[Bill Davis]

I hesitated a week to finish up a project in progress. Then ran a fresh TimeMachime image of my prior system. Then I totally erased my machine and did a clean install of Catalina. Since I’d already taken a leasurely week to find all my legacy 32-bit apps and trash them, the install went extremely smoothly over two half days. The following morning at 11am I had a session and utterly no issues. It’s been two months since and I haven’t had a single problem. Everything’s operating as expected and super smoothly. And that includes complex days when I’m juggling FCP X editing and live Zoom meetings, running multiple Apps and running both Safari and Chrome for different uses simultaneously.

My 16” MacBook Pro seems to totally love Catalina.

Just my experience.

[Bill Davis]

Definitely re-invention time.

I’ve been super lucky in that I’ve been “home based” for far more than a decade. But even with that, I had to buckle down and adapt a lot in March to May in order to keep competitive. One huge boon was finding and getting involved with Alex Lindsay’s Office Hours daily Zoom — joining the panel early. It was like a master class in all sorts of remote workflow technologies. I didn’t know much about NDI, OBS, MIMO Live, unreal Engine, AWS Elemental, AKAIMI or VMix when I started, but simply listening to the discussions there, my understanding grew fast.

At the same time, the OH folk were exploring how to maximize our WFH telepresence.

I initially participated by installing a simple webcam rig in my voice booth, but realized I needed to do better if I wanted to project a real professional presence. So I bit the bullet and invested in re-configuring my entire edit bay for an improved remote access telepresence. I installed a BlackMagic 6k camera, ATEM mini switcher, neutral roll up background, and added lighting and sound improvements.

It took me most of 3 months to wire and dial it all in, but as my web presence got more and more professional, my clients started noticing, they started asking me to consult on their rigs.

I got gigs recording their business meetings and turning them into edited presentations.

And my Office Hours responsibilities increased as well, and I got chances to act as a substitute host and have made dozens and dozens of new contacts with fellow professionals all over the world.

To the point where I’ve been asked recently to join with virtual crews helping with some pretty high profile web seminars.

And these are composed of players often half a world separated, all collaborating in real time virtually.

This is not the old “fly packs in a ballroom” mode of live gigs. That’s gone bye bye.

The point of all this is that this pandemic has been a HUGE global industry disruptor.

Things won’t be going back to “normal” for years if ever.

And that kinda means adapt or fall behind to my thinking. Seriously I’ve been up at 4-5am EVERY Single day since March trying to stuff my head with new things I think are going to replace the old ways.

My advice? Dive in and swim hard if you want to remain relevant. Pick some areas that look like they have a strong future. What? Up to you. If I was younger it would be stuff like Swift, Unreal, Dolby Atmos and Vision, and grokking collaborative distribution tools like Frame.Io, Vimeo and (well maybe) YouTube.

Mostly I’d be ready to do my best to maintain gainful employment while leaving the house as little as possible. Cuz that’s going to be the new normal for a long time.

My 2 cents.

[Bill Davis]

I’ve been using Frame.io’s new Transfer service with excellent results. It’s basically bit torrenting for grown-ups, in that it breaks whole folder data streams into packets and securely sends them in parallel in order to max saturate whatever bandwidth you have available. The transfer has full encryption between disassembly and re-assembly, so it’s super secure too. I’m lucky in that I’m on home gigabit fiber from AT&T (Speedtest shows 940Mbps down AND up) – so I was able to transfer 600Gigs of video content in about 70 minutes on my first test. It’s greatly enhanced my ability to remain working at pre-covid efficiencies over the past 6 months.

For what it’s worth.

[Bill Davis]

[Michael Gissing] “In relation to FCPX, the significant issue with this camera is also the performance of BRAW. I hope Apple are looking at how BRAW is developing and the petty (see what I did there) RAW wars will not continue. I want to see BRAW and ProResRAW available in FCPX and Resolve”

Was on a Zoomchat meeting this morning watching Steve Bayes (former Product Manager for FCP X) and while he was CRYSTAL CLEAR that since retiring a few years back he knows NOTHING about any plans or status for anything like BMRaw coming to FCP X — he did GENERALLY note that one “factor” in any codec coming to a platform is the resources it takes to support an outside codec once it becomes an official part of different companies offerings. It’s apparently not a trivial thing. He mentioned that’s why Apple leaves, for example, Canon MXF Codecs as something for Canon to develop and maintain.

The support burden requirements then fall to Canon to cover.

Same with RED stuff. (tho I understand that’s partially because RED didn’t want to disclose some of their codec secrets as well, so there desire to keep things “in house” was even stronger.)

Imagine the extra support load Apple would face in training, phone support and general troubleshooting if they folded BRAW into the official Apple portfolio of supported products?

Just food for thought.

Creator of XinTwo – http://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Small thinking to my mind.

What makes editing in X, editing in X isn’t really just timeline behaviors. Because for me, the storyline is simply where the rest of the efficiency enabling technologies in X REPORT their data for assembly. It’s an important part of the assembly process, of course, but for me ONLY insofar as it give expression to the organization I’ve done in the browser, the Prep I’ve done to my assets BEFORE the browser, and the metadata management the FCP X tools allow me to use before my first clip ever hits a storyline.

The entire reason I’m regularly getting projects that used to take multiple days done in hours isn’t exclusively because my storyline assembly practices are wildly more efficient (tho they often are) but because by the time I’m assembling, exporting rough cuts and getting into client approval loops so much other time-wasting distraction has been driven out of my workflow by my new prep habits.

