Where are we TODAY?

[Aindreas Gallagher]

craig seeman and chris kenny in..

5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1..

ah just kidding.

mate boris posted using it in anger on short turnaround a while back – the sudden failure of autosave, heralded, as he described, by a beeping noise when you press command z, actually shocked me personally, in my admittedly limited playing around, I haven’t encountered that.
an architectural instability of that order, in published software with no trial is kind of mindboggling – and he’s not the only one saying it. Other people have reported save instability – the autosave mechanism, not dealing out prior dated project versions to the finder, is a black box, and an unstable one.
I’m not sure if versioning can step in – has it yet in Lion?

Craig Seeman has, if I recall correctly, described this as being closer to alpha than beta software, and I think it was chris harrington who mused somewhere that there may well be *no blood at all* on the carpet in cupertino – they just popped this thing out, and then they were off.

I know – that last statement reeks of FUD – but seriously: does this look to anyone like a well observed, well managed, well de-bugged software release?

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Tom Wolsky]

Quick turn around, limited material, slap it together, get it on air from import to output, it’ll whup FCP hands down, and I’ve been using and teaching that since 1999, also Media100, Premiere, and some Avid. For sheer speed this is incredibly quick. You can finish a news cut or a VNR before FCP finishes ingesting. If you need anything aside from speed and simple, straightforward, cut and load, look elsewhere. You can do it here, but the more you want to do the more the others will catch and pass it, in fairly short order.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2011 “Complete Training for FCPX”
and “Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press

[Steve Connor]

Did you give your editors any training on it before their projects?

Steve Connor
Adrenalin Television

Have you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.

[Craig Seeman]

[Rick Fromet] “I have a question for all of you who absolutely LOVE FCPX – have you edited on FCPS (or any NLE) before (NOT iMovie)?”

Started with CMX340 around 1981. First NLE I edited on regularly was CMX600 in late 1980s. Started on Avid in 1989, by 1999 video engineer and Avid trainer at a post facility doing national network TV, 2001 FCP (lots of brief stints on other NLEs before then).

Keyword Collections, Smart Collections, Favorites is far easier to organize then bins ever were.
Skimmer is great for shuttling through clips.
Clip Connections and Storylines make it easy to move layers around.
No clip collisions allow me to assess layers after moving shots.
Timeline trimming generally much better than FCP ever did it.
Motion publishing to FCP allows “controlled” control over parameters when distributing FX.
Previewing FX to decide whether it’s what you need.
Auditioning shots for easy comparison of multiple takes.
Retiming with Optical Flow
Handling of H.264 and AVCHD sources while background transcode to ProRes.
Nice scopes.

That’s off the top of my head. That doesn’t make up for the serious flaws but there’s enough there to be usable on some projects . . . and enough missing to make it the wrong choice for others. Certainly there’s ways to do most of the above in other NLEs but I find all this faster in FCPX and that’s with 10 years on FCP and more than 10 years on Avid Media Composer before it.

[Olof Ekbergh]

M100 is the easiest to learn and fastest NLE around. And it supports XML and EDL’s.

It is $595 currently, I think. And there is a free 14 day trial.

I still think FCPX will be a great tool in while but for now M100 rules.

Olof Ekbergh

[Shane Ross]

[Tom Wolsky] “Quick turn around, limited material, slap it together, get it on air from import to output, it’ll whup FCP hands down, “

But you can do that with the latest Premiere Pro CS5.5 too (no transcoding, direct access to media) and Avid MC 5.0 and 5.5 (Direct access via AMA, no transcoding). And those offer broadcast professional tools that FCP X lacks.

OH, FCP X cannot do color bars, nor have timecode start before 1:00:00:00 (say, 58:30:00…so you can add…oh…no color bars…)

Look for FCS 3 on ebay, or Craigslist. And start the transition to something designed for a broadcast workflow.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Tom Wolsky]

For what it’s worth Mark Spencer made a bars generator for it ages ago. Can’t speak to Avid and direct ingest, but Premiere is a complete and total dog trying to edit AVCHD. It doesn’t rewrap so you’re always struggling with it. Playback is simply painful.

FCP doesn’t output to tape.

The question was what the application was good at. It can kill Premiere for speed for a news edit. Again I can’t speak for Avid, but for what I know of it, for slapping on the wallpaper, I’d be hard pressed for imagining something outpacing FCP.

