[Andrew Richards]

[Paul Dickin] “FCP X has to be a part of the solution to plug the ‘gaping hole’, but I was expecting the pace of progress to be faster in this. Why doesn’t FCP X (= newQT) handle ALL media types natively…”

The gaping hole I was thinking of is the one left by good ol’ QuickTime Player Pro, and its swiss army knife MOV manipulation capabilities. AVFoundation and CoreMedia are now firmly in place as the replacement for the old QuickTime APIs, but we’re missing the application layer at the <$30 utility level. I’m surprised a little indie developer out there, sensing the angst about the decline of QTP7 and having access to the Lion beta most of this year, hasn’t whipped up a spiritual successor to QTP7 to capitalize on the demand until Apple adds the features back to QTPX (if ever).

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

While I don’t completely disagree with your overall point that Apple sees iOS as its mainstream future, there are a number of your supporting points I do not agree with in terms of your conclusion. I’ll address them in the order they appeared in your post.

[Christian Schumacher] “What was added since Leo? -Coverflow – Quicklook -Exposé/Spaces
– Time Machine – All very, very iOSish features. Coincidently?”

I don’t follow the parallel you are drawing. Coverflow is useless eye candy, IMHO, but the other features all either predate iOS or were added to OS X the same year the iPhone debuted. Exposé dates back to Panther (10.3), and Spaces was borrowed from X Window desktop environments like GNOME and KDE in Leopard. Time Machine and Quick Look also debuted in Leopard. How is one-button previewing of a file in the Finder and in open/save dialogs in any way an iOS-like feature? iOS doesn’t even expose the user to a filesystem, let alone given them tools for navigating it. Lion may have added some iOS-esque veneer, but the features you listed, save for Coverflow, are hardly iOS window dressing.

[Christian Schumacher] “Meanwhile core functions like Menu Commands, windows lay-outs and file management are the same-old-never-updated since when? The XX century?”

The last major overhaul to the way the Finder operates conceptually was during the transition from OS 9 to OS X. It caused a stir not unlike FCPX is causing now. So if we’re keeping score, the original Finder bowed in 1984, and the modern Finder in 2001. If you were to use the Finder in Jaguar or earlier versions of OS X today, I think you’d appreciate very quickly how far it has come since then, due in no small part to the features you bemoaned above.

The Finder was completely rewritten in 64-bit Cocoa for Snow Leopard, so it isn’t as if it is being neglected.

[Christian Schumacher] “The beloved iPad was created to lead the way and to subsidize the
complete switch at the computer line of the ecosystem. “

The iPad probably is Apple’s vision for the future of general purpose computing. Steve Jobs described traditional personal computers as being like heavy trucks where the iPad is more like a passenger car. Both are needed in the world, but most folks don’t need a CDL to get around.

[Christian Schumacher] “The recent Mobile Me cut-offs were just another writings on the wall
at Cupertino Temple. God forbids creative users taxing their busy gadget servers.”

MobileMe was killed because it was a dismal failure. They didn’t kill it because some editors used it to share videos.

[Christian Schumacher] “Oh, and there’s is this handicapped Quicktime too. RIP QT Pro.”

QuickTime (the API) is dead, and its true replacement only just appeared in Lion. The QTPX that shipped in Snow Leopard was built on a false start of an API called QTKit. Apple did stumble on the transition away from 32-bit QuickTime, and I too am puzzled as to why they didn’t roll out a fuller-featured QuickTime Player X for Lion (since they now have the underpinnings to support it). I’m more puzzled no one has seen this gaping hole in the market and attempted to fill it with a modern spiritual successor to QTPro 7.

[Christian Schumacher] “It is going to restraint the user by preventing those new customers
from the mess they make with their own computers. “

They are already starting to obscure more of the filesystem from casual observers. Seen your Library folder in Lion lately? The day they take my Terminal away is the day I walk. Everything else is protecting users from breaking their Macs out of ignorance. And yes, the vast majority of them need to be protected from themselves.

[Christian Schumacher] “The hope for Apple in the near future is that the market ultimately
delays this process, easing the transition to its demise as a computer maker. I’m not sure though, they have been disruptive lately.”

I dunno, Apple seems to be outpacing the industry on both the iDevice and Mac fronts. The market must like what it is seeing.

As I stated, I agree there is an overtone of shifting general purpose computing to the iPad user interaction model. iPads are driving low-margin commodity PC makers out of the consumer space. Look at HP! They sell more PCs that anyone and they want to quiet the business because they can’t profit from it. Look at Windows 8, Microsoft clearly sees that the iPad computing model is the future of general purpose computing.

I think it will be quite a while before there isn’t a place for the Mac at Apple. And if that day ever does come, enough else will have changed that it won’t be nearly as bleak as you imagine it.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

It sounds like there might be a permissions mismatch for the folder you attempted to connect to. If you create a folder at the root of the Xsan volume, then try to add it as a location, does that work?

