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You are all amateurs….
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Well David, you can label observations pejoratives all you like (and apply it more to people who disagree with you than those who agree with you).
But really, I hope when temperatures here cool down, someone can stand back and ask how helpful this forum is currently being to a newcomer to FCP X.
Something about the mote in others’ eyes and the plank in our own. It works both ways.
We probably agree on more things than we disagree on. I think Apple’s lack of backward compatibility on this goes as far as being unethical and immoral.
I think what Apple has done is to say: “Suppose we were designing a new, computer-based, editing from the ground up, with no preconceptions.” It’s the Godardian back to zero. We should be able to disagree on the merits.
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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
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I’m not quite sure what is uncivilized about people writing complaints and/or opinions on an update to a piece of software that is critical to their livelihood. I keep reading how we should be accepting this – that it is only version 1.0 and will improve in time. Nonsense, this is version 10 according to the name that has been chosen by the marketing types – version 8 by a more realistic account. Therefore, it should not be looked at as a brand new piece, but as the improvement its name implies. As such, removing the very capability that made it so easy to incorporate with industry standard (and custom) workflows would certainly account for the opinions being voiced. If Apple wanted to change direction and create a new market, they should have changed the name to something that indicated that change, and kept FCP 7 on the market, clarifying the difference. Then people may have been disappointed, but maybe not have felt abandoned. As of now, any facility that needs to increase capacity at this time must switch to a competing system if FCP X does not fit the bill. And how long will FCP 7 be able to run. Past Lion? Then what? On the other hand, at least it is a comfort knowing it will import iMovie projects! Now all we have to do is somehow import our old FCP 7 projects into iMovie, then import… well, never mind.
The reality is that in any facility larger than one editor, there is a need for interoperability. This was very well supported in FCP 7 and earlier, and is a lot of its reason for success. Yes, some workflows are old- EDLs have been around seemingly forever, OMF is pretty antiquated, but they still are used everyday. The rest of a facility’s equipment does not and cannot change overnight just to support a new editing package. The new editing package has to support the legacy, or loose that part of the market. It is certainly Apple’s right to decide on their product and its desired market, and only time will tell if they made a good decision Hopefully they will add these needed workflow capabilities back, but until then, many are left without much choice – either hope for the best or start looking for a substitute to keep their business going. Remember, these are professionals who make their living using these tools. Yes, maybe FCP X will be a game changer in the future, but we work in the present, and at the present time, we have no solution from Apple. That solution has been removed from the market.
As an aside, I find it interesting the OP finds fault with supporting a “2007 workflow”, but feels supporting a 100 year old workflow is professional. But yet in the closing remarks, comments that we should not post ideas of the last century (maybe other than film — talk about last century) if we haven’t used FCP X yet. There is not much reason to use it (or try it for that matter) if you know going in it will not be capable of doing the job. Anyone in business needing to make a profit would not waste their time. A profit!?! They must be professional by definition!
All this being said, it may be very slick for the one man bands and amateurs who want something more capable than iMovie. These people generally do not need the interoperability the larger facilities do. For these, it could be a game changer, and exactly the right choice. Maybe that’s what Apple has in mind.
Glenn Kenny
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[David Roth Weiss] “I put a damn smiley face on that one Miriam. What’s a guy gotta do here to get a giggle, laugh at my own jokes, write a humor disclaimer at the bottom with asterisks?
HUMOR ONBOARD*****”
maybe you should change your signature file to something like
“90% of the time I’m 50% joking.” -
[Scott Sheriff] “If you ask me, auto color correction on ingest is an example of an X ‘dumb-down’ feature. Don’t most normal people wait until the picture is locked to do the grade? Who is this feature targeted at? So at the expense of including something like backward compatibility, or XML in and out, the developers wasted time on that. This is one of many dumbed-down ‘features’.”
Auto-color isn’t generally the most useful feature in a pro app, but it does have its occasional uses and is widely implemented. Photoshop has it. Even Resolve has it.
Once you have this implemented, adding a checkbox to apply it on ingest requires virtually no developer resources.
In any event, FCP X does not actually have an option to automatically color correct on ingest. What it has is an option to automatically analyze shots for color correction on ingest. You use the video inspector, on a shot-specific basis, to actually apply the results of that analysis. This approach makes a lot of sense. Importing footage is often I/O-bound, so there are free CPU cycles available while it’s occurring — you can analyze shots preemptively, just in case the results of that analysis might be useful later, without even slowing down the import.
Nothing about this sounds remotely “dumbed down” to me.
As far as waiting for picture lock before grading, it really depends on the project. But, for instance, with feature films, it’s not uncommon to screen rough cuts for test audiences or investors or to submit them to festivals. So having the tools to let the editor clean up picture (and audio) a bit during the edit process is not without value.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Alan] “But MS did screw end users a couple of years back. “Pro” users. They got rid of the macros that had been built in to all previous versions. So goodbye all that formatting. “
That screwed up a lot of budgeting programs for sure.
A buddy of mine had a really slick transcript formatter that got lost in that shuffle too.
Nothing lasts forever.
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I don’t think that this debate is about whether Apple have come up with a better/worse/different way of editing. It’s about the fact that Apple seem to be pushing us into something that isn’t ready yet.
