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Why one user Switched to FCPX
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[Neil Goodman] “No diss on youtubers but the #1 reason I choose an NLE has nothing to do with a Share button. That might be the 500 reason on my list.”
But that’s what was important to him. That was the catalyst for him to change. As he dived deeper, he found many reasons to stick with FCPX which may keep him using it even if Adobe sorts out their sharing feature.
For the record, I hate the word “share” used in this context. It’s an export, Apple, an export.
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[Martin Curtis] “[Neil Goodman] “No diss on youtubers but the #1 reason I choose an NLE has nothing to do with a Share button. That might be the 500 reason on my list.”
But that’s what was important to him. That was the catalyst for him to change. As he dived deeper, he found many reasons to stick with FCPX which may keep him using it even if Adobe sorts out their sharing feature.
For the record, I hate the word “share” used in this context. It’s an export, Apple, an export.”
I completely understand as it applies to him – I was just stating my opinion that for me exporting is the least of my worries. For some people like myself – the only exporting we do is same as source – then someone else takes it from there.
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[Martin Curtis] “For the record, I hate the word “share” used in this context. It’s an export, Apple, an export.”
This is interesting to me.
I see it differently.
Export, at least the way I had been conditioned to think of it prior to FCP X – was largely creating a new, fixed asset on a desktop.
The word itself could be either, obviously. But it’s how I was trained to consider it back when the concept I was learning was to create your MASTER as a unique stand-alone file on the root level of your system.
So when Apple elected to go with “share” – it put me “conceptionally” in mind of sending someone an email or, perhaps making a photocopy and handing it to them.
Seemed more to me like what I was doing when I uploaded a copy of my project to an on-line service.
Export and share are BOTH perfectly suitable linguistically. But for me, “export” was already in use by the software of the time – so using a newer term was signaling internal changes in the process. New thinking, so to speak.
Not sure this is a “right or wrong” thing – more just a “how communications happens” thing.
Like I said – interesting.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
“Share” Semantically, for me, means an export customized to a particular deliverable.
“Export”, – unless you opt for a different transcoding in the export dialogue – sends a flattened copy of the work product on the timeline, in whatever codec it currently is using.
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[Mark Suszko] “”Share” Semantically, for me, means an export customized to a particular deliverable.
“Export”, – unless you opt for a different transcoding in the export dialogue – sends a flattened copy of the work product on the timeline, in whatever codec it currently is using.”
That makes great sense to me.
The only issue I can see is is it a “share” or an “export” if you’re taking, for example – a ProRez 422 export from a laptop timeline where you’ve been working in proxy (so you might not be working in the delivery format at all) and creating a higher resolution “sorta mezzanine” file via pointer swapping – that you THEN want to host on a service that will take that “sorta mezzanine” file and transcode it further into versions for end user delivery.
There’s a LOT of complexity in the modern workflow – and yet only a few words we use to describe the types of files (and the states of those files) that we are creating.
What is a “Master?” That’s becoming about as soft and fuzzy a term now as is “Final”.
Maybe we don’t have quite enough discrete terms to distinguish things in order to keep our communications as clear as we’d like.
OTOH, perhaps we’re in a space where the language we have will just have to do – and we’ll rely on users undersigning in the specific contexts to get the jobs done.
Like I said originally, all this extremely rapid change is making things very interesting!
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Bill Davis] “There’s a LOT of complexity in the modern workflow – and yet only a few words we use to describe the types of files (and the states of those files) that we are creating.”
I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Share and export are one in the same. Master files are whatever the deliverable requirement is and exports are usually h264’s. why make it more convoluted than it actually is?
I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles -
Re: “Share”
I don’t think we have to overthink this. It’s simply the terminology Apple has chosen to use across nearly all of its applications. Although in most, they have both a “share” and an “export” function, which tend to do different things.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Neil Goodman] “the only exporting we do is same as source – then someone else takes it from there.”
Yes, exactly. This is EXPORT. Once the Exporting is complete, a new process begins. That file may move or be copied, but in any case, something’s gonna happen to it. It’s an INTERIM step. LOTS of things are going to happen after that.
But with Share, the goal is to be done, done, DONE, with the movie I’ve exported resting safe and sound on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, AND Snapchat, complete with hashtags and other relevant stuff.
I mention that because this is in fact part of the Share feature set in Premiere Pro. This is kind of an Adobe thing, where there are features built into Photoshop for doctors and geologists — well, there’s a huge class of people whose final destination for their videos isn’t TV or film, but online platforms who might in fact have bigger audiences.
(F’rinstance, I’m pals with a fashion vlogger. She shoots with pro cameras and lighting in an actual studio with a full crew, and her YouTube channel has 11 million subscribers. That’s more than the NFL, Marvel Comics, or HBO, so I’ll ask YOU: how many people subscribe to YOUR work?)
So the “Share” feature set is a mini-encoder hub if you will, where each platform might have different rules for hashtags (the number of hashtags, which work on which platform, the fact that you NEED to use spaces on Tumblr, SHOULD on YouTube, but CAN’T on Instagram), ideal aspect ratios, and much more.
Additionally, Premiere Pro’s Share feature set includes built-in analytics, so that you can see how many SHARES you’re getting for each of the videos you’ve SHARED.
I’m not suggesting that Apple is dropping the ball by failing to have this extensive a feature set. Nor am I suggesting that Premiere Pro is any way less capable as a feature film or television editing environment because it has robust social media sharing.
But I AM saying that many of the people who Share for a living might never get around to exporting!
