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Time for FCPX to step up – collaboration
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[Tangier Clarke] “However Resolve has always been that app that is feature rich, but does’t perform as fluidly nor as intuitively as FCP X. There’s really a stark difference between FCP X and other NLEs in my opinion. Often to get similar performance on other NLEs, I’d have to have a more robust computer than FCP X requires.”
My experience as well.
[Tangier Clarke] ” I wish FCP X would incorporate many of Resolve’s features, not the other way around.”
Yes. For me that would be an audio mixer.
[Tangier Clarke] “At the end of the day FCP X just lets me work so fluidly that to date I haven’t gotten that experience on another NLE.”
And that is probably where Apple is coming from. I actually think the ProApps division is hampered by Apple’s overall marketing policies and priorities more so than actual product development.
On another note, please contact me off list (website in signature). Thanks.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Tangier Clarke] ” If I were working in teams more regularly”
When I look at Apple marketing, to me they are all about empowering the individual. When it come to film, music, or art. Making the person who is an outsider and lacking the support of a huge team feel like “You can compete on your own”. “Don’t have super big money and means?, We got you”
They used Billie Eilish last year and I don’t think that was by accident. She speaks publicly about making her album in a bedroom in her house and now she is on top of the world. It’s, you can be like her……from your bedroom to record Grammy wins.
I think the whole collaboration with a bunch of people almost goes counter to that on it’s face. I agree with the points Oliver made when he wrote about the marketing team.
When I collaborate with people on X, I’m on the front end. I start the library and bring in the footage that I shot. I tag and organize things and sometimes set up grades and sound work as option in events. Then I hand that library off to the editor in another location and I’m done. Works great if you are not trying to have the same library open at the same time. I think most people work that way anyway. Someone preps footage and organizes and then someone cuts, then someone grades then sound. I think people do that all the time with X. Do your part, get out and then the next person comes in and so on.
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[Tony West] “Do your part, get out and then the next person comes in and so on.”
But what if someone could be editing while you are organizing?
Also, we often work on the same “job” with multiple people. There might be three or six different finished exports that come out of one job or pool of media.
Many times in spots we make :06s from the :15s from the :30s from the :60s from the :120s.
It would be great if all of that could be done inside one library instead of duping a library and keeping track of which cut is in what library.
It’s not a deal breaker, in no way shape or form are we switching to Pr, but multiuser collab would be very welcome and would sell a boat load more Macs.
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It’s the simultaneous in the same library workflow that is sought.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “But what if someone could be editing while you are organizing? “
They could be, but how would they know what to edit? I’m not done with the footage yet : )
All joking aside, I would welcome it also and agree it would go a long way for groups like yours Jeremy, I was just speculating on why I think it hasn’t been a top priority for them.
I think their aim has been empowerment of individuals first, and so much of what they do points to that. Hopefully they will add it, but like you, I’m going to keep on with it either way.
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[Oliver Peters] “from the very beginning, Avid designed a file and database structure that turned out to be conducive to collaboration. Whether this was out of necessity, foresight, or dumb luck is unknown. (Maybe some early Avid folks will see this thread and chime in.)”
I can tell you that it wasn’t dumb luck. I only worked at Avid from 2003 to 2006, but when I was working at Boris FX before that, I worked with Avid folks a LOT, and have certainly carried on many conversations along these very lines with my former Avid colleagues in the years since I’ve left.
Every product, even terrible ones LOL, start with the question, “Who is this for?” Avid knew from the beginning that they weren’t aiming for the whole wide world with Film Composer, the product’s original name. They were aiming for offline film, knowing that visual effects, finishing, and audio post and more would follow after picture lock. After all of that was in hand, negatives would need to be cut. So everything about the product was designed to work in THAT environment, sharing information in lots of different directions.
This makes it sound way too simple though. Think about the simplest film production back in the late 80s when all this was happening — sure, one shooter, one editor, but there’s still going to be a couple of sound people (sound editors, sound mixers, music composers), the title house, and the negative cut. At minimum, a dozen people are going to need bullet-proof interop. In practice, for a picture of any size, it might need to scale up to HUNDREDS of people who needed to know lots and lots of information about lots and lots of things. For a VFX-heavy contemporary thing, THOUSANDS of people, but still, yeah, even for a mid-size picture in the late 80s, early 90s, no major VFX, we’re still talking about scores of people.