FYI, Fibre Channel Protocol is inherent in an Xsan connection. You don’t need to know anything about it to use it.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “seriously tho – the keywords cannot be made to function like bins – you cant open and arrange multiple keywords on the second monitor so you can casually visually scan the contents of the various keywords.”

Totally true as a practical matter.

But.

In all fairness, isn’t that more to do with the lack of tear-away tabs than the nature of the clip container? If there could be multiple instances of the Event Browser, you’d be able to see inside different keyword collections simultaneously and have the same net effect you get with bins.

Conceptually speaking, I would maintain that keyword collections are bins+.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “Maybe it is for the type of material you work with. This might even be true for most editing in general (though I doubt it). But the question at hand is – should tools be designed around that model?”

I base that statement on my observations of regular people consistently truly enjoying content despite relatively abysmal reproduction. From highly compressed SD stretched out onto an HDTV to badly encoded YouTube pirated TV and movies, regular people just don’t have high standards when it comes to signal quality. A bad script or bad performance is much more of a turn off to them than crunchy artifacting on a dissolve or flat dynamic range on cruddy speakers.

[Franz Bieberkopf] “In short, FCPX seems to assume:
– that I have a “primary through-line” against which I am judging and adding other things
– that this is, mostly, a “storyline” of some sort

This seems to be developed for and work best with the most formulaic of work (using as three of the best examples of this):
– music video type productions, where music dictates the edit
– interview with b-roll type formulations
– dialog with cut-away type formulations”

Are these formulas? Or conventions? The only difference between the magnetic timeline and the open timeline as I see it is how the user interacts with them. Both metaphors wind up producing a composite video stream synched to audio along a regular time scale. I don’t see any technical barriers to being as creative in a magnetic timeline as you can be in an open track timeline. Default ripple and non-spatial organization may rub you the wrong way (like, a lot), but they are not exclusive of creativity. They are a different means to the same end.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Bill Davis] “I’ve seen this time and time again in production. People will watch a movie on DVD coming out of a cheap korean combo DVD-TV set and be every bit as “engaged” as they are sitting in a Dolby 5.1 surround theater. “

Yeah, but they are getting a crappy image on that thing too. Story and characters are what the audience connects with, not signal to noise ratios or gradients with no visible banding. You’re touching on a long-standing meme in which fine quality is lost on the consumer, much to our collective chagrin. Where’s Terence Curren? He has a lot to say on that matter.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Chris Harlan] “It’s funny, Franz. It really depends, I think, on whether you come from television or film. Television gets used quite a bit differently, and amongst many television producers, writers, and editors I believe there is a general recognition that audio is often the stronger component.”

A wise man once told me that people don’t watch TV, they listen to it. He referred me to the sometimes sloppy visual continuity in sitcoms that rely more on audio timing to get a laugh.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[David Lawrence] “I guess it depends on how we define “editorial intent”. I would argue that editorial intent is explicit and intrinsic to spacial positioning in the timeline. When I look at a timeline I read editorial intent like a musician reading sheet music.”

Yes, you know the intent. Your collaborators know your intent based on conventions you share. But the software doesn’t know anything more than that clip is on that track from that timecode value to that other timecode value.

[David Lawrence] “The idea that the software might understand the edit is interesting, but I’m hard pressed to think of any examples where it would be useful. Can you describe an example of the potential value?”

Well no, I said I have no ideas for how capturing all this explicit intent might be exploited for additional functionality. Maybe I’m way off and all they wanted to do was simplify rearranging chunks of an edit compared to how you’d do it with the arrow tool in FCP7.

I’ve got a few good ideas for roles metadata, but no epiphanies for connected clip relationships. Maybe something to do with flexibility in how the timeline is visualized (my old saw)? Nothing much springs to mind for me either.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Michael Gissing] “I also do color grading so I never advise any editor to change file names during L&T as it breaks the workflow to relink original RED media or generally confuses an offline/ online workflow. That’s why I would prefer the meta data descriptor to be transferred via OMF (as an option).”

Ah. Does OMF support that kind of thing? I tried skimming it out of the OMF spec but couldn’t suss it out. FCPXML certainly does with roles.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Michael Gissing] “My point was that in tapeless video, clip names are useless as a descriptor of content so meta data is added. Audio libraries use the name as the descriptor similar to log & capture using a name descriptor as the file name. You can read this data without digging into the file headers to read additional (meta) data.”

It’s an extra step, but tapeless video clips can be systematically renamed to suit what you’d like to see. FCP7 offered a similar capability during Log & Transfer. FCPX lets you do it at any time. It sounds like it would be well-worth the effort if it aids the post pipeline downstream from the editor.

Best,
Andy