I use FCP and Avid now (and I think it’s quite likely that I’ll be using FCPX as well at some point) and the choice of which one to use for a particular job is almost always down to how I’m going to interact with other professionals – what’s the best workflow for ingesting, for example, multi-cameras, then getting the cut out to the online session, sound dub, colour grade, etc. If the production has chosen to use a particular, say, colorist, then they’ll want to use some particular kit… usually there’s not much of a difference between FCP and Avid, but sometimes that choice can make life a bit easier somewhere along the line (and making life a little bit easier translates into time and therefore money).
When I’m doing stuff for the web, I’ll usually do everything myself and quite often the choice of kit is mine (I don’t do much that goes onto YouTube, but I do a fair amount that goes onto company websites), but in terms of my income that’s less than the broadcast stuff where the output/tape formats isn’t my choice, so if a software package doesn’t support what I have to deliver, it just pushes that choice out of the window.
To be honest, I’m not all that bothered about Apple’s PR cockup, I go where the work takes me and I’ll buy/learn whatever kit is necessary for me to stay in the game. Five or six years ago I thought that FCP was irrelevant to me and that Avid was where it was at; in the last year I’ve used FCP more than Avid; I wouldn’t like to guess what I’ll be using in five years time.
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[Gary Pollard] “We should be able to disagree on the merits.
“Agreed. We are all communicators by trade, and we just need to keep talking, even if we don’t agree. The key thing in this ongoing discussion and debate is to remember that all of us lose if FCP X ultimately proves not to be anything less than a dramatic improvement over FCS 3.
So there you have it… you and I appear to have made it to a new level. Isn’t a debate better than an argument?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comDon’t miss my new tutorial: Prepare for a seamless transition to FCP X and OS X Lion
https://library.creativecow.net/weiss_roth_david/FCP-10-MAC-Lion/1POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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Exactly. This is a worthwhile discussion because people have been using this software for years and the workflow is part of their life. FCP along with firewire, the DV codec and the Sony vx2000 helped democratize multimedia creation in a very big way. To have Apple pull the plug on it feels less democratic. Democracy means being allowed to protest decisions you feel are wrong or counter productive. Maybe bitching will even create some change in Apple’s development of NLE. Bitching about bitching is hypocritical.
I remember when Apple rewrote the interface for Imovie HD. Many hobbyists and educators were loudly disappointed. Imovie HD was a very good beginner’s program that was one version (I thought) away from being a great app and a great stepping-stone towards FCP. Get the bugs out (too many crashes), debug quartz effects, add a second /third track of video, add two or three extra tracks of audio, add QT’s J/K/L and I/O keyboard commands, add support for more codec-s including prores and you’d have a great beginners app. I stopped teaching it to the beginning students at that point because it no longer resembled the profession apps, in particular FCP. In the old Imovie app, I had students editing in two days – sequencing on a timeline, adding transitions, adjusting audio levels, adding titles and sub-titles, unlinking the audio from the visual, adding a sound track. The new Imovie felt to me like students were not editing but rather the program was.
Little did I know that the tail (new Imovie) was going to wag the dog (FCP). And here we are. All that said, I think the new FC interface looks promising as long as Apple is willing to borrow from the past when needed and certainly add the missing functions. Not being able to open old projects – it’s like the people serve the program rather than the other way around.
There are some advantages to maturing. Having to start all over again every few years may be good for business but it is not good for mastering a craft or creating artistic works. It is not good for any business other than the computer business. All the best things about FCPX could have been brought into FCP 8: 64 bit, Magnetic behavior in the timeline, rendering in the background, increased efficiency of end user created meta data.
Getting rid of Color? Big step backwards. I really think that the reason more people did not use Color was because it requires expensive gear – an output card or breakout box and a broadcast monitor. My guess is these will come down in price and people will start color correcting/playing/painting.
“Sometimes you have to go a long way out of your way to come back a short way correctly.” (https://www.npsd.k12.nj.us/20212069133133600/lib/20212069133133600/The_Zoo_Story.pdf).
If you keep starting over you’re never going to get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_SisyphusOSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz
; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A. -
[Craig Alan] “FCP along with firewire, the DV codec and the Sony vx2000 helped democratize multimedia creation in a very big way”
sorry make that Sony DCR-VX1000
OSX 10.5.8; MacBookPro4,1 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz
; Camcorders: Sony Z7U, Canon HV30/40, Sony vx2000/PD170; FCP certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A. -
“…and once those issues have passed FCP X will probably have little trouble establishing itself.”
I’m not so sure about that. This comes under the heading of “fool me once…”. I’m not sure the broadcast business will ever trust their resources to a company that is so obviously unconcerned with backwards compatibility.
Companies like Avid and Adobe or even Microsoft can have a poorly written upgrade, Vista anyone, but because they don’t totally discard their present users, business’s will stick with them. They can be trusted NOT to wreck havoc with their purchasing plans or workflow.
I know that I for one will never have full trust in Apple again and I will be very reluctant to invest my business resources with them, and I don’t think I’m alone. Now if future iterations of FCPX are way better in terms of productivity, then I’ll certainly consider it, but it will have to be WAY better, or else I’ll stay with a company that values my business. This comes under the heading of “You’ll never do business in this town again … unless we need you.”
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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