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The Plan for Now
Not that anyone was waiting with baited breath for me to finally figure out a way forward, but the dust is finally settling and I can see my probable path and figured I’d post this.
FCP7 is getting more cantankerous by the minute and it is definitely time for a change. I expect there to be some 4K material coming my way, say about 5% of my workflow, and that is helping push me to another NLE by June, when we start cutting our next season.
My main requirements are ability to create ProRes deliverables, excellent multi-Cam, compatibility with some key plug-ins and ability to easily go back and forth with an EFX/compositing program. I am also looking for the ability to handle serious de-noising of audio, although my final mixes will be on the timeline.
CC PPro looks to be the winner of the NLE contest, and I say that with no joy considering my loathing for the whole subscription idea.
Avid is best suited for large scale collaborative workflows, and since I work primarily alone I get none of those advantages and it is a stodgy old nanny of an NLE that I’ve been avoiding these past 20 years or so. If I were younger and worried about finding work, I’d probably switch to Avid as the surest way to increase my marketability, but those are not my concerns.
FCPX is often tempting, I love the design of it’s multicam feature, I’m intrigued with it’s proxy workflow, but every time I hear a discussion about how you need to develop a plan as to when to use primary or secondary storylines, and knowing what kind of transitions can and cannot be done with connected clips, and how everything is solved with the tilde ~ key, I ask myself why would I ever want to spend my time figuring this out and I don’t have an answer that makes sense for me. The more I hear discussions about X from it’s happiest users, the more I believe that my original take on it was correct — it’s the solution to a problem that I was not having. I will sorely miss Auditions, as that feature addresses real needs that I have all the time, but for the rest, I’ll happily wait a few years and see what develops.
So that leaves PPro, with the least attractive of all the workable mulitcams, but in it’s tie-ins with AE, Photoshop and Audition, the most complete feature set of the 3 A’s. I’ll bite on the subscription for one year, make XMLs of all finished projects, and look to jump to something else (Lightworks???) when it becomes feasible.
Because of my need for ProRes deliverables I need to stay with OSX. I know there are freeware solutions to encode ProRes in Widows, but I’m not interested in a workaround for an essential part of my workflow so Mac it is.
If I was going for the nMP it would be the 6 core with D500s, 32 Gig of memory and a 500 gig boot drive – $4700. Then I’d need a 3 lane PCIe Expansion box with extra hard drive slots – which ups the price another 2K. I talked to my computer guy about building me a hackintosh, but he’s strictly high end and that would cost me around 8k. But after seeing some of the Barefeets tests and talking to some PPro users I’m going in a different direction – upgrading my 2010 8 core tower with a Quadro K5000. Total cost – $1800. I don’t get Tbolt, but then again I have a fairly extensive PCIe infrastructure and no Tbolt at this point. Other than that I will get performance fairly close, and is some instances better, than with a $6700 Tube/Expansion combo.
So it’s back to the future, until something better comes along.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
26 Replies
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Same where I am.
And agree that FCP X is a solution to a problem I never had.PPro all the way. We’ve been told that Adobe has more people in Premiere development than any other project at the company — they’re committed to continuing the great workflow Classic FCP set up. And I think we’ll get a lot of really cool features with the version 8 release at NAB.
We’re working on our first few series in Premiere and loving it. They have kinks to work out, and like FCP X the interface can be sluggish at times — but it’s headed in the right direction for sure.
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Yeah Herb, the new X hasn’t set well with you since it’s launch so why not try Premiere? In terms of the CC rental thing, it’s not my favorite either. No matter what NLE we use, we should all have excellent submaster, multi-track audio QT’s of final projects. That’s probably the best thing that came out of using Blackmagic to lay back to tape – generating complete QT backups is just part of our final process now instead of an afterthought that might be (and often was) easily forgotten with FCP7.
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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Herb, I know you’ve been holding out for a while, it’s good that you have finally got a plan! PPro CC is a good choice, I’ve been using it a lot recently and it’s been stable and fast.
Steve Connor
There’s nothing we can’t argue about on the FCPX COW Forum
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[Herb Sevush] “but in it’s tie-ins with AE, Photoshop and Audition, “
Don’t omit Speed Grade! WOW!!
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[Herb Sevush] “I know there are freeware solutions to encode ProRes in Widows, but I’m not interested in a workaround….”
There are multiple well-supported professional applications from people like Telestream and Harmonic Rhozet that work directly inside Premiere. ProRes is an export option like any other. No hacks, no freeware, no workarounds.
Not to say that you don’t need to pay attention in setup, but in fact Telestream Episode Engine, Vantage, and FlipFactory will all get ‘er done – professional, fully supported, painless and fast.
I’m emphasizing fast, because you’ll need to trade off price vs. speed…but you really need to see to believe. It’s one of the places where faster processing on Windows really pays off….”pay” being relative of course.
Not that that changes anything else, including general comfort level, your budget, etc. but all else being equal, ProRes shouldn’t be a go-no go question for platform because you WISELY don’t want to trust a key workflow component to freeware.
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[Tim Wilson] “but in fact Telestream Episode Engine, Vantage, and FlipFactory will all get ‘er done – professional, fully supported, painless and fast. “
Damn Tim, just when I thought I had it figured out you go ahead and mess me up with some of your elitist “facts”. Well, while this is good to know, I still think for ease of transition, and ease in my bank account, I will stay with OSX for now. But when the time comes to actually buy a new box, Windows gets consideration again. Nothing worse than facts to screw up a decision.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Richard Herd] “Don’t omit Speed Grade! WOW!!”
I have never used Speed Grade before as I really like Resolve which is really nice.
I am thinking of going back to Premiere Pro as it seems a better tool than FCP X at the moment. For some reason in X there are areas where there are more extra steps to go through than is really necessary, just my opinion.
I also like to save several versions of a project, this way if something gets corrupted there is always another version available.
Not sure if it is me but FCP loves to create all kinds of render files which can quickly eat up drive space if you are not careful. Not a real issue with Premiere Pro as far as my experience has been.
I also love the “Dynamic Link” feature that Adobe has. I also like the fact you can import an AE project into Premiere, make any necessary changes and everything will update like it should, for the most part. At present there is no way of directly importing a Motion project in FCP X, why I will never know. There is no fast way of getting a FCP X timeline into Motion as well. Very disappointing to say the least.
I will say the color correction tools in X are nice for simple to intermediate stuff. Anything that is more involved or can be done better there is Resolve ready for action.
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[David Mathis] “Premiere Pro as it seems a better tool than FCP X at the moment”
Funny, I was just thinking the opposite. Bunches of footage to go through, and the metadata tagging in PP CS6, just isn’t as good as X’s range select and keywords.
For example (and I posted in the PP forum for help) the same clip has many shots of the different brands, but the retailer’s deal with his wholesaler means he needs some commercials with just BrandA. So I am trying to use PP CS6 to create metadata fields, but I can’t get it to work the way I need. Set the ins and outs and label the metadata, in a column called Brand. When I change the name to Brand A, then ALL of the clips change with it.
It’s a real bummer actually.
I’m about an inch from going to 7 for it’s fields and then XML over to CS6.
Getting coffee. Taking a walk.
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[David Mathis] “Not sure if it is me but FCP loves to create all kinds of render files which can quickly eat up drive space if you are not careful. Not a real issue with Premiere Pro as far as my experience has been. “
No it’s not just you. Just turn off ‘background rendering’ in the prefs if your GPU can handle it.
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Yay! Turned off the link/chain button.
Now I’m cruising.
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