And indeed, to Neil’s point, most people who Export will never, ever, ever, ever, ever Share.
They are not even vaguely the same. They are almost exactly the opposite in every meaningful away.
And I’m definitely saying that Apple would be remiss if they failed to recognize this. Well, lo and behold, they DO recognize this. You can decide for yourself if either or both of their Export and Share feature sets are robust enough for you, but no amount of robustness in one can make up for deficiencies in the other. Any workarounds are excruciating at best, which is why, as developers understand the world they’re sending their products out into, they’re accommodating the realities on the ground.
It’s also no big deal that Apple is behind on this. They’ve been behind on almost everything, and it tends to work out for them just fine.
But if it looks to anyone that Apple is running needlessly ahead into yet another avenue of irrelevance for “professional” production, I’ll suggest that this is a measure of how much further behind you are than you thought. ????????
Which, as always, may have nothing to do with whether or not they’re meeting YOUR needs or not. But the market NEEDS BOTH Share and Export, and they’re gonna need a lot more from both feature sets, from every developer, and they need it yesterday.
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[Tim Wilson] “But with Share, the goal is to be done, done, DONE, with the movie I’ve exported resting safe and sound on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, AND Snapchat, complete with hashtags and other relevant stuff.”
Here’s the danger in promoting that concept. It lulls the user into believing that the “shared” export to YouTube, Vimeo, etc. is an adequate final product. They believe that the working Library/Project is a safe “master” to which they can return should changes be required in the future.
Unfortunately these forums are littered with threads by panicked users who can’t access their project file any longer, because it is corrupt, or a version has been updated, or a plug-in is now missing. Considering your “shared” export as any sort of “master” is a recipe for disaster.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Here’s the danger in promoting that concept.”
I’m not promoting the concept. That IS the concept. ????
[Oliver Peters] “Considering your “shared” export as any sort of “master” is a recipe for disaster.”
But the concept of “master” and “sharing” don’t have anything to do with each other. This is yet vector another along which “Share” and “Export” are actually the opposite of each other. A master is something you hang onto. “Share” is by its nature ephemeral. Instagram Stories last 24 hours. A video on Snapchat vanishes after it’s been seen.
Note again that I’m not just talking about kids on phones. Huge money is going into these platforms from companies whose money you’d be happy to take, and very likely are. Among the folks producing original content are A+E Networks, Discovery, ESPN, NBCUniversal and Turner (owner of CNN, TBS and TNT). WSJ reports that Fox and CBS are sniffing around because the numbers are insane.
NBC does a twice-daily newscast for Snapchat in vertical orientation that’s getting 29 million viewers. So sez NBC, so you can take that for what it’s worth, and having invested $500 million in Snapchat’s IPO, they have a stake in promoting the platform for its own sake….but it’s not like 29 million people are watching NBC Nightly News. It’s the top-rated newscast on broadcast, and pulling in 7 million, give or take. Those folks are more thoroughly monetized for now for sure, but there’s a there there, even for grown-up, mainstream media creation.
It does raise a question, though. To what extent does NBC archive their 2-5 minute Snapchat news elements that disappear after viewing? I mean, ALL newscasts are ephemeral, right? Except to the extent that they’re not. Nobody has bigger archives than news organizations.
So you’re right that especially for producers like the ones who frequent these forums, social platforms represent a gray area, and in fact best practices are still going to include real live archiving. YouTube is not the best place for archiving.
[Oliver Peters] “these forums are littered with threads by panicked users who can’t access their project file any longer, because it is corrupt, or a version has been updated, or a plug-in is now missing”
And you left out, “The original application won’t launch on the new OS that all my machines are running.”
’twas ever thus, though, from the dawn of the nonlinear age. How often did you or your clients have to go back to the VIDEOTAPE master, redigitize the section that needed changing, rebuild in the NLE, then insert edit back to tape. Not because anyone involved was less than thorough on the backup, but because of some weird thing that was entirely outside anyone’s control.
This is why people who NEED access to old stuff are doing a combination of freezing machines in legacy states AND updating projects with each new version. You need BOTH approaches if you’re going to be truly ready for anything.
But sure, I agree that people who count on YouTube as the only place that their finished project lives are asking for trouble.
Then again, you could say the same thing about any online repository, for anything. Surely you know folks who figured that WordPress is the only backup for their writing that they needed, only to discover some bizarre corruption or inability to get at their accounts. If only they’d saved Word files to their own computers! And, uhm, Dropbox, and probably a couple of other places.
THAT aspect of what you’re talking about has nothing to do with misunderstanding the relative values of permanence and ephemerality of Export and Share.
Nor does it change the fundamental workflow differences of the two. Ideally, the thing you have in front of you when you click the Share button is in fact your master file, but that’s never going to be the case every time for everyone. It certainly doesn’t make a robust “Share” feature set any less critical for some people to have, even if other folks will never need it, and might indeed encounter nightmares if they implement “Share” workflows where they should be using “Export” workflows.
Ain’t none ‘a this either-or, though. That’s my point, and indeed the point that Apple, Adobe, and Bill have been making all along. “Professional” media production doesn’t mean just one thing anymore. It’d be a lot easier to talk about and develop for if it only meant 10 things, and we could agree on what those 10 things are, but it could now mean almost anything. It has to. Not because I’m promoting such notions. Because that’s just how it is.
And yeah, this is yet another area where new platforms don’t obviate old best practices, but when Robert Burns wrote “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain / For promis’d joy”, he could just as easily have been speaking of Export, mastering, and archiving as Share. ????
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