This meant two very, very basic things. One, without a massively scaling database whose reliability stayed the same no matter how big it got, there was no product that could answer those needs at all. More simply, no database, no products, no company.
Two, Avid had to develop massive communications channels between lots and lots of companies, some of whom were competing with Avid, and most of whom were competing against each other, because there was no such thing as a project that could be completed in one manufacturer’s ecosystem. The databases had to scale virtually infinitely in the horizontal direction, across companies and previously otherwise isolated silo workflows, as well scaling vertically in complexity.
Now imagine trying to create an interop infrastructure that spanned film labs, film cameras, sound recording devices, sound editors, music, graphics, visual effects, negative cutting, and all the layers of management around them — with ZERO help from OS-level resources. This was before QuickTime. There were no OS-level resources for playing audio or video files. There was no industry-wide audio or video formats at all. No industry-wide metadata wrappers for these kinds of files.
In practice, nearly all of these problems were solved less by computer coding (although there was plenty of that) than by spreadsheets. This equals that. So it all ultimately feeds databases.
The 1995 merger between Avid and Digidesign, makers of Pro Tools, had a business component — we’ll take a bigger slice of the movie production pie if we control the leading tools for cutting pictures and cutting sound — but I assure you that there was a massive interop component. Both companies realized that were times when either the picture editing team or the sound editing team would say to the other , “But I need YOU to develop THIS for ME, NOW, even if it doesn’t matter to YOU, even if it will cause problems for your teams trying to meet the needs of your actual customers” — and there needed to be somebody at the top saying, “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. Do it.”
Somewhere in here, along comes video. The desktop video revolution was well underway at Radius, Adobe, Media 100, and others, but none of that had anything to do with Avid. They weren’t trying to revolutionize the WORLD. They were focused on a very specific community, with very specific needs.
Well, again, in practice, the early nonlinear days of video production with regards to episodic TV shows in particular was basically the same as film production. Most shows were still being shot on film, even in front of a live studio audience. The basic problems became more complex because of things like multicam — oops, wait, which turns out to be NO PROBLEM AT ALL when viewed as a DATABASE issue. Each camera is just a stream. “We know how to play streams. How many you want?” That’s why Avid had multicam so early, and so robustly. THIS community needed it.
There was also never an issue with Avid multicam and mixed formats. I don’t know that anybody has yet done multicam as robustly as Avid had on the first day. I remember the first time we threw HD sources into the same multicam group as SD sources, different sizes for all of ’em. It just worked.
That was actually the conversation, too. “Q: What do you think will happen if we try this?” “A: (Shrug.) Should just work. We’ll engineer something if we need to, though.” And it DID just work! Because as far as the application was concerned, it was a database problem. “Tell me where you want the streams. Tell me the output size. I don’t need to recalculate on the fly, because IT’S ALL IN THE DATABASE.”
I could go on like this, but I’ll add an example in broadcast. Think about election results, or a batting average or QB rating that’s changing over the course of a game. There’s not a human in the broadcast truck doing that math, and typing it into the broadcast graphics system. Those graphics are reading databases from someplace far, far away, and building pretty pictures on the fly.
And as anybody can tell you who goes to the Avid booth at NAB, there’s a huge portion of it devoted to breathtaking graphics, virtual sets, and all kinds of stuff for news and sports — really truly sci fi stuff that you should absolutely NOT miss, just because it’s neato to look at — and it’s alllll being driven by databases. You want humans to be ABLE to touch these things, but if a human NEEDS to touch it after the templates are set, then no sale.
Swinging back to shared storage for a sec: I was at Avid when they launched the first ISIS (Infinitely Scalable Intelligent Storage) shared storage system — wisely renamed NEXIS not a minute too soon. LOL (ISIS was still just a goddess and a rockin’ Dylan tune back in the early aughts.) The first iteration was 128TB, which was crazy huge at the time — nobody else had anything even vaguely this large for video production — and the first question from the audience at launch was, “When can we have more?” It got a huge laugh, but a bunch of hands went up as people said, “I’d like more” “I NEED more” and so on.
