Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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[Scott Witthaus] “What I would like to see from that interview is why X was released in the shape it was in. It was mid-beta at best. Can Randy explain that to us?”
Why in heaven’s name should he?
Remember, the whole world all got the exact same information about X at the exact same time.
People who filtered that info largely by virtue of their rigid prior experiences – got messed up badly.
It was going someplace they weren’t used to – so they bailed on it. Whether or not it’s papa had concerns from time to time is old news. More important are the neighbors who kept judging it so harshly and bashing it. They kept those blinders firmly on for YEARS and wasted huge amounts of time in negative land.
Again, this is NOT arguing that there weren’t things missing. There surely were. Kids have flaws. Part of the deal.
But from the beginning it had scads of interesting new ideas to explore. Ideas dope enough that the other kids in the area are just now adopting them with 5 years gone!
Those of us who instead filtered what we were seeing and hearing in the light of Apple telling us about where they thought editing might be going – and figuring we could trust in their talent and track record? Some of us were given a gift.
A big fat head start.
Magnetism. Metadata I can almost touch. Tedious actions automated. Old friction (like constantly waiting for rendering to complete!) banished. Re-imagined and awesome multi-cam. Roles driving automation into export. The list goes on and on – gleefully with no end in sight. And it’s not like there weren’t increasingly numbers of guys like me vocally out there who did out best to explain what it was becoming – loudly and often.
Randy doesn’t have to explain anything. All he did was create yet another great NLE.
Plus, pretty much ALL software gets rev’d like X today. Code, release, update, perfect. Pretty sure it’s the new normal.
Put it out into the market, pre-pubescent zits and all and let it grow up in public school.
The thing is, X complexion is pretty clear now. And as it grows up – holy heck, it’s mighty good looking right now and time will tell if it further matures into a real stunner. But it’s got the pedigree – and it’s being very well tended by it’s folks in Cupertino.
Sorry, that you didn’t make friends with it when it was a gangly, unpolished kid – but that isn’t exactly anyone elses’ fault, is it?
; )
I know, I know. Points off for hyperbole AND anthropomorphic excess. But it was kinda fun to write. So there’s that.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Your vision of editing is clear, Herb.
Editing is a thing that happens in a “shop.”
The “shop” determines how and what you edit, the tools you use, and sees video editors as worker cogs – it’s a perfectly valid 18th century mechanical/industrial era workforce model – and yes, it still works just fine today.The thing is that today there are OTHER business models that may work even better going forward.
And some of us, perhaps, don’t necessarily see the “shop model” as the brightest possible future for the content creation industry.Instead of “shops” some of us increasingly just see “teams.”
Teams which may (or may not) be fixed in time, place, or area of focus. Instead they remain as fluid and flexible as the internet. They require a new structure. New thinking. And perhaps yes, even new tools.
Not always, but sometimes.
Your own beloved Adobe gets this. It may be precisely why (aside from the virtual price hike/recurring revenue thing) they moved to CC.
It can easily be seen as a way to enable more focus on disparate teams and less on “shops” as where videos will increasingly be created as the industry evolves.
But don’t get me wrong, Adobe loves shops. So does Apple. Obviously they love ANY entity with a valid credit card – exactly like EVERY other business on the planet, bar none!
So hang in there and continue on!
Perhaps over the next 5 years you’ll get even more features lifted directly from X and added to Premiere than you did in this “upgrade”!
If they work as well as they do in X, you’ll really, really enjoy them, trust me!
(Sorry, just couldn’t resist that last little bit – somebody puts a golf ball on a tee and hands me a club…)
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
And of course, nobody should ever argue things based on a specific case.
Obviously every editor has different needs and preferences.
Interestingly, I was just chatting yesterday with an editor in the Czech Republic who works for a huge famous management consulting operation with offices all over the globe. He has hundreds and hundreds of “active” corporate edits in process at any one time.
We were discussing how he uses Frame.io for project management, in conjunction with FCP X – a subject very much of interest to me as I’m building my own “micro-sized” group of international collaborators for my XinTwo thing.
Unlike what either you or I do, he has to navigate between literally hundreds of concurrent projects.
For him, (and many others) what floats his boat is not so much the keywording stuff that I love – but rather the Motion templates features of X.
A library with dozens and dozens of re-usable opens and closes for far flung operations all accessible with a style menu and menu selectable from INSIDE X really delights him.
As with the Frame.io collaborative stuff, it’s obvious that X is not at all exclusive with any of this stuff. It’s just seems that he considers the specific Apple implementation as a wonderful fit for the type of work HE does.
So for the wider audience, the question remains, is the kind of work he’s doing more or less likely to be what the editing industry is headed? Or is it the kind of work you’re doing, producing traditional episodic TV programs, more likely to be where editing opportunities will be expanding?
The path you take implies the tools you gravitate to. As it always has.
Remember, I try hard NEVER to write against how Premiere Pro or AVID do things, because I don’t use nor understand them. It just seems that when I write how X does things (something I actually know about!) people get all upset and “push-backy” – or at least quite ready to twist the implications of what I’m actually saying to suite a differing narrative.
Of course, I’m fully aware that this forum is the ONLY place that ever happens on the internet.
/sarcasm.
And so it goes.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Just to be cantankerous, Herb, I’d be totally fine with that. But only if said editor had a reasonable grasp of how X actually worked. In my experience, most editors stopped really assessing it LONG before they had more than a faint clue about how it actually functions.
It would be like somebody forced by circumstances to migrate from iMovie to Premiere Pro and constantly bitching about having to understand “all that new crap that I can’t imagine I’ll ever really need!”
Hard to assess whether you might need it, if you don’t really understand what it actually does.