Until LumaFusion (or anything else running on iOS or even MacOS optimized for Apple Silicon) has THOSE toolsets available to me – there’s always going to be a place for the one tool that already has all those features in spades — FCP X.

Now, if any of those processes can be “sidecar’d” onto outboard devices or even moved to the cloud – I’d say BRING IT ON. I’d love to see LumaFusion become a better feeder world for my X storylines.

But as an editorial replacement, Pffff.

No need to fix what isn’t broken – and I’m already getting work done at Ferarri like speeds on my laptop at home.

Just my view.

Creator of XinTwo – http://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “OK, here you go. Big Sur is the next mac OS. Transition to ARM (Apple Silicon) is on. First ARM-based Macs and Big Sur will be out by the end of the year. Full transition to Apple Silicon will take about 2 years. All Apple apps (including ProApps) will be native.
“

For me, I was deliriously happy with the Keynote.

First, FCP X (and the ProApps in general) got stage time!
To me that signals that Apple top management understands that they have a suite of tools that scale perfectly into the new WorkFromHome reality – and they are committed to those tools.

PLUS, those tools (including FCP X!) were announced as being already actively ported to run on the new Apple Silicon! Which should put a huge NAIL in the coffin of all the idiots still thinking that “FCP X was announced with a 10 year life span, and that’s close to over and Apple will surely abandon it as unimportant to their iPhone sales.”

This was the POLAR opposite of that. The ProApps are CENTRAL to where Apple sees their hardware going! My take away is that the tool I love and that makes me a faster, happier editor will likely be around for the rest of my career.

This WWDC was an absolute HOME RUN for me because of those factors.

Features, shmeeshers. I can get features over time. FCP X has already given me huge boosts ion stability and efficiency, which drives my bottom line WAY better than whether or not I ever get DUP DETECTION. (nothing wrong with that, but it just ain’t “mission critical” which not crashing and being daily dependable totally IS.

I came away from watching WWDC as a VERY happy guy.

Creator of XinTwo – http://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

I suspect that in “some” cases, manufacturers are holding onto at least some of the news they would have published at NAB — if it had taken place.

I’ve talked to industry sources who’s told me that not only a TON of money goes into NAB demos, but part of what makes that a decent business decision is the fact that the global production industry will be specifically watching for news during NAB week.

Since there WAS no NAB week, rather than releasing product info into a “24/7 Covid News” environment, some are likely just sitting on stuff and continuing to refine it.

Maybe if we ever get back to some sort of normal, vis-a-vis large physical gathering type events, we’ll see a giant spate of beautifully rev’d stuff.

That would be nice, huh?

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “Still think we can move everyone to the cloud for business?”

I know I’m late to this but I’ve been swamped with crisis communications for a large local credit union client.

What scares me today regarding the avilablity of bandwidth is that many of the smarter governors (and I’m specifically referencing Cal Gov Newsome here – have already publicly said they are working on trying to integrate distance learning initiatives into the public school system, as we speak.

Imagine the bandwidth that will need to be deployed to live stream real-time lessons to all the students of a major system like the California Public Schools.

I just looked it up. There are just under 7,000 elementary and middle schools involved. I did some napkin numbers and came up with roughly 1.4 million daily streams (ave. 25 kids a class) IF each grade “team teaches” all the students rather than trying to do separate class by class.

And to the best of my knowledge, nobody has curriculum that’s ready to deploy to supplant the current “individual teacher lesson plans” for their classroom – which takes consideration of different learning speeds and modes.

I’m sure there are panic meetings happening right now at the Board of Education level down to the district and individual schools levels in case the public schools need to remain closed for months.

But you can bet this will be a MASSIVE undertaking and could easily disrupt the load profile of even the big gun services like AWS, Aspera, Azure, etc.

1.4 million school kids logging on every morning to take classes is NOT a trivial idea.

And I’ll just note that when I had my education product selling into schools, a few years ago the primary access platform was Zoom.

You might want to have a back-up collaboration pipeline available for your work, just in case.

FWIW.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

Looks like they took ALL the space that a Mac Laptop uses for the touchpad and used it for the second screen.

Personally, you’ll only take my touchpad away from my cold, dead hands.

It’s central to how I fly my apps and “the mouse” has been dead to me for nearly 7 years now.

But to each their own.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Bill Davis]

I’ve been 100% “remote home based editing” for ALL my clients for about 5 year now.

Up until this week, maybe 10 folks used to come to me regularly to work out of my home shop as part of a virtualization of an in-person traditional production team. Now nobody does, but the work is ALL proceeding as normal.

Before, some of my typical sessions featured bouncing ideas around between the client rep, a project manager and maybe an art director here on-site.

But it’s stupid simple to virtualize even that. For just a couple of collaborators, I set up one or two iDevices running FaceTime. They are on swivel arms, so I can talk to people directly, but then point the cameras at my monitor array. The res on idevices is FINE for this. In fact, if the art director needs to make a decision on something minute like type kerning or ledding, I either zoom up my screen as with any presentation situation, or just swing the “art director” device’s camera in for a close-up if that works better.

If more people need to participate, I switch to Google Hangouts or Zoom.

One factor I’m extremely greatful for is that I did a significant sound treatment to my home office so that the open mics from these devices don’t sound like I’m stuck in reverb city.

Basically, tho – all this has allowed me to work utterly uninterrupted.

Just my 2 cents.

Stay safe out there.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.