[Andrew Kimery]

Apple.com homepage for me is iPhone 7, Watch 2 and the new MBP with an image of exploding colored dust in its monitor. ‘Below the fold’ is a gift guide, AirPods, Super Mario Run and Apple’s coffee table book. Maybe different home page carrousels for different regions?

Your screen shot is what I’m talking about though. In that particular image Apple is selling the TouchBar on the 2016 MBP. Apple also uses Photos, Mail, Keynote, Safari and Customization to sell the TouchBar. What they aren’t doing is selling FCP.

I can’t remember the last time a FCP release got featured on the main page. In my non-exhaustive search, according to the Way Back Machine FCP 6 was featured on the main page after it’s release at NAB 2007. In 2009 FCP7 was below the fold on the main page, but the big billing was the iPhone 3Gs. I looked at FCP X’s release date and there was only a mention of it in Apple’s news ticker.

Maybe I’m blind, but is there even a direct link to FCP X (or any software) from Apple’s main page? The best I can do is click on “Mac”, which takes me to the new MBP screen by default, and then scroll down past accessories, past MacOS/iOS, and past the built-in apps until I get close to the bottom and find X in the Pro Apps section.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] ” I think I (and others) have done reasonably well waking up the nay-sayers. Sometimes, a whisper isn’t enough. You need at least a few folks shouting to gain attention.
“

I think Apple (and third parties) improving X’s toolset helped a bit too. ????

-Andrew

[Andrew Kimery]

There’s certainly overlap between this thread and one just started by Steve Conor called “This is encouraging” where I cite a recent Bloomberg article talking about the focus at Apple shifting more and more towards iOS and mobile (which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone). Apparently there’s not even a separate MacOS team anymore (iOS is the primary focus and MacOS gets worked on as time allows) and mobile hardware gets most of the focus. Again, not surprising given that mobile is where about 75% of Apple’s revenue comes from.

Saying that Mac users (especially desktop users) are a relatively low priority in Apple’s eyes isn’t a slight, it’s just the reality of today’s landscape. Where’s the growth potential to keep a company the size of Apple hitting its numbers? It certainly isn’t in desktop or laptop sales. It’s barely in cell phone sales anymore (unless you can crack a massive new market like China or India). Apple needs the iPad, iWatch, AppleTV or something not yet announced to be the new runaway hit to placate Wall Street and keep their stock climbing.

Apple fans’ favorite Gretzky quote is about skating to where the puck is going, and the puck-of-insane-revenue-growth sure as hell isn’t going towards computer sales (and definitely not NLE software). Would it be swell if it was like the pre-iPhone days when Apple was actively catering to the desktop crowd and FCP announcements would be front and center on Apple.com? Yeah, but those days are gone and never coming back.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Michael Gissing] ” But if you insist on driving their software on a laptop then why not give you a hand to make it less painful.”

My point is the implementation shown in the video does not look less painful than just using the keyboard and trackpad (we’ll stick with the out-of-the-box equipment since obviously you can use a Wacom or Tangent panel on a laptop just like you can a desktop).

Scroll
Scroll
Scroll
Select Highlights
Adjust slider
Hit “done”
Scroll
Scroll
Scroll
Select Shadows
Adjust Slider
Hit “done”

“Hmm…I don’t think I quite like the highlights now that I’ve adjust the Shadows”

Scroll
Scroll
Scroll
Select Highlights
Adjust slider
Hit “done”

Scroll
Scroll
Scroll
Select Tint
Adjust slider
Hit “done”

Scroll
Scroll
Scroll
Select Temp
Adjust slider
Hit “done”

I just don’t see that as a step above using the keyboard and trackpad in Resolve given that you’ll have all of those adjustments available at the same time in the GUI. I think the TouchBar can be useful, I just don’t think how Resolve uses it (at least how it looks in the demo video) is useful.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Scott Witthaus] “Which is what I will be getting next….”

Because you really want an iMac or because you’ll have no other choice? 😉

[Andrew Kimery]

The bar for “encouraging” is so low that anything short of Apple saying the Mac Pro line is dead clears that hurdle.

On a less than encouraging note:

“Interviews with people familiar with Apple’s inner workings reveal that the Mac is getting far less attention than it once did. They say the Mac team has lost clout with the famed industrial design group led by Jony Ive and the company’s software team. They also describe a lack of clear direction from senior management, departures of key people working on Mac hardware and technical challenges that have delayed the roll-out of new computers.
.

.
.
In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there’s no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team. There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first, giving the people working on the iPhone and iPad more power.
.
.
.
Mac fans shouldn’t hold their breath for radical new designs in 2017 though. Instead, the company is preparing modest updates: USB-C ports and a new Advanced Micro Devices Inc. graphics processor for the iMac, and minor bumps in processing power for the 12-inch MacBook and MacBook Pro. Cue the outrage.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple-alienated-mac-loyalists

There is also an interesting tidbit in there about a new battery design for the 2016 MBP failing at the 11th hour so they had to fall back to a less energy efficient battery design. If the new design had worked I wonder if we would’ve ended up with 32gigs of RAM in the machine vs 16?

[Andrew Kimery]

If you reread my ENTIRE post Bill you’ll see how I think the TouchBar can be useful even though the example in the video is horribly slow compared to using a keyboard and mouse/trackpad/wacom tablet, etc.,.

