Alan Okey
5
COW Coins
2
DaVinci Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Ofer Geva] “But apparently money has no place when one seeks perfection.”
I seriously doubt that even the most ardent FCP fan would describe it as perfect!
😉
If editing and editing project collaboration/exchange are not central to your business, Premiere Pro should be perfectly adequate for your needs. Despite FCP and Avid’s dominance of the editing market, Premiere Pro does have some very capable tools, as does Sony Vegas.
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Your unspoken implication is that if FCP were sold separately, it would be cheaper than the full Studio suite. I don’t see that happening. At this point, none of the other applications in the Studio suite could command much of a selling price, nor are they particularly useful without FCP.
Although Color was once a $25,000 application, its development has been slowed considerably at this point and it would not fare well against other standalone color grading applications (DaVinci, etc.) if it were to be sold at a similar price.
Motion does not directly compete with After Effects. It’s faster at some tasks due to its GPU utilization, but its feature set is much more limited. It’s primarily intended as a supporting application for FCP.
Soundtrack Pro is not a Pro Tools competitor, and Apple itself sells Logic Studio for more serious audio work.
DVD Studio Pro is still a great DVD spec authoring application for the money, but it doesn’t do Blu-ray authoring (and most likely never will), and it hasn’t been significantly updated in years.
Compressor is a great Swiss Army knife for compression and conversion tasks, but compared to free tools like MPEG Streamclip and more robust tools like Telestream Episode, I doubt it could survive as a standalone application on its own merits.
Also consider that FCP’s closest competitor, Avid Media Composer, retails for more than double the price of Final Cut Studio. Many people believe that Final Cut Studio is already underpriced, as its true strategic purpose is to help Apple sell more Macs, not necessarily provide the most comprehensive set of tools for professional video editing and finishing. That goal would arguably belong to Autodesk Smoke, which is priced at $15,000 for the software alone.
Many other professional postproduction applications sell for prices far above FCP, such as Nuke, Mocha Pro, or any comprehensive 3D software package. Final Cut Studio is already a bargain, even if Apple were to charge $1000 for Final Cut Pro alone.
Think of Final Cut Studio as Final Cut Pro selling for $999 with several free programs thrown in, not a suite of equally priced applications.
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This task is much more easily accomplished in Motion, and no format conversion will be required.
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[Alan Okey] “UPDATE:
Looks like Traffic is long gone. To bad, it was a unique tool:”
Sorry, link got botched:
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1000859
Hope that fixes it.
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While you can’t use Automator to do this, there was a product developed several years ago by xmEdit called Traffic:
Traffic can automate tasks like the one you describe using node-based editing. Traffic isn’t cheap, and it doesn’t look like the website has been updated in a long time, so the status of Traffic’s development and its level of support is questionable.
Still, it’s an interesting looking application that might be just the ticket for anyone who needs to automate large batches of simple operations.
UPDATE:
Looks like Traffic is long gone. To bad, it was a unique tool:
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[Dave LaRonde] “FCP doesn’t like you any more. What did you do to make it so angry?”
Dave, thanks for making my day. My eyes are still watering from snarfing soda up my nose, but I’ll get over it.
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Of course it’s a joke. Just watch it through to the end. Also visit the Vimeo page for some great comments.
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Just brilliant. I don’t know how he managed to get though it without cracking up constantly.
Now we just need someone to make some FCP tutorials in the style of the “You Suck at Photoshop” series…
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Try this:
Rather than keyframing the CC, use the blade tool to cut the interview into several sections of distinct difference in exposure. CC each section separately to taste, then place cross-dissolves on the edit points and make the transition length several seconds or more until the cross fade is not perceptible. This will probably look smoother than keyframing and be more easily tweaked. You can also slide the cut points as needed after the fact.
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[Walter Soyka] “MPEG Streamclip can re-wrap H.264-encoded .MOVs in an MP4 container (without re-compressing). Open the file in MPEG Streamclip and Save As.
This is also Batch-able if you have more than one to do at a time.”
Great information. Thanks for sharing, Walter.