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Time for FCPX to step up – collaboration
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[Joshua Pearson] “cut an Oscar-nominated doc “What Happened, Miss Simone” on it and rather enjoyed it”
And I enjoyed the documentary! Fantastic stuff that I can heartily recommend to everyone here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM9EA7XVIk8
[Joshua Pearson] “The our facility totally dumped FCPX becasue of the collaboration issue, as we often work on doc shows with two or three assistants and 3 or 4 editors… so we switched to Premiere and Avid.”
As sorry as I am to hear about your troubles, what I love about this is that it flies in the face of what is way, WAY too often the default narrative around here, that people who work with Avid (and Premiere to a lesser extent) are too old, scared, tired, etc., — especially ironic because the folks who regularly post here are the oldest in the entire COW (Google tells us that our average age is late 20s across all forums, definitely not the case in this one LOL) — without leaving room for the possibility that hey, maybe it’s about a tool’s fitness for the job.
(While also making room for the many folks here who regularly work with multiple systems.)
Which means on another level, it’s not even necessarily about preference.
[Joshua Pearson] “I will never move from Avid until transcript integration happens elsewhere.”
I spoke some about the origins of Script Sync in my overly-long reply to Oliver above, stories I learned when I was on the Media Composer team at Avid just before I came to work at Creative COW. You’re far from the only editor and/or facility that I’ve heard this from.
You’ve been in the COW long enough that you know that I’m not only NOT an “Avid above all” kinda guy, but was actually one of the earliest and loudest supporters of FCPX. I predicted in writing that Apple would sell 10 million copies the first year (oops! LOL), remain the ONLY public supporter (certainly here; maybe anywhere) of Apple’s EOL’ing of FCP (which I felt like they’d already done at least 3 years before they actually announced it), and predicted that the workflow advantages it offered had the potential to actually move the needle for FCPX in Hollywood in ways that FCP never could.
I was right about that last one actually, but the net net is that Avid has even MORE market share in Hollywood than before, and you’ve landed EXACTLY on some of the reasons why.
Script Sync is uniquely built for heavy lifting, and Media Composer is uniquely built for collaboration (again, the history of which I discuss above). Even when people prefer FCPX’s feature set, they find too much value in the ways that Avid understands and supports widescale collaboration to be able to stay away — again said with no disrespect toward FCPX, which remains uniquely suited to a whole lot of other things.
And equally with no disrespect to frame.io, or what looks like a very robust feature set in Adobe Productions, or indeed the many folks who are using FCPX collaboratively right now. It can be done…but Avid’s been building toolsets for collaborative editing for over 30 years now, though, and have gotten pretty good at the version of it specifically attuned to making movies and TV shows. Anyone who’s worked in Avid AND those others will tell you, they’re not the same.
None of which has anything to do with age, intransigence, failure to understand, fear, or any other negative trait that some folks here so often ascribe to anyone whose needs differ from theirs. Apple certainly understands that they’re not making FCPX for everyone. I have no idea why so many Apple customers refuse to accept this.
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[Tim Wilson] “but the net net is that Avid has even MORE market share in Hollywood than before, and you’ve landed EXACTLY on some of the reasons why.”
One huge issue that keeps people in the Avid fold is that Avid has gone to great lengths to maintain forward and backward project compatibility. This is something no one else does. Of course, they aren’t always successful and naturally it can’t be perfect, because of OS changes.
Just this week I’ve had a client approach us about project updates on a job done 13 years ago in FCP “legacy”. I have a bazillion project files from that original job, but ugh! I don’t even have an active machine anymore that can open the files. Avid, OTOH,… You get the picture.
[Tim Wilson] “Script Sync is uniquely built for heavy lifting, and Media Composer is uniquely built for collaboration (again, the history of which I discuss above). “
Along with Steve Hullfish, I’ve probably interviewed more feature film editors than others and most are Media Composer users. When the question about ScriptSync comes up, it’s often a division based on working styles. Some would never want to be without it and others are just ‘meh’ as to whether or not it’s useful to them. I’ve spoken with some editors who admit to driving their assistants crazy prepping dailies for ScriptSync and then never really use it.
Like range-based selections and keywords in FCPX – some editors think it’s the greatest thing ever and others just don’t work that way and prefer to organize in the timeline.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Along with Steve Hullfish, I’ve probably interviewed more feature film editors than others and most are Media Composer users.”
Me too! By a long shot, and not at ALL because the project was brought to me by Avid. One of my all-time favorite interviews with an Avid editor came to me directly from Apple (somebody who works at One Infinite Loop, no less), and others have come from people like Amazon inviting me to speak to any number of below the line artists — but there’s just no getting away from how overwhelmingly that community has solidified around Avid, at least partly in response to Avid overwhelmingly focusing on that community.
