[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “The stupid part is that FCP 7 with FC Server works (worked) EXACTLY that way.”

Yep,

And too bad Legacy was welded on to Quicktime – was based on a largely flat-file underpinning – and likely had significant pieces of licensed code peppered throughout it – all of which Apple dumped in the transition to X.

A lot of people would have been very happy if Apple could have simultaneously saved everything while simultanesouly re-building everything in a new and more modern expression.

But providing such absolutely mutually contradictory things at the exact same time is the stuff of dreams, not real-world software development, I’m afraid.

So certain users have lost a whole lot of good – in exchange for the as yet unfulfilled promise of better.

You label it “stupid” and I understand that.

I label it “risky” but also quite possibly “transformative.” And I personally like new ideas a whole lot better than I liked the old ones.

There are times for “safe” and times for “bold.” Since the new X works well for me already – I like that they took these chances to provide me with an alternative choice.

It’s more fun this way!

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “I’ll be there. Maybe we can get an FCPX or Not forum mini-meet going? Anybody else going and interested?”

I’m up for that – the more the merrier.

I’ve got plans Mon late evening and Tues from 4pm on – but daytimes, happy hours and Wed are cool.

God knows theres no lack of places along the monorail where some of us could assemble at a table for a chat.

Anyone’s welcome to raise a hand if they want in as far as I’m concerned.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

Marvin managed to invoke 9-11.

Now if someone will just mention nazis – then we’ll have achieved the perfect trifecta of dumb newsgroup arguing.

(working on whether I’m proud to have personally contributed to such a hallowed tradition.)

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Andrew Kimery] “Now 4k and 3D are coming down the pipe and they will be a chore to handle.
“

I’m the contrarian here often, but I’m not convinced that 3D is ever going to be much more than a solution looking for a problem in the reasonable future.

Some day it may well rock in fascinating areas like viraual surgical training and absolutely in immersive gaming. But as a passive entertainment medium I have my doubts. It’s just not that much “more” satisfying than the current state of 2D TV quality for most users in most cases.

4k makes sense in the same way DSLRs make sense for photography because if you’re going to all the hassle and expense of producing content, why not capture more data and future proof your content by capturing “retina display” friendly rasters now.

But 3D?

Not really interested at this time and a bit worried that it might well be the “quadraphonic sound” of this generation.

But I could be totally wrong here, and a part of me hopes I am.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “I think this is true, but Apple needs to push very, very hard to make sure that the tools they’re providing for data handling are as suitable to the task as the tools for image manipulation.

If metadata is going to be a true advantage for Apple and for FCPX in ongoing projects versus one-offs, they must really innovate that toolset.”

As is often the case, Walter – this is another area where we largely agree.

I truly appreciate your orientation. It’s important for all of us coming from “ground up” use profiles (as opposed to large shop experience) to come to better understand this stuff.

But it’s also critical, IMO, that Apple not spend so much initial time getting the plumbing perfected that they ignore the editing engine itself in the process.

So far, the bulk of the early development work in X has been split. Roles was largely data centric – while multicam leaned toward editorial – even if both were fundamentally just more metadata capabilities like everything in X.

I don’t want them to stop development of editorial to make better systems for the large scope data needs of the few – before they get more and better capabilities in the primary functions.

It’s a delicate balance for any developer – providing features for multiple constituencies.

Hey, are you going to NAB? If so, I’d love to try to shoe horn in time for a sit down drink. I’ve enjoyed our discussions so much that I feel I own you at least one!

Let me know.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Michael Hancock] “Then it’s poor design. Avid media is handled by a database too, and it can generate detailed reports of your sequence and bins showing you where that footage lives. What’s the point of having a database with all of this information being tracked by the software if it’s being held hostage by that same software? This is exactly what these databases are good for – tracking assets and giving that information to the editor.”

I understand that this is how you see it. I see it differently. I use X nearly every day for all my editing. It’s capabilities have made me feel like I’m using a much better editing tool than I’ve had during my last 10 years as an FCP-Legacy editor.