And it wasn’t just the size, it was the engineering that went into it. Triple redundant everything, but also a metadata controller that could scale up virtually infinitely — ie, the ability to reliably handle a DATABASE whose scale might approach infinity.
So I said to the VP of Post, wow, this is clearly a hit. People really want this. Why are we not selling it to people like Visa? They need massive storage with infinitely scaling databases. He said, “Yeah, but the databases are doing the exact opposite thing.
“At Visa, they have lots of little files. Each individual transaction is tiny, and Visa needs to fly through billions of ’em as fast at they can. Their database is optimized for lots of little files, the faster the better.
“Our database,” he says, “is optimized for fewer numbers of huge files, the smallest of which are many orders of magnitude larger than a Visa record, and they have to be delivered predictably, at the same pace. Too fast or too slow are both unacceptable. A smaller number of massive files, with the dimension of specifically-paced speed.”
We talked about this in more detail than is relevant here (say it ain’t so!) — but he concluded, “That’s why nothing about what we’re doing with infinitely scalable storage is applicable to anyone outside the world of media production. The databases just won’t line up.”
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. EVERYTHING about Avid’s development, from long before the first product shipped, was ENTIRELY built on the rock-bottom understanding that there is no company, and there are no products, without a wall-to-wall, top-to-bottom, infinitely scalable information infrastructure, one that’s specifically tuned to media production.
This also gets to some of the reasons why you can’t use SPEED specs as the primary vector for choosing video storage. Maximum burst speed is irrelevant if you can’t do the right thing with regards to pacing. That’s why the storage that’s optimized for live playout to air — doesn’t need random access or multiple points of exit, but DOES need bulletproof delivery of one stream through one pipe — is different from editing storage that needs to go in multiple directions with tons of random access, and so on.
Nobody who’s doing anything at a high level is trying to do EVERYTHING at a high level. Some stuff, they’re not trying to do at all. That’s how you get to be at a high level.
I haven’t even gotten into the specific toolsets for the USE of Avid’s products, but they’re developed with the same focus, always asking, “Who is this for?”
One of my favorites (developed by our friend Michael Phillips) is the quarter-frame slip. That means nothing unless you’re working with three-perf film — that is, three perforations per frame. The audio is synced FRAME accurate, but where IN the frame is it synced? It could be synced to any one of four places (the ones on either side of the the three perfs), no more, but no less. So you might need to shift every piece of video in the reel by a quarter frame to sync up precisely.
And the cool thing is that, because the database is robust, do it on one clip, and every clip in the reel now has that offset added to it at whatever number of quarter-frames you’ve incremented, whether or not it’s in your bin. When you do grab it later, it’s ready to go. Slick!
Obviously, if you’re not doing two-system recording, or working with film prints, you’ll never touch this feature. But there was a stretch of time where nearly EVERYBODY who used an Avid, whether for movies, TV, spots, or whatever — touched this feature. It’s the kind of thing that builds generational loyalty, because editors see THOUSANDS of these little, tiny, bizarre features that say, “We know who you are. You are our only audience.”
(You know, a couple of those features have escaped into the wild. Multicam, Bin-locking….another was what came to be known as script-based editing. I have stories about these that I’ll save for another day.)
Anyway, I mentioned earlier that even terrible product managers ask the question, “Who is this FOR?” The good ones also ask, “Who is this NOT for?”
There’s a boatload of features that Avid didn’t chase, sometimes to the infuriation of part of their customer base, because they fell into the category of, “Yeah, a valid market, a MASSIVE market, but that’s not who we’re developing for.” You HAVE to answer BOTH questions if you’re going to last. Who is it for, and who is not for.
Apple isn’t in the business of creating its own obstacles. They’ve done it sometimes, just like every company does, but Apple does it less often than most. That’s why they’re Apple. They don’t chase the newest features, and they definitely never want the most features. They want the ones that meet the needs of who their stuff is FOR, and they leave a lot of money and opportunity on the table by rigorously refusing to develop anything for people who their stuff is NOT for.