And so it goes.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
From what we learned at the WWDC, Apple is on the path to a pretty fundamental revamp of its core file handling system, one that has serious, system wide implications for every Application that runs on any of the 4 Apple OSs. On just MacOS, we also have new Skylake processors landing in mass, HFS+ going away, Sierra rolling out – so development happening on multiple fronts in the Apple ecosystem.
Revising something like FCP X in such an environmental stew must be … Interesting.Time will reveal whether or not this stuff impacts how X developes for the future.
And away we go!
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Herb Sevush] “NLE’s can be made to do the same sort of things, it is in the way they prioritize their features that the differences lie, and it is in learning which one’s priorities most closely match your own that happiness in editing lies.
“Agreed.
For decades, all NLEs prioritized things in an extremely similar fashion.
Now there’s a fundamentally different option available.
But that alone should quash the “there’s just not much difference” argument.
That an individual editor would prioritize conditioned comfort, familiarity and a shallower learning curve higher than transitional stress and a potential boost in efficiency is both rational and defensible.
It’s the argument that there’s really no difference that strikes me as weak. Because there is.
A difference that some editors won’t value, but a real difference with real benefits. And I suspect, ever-increasing benefits, as the direct result of Apple taking the bold re-invention path in 2011, rather than concentrating on the path based more on past workflow compatibility.
Time will tell.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Craig Alan] “Sometimes I think people think that FCP X is so much faster because media itself is so much faster. “
Or it’s that some of us who have spent decades editing one way – and now are editing another way – are actually getting more work done in less time and understand precisely why.
If it was just the processor speed, we’d know that. We’d be doing the same functions faster. But an experienced X editor doesn’t necessarily do the same functions in the same way.
And of course, some editors could care less about getting done faster. They’re content to shift any time savings to more iterations, idea testing, and staring into space actually thinking about the real challenges of making their work come alive.
There’s nothing stopping any editor from editing in X more or less the way they edited in Legacy. (I’ve seen plenty of X newbies try to do just that!) Import only from finder folders after dragging clips around manually. Use the event browser exclusively to store whole clips. Reject or Favorite nothing. Keyword nothing. Build a dozen string outs as projects and cut and paste from them onto a “Master” timeline. Pay no attention to the used clip indicators. Do all your work in a single huge library with one global event. Ignore the timeline index. Use “position mode” and the tilde key as much as you can. Stay away from Roles. Ignore the custom file naming generator. Ignore the Share system and instead use it exclusively to plop every saved “master” onto your desktop and then launch another program to burn that master file onto a DVD and put it into the mail! That will ALL get the job done. And it’s all possible in X right now.
There’s no FCP X police that will call anyone out for a workflow like that.
But please stop telling me that editing in X is really no different than how I used to edit. Because that’s what I used to do – and you’re wrong. It is. For me, it’s better. Consistently and measurably.
It’s an excellent editing tool right now – and I’ve been completely and utterly convinced it will continue to improve in the future.
but the reality is that I still hear voices from the two fringe poles. That either A) Apple ruined it with the total re-write and all the new ideas – or; B) it’s really largely just the same as all its competitors, no better or worse. These are mutually exclusive concepts, and both wrong IMO.
Apple changed it hugely, and in doing so, made it functionally BETTER in lots and lots of Both massive and tiny ways.
The proof is pretty obvious from how much its competitors are hurrying to adopt functions it pioneered.
(It’s as crazy as maybe Apple introducing a sleek new all glass buttonless phone at some point – then over the next decade ALL the smart phones ending up looking EXACTLY like that one – while their manufacturers are endlessly on TV bragging about how their phones are all so innovative and superior..
To my thinking, innovative means taking chances. Taking leaps. Taking a risk.
Are there features in other NLEs you folks see as evidence that other companies are taking big risks like that? The few brief glimpses of Resolve 12+ I’ve had kinda look like X with tracks to me. Is there serious innovation hiding there?
Lumetri? Not the NLE per se, but Premiere drivers seem to love it. Did it break new ground in CC?
What about AVID and Lightworks and Vegas? Are exciting new ideas coming from there?Just curious.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[John Young] “Oh, Timecode overlays with source timecode (and other metadata), center timeline on zoom in/out, multiple browser windows, a simple way to use alpha channels in proxy mode, better keyframe gui. Just off the top of my head. There are lots of things that need polish. I gave them until the last underwhelming update to make a semi-final decision for our office. I still use FCPX a lot for smaller personal projects, but for our “professional” work, we’ve settled on Premiere. They are consistently making solid improvements while I twiddle my thumbs waiting blindly on updates to FCPX. Like I said, though, I use it a lot. I just wish improving it were a bigger priority.”
Tactics
Tactics
Tactics
Tactics…I still yearn for refinements and updates in Strategy.
Those don’t just win battles, they win whole wars.
FWIW.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Fair enough.
All my career, I’ve been seeing things that spark edit ideas during early stage footage review. It’s only since I adopted X that I feel I finally have a purpose built system to save those ideas in a way that makes real sense to me.
It’s nice, that’s all. The fault is likely mine in failing to describe it in a way that hammers home that it’s not a requirement, but an extraordinarily useful option.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Herb,
Pardon me but you are still re-casting my point exclusively and narrowly from a point of view I don’t share.
You are stuck thinking about how X supposedly demands you to adapt to it.
Let make this crystal clear. It does not.
You can make X work EXACTLY as you ever have. If someone as an editor loves “whole tape” capture – never sub-clipped anything – and ONLY wants to spend their time endlessly manually trimming everything out of hour long takes to reassure themselves that there isn’t a single frame of vaguely useful content obscured by pre filtering – they can totally do that in X!
I don’t know WHY anyone would want to do that, but if they did, they could.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.