I’ve never edited with Avid. (or Premier or Vegas for that matter) so I’m not qualified to compare them. If such a comparison is important to you – then talk to others.

I’m qualified to talk about my personal experiences transitioning from Legacy to X for my full time work as a corporate video producer/editor who typically creates and edits 30-100 or so projects in an average year.

I know there are plenty of high volume shop or TV station editors who might edit that many projects in an average month – or even one massive project in a ear that has a budget that dwarfs my aggregate total by orders of magnitude.

That’s the point. I’m not arguing that X is the right tool for every editor in every situation. Just that it works amazingly well for editors like me.

YMMV.

[Michael Hancock] “So all projects have to be online all the time? Even for a one man shop that’s silly. When I was the only production guy at a small ad agency I would work on 20+ clients in a year, complete hundreds of commercials/videos, and generate terabytes of footage. Having to keep all of that online all the time because my software won’t share information with me isn’t good. This should be addressed by Apple. It’s a reasonable and logical feature request.”

You’re still just not “getting it” – and I’m not sure I can help you.

You keep trying to link what X is to your pre-conceptions. And that’s going to fail for you, IMO.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but NO, you aren’t “required” by X to have “all projects online all the time.” The number and arrangement of your projects is totally up to you. I regularly move mine onto backup drives. They stay out of sight until I connect those drives. Then all the projects on that drive are “INSTANTLY” connected to my workspace with all their clips linked.

This means I control the library by the simple process of choosing which drives to connect.

That plus one of the trivial disk cataloging programs like Disk Librarian, and give me all the tools I need to locate archived projects in seconds – and lets me determine what I want ti arrange on-line or off-line.

Again, you keep pushing about what the software does or doesn’t do. And all I’m telling you is that much of it is NOT like other NLE’s I’ve used.

What I see in it was confusing at first, but every week becomes more useful to me – and I better appreciate what it is and how it’s likely to keep growing over time for me. Even if Apple never adds a single new feature what’s in X right now has made my editing life easier with tools I don’t want to leave behind to go back to edit like I did in Legacy.

It may never work for you like it does for me.

Because our needs might never be the same.

But I’m one kind of very typical editor. One with clients that have on-going video needs with usually show to medium range production time frames (not instant every hour needs like a TV station – and not once a year massive needs like a movie producer) but somewhere in the great middle ground where most editors I know work. A large amount of my work is for on-going businesses where revision and deployment are important factors. Many of them are moving from physical media distribution to on-line access. They want to be able to publish now – revise later and republish the revised content quickly and efficiently. (they used to send out DVDs – now they just want to publish on-line for managed group access via the web.) They used to deploy to break room TV sets (in my corporate training work) but are moving rapidly toward deploying that content on smart devices like phones and iPads.

For those clients and for me FCP-X is an absolutely excellent tool.

It’s simplifying and breaking down the production and distribution cycle and making my content easier to produce, revise, manage and deploy.

And that’s how it’s earned my continuing use.

I’ve said here countless times that X is not the ONLY tool that does any of these things.

But it is, IMO, an absolutely excellent one among others that competes on it’s unique strengths exceedingly well.

Learn it or not. Use it or not. That’s up to you.

But it’s a mistake to judge it if you fundamentally mis-understand it. And your questions appear to me to be evidence that you don’t understand it very well at this point.

No more or less than that.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Michael Hadley] “Bill:

Please share your rules–tips, advice. Would love to benefit. I’ve been working with X for about two months. Much of it is great. And only a little of it (aside from audio mixing) stinks.”

Michael,

I try to do that when I have time – but I do this stuff between real work so sometimes I just don’t have the ability to do more than react to what others are saying.

Briefly, the one thing I have learned is that it’s really easy to do simple things (like click the “make proxie media” button – that might take hours (or even days on a huge project) to implement. When that process is running, things bog down in the rest of the software because a LOT of calculation work is subsequently happening under the hood.

