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Today’s experiment.
In a previous post, I alluded to a project I had earlier today that I thought would represent a somewhat new type of challenge for me. So I thought I’d report back for any who are interested.
I seem to keep coming back to touting the “agility” I see in X, so this past Thursday, when I had a small project pop up I decided to put my money where my virtual mouth has been.
I got a lead into a quasi-governmental initiative that is connected to economic development in my region. They work with the largest companies and the “movers and shakers” around. So even tho the job itself was quite small, I saw it as a way to make some connections, meet some new people, and spread some seeds that might bloom into future work.
The job was one of those typical “we have something we shot and the presenter wants a copy” things. Trivial as to creativity or impact, but a toe in is a toe in, so I decided to see if I could leverage FCP X’s strengths into something that might have a chance to impress a new client even a little bit.
So I went to their 25th floor offices today to “pick up” their DVCAM master. Then took it down to a table in the ground floor coffee shop, near an electrical outlet, pulled out my laptop, X, and my formerly “gathering dust” DSR-20 (which looks like a dinosaur in modern terms!). digitized the tape, slapped a pre-built short open and close on it. And transcoded and uploaded the result to the relevant website – and returned the DVCAM master to them – all in about 40 minutes.
To say the client was surprised to see me back that soon would be a bit of an understatement – and she looked thoughtful when I mentioned that “since I don’t really use tape any more, I wanted to get this digitized and back to you ASAP.” Then when I was able to call her a while later and let her know that I was emailing a link to the footage so that she could forward it to her principal, she seemed very pleased.
Yeah, I could have done that iMovie or other software too. But the point for me was that if instead of this simple “dry run” task, the client had asked me to sit with one of the executives, or in a conference room with their creative team, or in their marketing department – working on deadline, FCP-X would have been ready and willing with every tool I would have needed to do a basic “ready to deliver” edit. No, it’s not a fully realized “movie” editor. But for the kind of basic corporate information video that likely drives hundreds of millions of dollars in video production invoices each year, it’s sweet.
And with the new database stuff, what I can see is that each time I return to do a gig for a client like this, I would increasingly have ALL their projects, all their keywords, all their graphics and all their footage at my fingertips with nothing more than a plugged in drive and on my laptop. So starting it in X is something I see as an increasingly “incremental” approach to building my editing base around the new meta-data approach.
This is totally different from my wall of 300+ DVCAM tapes and bank of fixed hard drives in my studio where no project shared anything with any other. It’s a “virtualization” of my entire business model where I’m likely to be increasingly “un-teathered” from a particular location and can do my work wherever and whenever I need to do it. Perhaps if I’m the guy who’s laptop and hard drive has all their digital assets ready to go – then I become a wee bit more valuable than some other guy off the street.
In sum, what FCP-X has started to change for me is not so much how I edit – but how I *think* about editing. I’m starting to see it as something I don’t necessarily do in my studio – but rather a thing I do wherever and whenever it makes sense to do it.
And that’s a pretty big “dawning difference” for me.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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36 Replies
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That’s awesome that you were able to turn the project around so quickly. Nothing like surprising a client in a good way!
Now if I can play devil’s advocate here – what did FCPX give you, in this instance, that another NLE couldn’t? Namely Premiere and Avid since they seem to be the two main choices for people evaluating their options. This job sounds like it could have been accomplished just as easily in any of the major NLEs.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
Bill,
From your description, it seems like the work you did could have been done with a number of different pieces of software – it speaks to the utility of many off-the-shelf solutions today.
However, this bit catches my eye:
[Bill Davis] “And with the new database stuff, what I can see is that each time I return to do a gig for a client like this, I would increasingly have ALL their projects, all their keywords, all their graphics and all their footage at my fingertips with nothing more than a plugged in drive and on my laptop. So starting it in X is something I see as an increasingly “incremental” approach to building my editing base around the new meta-data approach.”
You seem to value building a library of projects and media for use in future.
You may want to examine the record that various companies have in terms of how they value past projects and past formats.
Franz.
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To me it reads as though Bill see’s X as something that can live on a small system whereas FCP could only live on a workstation – FCP on a book is very old news. Other software even more so.
People have been running around doing small edit job on laptops for ages – in studio mattes & cuts, cutting in client office – all no problem.
This kind of agility isn’t anything to do with the new software.
The Brit in Brisbane
The Pomme in Production – Brisbane Australia. -
Michael,
Three things the way I see it.
First, I’d never used it’s deck control utility – so that was new to me. (and yes, I realize that other programs do the same, but it was NOT proven to me that X would be useful in “deck control” situations until I experienced it. I’d previously thought of it exclusively as a “file based” system.
Second, I don’t know Premier or Avid well enough to evaluate whether they also “build databases” around clips like I’ve recently experienced in X. In my years of FCP-Legacy use, I’ve come to view “projects” as stand alone entities. I haven’t seen the ability to search across and around collections of information about global assets. Perhaps these abilities are in the other software, but they are new to me.
