Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Bob Zelin] “Hi Bill –
let me ask you a simple question –
in the past Apple worked hard to make sure that all the “other manufacturers” (you know, AVID, Adobe, AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, etc.) all worked wonderfully with Apple products, and in fact they did – which is how they created this legacy of “Apple only”.
“My answer is Yes, it’s important to work with other approaches.
However.
(ah, the “devil friendly details” that typically screw up seemingly simple binary choices!)
That also puts a reasonable burden on ALL vendors to similarly KEEP THE PACE OF THEIR INNOVATION UP.
If they do, then it makes sense for ANY company to try to accommodate their development in order to benefit all consumers as the entire industry moves forward.
It’s ALSO inevitable that in today’s business climate, more and more companies will try to LOCK IN customers to their particular vision of where the industry is going.
So you have to pick a vision.
IF any vendor decides (for whatever reason) that their best business plan is to SLOW migration to new thinking and instead try to grow their businesses, not by providing the BEST solutions, but relying largely on the solutions they developed for different eras and different technological landscapes, I believe they are willingly prioritizing things OTHER than moving the game forward.
The race is getting faster. It’s HARDER to keep up nowadays. It’s a global race. Any 10,000 editors – anywhere around the world – are now competing with 1 million other editors doing at least somewhat similar work. That is NOT how it used to be. There likely weren’t 1 million people editing ANY type of video a few brief decades ago. In the future, there will be multiple millions of people editing content going forward.
Some will be well served to use the approaches of the past. But I believe many, MANY more will be far better served if the industry continues to grow and evolve as a whole.
What’s preventing editing tomorrow from looking like editing yesterday is NOT the tools. It’s the tasks.
The tasks are evolving.
So the tools have to evolve as well.
If a company wants to evolve their tools along side their competitors, then I suspect they WILL find willing partners in ALL levels of the industry. If they are NOT willing to evolve their tools won’t they drag down the pace of innovation? Or is it better to narrow the scope of innovation to ONLY the innovation that benefits a specific CLASS of editor?
I can list at least a dozen fundamental changes Apple made with X that were forward looking. Can you name the same for recent changes to the other NLE approaches you’re citing?
Not saying Apple is alone in this, BTW. You cited BlackMagic as an example.
If BlackMagic can handle an FCPXML in Resolve – why can’t Adobes Lumitri accept the same FCPXML? You tell me.
Is that the fault of IP Laws? Apple? BlackMagic? Adobe? or just the way that the game MUST be played today for reasons that have nothing to do with the software and EVERYTHING to do with how digital business is conducted in the digital era?
The ground is shifting faster than ever. Thats the singular reality none of us can deny.
Happy to hear your thoughts.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Famously: When the tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.
On all sides.Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
What I wrote:
“But running X on a modern Mac Laptop – and the productivity boost appears to be as much as 10X!”
What David thought I wrote:
“But running X on a modern Mac Laptop – and the productivity — in EVERY aspect of your operation, from finding clients to planning, shooting, audio sweetening, rendering, mastering, delivery, including everything you do on your timeline which includes deciding which cuts to make where – and, of course billing, right through tucking your kids in at night and packing for your next vacation – will get a guaranteed! — boost (which) appears to be as much as 10X!
How did I ever imagine thats NOT actually what I wrote.
????
(this is fun!)
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Shane Ross] “But does show a general “we really don’t care to play well with others” attitude.”
Well, certainly not as long as some of those others are demanding adherence to traditions like OMF compatibility – things that were foundationally useful in their time, but are now getting so VERY long in the tooth.
Things are supposed to IMPROVE over time.
A descriptive language from the 1990s may simply not be good enough to go past the 2015s – unless the goal is to freeze industry practices at that point.
And there are many, I suspect, unwilling to trade historic compatibility for future advancement.
Time will tell.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Steve Connor] ” think if you’d have said this instead of
“But running X on a modern Mac Laptop – and the productivity boost appears to be as much as 10X!”
Then David wouldn’t have chimed in. Final output renders are just a small part of the Productivity measure of an NLE”
Fair critique.
I must admit I do get a bit tired of ALWAYS having to “condition” every single thing I say positively about X in this forum. It’s not enough that it’s correct in sum – it must be correct in EVERY SINGLE interpretation and aspect or I’ll get called on it.
I’ve come to accept it, here.
For some reason, no positive X post will EVER go unchallenged here.
????Wouldn’t it just be AWFUL for the editing industry if it ever turned out to be half as good as some of us *think* it is!
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[David Roth Weiss] “Please define “productivity boost” in real terms please, if you can. And, what is the source of the 10X number you mention, and how precisely is that calculation quantified?”
Not sure how anyone could could argue that an export that takes a 1/10th of the time as another piece of software doing the same task on the same machine would be anything other than a “productivity boost”, David.
The source is this “real world” comparison that the OP did with FCP X compared to his initial results where Premiere Pro handily out-performed FCP X running on the EXACT same machines.
When you’ve elected to run Premiere Pro – PC hardware is clearly superior by a decent margin.
When you are running FCP X on a MAC, however – it blows away Premiere Pro by a significantly larger factor in this test.I don’t suppose you have a similar problem with his saying that the PC he was using had superior performance in exporting on the PC rather than the newMacBook Pros, and he QUANTIFIED that with test results right? So if THAT improvement is legit. In what universe is the other comparison not equally legit?
I’m not a math wiz, but it appears that his results graph:
(Screen Cap from the Linked Video in my post above.)Indicates exactly what I said.
A 10 fold productivity boosts in getting 4k renders done with FCP X running on a MacBook Pro verses the same software running on PC hardware.
That’s relevant hard statistical information given the purpose of this group.
If you have stats showing Premiere Pro (or any other software) having better performance than what was shown for the Mac/X software combo – no matter the hardware configuration – please feel free to post the links here.
It’s an open discussion.
(BY the way, if you’re coming to JUST this graph – please watch the original referenced video for the entire test sequence – taken ALONE, this one image does not tell the whole story. It merely supports my specific point about a 10X improvement.)
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[andy patterson] “Premiere uses metadata fields but bridge… “
Call me when they take a jump as big as Apple did with X.
Toss all the code and re-imagine new possibilities is a bet purely for the future.
Preserving compatibility with the past, is largely a bet against industry change.
We’ll see who goes farther, faster – going forward.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
I’ve done a bunch of these over the years.
You don’t need additional “technical” help – but you do need some basics – and, ideally, least one additional set of hands if you want to make it work well.
On the technical side, go hand held and stay as mobile as possible. If you don’t shoot a ton, practice a good camera brace position (hands on controls, elbows braced at your body and camera held close so it’s not waving around too much – pan with your torso, not your arms or hands. You’ll NEED a simple on-camera light that dims. Use it sparingly, but you’ll have plenty of situations where a decent shot is backlit or just dull, and a little front fill will save the day.
Yes, get some shots of the enviromennt, wides of the rooms and decor – but THAT IS NOT THE KEY HERE.
The NUMBER ONE thing in these post-convention hightlight reels that people want to see is THEMSELVES.
The more faces you can get on screen the better. If you absolutely can’t do any sync sound, you’ve GOT to be the kind of shooter that can roll – then get a group of people to turn and wave, smile and look lively.
That’s where the second body comes in. If it’s at ALL possible, find somebody in marketing or PR who has a bright smile and maybe somebody everyone knows and likes. Have THEM take out a simple wireless stick mic and “interview” people. It can be as simple as “Are you having FUN!” – the point is to get people ANNIMATED.
Prowl the event looking for small groups and singles. Make SURE you get representative groups. Sales teams are often much more demonstrative than IT, for example. But it’s important not to make it ALL about one group.
A convention is the one place where you often lots of the vertical teams participating – so one happy face from Real Estate or Loss Prevention who typically go unsung compared to sales – goes a LONG way to making all the elements of the corporate culture feel inclusive.
Also, if you understand upper management’s personalities and have any solid relationships there – and you can get them to do something lighthearted and engaging, that’s GOLD. It helps bring them down from the ivory tower and positions them as part of the team rather than above it all.
You (and hopefully whatever sparkling personality from PR you can recruit as a partner) will have to bust your tails as a solo team. But it can be done.
Good luck.
ADDENDUM: Last minute free concept. See if you can get permission from the meeting coordinator or the execs to do something like a Champagne VIDEO Challenge. Tell the participants to use their cel phones to interview EACH OTHER and that you’ll pick the best 3 to include in the video. Maybe 2 just questions. What do you like best about your job? And “who in your department is an unsung hero? Set up a Dropbox or Private YouTube account or something similar for them to upload their video to. It its all crap, no loss. Just announce the winner and give them the Bottle of Champagne at the last nights dinner. If you get a few submissions that are worthy of use – BONUS!
EVERYONE is carrying video cameras in their phones now. Find a way to leverage that.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Herb Sevush] “I have used some of Phil’s utilities in the past, they’ve always been great. When I went to the website it looks like Lumberjack is only for FCPX – I take it the Premiere implementation didn’t work out?”
Don’t know.
Back on Gone Girl, I believe they were working (perhaps peripherally?) with Premiere Pro.
And I know they have products that are designed to translate between the environments with their X to CC product.
But I don’t know the current status of where they are focused regarding development.
When we talk NLE stuff, it’s exclusively about FCP X, as you’d imagine.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I’m not at all sure I understand how you think “metadata about stored ranges” relates to the question of shared storage.
Could you elaborate?”
Sure Simon.
My central understanding of how X operates is that it looks for mounted volumes and applies everything in it’s system to those as metadata instructions. That includes it’s abstractions of Events, Projects, et al.
So I would presume that in order to share things in any networked share system, you’re still going to be leaving the Volume data intact on the server side, and dealing exclusively in exchange of user defined metadata.
In the AVID system, (if I understand it correctly) the central construct of project sharing appears to be BINS – which reside one or two levels below the volume level.
Bin locking makes sense to me with users basically “checking out” those mostly “fixed” bins in order to work collaboratively. a Bins content and configuration won’t change much during the editorial process.
With the X keyword system, it seems kinda unreasonable to expect users to protect and “check out” it’s equievlent organizational construct: keyword ranges. Unlike “bins” containing discrete clips keywords keyword ranges. These are VERY different from bins. I’d characterize them as “live” where a Bin is mostly “fixed.” If all the network editors in an X system are constantly re-configuring keywords, creating and deleting keyword ranges and auto-generating Smart Collections constantly. – so there’s no fixed “basic” structure to share as there is in the AVID approach.
So the very concepts of “shared storage operation” that might be useful in an AVID world – doesn’t really work in an X environment. You’d need something new.
If I’m incorrect about any of this, somebody please help me out.
And I can’t emphasize it enough, I’m NOT any kind of network sharing expert. FAR from it.
I’m just trying to figure out what an X style “project sharing” might look like in the future.
Certainly ALL the metadata is there in X. The database in X must be PRECISELY what makes all sharing systems possible. What seems to be missing is a way to translate how X “thinks” about describing it’s media (keywords and magnetic storylines) into what the older system users are looking for.
Also, the Apple X development system is often less focused on re-creating what people already expect – and more focused on doing what Apple does best – which is allow it’s team to jettison rigid historic structures IF they become convinced that doing so can provide their users real benefits.
I suspect their customer teams doing shared workflows in X right now are mostly “modularized” with discrete teams working on individual projects – that while sourced from and stored on a central server, don’t try to propagate the shared project itself across the server the same way that an AVID Isis system might?
Sorry for yet another long post. I’m trying to learn here so please, if I have any of this wrong, somebody correct me.
FWIW.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.