So I don’t have much to add to what people have already said about that on this thread. Apple has only showed a small if still meaningful interest in film-oriented workflows over the years (certainly the purchase of Cinema Tools is a good example) and shared workflows in general (during Xserve and FCP Server, yes, but the demise of those says all that it needs to), and barely any interest at all in anything that scales (to borrow a phrase) “to infinity and beyond”. No disrespect. It is what it is. Third parties are making a lot of cool things possible, and that’s gonna be the story for, well, maybe for forever.
Nothing about what Adobe is doing with the Productions or Adobe for Teams strikes me as fundamentally incompatible from a structural point of view….although, I’ll be honest, looking at the Catalina warnings thread, it appears that Apple is doing some things with permissions in particular that might in fact make some of these kinds of distributed databases not work in practice. Or if they could work, only with Catalina clients, which suggests that it’ll be mighty easy to break down the road. That’s just not Apple’s game.
I think one reason that they don’t have to chase people outside their targets is the realization that, once they hit YOUR target, there may be nothing to make you budge. Jeremy’s quote along those lines resonates — paraphrasing, “I’d love to have this kind of collaboration, but no way that the lack of it will make me jump to something else.” Something like that, and certainly plenty of other folks have said similar things.
I think Apple is relying on that dynamic to continue to give them the air cover to NOT pursue a lot of things that THIS market would like to see….but I think we’ve all pretty well wrapped our heads around the concept that some parts of our lives are fully outside of a lot people’s targets. LOL
That said, I’m curious to hear more from X-ers about the kinds of collaborative tools you’d like to see from Apple, what you’d do with them that’s different than what you’re doing now, and if really, truly, any of it would make any difference to you in any ultimate sense, whether they show up or not.
Anyhoo, I’m readin’ more than writin’ these days, even if it looks like I’ve tried to make up for all of it in just one post. LOL I’ll try to be around a little more often, and maybe make some of the posts a little shorter.
SOME of the posts, a LITTLE shorter.
Peace,
Tim -
[Tony West] “I think their aim has been empowerment of individuals first, and so much of what they do points to that. Hopefully they will add it, but like you, I’m going to keep on with it either way.”
There has been a shift, though, of Apple talking to the serious professional.
The landscape is different since the last time Apple brought a true upgradable workstation to the table. Collaboration is nearly everywhere. Platforms like frame.io, Slack, Google Docs (Or Apple Docs), even Vimeo, or Microsoft products these days, but collaboration and team participation is almost a must. It is also sometimes, a mess. Large Slack groups can become nearly impossible to find that one document, or link, or note or conversation that you need.
Sure, editing is different, media is different, but how different? Postlab makes what I assume to be, the best solution out there right now for FCPX, and it is great for ‘distributed’ teams and presents an easy interface and trackable database of who is doing what. On shared storage where editors are in the same network, the permissions are handled already by the OS, so Postlab Cloud, while still cool with a very easy way to keep things organized, becomes less necessary. Postlab Cloud is a cloud based product, showing it’s biggest intended audience.
I don’t know if you have watched many of these influencer videos on the MacPro unboxing’s and all that, but these teams of people shoot on Red, have networked storage, and require a few people to work on what amounts to, 30 minute informercials. These seemingly ‘self-powered’ simple productions are somewhat involved. I would imagine multiuser collaboration would be very welcome in FCPX for even the Youtube influencer.
In our productions, there is more of a need to get a piece out quickly as a teaser, or a need to send a few clips to someone else, or get media out for transcription nearly immediately, before we even start organizing for the job we were initially contracted to do. It’s a bunch of pre-post production, if that makes sense. It requires more than one editor, and it would be really welcome to see multiuser collab in fcpx on networked storage for people who work in the same building so that initial busy work can be done at the same time as the work being started for the flagship pieces that will eventually come out of that production. More and more finishing and audio are accepting fcpxml as well, which helps keep things streamlined with easy interchange.