I haven’t used M100 in years so I can’t speak to what magic Boris may have breathed into it.

All the best,

Tom

Class on Demand DVDs “Complete Training for FCP7,” “Basic Training for FCS” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy”
Coming in 2011 “Complete Training for FCPX”
and “Final Cut Pro X for iMovie and Final Cut Express Users” from Focal Press

[Shane Ross]

AVCHD… That specific format. Yeah, Avid doesn’t deal with that natively. So if you are dealing with AVCHD (which seems to be gaining popularity), you still have to import into Avid MC. Premiere, well, I have played with that format using PPro 5.5, and I do have a GFX card that enables CUDA, and it does run 64 bit, and it plays this stuff natively decently. On short projects. Get into longer ones and it bogs down…but we are talking the “quick turnaround…ingest the footage fast and turn the edit around in minutes,” right? Well, then the projects wouldn’t be long…they’d be short.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Aindreas Gallagher]

[Craig Seeman] “keywords, smart collections, Favorites is far easier to organize then bins ever were.”

hello…said the troll.. but seriously – really? why? I genuinely, fundamentally disagree with this point. In my bones. My ability to make clip bins as infinite clip container objects to fling things in is a little intrinsic to the old basic mental edit process, I feel.

the things you describe are a great way to organise things because they are screaming at you, every second you use the software, to organise things. It’s genuinely irritating. it’s like the software is roaring at you to categorise from the first instant and from then on continuously – I am, on occasion, deliberately messy – bin descriptions can become highly esoteric for me – they can be – “the very last graphics” – I need to be able to do that – I need to be able to make sloppy conceptual buckets – I like to be able to think that way – and by god an assigned keyword is not the same mental construct as a bucket. Buckets are made casually, and intermittently, then, careful thought can go into what is to go in, maybe question just how loose you’re running things under pressure.

The point about it is, as I reach the critical picture lock, I will clean up those buckets – I enjoy that period of the edit – re-rationalising my thought structure and moving all the stuff around between the disinterested bin containers, It’s like a lovely period of scratching as I consolidate the contents of, and delete the temporary bins I had constructed to cover the very hectic periods of the edit.

But dealing with keywords neither feels or acts anything like this – it is.. germanic in its outlook and operation – I am sometimes germanic in my editing process, but sometimes I need not to be. that is where the malleable absolute nature of a bucket comes in. Buckets are important. Much like malleable absolute timelines – they are not interested in my specific approach because they are sufficiently powerful and utterly objective in their nature to encompass any given approach from any given infinite number of practitioners.

but of course now apple have broken that wall between clip container and object, everything is glued to the other thing – I have no room or space, nothing is in a bin, everything has multiple magnetic word decals applied to it. All bloody metadata, all the bloody time. I can have enough bloody metadata.
It’s not the ark of the shagging covenant.

[Craig Seeman] “Nice scopes.”

absolutely no argument. some of the quality in this software is heartbreaking.

http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Neil Goodman]

Timeline trimming better than FCP 7? not a chance. The fact i have to wait for it to guess what kind of edit i want to do (trim/slip/roll/ripple) depending on where i put the cursor slows me down right there, and there and its extrmely clunky. Picking the best tool and just using it, instead of hoping it knows and waiting for i to tranform to the tool you want, is ten faster. Not too mention secondary story line wont ripple at all, and if i rmemeber corrctly wont give you the roll tool.

The Playhead jumps all over when you click in the project or story window or whaever you want to call it. FCP7 only effects the playhead if you click up there, not anywhere in the window. So ill have the playhead set on an inset point, click a clip and the playhead moves there , Not cool at all.

My biggest gripe is that now that i know all the keycommands, it seems my hands can work way faster than FCPX can handle. FCP 7 allowed me to breeze thru stuff, i never had to wait for the interface to catch up to what i was doing .

The background rendering is a joke too, because it DOESNT RENDER IN THE BACKGROUND, it waits till you stop. By the time im done with a finished cut, i have tons of rendering to do anyways before i export so its basically like doing it the old fashioned way anyways .

Epic fail on all parts. I like the Color Tools tho and for easy stuff, i dont miss the wheel. The bundled FX are like fischer price my first transitions,i could go on and on.

I really did give it a shot, did the ripple training, tried a few web only interviews i was doing, and while i got it done, it tooks ten times longer.

Neil Goodman: Editor of New Media Production – NBC/Universal