Third Party Apps

[Craig Seeman]

[Andy Field] “Can anyone explain why anyone is twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to make FCP X work for them? What’s the point? “

For me FCPX untwisted pretzels I had in Avid for over 10 years and FCP legacy for another 10 years. Keywords do for me easier than bins. Connected clips and Secondary Storylines are a relationship I’ve always wanted because, for me, they represent more control over vertical or horizontal relationships. While I loved Avid trimming, for a decade FCP legacy could never match it with it’s poorly implemented timeline trimming. While I won’t say FCPX is “better” than Avid, FCPX finally shows a good direction with timeline trimming.

ALL the above need improvements in FCPX and there’s scores of other things not or poorly implemented but the above things are such major improvements in direction FOR ME, I’m willing to struggle with some of the other things (and sometimes not willing to struggle). I’d rather do multicam in FCP7 for example.

If I truly foresee being tied in knots in FCPX, I know not to go there. But in order to gain the “knowing” I also have to spend time with it. I remember being very frustrated with FCP 1.25 for the first week after spending 12 years on Avid. By the 2nd weekend I saw major improvements in some workflows and saw others couldn’t begin to touch Avid.

There comes a time when, in the process of an app’s growth, you can ask the question, can it handle the jobs I personally need to do. Sometimes you may even need to ask that on a job by job basis. If and when that threshold is crossed, you can move. Sometimes some things don’t match things we loved (Avid trimming vs FCP trimming for me). There comes a point when you decide that in the cost benefit analysis, there’s enough to be gained to make a move.

And. . . it’s important that in order understand (Grok) a new tool, one may have to work at expunging old thinking, to not try to force a new thing to work like the old, to see if the new way has value. Had I made my decision after a week of FCP legacy, I would have stuck with Avid. Once you really know the new language can you honestly determine if you can speak good pros and poetry and tell the story you want.

[Craig Seeman]

[Andy Field] “And we’ve paid 300 for the privilege of working out the bugs for Apple for who knows how long? “

I have never meet a program that was bug free. I also know that the first version of any new app or even a major upgrade is going to have a fair number of bugs and some of them are very serious.

[Andy Field] “This is absurd — speculating what Apple might do and when they might do it “

I can use whatever I want now and either Apple will deliver improvements in a fashion timely for me or not. In every case we can asses current value and long term investment. $300 is pocket change compared to the $60k+ an Avid system used to cost.

As they say in financial investing, they give you lots of nice performance history and will follow with a disclaimer that past history is not a guarantee of future performance. Personally, I think Apple has a good history understanding User Interface in both hardware and software. Of course maybe this will be the hockey puck mouse (remember that?) but Apple has also has a history of fixing their mistakes. This is my evaluation suited for ME. It’s my choice to invest and at $300 it costs nothing more than a penny stock.

[Andy Field] “folks who do this for a living don’t have time to learn a half baked program”

Maybe you’re in the wrong business. I’ve spent 30 years learning half baked programs to get work done. I used an Avid in 1990 and the images were near useless compared to a CMX 6000. I also knew that Avid would win that market.

[Andy Field] “we’re busy helping clients with programs that work as advertised”

And that should never be the road block to examining products that may give you a better ROI in the future even if you can’t use it until (or if) that future arrives.

[Gary Pollard]

Ironically, many of the same people complaining about them bringing out a substandard product to meet a release date are now complaining that they aren’t releasing the updates in time to meet a release date.

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”