[Bill Davis]

[Frank Gothmann] “Adding 10 features to an app is certainly not the source of grief. Adding 10 while removing 20 others is.”

Not if the 10 are useful to the vast majority of everyday editors – and the 20 are critical to only those who have niche “big facility” needs.

That’s what the professional business folks working at the top level label “efficient assortment.”

Providing the most good for the largest consumer base possible.

“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]

[David Lawrence] “Seriously though, it’s a nice little add-on for DSLR photographers but that’s about it.”

Watch out David…

You’ve just described “magnetism” using the word “nice.”

That could eventually come back to haunt you.

; )

“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]

[Frank Gothmann] “There isn’t all that much “revolution” going on with X once you look around the “enemy camps”.
“

OK,

I *think* I get it.

Everything Apple did regarding X was evil and wrong as witnessed by the countless deep arguments and hundreds of thousands of on-going posts where legions who feel violated by the revision must stand up and endlessly condemn the company and what they’ve done.

but on the other hand, “there isn’t all the much “revolution” going on with X.”

Pardon me for a moment, I need to go make sure I remember how to spell “cognitive dissonance”…

“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]

I honestly thought this was a joke headline.

Then I watched the video and realized it was completely true.

The Adobe team has actually coded “magnetism” into Photoshop’s new video editing capabilities.

Wow.

I’m stunned.

I thought magnetism was the singular spawn of the devil – the tool purpose built to wreck video editing for human beings for all time.

And now it’s crept into a tool in the enemy camp.

Worst an expensive tool designed for very smart, capable and talented people who work at the very highest levels of their craft!

Sell your stocks and raze the farm, arm yourself and head for the hills!!!

Keep your eyes to the skies searching out the flocks instinctively heading for safer climes.

Video editing armageddon must be nigh!

“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]

[Andy Field] “Listen to your users…and you’ll see the folks in broadcast and film back on board

Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852
“

And in doing so they may damage the potential of FCP-X irreparably.

Too many people are still hollering for it to be more and more like the editing systems we’ve had for decades.

I don’t.

I want it to develop into something better.

The fundamental reality of X is that they took a one trick pony – a video editing application – and cleaned it up, cleared out the cobweb code, and bolted it to a sweet little search engine.

Last time I looked, the elevation of “search” into brain dominance all over the world has been the single most transformative occurrence in society in a generation.

Search is what makes the modern internet actually functional on a day to day basis. Not for “computer professionals” who could always manipulate the bits they needed, but for every day people.

I completely understand why all the professional editors here are so inflexibly stuck in obsessing on the fact that it doesn’t “edit” the way other software does.

But editing is only one part of the game in the new connected world saturated with a zillion videos produced every second.

FCP-X elevates “edit” more towards parity with concepts such as search, sort, find, alter and deploy.

THAT is what is going to be transformative in the long run.

Largely because it’s how my life operates every day today. And yours too.

I need to discover? I search. I need to target? I sort. I need to deliver? I deploy.

X does all of this inside the same tool that lets me cut, rearrange and perfect.

If it’s just 50% as good an editing software (and I suspect it’s going to be 90% some day!) but becomes 80% better at the search and soft and manage stuff – it’s going to rock the wider video world.

Because search is increasingly what powers modern communications today for all of us.

That’s what I see.

If I’m wrong nothing much will change in editing in the next decade.

If I’m right – pretty much everything will. Whether we all like it or not.

Time will tell.

“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]

I dunno, but I was doing some set plots in OmniGraffle and stumbled into a big discussion of the whole “versions” instead of “save as” thing on their discussion group.

One link referenced the Apple thinking behind the big change in Lion towards versioning.

Appears it’s also linked to the new “auto-save” functions build deeply into the OS.

Here’s the link for those who are interested…

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4753?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

“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]

Andy,

I understand. Most people don’t at all share my thinking about where X might be going. And it’s all pure speculation on my part.

I just see things like the Project Library as a tantalizing glimpse at something that could become a mini-playout feature – allowing you to have your “projects’ published to either an internal or external portal (maybe Vimeo, maybe a corporate intranet) and in that instance, you would benefit if your “published works” were persistent and connected to only ONE revision capable owner.

Essentially, I think that in the classic world of “individual desktop computers” each machine and the files on it were an “island” (unless you were working in a true workgroup situation – something only a tiny fraction of the computing user world currently does.) cut off from everything else.

But general purpose computing is moving to a “cloud centric” model where even an individual user would benefit from being able to store their “projects” in a central location, then access the same files from multiple devices (desktops, laptops, iPads, etc) for revision as necessary.

The whole “versions” rather than “save as” model in, for example reflected in Pages or the other newer Apple software seems to support this. The central storage vault is designed to hold multiple versions of the same document and maintain versions in time ala Time Machine.

Put the two together – software that allows “versions” and shared storage that allows a “current version” to be “published” for review and use until revised – kinda needs a way to leave the published version in place while we are allowed to continue to work on new “versions” of the original.

The new Project Library in X looks very much to me to be a construct that supports this kind of more modern “cloud based – version oriented” storage concept.

Again, I could be totally wrong. But I’m trying to learn to think more in “versions” and less in “save as” truncated copies of what I used to do. And exporting a truncated “range export” ala Legacys “export this selection” seems a step backwards if I’m right about the trend toward persistent connectivity.

The less you break your connections, the more choices you maintain.

To use an example (hopefully not an actual metaphor!) We don’t want to allow everyone to draw on the original photo – but just giving them individual copies to draw on is kind of inefficient since those copies are “cut off” from further revision and everyone else. Might allowing them to access a particular “version” or even multiple “versions” while preserving the original document – and making those versions more connected and accessible be a smarter organizing principal?

