[Bill Davis]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I do agree the foundation has been built, but let’s not make it to be more than what it is.

Right now it’s a really fast and extremely efficient renaming and description system. I welcome that, but it needs to be opened up even more. I’m sure it will get there, otherwise apple will have wasted a bunch do time for nothing as the sheer amount do metadata that it’s primed for is staggering.”

I guess I see the metadata foundations of X as buying into a house with electricity and decent wiring.

I may not own (or even have current access to) all the specific electric appliances, that I suspect I will come to enjoy in the future – but the fact that the electrical distribution network was designed into the basic architecture is the most critical factor.

If all I have is a couple of 2 prong plugs in the kitchen, I’ve got a problem.
(having lived for more than a decade in a house built in 1937 , I can attest to the fact that six to 10 2-prong ungrounded outlets were once adequate for a “modern” home, are NOT optimal any longer – times have changed!)

The rest I can deal with 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]

[Rafael Amador] “It seems that for you things can only be white or black: Who is not with FCPX is against FCPX.”

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

I see ample grey in FCP-X. Believe it or not, there are things I sometimes wish it would do that it doesn’t do yet. I probably praise it too much – but largely as a reaction to so much misplaced hate in the early days that obscured it’s real value. And far too many who can’t get “unstuck” from the positions they initially carved out and maybe they feel they have to defend – regardless of a growing realization that lots and lots of what was said about it initially – have turned out to be totally wrong.

It’s not a disaster. It’s not a lousy design. It’s not iMovie Pro, and it’s not the end of editing as we’ve known it. Period.

I don’t have a problem with anyone who comes here and looks at it objectively and have either praise, concerns, or even outright dislike for it – as long as they can express valid reasons for their thinking.

I do have problems with people who come, make blanket statements about how useless or terrible or ill-designed it is – since I use it every day and I know the truth to be nothing like that.

(I do find amusing the number of posts over the months where folks have said “but it doesn’t do (this) – only to find out that it actually does – that’s been fun to watch!)

End of story.

“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]

[Neil Patience] “FCPX was marketed and sold as a total replacement for FCP7, there is no doubt this was Apple’s intention as they removed FCP7 from the shelves the day FCPX was released. No transition no crossover just total replacement.
“

Uh…. want to show me a single piece of Apple marketing material that supports this?

It might be true. But your phrasing is based on argument and contention, not fact. The “removed FCP7 from the shelves might have been nothing more or less than the patent license on some lines of internal code that Apple chose not to renew and which was set to expire. There’s no way to know for sure. But just because you believe the above is gospel, doesn’t make it so.

[Neil Patience] “That presumption that somehow that would be OK with everyone at all levels led to a marketing and PR disaster that has seen more editors look in the direction of Avid, Adobe, PCs and any number of other bits of software and hardware.

So I would say Walters point is quite accurate.”

Walter is often quite accurate. But not always perfect any more than anyone else. And he’s usually first to admit when he’s engaging in speculation.

In truth, looking at the the universe of “people who edit video” – narrowing to “people who edit video for money” further narrowing to “people who edit with significant budgets” and further narrowing to “those who edit at the top tier of that sub-group” yep, Apple has pissed some of them off.

But that a pretty small sub-set of “editing” and Apple hasn’t even pissed off all of the people at the top.

Those guys at ABC Sports aren’t pissed off. And cutting “billions of dollars on the line” replays for hundreds of millions of eyeballs is as pro as it gets.

And while I’m just a busy corporate video producer, I’m fully convinced by my personal experiences editing paid work on deadlines over and over again over the past 90 days on X that it’s a great general purpose editing tool.

So I’m confident that it’s going to not just survive, but thrive over the coming years.

But don’t believe me.

Keep talking about what a terrible mistake it is. And by all means ignore it and bad mouth it whenever possible.

If you’re right, I’ll eventually “wake up” and see that I really shouldn’t have been able to do so much work, so quickly, and so profitably with it. But as long as I can. I’m gonna disagree with those who say it’s a poor tool.

That simply doesn’t jibe with what i’m experiencing day to day.

“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 Aranyshev] “1. FCPX did not invent metadata

True

2. FCP handled real production metadata as well or better than FCPX”

Only if you artificially limit the definition of what “real production metadata” is or should be.

Some of us simply don’t want the concept to be so limited. Particularly since expanding it don’t take anything away from the limited traditional uses that you seem to be stuck on.

Metadata as a concept that yearns to be WAY more broad in scope and potential than camera IDs and Reel numbers.

And I feel it’s patently short-sighted to constrain it like 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 Aranyshev] “The timecode, reel, scene, take, white balance, ISO, F-stop and lens stored in the file is metadata. When software allows me to see and manipulate this metadata but doesn’t allow to pass the changes to other software the changes it made is not metadata anymore.”

Fine.

But when you have the ability to apply a tag like “Favorite” or Rejected” – or better yet, “Part of Series A” or “old product label” or “”needs color grade” at the clip level, that’s every bit as valuable as “metadata” as the reel number or ISO setting. Perhaps more so.

That’s the whole point. The nature of metadata has opened up. It’s no longer just what the camera manufacturer reports, it’s ANYTHING you want to attach to the clip. And extending that to areas such as audio tweaks, color grades, and titling info opens up HUGE new vistas in organization, clip access and workflow.

I know a company who works training dogs for all sorts of purposes including police work and guide dog stuff. They are gleeful about X since they can instantly search and pull up behavior characteristic examples “by breed” in seconds.

The clips are the clips. The metadata is what you make it.