I come at this a couple of ways. I remember being there when they said, “How can we go after [insert name of market vertical here]?” and my reply was, “You need a product as well suited to that market as Media Composer is to film and TV”……typically followed by…. “which we don’t.” LOL
So yeah, even at Avid, I adamantly refused the notion of “try to get everyone to use what your thing.” It’s a colossal waste if the end result is that people buy the thing and it’s a bad fit, and we know in advance that it’s unlikely for more than a few market verticals to line up on MC’s feature set as well as film and TV. There definitely are some (science, certain kinds of corporate / military / enterprise production that need large-scale collaboration, etc.), but there are a few, and not more than a few.
Contrast this with Apple visiting Joshua. Apple understands who’s in Hollywood. They understand those workflows. They take those requests face to face, by the dozens if not hundreds, and decline to develop that way. GOOD FOR THEM. This is exactly why FCPX is so well suited for the things it IS suited for. I CELEBRATE that FCPX isn’t optimized the same way Media Composer is, and I think everyone should.
Including celebrating all the people for whom FCPX is a very, very bad fit, exactly as Apple intends. Strokes, folks — all different.
[Oliver Peters] “Like range-based selections and keywords in FCPX – some editors think it’s the greatest thing ever and others just don’t work that way and prefer to organize in the timeline.”
As usual, you said it better and more succinctly than me. ☺ I believe in Script Sync, and showed it at what must have been 50 non-Avid user groups I was invited to, maybe more — but you’ve got to do a LOT of work to set it up. If you don’t have a bunch of assistant editors, it’s useless. But I saw some reality production guys who’d had 30 cameras going around the clock for a month perform what might as well be magic with Script Sync.
It’s really just one of a handful of examples, though, you’re right — just as limited and specific as range-based selections in FCPX. The larger point is that any number of Hollywood folks could build a long list of Avid-unique features at least as long as any FCPX-specific list that anyone here would create, and both would be equally valid.
That’s what I’m talking about. Equally valid outcomes for companies who develop for equally valid if only nominally similar target markets.
You could even state it in reverse: there’s an inverse relationship between FCPX’s suitability for YOU and it’s suitability for anyone whose work is different than yours. The less like your work theirs is, the less suitable FCPX is for them.
You could equally validly swap in “Avid” there. Or Resolve, or Premiere, or (heaven forbid) cars, clarinets, or guitars.
This is not by accident. It is by design. That’s why the further you get from a Hollywood-style workflow, the less suited Media Composer is to you. Nobody here seems to have any problem with that notion, so why so much angst about the same truth for FCPX applied in the same way?
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[Tim Wilson] “This is not by accident. It is by design. That’s why the further you get from a Hollywood-style workflow, the less suited Media Composer is to you. Nobody here seems to have any problem with that notion, so why so much angst about the same truth for FCPX applied in the same way?”
I think that’s a very key point in the ongoing arguments around FCPX. Apple made the decision to service/create a new and emerging market of content creators.
They were willing to move away from an existing market, because 8 years ago, that market was adequately services by others using the Mac platform. That was less secure when the original FCP was acquired by Apple.
In contrast, Avid has generally catered to an existing market. Adobe tends to have a foot in both camps. Blackmagic is taking a page from Apple’s playbook more so than from the others.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Blackmagic is taking a page from Apple’s playbook more so than from the others.”
The fascinating thing about the continuing Blackmagic improvements is that they’re in effect taking FCPX completely out of the NLE equation. The market I work in is dominated by Adobe but if that market was to soften the most logical/probable replacement NLE is Resolve.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net -
[Oliver Peters] “In contrast, Avid has generally catered to an existing market. Adobe tends to have a foot in both camps. Blackmagic is taking a page from Apple’s playbook more so than from the others.”
In fairness, Avid created that market in some substantial ways. Anyone else is free to go after it, and some people obviously are. I remember one year when I was working for Avid at NAB, I watched a then-VP at Adobe poke my then-VP of Post in the chest and say, “We’re coming for you next.” They added support for feet and frames immediately after that, but found that there’s ultimately more to it than that…and indeed, Productions may be getting closer to the heart of it.
More interesting, I think Adobe has gone even harder than Apple at social media creators, and they’ve done it more broadly. Some of it is invisible to us because it’s happening outside the US (Behance), in the photography market (Fotolia), and both below and adjacent to the folks who frequent the COW. They’ve built a dashboard into Premiere Pro that allows you to upload once to a variety of platforms (Facebook, Insta, Snap, etc), WITH ANALYTICS RIGHT THERE.
We haven’t really spoken about how seriously Adobe is taking analytics. It’s now almost a third of their revenue, and is putting them head to head against companies like Nielsen for tracking streaming.
