[Andrew Richards]

Gotcha. New slang to me.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Walter Soyka] “That said, some of the FCPX features which I suspect you think are evidence that Apple cares about the pro market, like 64-bit, multi-threading, and native file support, are table stakes in 2011. “

Wel I guess Avid is in trouble… (not really, but they seem to get a pass for not having all these boxes ticked on their spec sheet)

I also see an interesting theme with all the business analysis going on; that no one is at all concerned with the fact that Avid isn’t making any money. Could it be that Avid’s tight focus on just the tens of hundreds of high-end pros could be just as big a liability as Apple being Apple? For Avid to be profitable, and thus sustainable, they need to make a lot more money off each of their tens of hundreds of users than they do when they have to compete on price with the likes of Apple and Adobe, who can both afford a race to the bottom on NLE pricing since they both make most of their money elsewhere.

Avid will sell a few thousand more copies of MC5.5 the second half of this year than usual, but I don’t see that getting them out of the financial hole they are in. Especially when most of the bump will come from sales at 40% of their usual list price from the crossgrade promotion. Just like we need to wait 6, 9, or 12 months too see where things tend to be headed with FCPX in terms of features, we also need to wait that long to see if Avid is heading in a positive direction financially. Maybe Avid is seeing healthy revenue growth in their other products, I wouldn’t know. I just know what I see on their recent financial statements, and they’re in a bit of a hole in general.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Patrick Murphy] “2. Despite the price tag they ignore most of the industry standard data protocols.
Firewire 800? Are you kidding? What about USB 3, and SATA?”

USB3 is hardly an industry standard. Thunderbolt leapfrogs it by more than double the bandwidth anyway. Apple knew they were hitching their wagon to Thunderbolt by the time USB3 was coming to market. I assume you mean eSATA. There are lots of cards, and that is why there are slots. You pick the I/O. You have a point about the price though, if you have to buy your I/O you should pay less for the chassis.

[Patrick Murphy] “3. Apple’s Mac Pro’s don’t support CUDA, an essential for serious PPro users”

Or is it that nVidia doesn’t support Macs?

[Patrick Murphy] “3. Is it reasonable to expect a company that’s turning it’s back on media professionals will continue to manufacture a workstation that is only really necessary to FCP “

Mac Pros may only be necessary to support FCP if you only look at Apple’s app offerings, but there are plenty of other use cases, even beyond pro video. AutoCAD comes to mind, so does Mathematica. Don’t forget Apple is a hardware company. The only reason they would stop selling the Mac Pro is if not enough of them were selling (as was the case with the Xserve). WIth the margins they make on a Mac Pro, selling one beefy 12-core nets Apple the same profits as selling a dozen iPads.

[Patrick Murphy] “4. Certainly there are some specialized applications that require the platform.
Don’t you think these software creators are up tonight creating a port to W7?”

I can’t think of an industrial strength third party app that is Mac exclusive, can you? Everything I can think of can also run on either Windows or Linux on commodity hardware already.

There are rumors of a new Mac Pro in the pipeline, one with an all new chassis (finally!) and naturally Thunderbolt galore. If they are sticking with Xeon class CPUs they are at Intel’s mercy since Intel hasn’t shipped the Sandy Bridge multi-socket Xeon line yet. I just hope they make it rackable. Please.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Brandon Kuchta] “I’m having trouble seeing how FCP X’s approach to organization fits into this (fairly common) workflow. From what I can tell, all projects have to live together in the “Final Cut Projects” directory at the root level of the drive.”

This is true for projects you want to open. I could argue that even on FCP7, best practice would be to edit from a local project file and copy to the server a few times a day rather than opening them in place, but I know a lot of places just open in place. That used to be a big technical problem depending on the way your connection protocol, but in latter versions of FCP it really wasn’t.

I could also argue you can copy your projects in and out of your existing file structure, but that is also kind of wonky if you are used to opening your projects in place on the server.

Bear in mind the Events and Movies folder-at-root concept is there to make the FAR more common sneakernet approach to sharing something editors can very easily deal with by duplicating Projects and/or Events from within the FCPX interface. You plug in a drive, you drag your Project onto it in the Project Library, and FCPX gives you very straightforward options for placing exactly what you want on the drive. The next editor plugs in the drive, it shows up in FCPX, and they can open and edit with all media, renders, and organization in place. This is good stuff, just not what we want to see for SAN situations. Like so many other aspects of 10.0, Apple tackled the most common use cases first and lest the more niche stuff for later.

Certainly the ideal would be for some kind Event and Project sharing support to be implemented, but it isn’t clear how that could be done yet. I’m certainly keeping my fingers crossed. I think multiple users being able to tag the contents of the same Event simultaneously would open up some seriously powerful workflows. I would also love a shared Project Library with per-user-locking for open projects just like Avid Unity has had for years.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

That all makes sense. Thanks to all who answered.

If ProRes didn’t have generational loss in FCP7 it won’t in FCPX. The codecs haven’t changed. They are still designed to losslessly render.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[Michael Aranyshev] “Because a project going to Resolve is more likely shot in R3D, ARRIRAW or film than in h.264. So you aren’t cutting your “digital negative”. Your’re cutting with “digital workprint”. Then send an EDL or XML to Resolve that matches back to the “digital negative”.”

