Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Michael Garber] “Hopefully Thunderbolt can make it’s way to PCs in the near future.”
MSI already has a Z77 mobo in the channel with Thunderbolt built in. They are coming.
Best,
Andy -
[Joseph Owens] “You mean like…. “tracks”?”
Har har.
I just want to be able to see and manipulate each audio channel independently when I expand a clip since frequently the embedded audio channels represent very different audio inputs. FCPX assumes embedded audio is always to be edited in unison with the rest of the clip it came in with, and that often isn’t the case.
For me, on balance, manipulating blobs of content in FCPX’s timeline is much less fiddly than it was in FCP7. I used to really give my T key a workout and spent a lot of time manually shifting chunks of content around where now I don’t have to make room for a move before I do it. But I still want to be able to have fine-grain control over audio in the timeline, and that is thus far not very well implemented in FCPX.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “I do love a good sizzle core beast, but a couple hundred extra dollars on a GPU can make a much bigger difference for some work than a couple thousand on the CPU.”
The line that seems to give away his bias is this one:
[Walter Biscardi] “We honestly don’t miss the CUDA “extra realtime features” because we’ve never had them.”
So since FCP7 never had any GPU accelerated goodness, they don’t care if they don’t get it in PPro? That smells like rationalization to me.
Best,
Andy -
[Frank Gothmann] “It’s much cheaper to get all you add-ons, ram etc. separate.”
Yeah, I agree. Once you start looking at third party RAM, the iMac can suddenly hold 32 GB, and the GPUs that are available for BTO from the PC vendors might not be the GPU you want.
But I chalk that up to keeping his cost comparisons consistent for the sake of argument. Benefit of the doubt for the sake of a cleaner blog post.
Best,
Andy -
Walter is pragmatic as ever, but I think he’s leaving out a wide swath of PCs that might change his analysis: light iron towers. He could get PC towers with comparable guts to an iMac that also have slots for his existing cards, all the flexibility of a tower (interns of GPUs and serviceability), but aren’t a big iron dual CPU $10K workstation. He says if he is going to buy big iron, he is going to go really big, but what about small iron? Wouldn’t that compare more evenly with the internal specs of the iMacs?
Now, if this is about finding any way practical to keep using OS X wherever he can, I can certainly sympathize. I think the only reason Apple is able to pass the top-end iMac off as an entry-level workstation is the lack of a headless Mac between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. If there was such a thing, it would be very popular among the pro video folks.
But if you are not biased in favor of OS X, why not line the iMac up next to something like a Dell Optiplex 990 or an HP Z210?
I’m a big time OS X partisan, and I would be one of those guys that would accept the limitations of an iMac just to keep using OS X in lieu of Windows on a comparably equipped mid-range tower. But Walter is framing his decision around strictly cost/benefit, and he’s leaving out a very significant class of options. Tough to kick the Apple habit.
Best,
Andy -
[Craig Seeman] “It’s almost easier to guess what the system might consist of than the name they might give it.”
Tim Cook seems fond of the archaic “Macintosh”, so maybe that will make a return in some form.
Best,
Andy -
[Bob Woodhead] “iPro”
Don’t cross the streams!
Best,
Andy -
[peter pop] “The delivery spec is pretty adamant that they require a single four track file.”
I misunderstood your original post. You can do this in one pass in FCPX, but you’ll need to set up some custom roles and subroles for it to work. For instance, if you create a custom role called “Mix” and then create two subroles under it called “M&E” and “Dialogue”, you can assign the M&E subrole to the clips that should map to the M&E channels and Dialogue to the rest of the mix. Then you can do an Export Roles to Multitrack QuickTime Movie with the track layout you want; with a stereo mix on two tracks and an M&E mix on another two tracks. You could even go further and have three subroles, “Dialogue”, “Music”, and “Effects”, and then you could export with a full stereo mix and independent mono tracks for the M&E.
Backing into that at the end of an edit would be very tedious, but if you tag your clips with roles in the Event Library ahead of time it wouldn’t be so bad. If you are cutting from multitrack audio source clips, you’d need to open them in a timeline and assign roles to each embedded track.
And yes, this is stuff Apple can certainly improve on. I think in general FCPX hides too much of the audio in the name of “keeping sync”. There needs to be an option to see the audio in a more granular way, without having to open clips in their own timeline to do so.
Best,
Andy -
I stand corrected then. A good question for Dennis’ Q&A thread perhaps?
Best,
Andy -
[peter pop] “Can FCPX do this currently?”
Yes, you would use roles to define which audio from the timeline would route to which output channel. Depending on how you organize your roles, you should be able to do two export passes, one for full mix and one for M&E.
[peter pop] “For that matter Can CS5.5?”
For CS5.5 you’d use the conventional track assignments to route audio to export channels.
Best,
Andy