And you might say, “What does that have to do with the influencer in her bedroom?”, but the way they get to be influencers is by building and tracking their audience, and being able to pitch it to brands in ways that include stats about engagement. But certainly for brands working at enterprise scale, this component of Adobe’s development is creating the kind of stickiness for them that Script Sync and collaborative editing have for Avid.
(And frankly, so has the subscription model. A bane for folks here, perhaps, but for anyone who’s doing business at any scale, the tax advantages of subscribing to software make any non-subscription options a non-starter.)
I hadn’t thought to mention this earlier, but pointing people again to your terrific interview with Steve Bayes, it’s easy to forget for how very long he was the product manager for both FCP and FCPX. Having literally written the book on Avid when he worked there (his Avid Handbook was certainly how *I* learned Media Composer, and never left my desk when I worked there), there’s nobody who would have been better positioned to build in Avid-ish features than the father of Avid Symphony….but why would he? It wouldn’t have been relevant, and that interview goes into a lot of tremendously insightful specifics about why.
[greg janza] “The market I work in is dominated by Adobe but if that market was to soften the most logical/probable replacement NLE is Resolve.”
I’m always going to find Blackmagic’s approach here endlessly fascinating, just from the perspective of a longtime fan of the industry if nothing else. They’re not having to work to serve investors, and Grant is only interested in having the business make enough money for everyone who works for him to have a good life (which includes NOT working around the clock), to have enough money to do the next fun thing he thinks of, and that’s about it. So piling in more products and features for free, or close to it? No problem.
But there are a lot of business and enterprise-scale Adobe customers who need the collaborative features that the paid versions of Resolve provide, but who won’t budge until they can subscribe. Same for film productions who categorically refuse to own anything. The business entity of the film production isn’t around long enough to amortize anything, so it’s write it off now, or never. (Seriously, the tax advantages of subscriptions are HUGE.)
I think that Blackmagic is leaving those opportunities on the table, but I’m also inclined to think that Grant’s okay with that. His ambitions may well not include creating another layer of financial and development infrastructure to chase what’s ultimately a narrow-ish slice of the larger pie. I’m also willing to bet that Blackmagic’s 2020 NAB booth will once again be the biggest at the show, and that rather than wheel and deal in back rooms, Grant will once again be front and center on the floor, looking forward to hearing whatever is you think he needs to hear.
I do think a lot about my days as an editor, and think about what’s happening now through that lens more often than the lens of my life as a corporate weasel, even if I talk about that perspective more here. Yeah, it’s been a while since I edited for a living, but it was the longest career of the many I’ve had, and other than managing bookstores, my favorite gig in some ways. The combination of Resolve with the Mini panel would have made a huge difference in the work I was doing, which included hours and days using keyframes and the pen tool to build masks for grading in Boris FX and After Effects because I couldn’t afford Resolve as it was configured in the 90s. LOL
I definitely remember people saying, “Here comes DV, nobody’s ever going to do color correction ever again,” which is equally obviously both true and not true. But I certainly don’t feel a need to stop people in the street *(ie, social media LOL) and yell at them about their failure to understand the value that integrated grading on dedicated hardware provides. I don’t honestly think people need persuading about anything. They blink and decide, and the whole point of that observation is that the blink is almost always right for them. People need to trust that first blink more, not less. The agony of evaluation is a distraction, and tends over time to take you further off course.
My larger point in this forum has always been that most people get most places in their lives without overthinking this stuff. It’s just that in this forum, we tend to psychoanalyze the OTHER guy’s choice (he’s too afraid to choose FCPX, his ego is wrapped up in it his old way, he doesn’t understand what’s really here, etc) without imagining the possibility that our own fear, ego, and inflexibility or whatever traits we ascribe to THEM might be exactly how we wound up here ourselves.
Probably not true for you, though, and probably not true for the other guy either. That doesn’t make it any less fun to talk about the differences between these toolsets, and the kinds of work they enable, and how the tools and the companies that manage them could all be doing better. On the contrary, it’s MORE fun to talk about when we remove relative judgements that go any deeper than the blink of an eye.
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I would love for FCPX to add collaboration. I don’t really care what editing platform you use, if you can make it better and have an easier workflow, why not do it.
We did a 2 hour doc and there were so many times I would have loved to have collaboration and yes we used Frame io but its not the same. I don’t want to have to go to a third party app to do it. Ive been a FCP user and a FCPX user from the beginning and would hate to leave it. I’ve also used every editing platform out there so I’ve know what they can do.
I’ve recently started learning Resolve, which we may use for our next project, That’s only if I don’t see something new in FCPX at NAB this year. I’ve noticed other NLE’s taking good ideas from FCPX and integrating them into their NLE’s now it’s time for FCPX to do the same, take what the others are doing and give editors what they are asking for. Ive seen it over and over and that is collaboration.