H.264. Hardy har har.

Point taken, and support for R3D and maybe even ARRIRAW is undoubtedly coming in a dot release. Then you could be cutting with your digital negative, if you want. Is sending ProRes 4444 to grading pointless? Don’t people grade projects shot on SR?

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

Makes sense. The DPX files embed timecode for each frame, but knowing where the edits are would be essential- not like you are going to grade each frame individually!

Now it seems like such a dumb question.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

NOS? Please define.

[Andrew Richards]

[Brandon Kuchta] “I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about the fact FCP X can’t access projects on any type of shared storage. No XSAN, no network volumes. This combined with a project model that doesn’t allow for organizing files by client and job means I can’t even think about adopting FCP X regardless of any other features they add. Looks like the only option is to go back to “sneakernet” with separate drives for each project that can’t be worked on at the same time. This seems like it’d be a big issue. Or are less people working in collaborative environments than I think?”

Project and Event folders aren’t enabled for shared storage (yet) for good reason- multiple users would collide and potentially overwrite each other’s data or not be able to write data at all. I do hope something is coming from Apple or a third party that will enable shared Events and Projects. That would be killer.

HOWEVER

Media can be stored on shared storage and linked to an Event for editing in place, and you’ll want to uncheck the box in FCPX’s Import preferences for “Copy files to Final Cut Events folder or it will try to copy it in. You’ll also want to turn of automatic transcoding. Ingest for this scenario pretty much needs to be handled outside FCPX, though. That does suck, but in a shared setting stand-alone ingest isn’t that unusual. Not ideal though.

ALSO

You can absolutely organize your projects. Make folders.

Xsan is included in Lion now. Maybe something more is coming…

[Andrew Richards]

[Mike Jeffs] “What i mean is that Events, that have been added to a Workstation (fcpx on Edit Bay 1) will always show up unless the drive they’re on isn’t mounted. This is a major concern for me. We can have 20 students a day on a single mac.”

Default Events are per user in ~/Movies/Final Cut Events, not per host. So what you should be doing (and really should have been doing all along) is running an OD server with individual user accounts for each of your students. That would give each of them a login to work in as a sandbox, and you could even do home folder syncing to central storage on the NAS that would make their work more portable. This also gives you very granular control on what they can do on (to?) the edit systems.

[Mike Jeffs] “2nd NAS server. Currently we cannot have FCP see a NAS server and have it hold events. Because we have many many different classes, (comm 101 102 etc.) each has their own partition on the NAS server so a student in a lab isn’t bound to one edit bay. I have heard that some have had their vendors create work a rounds but we are small potatoes to most of ours so we are at they’re and Apples mercy to get this fixed.”

Here is where those managed preferences really come into play. You can still host the media on the NAS, you just can’t put Events there. If you uncheck the box in FCPX’s Import preferences for “Copy files to Final Cut Events folder, you can link media to an event while leaving it in place on the NAS. This does complicate ingest a bit, but if your students are shooting tapeless, they could dump their cards into the NAS prior to editing and then link the media to an Event.

They should probably also work natively and uncheck both boxes for Transcoding in FCPX’s Import preferences. The great thing about OD managed preferences is that you can probably lock these preferences user-by-user, or group-wise, to guarantee they can’t muck it up by fiddling with preferences (I haven’t tested this myself, but I expect it to work given FCPX’s modern OS X roots; FCP1-7 did not play nice with managed preferences).

Further, since the media would live on the NAS, you could implement home folder syncing so the Events and Projects folders in their ~/Movies folder would just sync to the NAS and then sync to whatever workstation they log into at any given time. This isn’t trivial to set up, but it is almost certainly doable and sounds like it would be a tidy improvement to your existing layout. Render files that live in these folders could become a storage burden, but there might be a way to make exclusions to the sync rules (not sure off the top of my head).

[Mike Jeffs] “3rd. No reconnect or relink clip options. Students do dumb things they move delete or change video files. If they can’t reconnect to a updated clip this seems to be a major problem. “

I’m not sure exactly how I’d arrange it, but I bet there is a way to leverage ACLs on the NAS to limit this behavior and prevent unlinked media in the first place. But yes, Apple does need to add a relink option for edit-in-place media that doesn’t get the benefits of media managed within the Events folder.

[Mike Jeffs] “4th, Similar to issue 1 all projects show up on launch a can be accessed by anyone. I don’t like that every project in a event library (or whatever it’s called, not use to new language) is accessible on launch of FCPX again it is possible to have a lot of confusion. Lots and lots of projects, again to me there is a great potential for one student to again “borrow” work done by another.”

If you are syncing home folders per student, each student’s work would be collected in their ~/Movies directory. They’d have only their own work, and all their work across all classes.

So what you need is OS X Server (if you don’t already have it) and some assistance in setting up a managed workgroup that makes sense for controlling what the students can and can’t do, while giving you a much more flexible storage arrangement.

Best,
Andy Richards

VP of Product Development
Keeper Technology