FCPX is really creative software. I’ve tried and tried to like other programs that have collaboration features, but for all of us in the office, it’s hard to step away from fcpx. Although, I do wonder at some point, if multiuser collaboration doesn’t show up, when will we obsolete ourselves?
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t know if you have watched many of these influencer videos “
I have Jeremy and that’s part of how I came to my conclusions. This video with Jonathan Morris on “collaboration” in X is a perfect example.
Two things jump out at me, 1. They mention that he has Apple’s ear 2. The way he describes his collaborative workflow near the end of it. He describes just what I wrote, jumping in and out with other editors. I understand why he has their ear, he has millions of viewers but he doesn’t seem to be complaining about not being able to work in the same library. The opposite, he’s talking about how much he “Loves” it. My point is, if they are listing to him say that, are they more likely to change it or not? I’m not privy to what he says to them offline, maybe he is telling them something different but I suspect not.
This is not to say that Morrison can’t benefit from being able to work in the same Library, I’m just saying if HE were telling them that it might go a long way.I have spoken with editors who cut some of the top feature films in Hollywood and some of them are working remotely. I figure if they are doing it on that level and small groups are, how soon before almost everyone is scattered about. It seem that’s what groups like Frame IO and maybe your Postlab are betting on.
The elephant in the thread is, is the future trend working in groups in the same building or remotely? If it’s the latter, what does that workflow look like?
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[Tony West] ” but he doesn’t seem to be complaining about not being able to work in the same library”
We shouldn’t lump “collaboration” into a single workflow. There are a lot of different needs for ways to collaborate (on premises) depending on what you are doing. For example, in the “YouTube influencer” scenario, the workflow is about the same as multiple commercial or corporate video editors – and for that matter, broadcast news, too. You want to pull from a pool of media, but you aren’t all cutting on the same overall project. You may be cutting alternate versions, different videos from common sources, or something entirely unrelated. FCPX/Resolve/Premiere Pro/Media Composer can let you do that now and easily if everyone is connected to a shared storage system.
The next level is where you have different editors working on sub-projects that are interrelated to one larger campaign or production. There’s where FCPX falls short. For example, editor A has a cut of something that editor B can use within his edit – B-Roll stringouts for example. In the current version of Premiere (without any of the current or future sharing methods), editor B can open editor A’s project (while editor A is working on it) in a read-only mode and copy that stringout into his or her own project. That cannot be done in X today without using the workaround of a transfer library – or by editor A closing his library so editor B can briefly open it.
The third level is complete collaboration. Multiple editors/assistants/other artists all working within the same “master” project file. That’s where Avid excels and what Adobe is trying to attain. For example, the assistant editor syncing/organizing scene 2, while the editor is concurrently cutting scene 1.
It’s this third level that I suspect we will simply never see with FCPX. It was never attained in FCP7 either. I could be wrong, but it just doesn’t seem like a feature that Apple has interest in. In fact, the direction Catalina has taken the OS will make this much more difficult, so that’s a level of complexity that ProApps simply might not want to fight.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “We shouldn’t lump “collaboration” into a single workflow.”
Bingo. My thesis for years now.
I also resonate with the discussion of differing needs for differing levels of employers or users.
Tangier’s Billie Eilish nod is very relevant to my thinking. If the myth makers are to be believed, Billie and her brother had the initial EP that launched her career done exclusively on stock MacBook tools in the brothers’ bedroom. When things utterly blew up success-wise, the two of them tried recording in a “real” studio – but from what I read, that change lost them as much as it gained in terms of creative flow.
Who knows where it will go from here. But the genesis of the success wasn’t a “production house” in this case. It was personal expression enabled by very personal tools.
Collaboration implies distributed effort. The “production” mentality can certainly involve the application of creativity – but as we all know from spending hours just managing files, it also might not.
How far each of us wishes to position ourselves away from – or adjacent to – the actual creative rather than mechanical nexus of the business — is going to be more and more a personal choice.
The excitement is that you can now work “for the house” for your 40 hours. Then come home and work “for yourself” with the same level of production capabilities that ONLY the studios used to have.
That’s a very good thing, IMO.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.
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