So I’ve tried to become sensitive to the choices I make that can have “hidden penalties” in slowing down the X workflow. Eventually, my machine gets the calculations done and things get back to “normal” but that might take a long time. It’s often a trial and error process. But in becoming more sensitive to that stuff, I find myself doing stuff that’s processor intensive or “write new data” intensive less and less when I need to maintain speed – and so my efficiency with the software has increased.

I still do stuff like proxy processing, just largely when I can walk away and let the machine process stuff during periods when I’m not trying to edit at the same time.

It’s a lot of stuff like that that just has to be learned about how X operates.

As machines get faster and with new technologies like faster processors and bigger pipes, maybe this stuff will drop away as workflow issues. But right now, the more experience I have, the better X runs, because I keep learning through trial and error how not to do things that slow performance down.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Richard Herd] ” If I’m looking for a particular piece of footage, I want X to tell me its own Drive_A then I can plug it in and get the footage. “

This gets so frustrating after a while.

That’s NOT how X is designed, Richard. What you’re describing is how Legacy was designed.

Back then, our Capture Scratches were simple folders of clips and all that was required was a pointer in the software to the location. So storing clips in separate places off-line and connecting to them to the editor made perfect sense. Where you stored them and how you named them and whether you moved them somewhere else or not was trivial. Just update the connection info and keep moving.

In X, the Project Library the Event Browser and the Timeline are always connected – for extremely valid reasons that provided a lot more power and flexibility – once you become accustomed to it. The cost for that is that you can’t just move stuff willy nilly. So instead of loading up “clips” you load up whole PROJECTS – and the expectation is that ALL the clips for that project will be in fixed locations and dependably accessible for X. You shouldn’t really ever have to go looking for them, because they’ll already be there – embedded in the fabric of the project database.

And this (along with a lot of other new thinking) has been a major hurdle to all those who spent truly significant time operating any traditional NLE interface before migrating to X. This program is fundamentally different. It’s built on different ideas and different ways of defining tasks. And if you approach it with anything but an open mind – willing to re-think how things might function – you’ll be running up against walls unnecessarily, IMO.

Blow “I need to connect clips” out of your thinking if you want to operate efficiently in X.

Substitute “‘I need to build a reliable database of all my assets – so I can access and use ANY of those assets – across any and all present and future projects.”

The joy is that in the new system – anything (edit decisions, color correction, audio levels – you apply to your captured assets in the Event Browser – remain available for use in all subsequent projects. So you’re building a persistent body of assets “as you like them” as you operate X. The database of your edit decisions grows and grows and makes you life easier and easier the longer you work in X.

When legacy was born, storage was expensive and computers were slower. Today, storage is cheap and computers and networks are ever faster. X is building toward that future. All your past editing decisions – preserved – constantly on – and available to you to use or modify as you like.

So hopefully “where’s that clip so I can link to it” will be completely unnecessary in the future X is building towards – because it will always be right where it’s always been – connected to your editing system.

Ready when you need it.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

Kinda makes me miss the classic Audio Magazine “I. Lirpa” yearly gear reviews of yesteryear.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “You could end up having to mount an awful lot of virtual disks.

Will transcoding to optimized media still be ideal?
“

I do this pretty regularly since i store all my field shoot cards as disk images.

On one particularly long group of interviews with multiple cameras – I think I had regularly had 12-15 disk images mounted simultaneously while sorting through footage. Didn’t seem to bother X a bit.

I’m currently in planning/prep for a 16-24 camera shoot of a jazz performance for next month. With multiple cameras over multiple songs that could go into 32-48 mounted virtual disk images if I want to work with all the content “live to mix.”

The projects shoots a week after I get back from NAB and edits the second week in May. I’ll let you know how it works out – but to date, multiple virtual disks mounted via the finder seem to work seamlessly under Lion and X in my limited experience.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor