Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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What’s the difference, though? You can organize your projects in folders just like you could put sequences in bins. You can explode compound clips into their own popup timeline for fine tuning just like you could with nested sequences. You can have multiple projects open and keystroke between them (totally mappable keystrokes to boot). Why do you need multiple sequences per project if all the same essential functionality is there under another name?
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
[Neil Goodman] “but if you dont dont transcode, then essentially your editng an h264 file, which doesnt quite hold up the way a Pro res file does when it comes to color space and whatnot ans also isnt as fast and efficient in the way your computer handles it. “
Transcoding first only aids in processing time later. You don’t gain any new color space from transcoding, and all the rendering takes place as Pro Res anyway. There isn’t any generational destruction going on if you work natively, it just means your renders will take longer than if you transcoded first.
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
Yeah, for everything to fully complete it can take a long time. Try adding a speed change with optical flow to something!
The difference is you can keep working and you get (in my opinion) a very good preview of what the final render will look like. No more red lines over the timeline that force you to sit on your hands while you wait to see if you like the last keyframe tweak. I’d say that is an improvement.
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
My hope is this is exactly the plan. Apple builds the platform and the % everyone needs, and leave the other % to third parties. That way Apple gets to market to a wider audience and the high end can still build out a tool that suits their workflows. Time will tell.
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
Bingo.
Though in my experience the support requirements for Windows typically push the cost of ownership higher relative to Macs. But then that may be moot with Win7. I’m thinking back to Win2000 and XP…
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “And would you look for gods sake I ranted again – I should go back up to asking stupid questions about premiere – which doesn’t look half bad actually. weirdly close to FCP really, the timeline is the spitting image of it. It has a viewer!”
Well considering Premiere was Randy Ubillos’ old project prior to KeyGrip-cum-FCP, it stands to reason it would bear a striking resemblance. And while Randy wasn’t there for the big shift to Premiere Pro back in 2003, copying the successful FCP UI since then to rise to credibility after its own scorched-earth rewrite also makes sense.
Your contention is essentially that the computer-based video editing UI metaphor invented in the early 1990s remains the ideal for all visual storytelling. Only time will tell if you are right.
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
Apple claimed 2 million FCP installations at the SuperMeet where they previewed FCPX. They did not specify current version.
Apple is in the business of selling hardware. Nothing new there. Revenue from Pro Apps is a rounding error for them. Pro Apps exist so users will have a strong incentive to drop $4,000 on a 17″ MacBook Pro or $9,000 on a 12-core Mac Pro. Those are high-margin items, probably the highest in any of Apple’s product lines. One single unit sold is good for thousands in profit. That is a market worth stoking with platform-unique software that is very resource-hungry. What you pay for Pro Apps nowadays is to cover development and marketing.
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
[Craig Seeman] “It’s actually pretty astonishing that a company that handled the move from OS9 to OSX and PPC to Intel acted is if they had no prior experience bringing their customer base through a major transition. The handling of FCPX defies their track record. Something changed somewhere. It doesn’t take a MBA to have seen this coming . . . to have worked out a transition plan. Did the brilliant minds who handled those transitions leave Apple?”
I think perhaps the understanding of the market by the product marketing upper management types has been spoiled by their iDevice winning streak. This stinks of hubris, even by Apple standards.
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
“Those “traditional tracks” Apple thinks are such dinosaurs map directly onto physical tracks. We need to be able to put music on tracks one and two, VO on three and foley and effects on four through eight. We require the ability to assign different tracks to different output channels, so the tape master that goes to the network meets their delivery specs.”
Disagree. Legacy FCP could support a 1:1 relationship between tracks in the timeline and tracks in the output, but it wasn’t a given. You had to set up the sequence settings and define what output each track was gong to map to. There is no reason this can’t also be done in FCPX. Look at an audio element in the Inspector, and you can assign its tracks roles (though I say there aren’t enough options here). Ultimately the tracks in that audio are being fed to virtual buses that will handle it a certain way. The difference is the removal of hard tracks in the FCPX timeline allows for more flexible handling of audio that still maps to specific output busses. That’s the whole point of the Magnetic Timeline- collisions can be avoided when you abstract the role of the media from its physical placement in the timeline.
“Well Apple, love you guys, but we use traditional, track-based timelines for a reason. Ever had a project so organizationally complex you needed twenty tracks of video just to keep it straight? I have. So’s every editor who’s ever done even a reasonable-sized project. And it’s not just organizational convenience, either. “
Weak argument. 20 video layers as a form of organization sounds more like a workaround than best practice to me. Just because the limits of legacy FCP lent themselves to certain methods doesn’t make those methods good, only familiar.
I’m not saying FCPX is ready for primetime, but I see a lot of knee-jerk reactions like this out there that only prove the user didn’t approach the new editing metaphor with an open mind or an interest in learning it. If you go looking for a reason to hate something, you’ll almost always be successful.
Best,
Andy RichardsVP of Product Development
Keeper Technology -
[Tom Daigon] “Andrew, unfortunately this is a good indication of your limited experience with other editing software. From FCP 7 to PPCS5 is like falling off a log. The keyboard can be mapped exactly the same and the GUI uses the same concepts with lots more enhancements for productivity. “
Fair enough, the leap to PPCS5 isn’t that far (I’ve dabbled in it a little, but never saw the need to immerse). But certainly the leap from FCP7 to MC5 is significant enough to give one pause. The point is that FCPX is a pivot point for anyone who has been earning a living on FCP up to now.
[Tom Daigon] “We all have difference projects, clients and technical requirements. If yours is such that its not an issue now or in the future, by all means tough it out. After 30 years of editing I find following my gut instinct is the way to avoid disasters and make my clients happy with video I am proud of. Each to their own.”
Tough what out? I still fail to see why continuing to use FCP7 is such a nonstarter. If FCPX doesn’t suit you today, don’t buy it. If it never suits you, never buy it. If FCP7 hasn’t suited you for the last 12 months, why haven’t you already abandoned it for PPCS5 or MC5?
This whole thread is about not taking the feature set of FCPX as a personal insult from Apple.
It’s business. It isn’t personal. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.