That’s a HUGE change in thinking that only starts when you ask yourself “what can metadata do for me beyond what the camera manufacturer could see.”

Your very language choice above “this metadata” tells me you’re focused on metadata as what you’ve traditionally been supplied with by others upstream of your edit process.. I’m saying that built into X is a new orientation that encourages creating and sharing useful metadata in new ways by allowing the editor to easily make non-destructive decisions and judgements that append to your clips, then flow to others in a more customizable and useful form than was easy to do before.

That’s a huge, important change, IMO.

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]

[Michael Aranyshev] “How good is FCPX interface for accessing the actually useful metadata, for instance TC, reel, Scene and Take embedded in BWF files from modern production sound recorders? How bad is FCP7?”

If you see “meta-data” as something you merely “access” then perhaps there’s not a massive difference.

However, if you can instead start to see metadata as something brought directly into the user experience and given nearly equal weight in the actual editing interface – essentially elevated into something the user is “expected” to interact with, add to, manipulate and manage, then I’d say the difference is profound.

The vast majority of manipulations you do with your metadata in the Event Browser become available to ALL projects across all drives and all edits – while in Legacy, anything you do in metadata lives in a single project – walled off from everything else.

As an example, color correct a clip in the Event Browser and that color correction is still in place when you drag that same clip into as many projects as you like from that point on.

It’s a very significant fundamental difference in approach.

“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 that FCPX was launched in rough shape, and without consideration for industry standards. Since it didn’t interchange, it was neither a good standalone tool for rough cut, nor a good standalone tool for finishing.

In other words, if you couldn’t do your entire job on FCPX, you couldn’t do any of the job on FCPX.

If 10.0.0 had supported EDL/OMF/AAF interchange (or maybe if 10.0.3 had been the launch), we’d be having difference conversations about FCPX: we could have been talking about what it does, instead of what it doesn’t do.

With interchange, FCPX could have still satisfied everyone using it today, but wouldn’t have alienated so many editors with more complex or collaborative workflows. Instead, Apple could have positioned FCPX as a strong all-around editor for the broad middle as well as a serious offline tool for collaboration.”

But Walter, again this “presumes” that the default (and more importantly, initial) goal of every editor must be to work collaboratively.

And sorry, but it’s not.

In fact, I’d argue that very few modern editors actually start out working collaboratively. We all have to learn to edit as INDIVIDUALS before we can bring our skills to any collaborative enterprise.

Essentially we start out learning to push the buttons for ourselves, on our own. Training our brains to “think” in editing terms.

At some point, when you’ve developed higher level skills, then the market may want you to contribute them in collaboration.

Maybe Apple understood that since they were making a significant shift in overall editing concepts – concentrated on making it an “individual” tool rather than a collaborative one in the first iteration makes good sense.

I can easily imagine an internal Apple meeting where somebody debated the time, effort and money that would have to be tossed into A) maintaining backwards compatibility with Legacy. B) The hassles of maintaining support for two major editing products simultaneously. and C) looking at the growth potential signaled by a burgeoning new class of pervasive editing reuirements in society that do not greatly benefit from the highest level feature set that grew up in response to traditional workflow needs.

And somebody in a position of authority at Apple simply said “Screw it. Let’s make a clean break and leave the past behind so we can push forward. And if we’re right we may lose in the short run, but we’ll win big in the end.”

And if we win with this and have a new, more modern approach, there’s nothing to stop us from adding back all the capabilities that Legacy ever had and more – but built better, faster, and stronger because of our new approach. Isn’t that a good reflection of what we’ve just seen in 10.0.3’s Multi-Cam? Most people say that while it’s new and not totally fleshed out – what it IS is in many ways superior to what it was in Legacy.

How many more features will follow the same path and return stronger than they could have been via continued Legacy development?

We’ll see.

“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]

[Rafael Amador] “Beside un intuitive, has a shit of GUI where nobody except the editor would be able to understand what’s going on over there.
With FCP, anybody could fallow and understand a sequence that somebody else has started. That do not happens with FCPX at all.
rafael”

Again, I respectfully TOTALLY disagree.

After a month, I understood the GUI perfectly. Just about what I went through with Legacy back in 1999. I think you’ve just forgotten what it was like back when none of us knew how to find a Capture Scratch with both hands.

Second graph above is wrong too.

Send me any X sequence you like. I can parse it as fast as I can parse one from legacy. All it takes is understanding the conventions used. What the heck is the difference between opening someones’s sequences buried inside other sequences and opening a compound clip? Nothing, really.

What you’re arguing is the rough equivalent to saying its harder to express ideas in Itallian than it is in English. It’s only harder for someone who doesn’t speak Itallian.

All that matters, is that you learn to speak the language.

Period.

“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]

[Joseph W. Bourke] “I firmly believe that if they had called it Fetal Cut Pro X that people would have immediately known that this baby was not ready to go out into the world yet.”

Oh poppycock. Pure and simple.

It was “ready to go out in the world” from day one.

Because the real world is where real things grow up.

If the FCP team had waited until the software was “perfect” for movies and episodic TV and 100 seat shops it would have likely been released just in time to celebrate the out-sourcing of master control in the last local TV station on the planet.

The smart play isn’t building towards what a society is transitioning away from – but building for what it’s transitioning towards.

“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 Dobson] “Sure there are still a lot of shortcomings with this software and the launch was similar to that of the Titanic, however with each update more editors are taking a second look.”

(slapping forehead)

Of course!

Now I finally understand that on this journey, sometime in the future, because they hopped aboard Final Cut Pro X – many hundreds of people will die violently.

Glad we got that cleared up.

“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