Why The Pro Market Should Take FCP X Seriously – HD Magazine article

[Walter Soyka]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I think smoke is overkill for a promo department. Premiere combined with a fully tooled up After Effects with all the trapcode stuff and magic bullet is probably a better, cheaper fix. you get a broader price competitive skills pool to draw from too. Actually trying to say train staff internally on smoke to a proficient level is no small dice. Smoke is a beast.”

I’ve been banging away on the Smoke prereleases, and you’re right — Smoke is a beast. The timeline is familiar enough, but the compositing/effects side is really not something that one can pick up in a couple of days. Nonetheless, I’m really enjoying working with it. Discreet were a bunch of UI geniuses, and I think Autodesk are on the right track in revising the workflow for timeline centricity.

However, I must also say there’s a lot of stuff that’s very easy to do quickly with Ae and a nice set of plugins that would be very hard to do with Smoke and nothing else (if not impossible). I’m finding that Smoke is a really intriguing tool for my work, but it won’t replace Ae.

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

[Keith Koby]

Thanks for posting. I don’t agree with everything the author wrote there, but I do think the app is ready for use.

We are currently switching workflows over to fcpx – promo and other longer form workflows. Staff who have been exposed to the app and are using it are happy with it and adapted without losing much of a beat. They were reading the manual and listening to me talk about it over the last few months and looking at it at work and at home – so getting familiar helps – but the transition hasn’t been nearly as bad as you’d think.

We are sharing media and finding 10.0.6 stable. There are a few little issues that we are sorting through, but they do not effect the final output files. The editing process has been much faster than 7 and the export to audio is slick with the xtopro app.

If you are a freelance editor in our goto talent pool and you want to continue to work with us in the future, take some time and learn the app. The rate is the same.

[Chris Harlan]

[Keith Koby] “f you are a freelance editor in our goto talent pool and you want to continue to work with us in the future, take some time and learn the app. The rate is the same.
“

Keith, pardon me for being unfamiliar with you, but you are making this statement for iNDEMAND NETWORKS? I take it this is for internal promo work? I’m on the west coast some I’m not directly familiar with you. What’s the size of your operation? How many X seats are you talking about?

[Keith Koby]

Hey Chris!

I wouldn’t expect you to know me or the brand of the company I work for because we are not consumer facing for the most part, but we are a good sized facility (post-wise) producing a lot of content.

We have 30 odd edit seats and we are moving many of them to X. I can’t give exact numbers until after the new year, but yes we are adopting x.

Keith

[Michael Hendrix]

Franz, I have been testing the Adobe workflow for a few months not. We have 10 seats of FCP working on a shared system, Omneon(Harmonic). The second step was to get ever system up-to-date, ie, RAM, OS (we were still on Snow Leopard).

Keep in mind, we are a Fortune 50 company so working within the IT infrastructure is very painful, alot of security barriers, they have to touch and approve everything so we are always late on upgrades.

The problem came when our IT support was told Omneon was okay on Mountain Lion. We imaged all 10 systems and started having problems. Then we were told Omneon was not okay on ML and a update would be coming in Dec.

So, the transition has been slowed waiting for Omneon to provide a update. I am still bouncing between FCP and Premiere and it works great. Next step is system testing on the shared storage.

[Michael Hendrix]

I believe NASCAR has switched to Premiere for the most part. I wonder how many people have been enticed by the Adobe Anywhere demos. When I saw it, my jaw dropped.

We are contracting out at least 50% of our editing. I would love to open up our base outside of the region to get more diversity and talent but loading up hard drives, shipping, relinking projects is tough. And a big problem is security for that content. Our training stuff is incredibly proprietary so letting it walk out the door is troublesome.

[Jeremy Garchow]

3. Abandon Revolution

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Keith Koby] “We have 30 odd edit seats and we are moving many of them to X. I can’t give exact numbers until after the new year, but yes we are adopting x.
“

Rabble rousers!

[Keith Koby]

There’s a base for a killer sharing app there in fcpx. The adobe sharing thing isn’t real yet and will be expensive because it’s going to require expensive servers to crunch footage into proprietary streaming formats to get it done. I highly doubt apple will role over and play dead.

We actually are finding it just as easy to share with X as it was with 7, if not more easy to share. We can prep graphic layouts with compound clips in an event and export that as an xml. We can do the same for base versions of spots cleaned up and ready for multiple editors to use for different purposes. Just as easy as fcp7 but better because of roles and metadata. We think organization is better than 7 because we have the media shared in a central location outside of the trappings of the legacy FCP Documents folder.

[Keith Koby]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Rabble rousers!”

Insurgents!

Keith Koby
Sr. Director Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND NETWORKS
Howard TV!/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View/iNDEMAND 3D