular, but it was probably not the best/most modern tool. It had a lot of weird things about it, but it was stable, effective and cost efficient. I don’t know what evidence there is about video applications losing or gaining ground on a Mac, but I’d be happy to read what you’ve found.
[Christian Schumacher] “I’m sorry if I can’t be specific when talking about a general idea.
Go figure. “Yeah, this is kind of my point. Specifics matter.
[Christian Schumacher] “A lot of postings lately, eh?”
Yeah. I am trying to figure this out as well. We are all on the same team, we make a living with these tools. This is a “debate” forum. I enjoy the intelligent conversations that happen here, a lot of them are based in fact and informed opinions. All I am asking you to do is inform us. I enjoy opinions, but when stated as a fact they lose meaning until the proof shows up. It’s ok for you to feel however you want, and it’s ok for me to ask where your info comes from or to clarify your meaning.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “You’re kidding, right? A keyer that you have absolutely no serious control over???? The old 3-way was waaaaaaay more sophisticated than that – OK, so it didn’t have user masks …
But my point was actually about how coarse the controls are – not up to the job of refined colour correction, OK for a quick fix type job. In short, it’s not good enough …”
I wanted to revisit this. What control don’t you have?
Jeremy
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[Jeremy Garchow] ”
I wanted to revisit this. What control don’t you have?”I’m glad you asked …
It’s not so much the lack of control as the fact that the level of control is so coarse. The interface is absolutely microscopic which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, except that it means that very small movements translate into pretty big changes.
I really, really hate having to make very small mouse movements to adjust anything but with colour grading it’s especially undesirable. (Note that you can’t use the Cmd key to gear down even.)
Worse still is that although you can use the cursor to move the sliders, the increments are massive.
This is not the level of control I expect from a pro grading interface.
(I admit that I’m still working on a laptop which exacerbates the problem, but I think my point still holds.)
Then we come to the keyer, which is frankly a joke when compared to the FCP 3-way keyer which had a very decent level of control.
Here you have effectively none – you can add or subtract from your selection but that’s as far as it goes. You can’t see the key (major, major drawback), and you can’t adjust the softness. Not good – not good at all.
I won’t say anything about the lack of color wheels – maybe this is a better way, I can’t say. But the way it stacks up at the moment with the limitations above, it’s not the business as far as I am concerned.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “(I admit that I’m still working on a laptop which exacerbates the problem, but I think my point still holds.)”
Yeah, I can see that. You can also use the keyboard arrow keys to move the pucks around.
[Simon Ubsdell] “Here you have effectively none – you can add or subtract from your selection but that’s as far as it goes. You can’t see the key (major, major drawback), and you can’t adjust the softness. Not good – not good at all.”
I agree that it’s not perfect here, but I find the keyer to be pretty sweet. You can key multiple colors and have them stick, and then add and subtract. To see the matte, you go in to the saturation pane and slide the saturation down outside the mask and you can see what’s left behind. You can then add and subtract the mask from there, even on the desat image. And the slider next to “Color Mask” adjusts softness, but it’d be nice if there was a little more softness. Then combine that with the shape mask (which has a long feather) and you have a pretty decent little setup. And the quality I find to be much better than 3way. So yeah, it’s not perfect, but overall it’s a more powerful tool, but that’s an opinion. As with everything in FCPX, it could certainly use a bit more control. A matte check would be great, no question.
[Simon Ubsdell] “I won’t say anything about the lack of color wheels – maybe this is a better way, I can’t say. But the way it stacks up at the moment with the limitations above, it’s not the business as far as I am concerned.”
I hear that too. I do find the color board very intuitive to get rid of color casts, though.
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[Jeremy Garchow] ” You can also use the keyboard arrow keys to move the pucks around.”
This is actually the point that drives me the most crazy as I thought I’d mentioned – the increments when nudging with the keyboard are insanely huge, I mean just grotesquely huge! Can’t work with this.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” And the slider next to “Color Mask” adjusts softness, but it’d be nice if there was a little more softness.”
OK, so I missed the softness slider but then I was so disgusted by there not being a view matte option that I wasn’t really interested in exploring it too much. As always I admire the ingenuity of your workaround but it’s a pretty crazy sort of kludge, isn’t it?
I do dispute that this keyer is better than the old 3-way version – I really do. At least in its current state.
I think what offended me the most was the notion more or less explicitly put around by Apple that this way in some way a replacement for Color. Color was (and still is while it lasts) a really great grading app. The Color Board is a handy-ish tool for temporarily fixing up the odd shot for client approvals.
As for finding the quality significantly better than the old 3-way I’d love for someone to run some actual tests to verify the truth or otherwise of this widely held but unquantified view. Not saying it’s not true but would love some hard evidence.
Thanks for continuing the conversation, though!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “As always I admire the ingenuity of your workaround but it’s a pretty crazy sort of kludge, isn’t it?”
Far from perfect, for sure.
[Simon Ubsdell] “I do dispute that this keyer is better than the old 3-way version – I really do. At least in its current state.”
Eh, we will agree to disagree. Again! 😀
[Simon Ubsdell] “I think what offended me the most was the notion more or less explicitly put around by Apple that this way in some way a replacement for Color. Color was (and still is while it lasts) a really great grading app. The Color Board is a handy-ish tool for temporarily fixing up the odd shot for client approvals. “
I think it took the best and most powerful aspects of Color, and then turned it on it’s side. It’s not a replacement for a dedicated app, that’s for sure. Funny I see 3way as the quick fix, and the Color Board as a deeper tool. Why am I so weird?
[Simon Ubsdell] “As for finding the quality significantly better than the old 3-way I’d love for someone to run some actual tests to verify the truth or otherwise of this widely held but unquantified view. Not saying it’s not true but would love some hard evidence.”
The only thing I can judge is with my eyes, so of course it’s subjective. The 3way is a noisy render, FCPX seems to give a cleaner render. I can only really tell after exporting out of FCPX and watching with AJA TV on monitor as I’m naked without it.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I think it took the best and most powerful aspects of Color, and then turned it on it’s side.”
Can’t agree with you there – one of the best and most powerful things about Color (in addition to the overall depth of control throughout the interface) were the Hue, Saturation and Luma Curves which I absolutely rely on and provide control actually not available elsewhere within Color, and certainly not matched by anything in the Color Board.
The other obvious major, major difference is the Color FX Room which was massively powerful – and had some great plug-ins from Graeme Nattress that took the whole thing to a completely different level.
I don’t see that anything of Color has been incorporated into the Color Board though the under-the-hood processing might owe something to it.
On the rest, I guess we’re not going to agree 😉
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I totally agree about curves and fx room. Those are the hallmark of a dedicated app. They weren’t present in the 3way, either.
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[Jeremy Garchow] ” And the slider next to “Color Mask” adjusts softness, but it’d be nice if there was a little more softness.”
Actually, I don’t think this is quite right now I’ve had a closer look at it – the slider doesn’t actually introduce softness, it just “crunches” the levels on the key which is not the same thing at all.
I’d say that in most cases the key is going to be unacceptably noisy as a result of missing this feature.
Honestly, the keyer in the 3-way is vastly superior to this … you can actually get some very decent results with it.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
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