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Nice discussion. Tim, I loved your deep essay about Avid… so interesting to hear inside info like that.
I also spent a couple years on Media 100 back in the mid 90s… the Media 100 card for $2000 was the bait, the amazingly affordable option to the hugely expensive Avid at the time… i used it with early Premiere at first but then kind of dug the Media 100 software, even though it only let you have two tracks of video!!! I cant actually remember why I liked it… maybe Premiere was crashy and Media 100 was more solid?… ah, the 90s. -
[Joshua Pearson] “kind of dug the Media 100 software, even though it only let you have two tracks of video!!! I cant actually remember why I liked it… maybe Premiere was crashy and Media 100 was more solid?… ah, the 90s.”
Thanks for the kind words!
I was a Media 100 customer too! It being a small world and New England tech being rather incestuous, I was hired at Avid by a guy who knew me from when he worked at Media 100 and I was a customer, and all three years I was there, I sat next to still another guy who worked at Media 100. I regularly bumped into Media 100 folks, and helped bring on one of the most publicly-identifiable Media 100 people, Marianna Montague, who’s now filling the same customer advocate role at Avid. VERY small world.
Anyway, yes, as editors, we loved the bullet-proofness of Media 100 relative to the (pre-pro) Mac version of Premiere. Even though Windows came later, in 1996, Premiere on Win + hardware from people like Matrox with DigiSuite ran like a dream. Mac, closer to nightmare, not least of which was no support for drop code, so your 30 second spot would be a full frame out of sync by the end. Completely not usable for broadcast at that point….but hey, to this larger conversation, that wasn’t the point of Premiere THEN.
The difference with Avid wasn’t price for me. The Media 100xs was only a few thousand less than a very, very similar featured Avid Xpress system, both in the $30,000-ish range. The difference was intent. Media 100 was focused on providing the highest quality images possible (the company started as an optical tech company, Data Translation), whereas Xpress was an unholy marriage of focused on offline and the lowest image quality they could get away with.
It had to do with being made with a different audience — film, since even the TV market that Avid was aiming for was still mostly shooting on film — and I was all video, all the time. I also had no clients or collaborators who cared about Avid, so even though Avid had something in the right price range for me, and had plenty of features that Media 100 didn’t, it was the wrong set of product priorities for ME. I spent all of about 90 seconds figuring this out. LOL And I was right.
That’s why these questions have never seemed trivial to me. The notion of “we’re developing for THESE customers, and to succeed, we CAN’T develop for THOSE customers” is so foundational that it can’t be separated from feature requests. It may well be the case that for FCPX to be what you need it to be, that you’ll have to rely on third party solutions to address any needs for specific kinds of collaboration, epic-scale film, what have you.
So, behind the question of “What do you want Apple to do for you?” is “How do you want Apple to understand itself, and what tradeoffs are you willing to make for Apple to be who you need them to be?”
Which is also why I find the notion that you’re NOT making tradeoffs when you choose ANY product or platform to be so delusional. You’re also choosing what’s NOT going to happen for you. Of COURSE there’s no way that every NLE can work in every context. It’s impossible, and even if it was possible, it would be a genuinely bad goal. LOL
In fact, my favorite thing about this forum is the extent to which it has become a place for people who do in fact use multiple toolsets to talk about all of them in relation to each other. The more the merrier, sez me, but there’s really not much to say if we can’t be honest with each other about what each one precludes as much as we talk about what each of them offers.
Understanding that somebody else’s reality is different from mine isn’t a reason for either of us to dismiss the other. Ideally, it’s an opportunity for empathy, and for us to gain greater insight through multiple perspectives.
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As a high school instructor that uses 24 seats of FCPX, it is hugely frustrating that there aren’t better local sharing capabilities in FCPX. We have a Jellyfish server, which has been awesome this year, but my students have to go through a number of ridiculous steps to import their footage to edit:
Create a capture library on the server, make sure the Library is set to import footage to a designated external location, then each group member copies the Library to their own computer so that they can edit.* We use proxy files when editing which makes it impossible to use an XML process; i.e. export out an XML from the capture Library that all the students can then import to their project.
You have to remember, I’m dealing with high school students that occasionally ask, “how do I save this to the mouse,” cause the only tech they use are their smartphones. So, this process (very simplified to keep the reader from being bored) is almost always problematic for my kids. One misstep in the process and it very easily can ruin the entire capture process, setting up the students for editing failure.
*It’s part of my responsibility to make sure all my students can edit, hence making all of them edit their own version of their group’s short films.
Winston A. Cely
ACTC Media Broadcasting Video Instructor
Apple Certified Editor FCPX 3\”If you can talk brilliantly enough about a subject, you can create the consoling illusion it has been mastered.\” – Stanley Kubrick
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