Funny you make a piano analogy because when trying to describe to people the advantages of using color panels when grading I’ll say it’s like the difference between playing a piano with all ten fingers vs one finger. To follow your example, Mr. Jones is using all 10 fingers, plus his feet, to play. Now imagine he is on a computer using a mouse and can only click one key at a time. Now imagine he is on a computer using the TouchBar and has to linearly scroll through ALL of the keys to find the one he wants, then select it, then play the key, then hit “done”, then scroll, scroll, scroll to the next key, select it, play it, hit “done”, then scroll, scroll, scroll… See where I’m going with this?

Just because you *can* do it on the TouchBar doesn’t mean it’s *better* doing it on the TouchBar. Someone hacked the TouchBar so it could play Doom but I really, really, really doubt it provides a superior experience than playing it on a computer or a console. ????

I think the kitchen sink approach shown in the video is a poor use of the TouchBar. Why put all those tools in there and force the user to scroll, scroll, scroll when accessing them via the GUI (not to mention a color panel) is infinitely faster? Especially when something like grading is a constant back and forth of balancing multiple adjustments? I think my idea of how I could use the TouchBar in PPro is a much better example than the Resolve demo in the video.

The TouchBar should allow users to quickly and easily do something that they weren’t able to do as quickly and/or easily as before. Those criteria aren’t going to be the same for everyone which is why user customization is paramount, IMO.

EDIT: Spelling/grammar (at least the ones I caught).

[Andrew Kimery]

Two thoughts.

First thought, people should download the free version of Resolve from Blackmagic’s site, not the version from the App Store (the version from the App Store is updated less frequently due to how Apple manages the app store).

Second, just based on the video, I think I’d lose my mind trying to grade something using the TouchBar the way the person in the video is. It looks glacially slow and frustrating. Scroll to find right tool, touch to open tool, adjust slider, back out of tool, scroll to next tool, touch to open tool, adjust slider to back out of tool, scroll to find next tool, touch to open tool, adjust slider, etc., etc., etc.,. It’s the desktop equivalent to only being able to have one adjustable parameter open in the GUI at a time. Your typical color corrector will give you at least six (color wheels and brightness sliders for Highs, Mids, and Lows) and Resolve’s GUI gives you many, many more that are just a click (or keyboard short cut) away.

Resolve certainly packs a lot of functions into the TouchBar but is that really the best use of the TouchBar?

In my limited time playing with the touch bar at the Apple store and watching videos I think if you make the user scroll through a bunch of tools that are ‘off screen’ in order for the user to find the tool they need you are doing it wrong. I think the real strength of the TouchBar is in user customization. In any App I should be allowed to put whatever I want into the TouchBar.

For example, for quick n’ dirty grades I’ve been using the Basic Correction panel in PPro’s Lumetri Color a lot recently so mapping Temp, Tint, Exposure, Contrast and Saturation to the TouchBar would be cool because that’s 90% of what I use on these fast grades. W/o the flexibility to customize like you can your keyboard I think the TouchBar will always fall short of its potential.

[Andrew Kimery]

Adding the 2 frame fade just takes a couple of clicks since I already have that set as my default audio transition. I just highlight all my dialog audio (which is typically on A1 and A2) and hit Command+Shift+T to apply the default audio transition to everything highlighted. I usually do it as I’m cutting though so I can better time it with breaths, getting in/out between words, getting rid of “ummms”, etc.,. I mainly work in the doc/unscripted world (usually w/o narration too) so I do a lot of dialog editing/frankenbiting and using the fade is second nature to me. Do I need it on every cut? No, but I’d say on 90% of the cuts.

I certainly have used room tone (assuming I get it from production) or canned background noise, but it doesn’t always match the situation. For example, one piece I worked on had an interview with two bar owners and when the interview started the bar was empty but by the end of the interview it was pretty full with the lunch crowd. There was a steady increase in background noise that would’ve been hard to replicate with tone unless they had recorded room tone via a separate mic for the duration of the interview. For that I did use room tone once the place started to fill up, but I still used the fades so that ‘sharp’ sounds (like a beer glass coming down on a metal counter) didn’t get cut off mid ‘thunk’.

I might also have many interviews in various locations edited into a single piece so that would require separate tone/sound design for each interview. More often than not the combination of audio fade plus music bed is enough to keep the audio edit invisible. If I have room tone (or at least something that I can fake as room tone) I like using it because I like using nat sound to help bring people into the piece, but more often than not the quick fade is required to keep the audio edit from calling attention to itself.

I think it’s mainly a product of the type of work I usually do. The quality of the audio person in the field also makes a big difference. On one project the interviewee was driving his truck down a country road with the windows rolled down and the audio from his lav was pristine (no wind noise at all from the open window). I don’t know how the audio guy did it in the field, but it sounded amazing. And sometimes I get things where I swear they pointed the mic at the AC vent instead of the interviewee. #PostProblems

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] ” Is it because of some issue with the signal to noise ratio of the audio recording where you’re trying to smooth out the sound of the background at the transition points?
“

Not to answer for Oliver, but I work a lot with audio recorded in uncontrolled/semi-controlled environments and I’ll almost always add a two frame edit to the head & tail of all my dialog edits in order to smooth them out (some people are just loud breathers too boot).