Finally, my entire orientation has always been that I would a significant penalty in performance for using anything less than the newest, largest, and fastest system that I can afford. I’ve suffered years of dropped frames, hiccups, momentary freezes and crashes in working with edit systems that were less than “hot-rodded” with maxed out specs. In fact, my FCP Legacy thinking was always “It would be much better if I could only run this on better hardware.” That has involved not just the base processor(s), but RAM, HD arrays, and add-on cards. The performance I’m seeing from my i7 laptop with a single Firewire 400 drive has been very reassuring to me with regards to FCP-X.
Again, perhaps Premier and/or Avid are doing the same and will run on a simple notebook just like X does on mine. But it’s counter-intuitive to my traditional thinking. I would have NEVER attempted to run a job like the one I described on such basic hardware in the past. (And to be frank, the reason I set up my “experiment” taking the footage down to the coffee shop was so I’d be insulated from the client in case something went wrong.
If I keep getting these kind of results, I’ll start telling clients “just give me a few minutes at a desk or in the board room and I can get this done for you.
I’m not there mentally quite yet.
But I’m getting there.
I’m not here saying FCP-X is superior to anything else. I’m here relating what I’m experiencing in day to day, average editing tasks. I think it’s important because many people reading these threads have probably gotten the impression that since it doesn’t do something that the high-end “disappointed” crowd is upset about, they might extrapolate that to thinking it doesn’t do solid BASIC editing well.
And that’s simply not the case in my experience.
For what it’s worth.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Not sure where you’re going with this? What did X do to facilitate this job?
I couda’ done this on a MBP with FCS2, and not been out 300 bucks for the privilege of being an Apple beta tester.
Maybe I missed something.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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At the very least FCPX showed no overt disadvantage for this kind of job.
In addition Bill pointed out the potential long term advantage in organizing client material, he sees.BTW I’ve had a couple of jobs that seem to be similar to Bill’s. In one case, after a failed camera recording during a shot I was handed an H.264 .mp4 archive of a live stream, the only existing copy. The turnaround was so short that I disabled background rendering and edited the H.264 file natively, exported ProRes and encoded again (yuck, I know) for FTP delivery in just a couple of hours. The client was a bit surprised I was able to deliver (to another country) the same night. Sure maybe Premiere Pro might have been able to do the same thing but certainly FCPX was capable and delivered without any disability.
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Thanks for sharing, Bill. I agree with you that this is one of FCPX’s greatest strengths.
FCPX’s Event Browser is a DAM (digital asset manager), built right into the NLE. I think that FCPX will do for asset management what Color did for grading: increase awareness of — and access to — a feature that was once limited to high-end workflows.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
TLDR: guy captures tape and exports into a quicktime movie, hails FCPX a success.
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[Walter Soyka] “FCPX’s Event Browser is a DAM (digital asset manager), built right into the NLE. I think that FCPX will do for asset management what Color did for grading: increase awareness of — and access to — a feature that was once limited to high-end workflows.”
Great way to put it Walter.
I’d add that unlike Color, (that wasn’t Apple’s and was old code) this isn’t the end but the beginning.
I think it’s obvious that there are solid pillars under the structure. -
[Bill Davis] “if instead of this simple “dry run” task, the client had asked me to sit with one of the executives, or in a conference room with their creative team, or in their marketing department – working on deadline, FCP-X would have been ready and willing with every tool I would have needed to do a basic “ready to deliver” edit.”
This is the crux of the matter. Can we be professional and still use X in public? It’s one thing to wrestle with it in our dark edit closets, but to go out where people can see us. Horrors.
I have been using X to edit broadcast tv stories for our show, and frequently, I’ll camp out on a sofa in our office space, with my project on a orange-bumpered Lacie firewire drive and edit away. My co-workers seem impressed with not just the outcome, which I could achieve on a number of different NLEs, but when I show them how FCX works, and how snappy the interface it, and all the cool tools it has, they are all appropriately impressed.
That is until I start getting the beachball from some unknown analysis happening under the hood, or I tell them the extra work I need to do to get my stem tracks out.
The moral of Bill’s story I believe is that there’s enough in this app right now, to make it a welcome tool in our kit. It’s working right now, and it’s only going to get better.
I just wish it would happen faster.
I had a fun job recently at an auction, where a camera gathered interviews with people as they arrived, they passed the cards to me to ingest on my MBP. I cut 6 or 7 good comments together with a pre-built open that I made in Motion, and quickly added lower thirds using a motion template I built based on the artwork from the fundraiser’s invitation. To top it off, the windows computer they were using for the powerpoint was sketchy playing back my mp4s, so I played it live out of my laptop right onto the screen for all the well-dressed attendees. We did three different videos during the first hour of the program, and everyone was impressed, and we all got paid.
This was FCP7, but I could have done this in FCX if I had it then.
It’s a $300 application with a lot of power and innovation. I’m looking forward to watching it mature.
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FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com
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