I haven’t studied this or really even thought about it in depth. It’s just me trying to wrap my brain around why Apple seems to be transitioning to this “versioning” idea rather than just staying with “save as” in the new OSX approach.

We’ll see over time.

“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]

Jan,

I just want to make sure you’re using the Intensity card to do what it’s supposed to do.

It provides a “broadcast video” signal out. That signal WILL be interlaced. That’s the US broadcast standard period.

If you’re displaying that signal on any monitor that is NOT designed for interlaced display (a computer monitor, for example, rather than a “TV” monitor – you’re feeing the wrong signal to the device.

Broadcast signals interlace two fields to complete a full picture. Computers generate non-interlaced progressive signals.

There’s a fundamental mismatch between the two. Some display devices can switch to or filter and trancode to and from both, but others cannot.

“Flickering” is a typical sign of trying to display an interlaced picture on a screen that expects a progressive signal.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but it sounds to me like you’re trying to get the Intensity card to drive a progressive computer style monitor and it’s not displaying properly – which would be exactly correct.

Connect the intensity card to an actual broadcast video monitor and you should get a picture that is accurately matched to the signal being presented to it.

(now if the originating signal has problems, that’s another story!)

And if I’m mistaking what you’re trying to describe or how you actually have it setup, sorry.

It’s much harder to “read” about issues and try to diagnose them, than to be in the room with a system and actually see what’s on the screens and what’s happening.

“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]

Also don’t forget that you can just look in the timeline index to see a particular asset has been used in your current project. (next door to the REEL icon – bottom left corner of the X interface)

Don’t know if it’s relevant for you – but can also sometimes gain back a whole lot of space if you have multiple old projects on your drive by using the render manager to blow out presently unnecessary render files. Just open the Project library – click on your old Projects – trash their render files.

Worst case if you make a mistake is that you’ll have to re-render that project again – so only do this if you have a good strategy for storage of all the assets your project needs to re-constitute and re-render the timeline.

That said, I did this a few months back and was shocked to discover that I recovered more then 500 gigs of space off a 1.5 Tb drive!

YMMV.

“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]

[Mark Morache] “Back to the idea of versioning by compounding the entire timeline… couldn’t FCPX just give us a versioning option for our single project? Instead of duplicating our project, couldn’t we hit a button to save a version, sort of like opening time machine. I’d much rather have one timeline with stored states, than several copies of the projects. When I share a project, it could automatically store that state as a version, then I could always go back and see what I sent out.”

Mark,

It’s easy to imagine that the FCP-X team probably *could* do what you suggest. But it’s probably not as high a priority as you or I would like. And I think that’s fair. We’ve both users who’ve spent a lot of time operating the software. Having mastered the basics, we’re looking for the icing and for things that help OUR editing styles. Which is a desire I share with you wholeheartedly. But most editors who might potentially benefit from X haven’t even tried it beyond the level of “experimentation.” yet.

One Apple hallmark in software design is to try to achieve something that is as easy as possible to approach for a newbie, but then reveals complexity and control as you master the basics.

X is a better fit in that (in my opinion) for someone without editing experience than it is for the experienced editor. For us, we’re constantly trying to fit the products features into our professional expectations. And while that’s fair, it’s not necessarily smart here in the early days of software development.

The one thing that NOBODY can argue with is that the X rebuild required so much new thinking and re-orientation – particularly compared to the way the 2 million plus Legacy users had been previously trained in expectation – that here we are six months later and users like you, me and many others who had many years of operating legacy and who have now had more than six months of using X still haven’t fully established all of our own “best practices” for use of the new tool.

It’s a VERY deep tool right now. And while I can see a lot of areas where it can become even deeper – and some form of range-export or range-versioning could well be really popular. I’m not sure I’d want Apple to add even more complexity to the already steep learning curve of X.

in the two previouos “bolt on” revision adding Roles then Multicam – Apple added many new workflows and options to explore.

I very much like the idea of what you’re proposing, but I’m personally content to watch the development curve that Apple has mapped out since the software is currently still working well for me (with occasional hiccups) – and I’m still actively learning all it’s underlying capabilities.

Heck, I’ve spent nearly the entire past month, working with backup and file management strategies trying to find the best ways to plan for old project storage, access, and revision – and on Friday I’m shooting a 9 to 15 DSLR and Go-Pro multi-cam concert project – and dealing with that part of X will probably take me a full month to figure out.

So while I’m certainly looking forward to new features as much as the next guy. I see them largely as future stops along the evolution path thats already chock full of interesting stuff to explore.

If FXP-X is truly Apples pro editing play for the next decade – we’re stilll in the infancy. That’s not an excuse for when things don’t work as we need – just a way to understand that if we’re going to eventually get a tool with as broad appeal in features, stability and relevance as Legacy had become, we’re going to get it over time. Not sprung up magically – fully realized.

Again and again when I get confronted with something that frustrates me – I think back to FCP V1.

I know some don’t give Apple ANY break expecting that as a pro company with deep pockets and lots of resources fielding less than “perfect” software is enough to damn them.

But I just don’t see things that way. If AV Foundation, Core Video and Lion had had as long to mature as MacOS and Quicktime – I’d accept the argument more readily.

But the X team is largely working with brand new technologies on many, many fronts. So I’m giving them a pass on needing time to build out their rooms on the new foundation, particularly if those rooms weren’t fully planned for from the get-go.

Fun to talk about, anyway.

“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