Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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I agree that if the music is at all edgy, the ability to have lots of space and NO light to start with is a HUGE plus – not a minus.
Hell, My first thought is to light it with road flares.
My second thought would be to light it with fire pits and tiki torches.
My next thought would be how about both?
It’s a MUSIC video. So there are no rules except make the PEOPLE in the band look cool.
Period.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Joe Marler] “Also the NLE is pushing all aspects of the underlying platform really hard — CPU, GPU I/O, etc. In general my experience is FCPX seems a little more reliable than Premiere, but I’ve sometimes had FCPX crash five times a day for weeks. FCPX is critically dependent on the library database, yet there is no integrity checker utility like there is for client/server databases or even Lightroom.”
I had a spate of crashes with a particular project too.
Finally figured out it was a toxic font.
Switched all instances of that font to a similar one – and the constant crashing stopped.These are complex interdependent systems. A problematic system could be caused by a a storage access issue, a hardware issue,, a RAM issue, or like in my case. a semi-toxic bit of code that rides along with one third party version of something like my font problem.
Oh well.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “Good tip. Thanks. Although docked panels, a la Adobe would be so much easier ☺
“But enough easier to be worth the never ending extra monthly fee to get them?
????Happy Holidays, Oliver!
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
This type of timing stuff has caught me a couple of times with posts.
It’s hard to keep track of everything let alone know which group has already discussed what. I know my forum participation has been WAY down lately, and I’m only just now coming back to these communities after a huge 4th quarter of focused work.
Plus, since Apple pushed out revised messaging about their earlier “deprecation message” it’s not surprising that a new round of notifications are reaching people – some of whom will likely have missed the original message.
Business as usual, in my mind.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Sorry to be late to the party.
When I did my studio conversion, one major win that cost very little compared to regular drywall construction, was to substitute a layer of drywall for one of MDF.
MDF has MUCH more mass than simple drywall.
It’s a pain in the butt to work with, since two guys can typically hold up drywall sheets to nail to a ceiling where you can’t get a sheet goods jack in place to do the work, but for the crew to do that with MDF, it took FIVE guys to do the same job, but the mass improvement really helped.I was not far from a commuter airport that landed a good number of small jets – yet I never heard them after my studio was finished.
The shell was (outside to inside) Stucco/Standard exterior plywood/Fiberglass insulation between 4×4 posts (the original hay barn framing)/then a layer of MDF/and finally a layer of standard sheetrock.
Inside that we built what I called “the capsule”, a control room with non-parallel sides and the double glass window where I could mix things and had my voice booth – but even in the general studio, the only noise that got into things that could potentially shut down the microphones in the main studio space was an active hail storm.
So In your scenario, three layers of Sheetroock, was one of exterior plywood, one of MDF for mass, and one of sheetrock for the interior finish.
Worked really well.
For what it’s worth.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Michael Gissing] “I’m curious Bill what you are going to do then. Will you go through all your projects over the past 6 years, find all footage that is in codecs that will not be supported, open them and replace all those shots with transcoded files in Apple friendly future codecs?
You might be lucky and only have some drone or GoPro footage but seriously are you going to transcode all that and replace those shots so your old FCPX projects will open in the future?”
I seriously doubt I’ll ever have to.
Having already been through BetaSP, Mini-DV, Digital 8, and DVCAM, eras from early in my career I know I’ve hardly EVER needed to look back very far. A few years pass, and anything I’ve shot is typically passe. Business uniforms and store decor changes – policies evolve – and the old footage becomes pretty useless. It’s probably different in narrative, but for modern informational videos , topics and focuses shift so fast, that any video is lucky if it has a few years of shelf life.
That GoPro, DSLR, or other non-ProRes footage will have been transcoded long since, and archived in my X Library backups. And yes, some of my Camera Archives from oddball formats (not ProRes originated) may become obsolete in a decade or two – but it’s just like those Mini-DV tapes. THEY are now mostly obsolete too. IT’s a major hassle to go back and recover content from them. But not impossible. I expect after this change, the same thing will be true. That’s all.
Heck, even the IRS only requires you keep financial records for 7 years.
And as of today, I already have 7 years of FCP X accessible Archives and Libraries that I can access and re-edit so easily that I just have no fear of content obsolescence any more. I’m feeling pretty good about things going forward.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Craig Alan] “Maybe Apple is just giving warning to transcode all your old projects to … if you want to use FCP X and that media in the future. “
THIS.
I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve gotten over the years from people looking for someone still running Legacy versions of FCP — not because they want to do any more work in it— but SIMPLY because they never exported an XML from Legacy that would allow them to use a tool like 7 to X in order to get a leg up translation from the old format for on-going work.
For many editors – it was NOT common knowledge for many years about how the simple task of exporting a plain XML archive could help with future compatibility.
I suspect Apple is making so much noise about future deprecation so that aware editors don’t make the same mistakes in the future.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[greg janza] “That kind of mandate is ridiculous. A project with a budget as large as the Apple holiday spot is all about the creative vision of the Director or Creative Director and the production team executing to the best of their ability on that vision. If by chance the production company uses FCPX then it’s a slight bonus for Apple marketing but the primary goal is to create a memorable spot that resonates with the mass audience and whatever tools the creative team uses to achieve that goal should be supported. The same would hold true for any project.
“THIS.
It’s also important to understand that when the creative budget is in the millions for a huge company signature ad — it’s still utterly dwarfed by the media budget that gets spent to support it. If the production process contains X financial risk – the MEDIA spend contains X times 10 risk.
Whether the pros charged with executing the spot elect to use a RED, a Mitchell BMC film camera, or Fisher Price pixel vision rig to shoot the spot with – THAT is what will get used. And it doesn’t matter a jot if somebody in the echelon loves or hates Red, Arri or Fisher Price as a company. Gear selection is WAY down the list of what matters at that level.
Once again, its never the piano that matters – it’s the piano player.
Of course, pianos do occasionally fail…
Here’s proof.
Enjoy a bit of holliday viewing when the equipment failure isn’t something on YOUR shoot!
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
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All those “third party codecs” are owned Intellectual property, developed (often at great cost) by business entities.
Sure we all want them built into and usable by all the NLEs we might like to drive.
But that’s simply not the way things work.The codec owner makes it available (or not) depending on whether that licensing fits their strategic plan.
And that’s never going to change.
Additionally, the fact that Apple warns the industry that the internal Apple product development roadmap demands that legacy code be made fully 64-bit native (presumably to preserve operating efficiency and compatibility with their future vision) going forward is something they have the absolute right to require.
It gives you a choice.
If you prioritize backwards compatibility in existing hardware or workflows – you might want to look elsewhere.
OTOH, if you value future performance and continued innovation – and feel Apple is where you will find that – then you revise your software and hardware as needed and go with that flow.
Options are good.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Fascinating days, for sure.
To my eye, there are three very generalized major themes that it feels to me are emerging…
Adobe is video creation as a part of a “spokes feed multiple hubs” approach.
Lots of discrete software stand alone programs that work independently, but also interchange with each other as needed. You pick a different program from the CC Menu, depending on where you are focused currently.Apple’s approach to video creation has a ” spokes feed ONE hub” approach – with FCP X forming the command center for everything they do. You focus on ONE program. Motion and Compressor are extensions. The Extensions Manager brings third party elements fully inside the one central hub that is FCP X.
BlackMagic’s theme appears to me to be more like “Video over IP will rule the world !”and flips Apple’s traditional “software sells hardware” philosophy – fully into a “hardware drives software” space.
I don’t comment on AVID since I know so little about them, but it appears that they are trying to navigate a transition from a traditional post suite orientation into something more agile and modern, but with so many marquee editors invested in the AVID way of thinking and working, they always need to move VERY cautiously. For better or worse.
It’s a major transitional era in this stuff. No telling what will happen next.
It’s also the era of the tech company comets – as witnessed by GoPro. Nowhere on the screen, then rocketing to dizzying heights, and apparently a bit of a fiery re-entry back to earth after gravity proves inescapable.
Strange days indeed.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.