[Bill Davis]

Jeremy,

If you’re ever out here in Scottsdale, I’m buying dinner.

You get it.

Peace.

“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]

This is overly simplistic I know…

However, if one of the coders in FCP-X simply wrote a call to CoreGraphics and let you switch the appearance setting metadata tags of all your gap clips to “transparent” you’d have exactly the same visual representation in the FCP-X timeline that you do in Legacy, wouldn’t you?

What you wouldn’t have is the ability to tie those gaps to ANYTHING. They are just mostly useless forced pictures of time representation – which, while comforting for all of us conditioned to “see” time in the traditional timeline representation – really have no practical function beyond acting as “visual comfort food”

As “gap cliips” one could presumably write some code to “return aggregate time of all gaps in my project” and other DB functions that might be very useful at some point.

Essentially I’m saying that the difference between viewing a particular timeline aspect as a discrete “thing” or as “not a thing” is a primary concept. I can do something with a “thing.” I can’t do much with a “not a thing.” comforting as it may be visually.

(thanks for indulging me – it was kinda fun to write that last paragraph!)

“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]

Maybe they were supposed to “infer” that we all need to keep our eyes on an information distribution structure where I suspect that in sheer numbers, more videos are posted in a week than all of Hollywood has ever produced in it’s lifetime?

YouTube (and Vimeo, et al) are ascendent. Movie theaters, not so much. In fact, you can find virtually empty cinemas in every major city every day. I bet my nearly 19 year old son and his girlfriend watch five times the movies via download and RedBox then they see in a traditional theatre in a normal year.

Trends matter.

And I think “publish to YouTube” is going to prove to be a WAY smarter top tier feature in an NLE Software package than is “export stems for audio sweetening” – if one can get over the “pro” verses “amateur” ego angst that rides along with much of this.

Personally, I want BOTH features. Increasingly.

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]

Herb (accurately, I hope)

In tone, content and logic, your post is a winner in my estimation.

I know you were extremely skeptical at first about what FCP-X represented. It appears that today, you’re open to it’s possibilities.

That’s all I and many other of the programs early, and very vocal defenders, were hoping to foster.

At first, the early, loud and often unbending “knee jerk” voices of condemnation were just about the only voices out there.

I know I personally took a LOT of lumps from those who were pissed off and were ready to jump down the throat of anyone who said a single nice word about the program.

Things are finally calming down. That’s good because as we we in this industry should always remember – as the signal rises and the noise diminishes – clarity of communication increases.

Peace.

“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]

No, I don’t.

I don’t remember anyone on stage at the unveiling. (and I had a good seat) saying this is an “upgrade to” or even a “replacement” for FCP-7.

IIRC said they were introducing “the future” of video editing from Apple.

Yes, they named it Final Cut Pro X. So it’s easy to understand how that left an assumption in many minds that it was an “upgrade”

But When Randy demo’d it – he didn’t show the audience a single thing that looked or worked like 7.

The name is trivial. The change was not. It’s a fundamental thing that we’re responsible for changing in our brains. And it’s not Apple’s job to coddle us through the change by wasting time and effort on a useless IP search for a different name when they already own a perfectly good one.

That’s how I choose to view it anyway. Tea leaf reading about Apple’s motives is fun, but functionally useless. The game has changed – and so has what the brand “Final Cut Pro” stands for. It used to stand for a big program a lot like AVID and Premier. Now it stands for a completely alternative way to approach the tasks of manipulating digital motion and still content.

Choose it or not. Your call.

“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]

“The limitation with FCPX as it currently stands is that the range of worflow options have been reduced dramatically – in many areas, as much in terms of the editing interface as elsewhere, there are now almost no options at all. You have to do it the FCPX way, or not do it at all.”

That’s as silly on it’s surface as being angry that if you want to become a “guitar player” you have almost no options at all – you have to do it the “guitar” way or not at all. Six strings. Not 7 or 11.

I simply don’t hear guitar players arguing that six strings limits ones creativity.
Keyboards stuck at 88 keys. Autos stuck with a gas pedal to the right and a brake pedal to the left.

FCP-X can cut video. It might not do it the way you like. But it can do it. It might not have all the buttons in the same place, and it might not offer controls you’ve become accustomed to – or even controls you believe deeply and un-changably that you need in order to do your work efficiently – but it can STILL cut video and do most of what most people need to do when they assemble video projects.

So it’s a viable alternative.

It will slowly sink – OR it will be tuned and enhanced and modified into a wicked fast, world class environment for real world cutting – based on what happens over the next few years.

I’ve learned NOT to bet against the men and women at Apple. They exist in a culture that succeeds by taking measured risks based on understanding long term trends and making smart future projections.

And I think FCP-X – and offshoots of it’s design structure – will eventually come to dominate “day to day” editing far into the future.

Hell, Window 8 looks like it was nearly totally informed by the “iUniverse” that Apple created over the last few decades. The “clicky-picture” teams at Apple have truly kicked ass over all comers largely because Jobs was bright enough to get there first.

Took a while. But then so will FCP-X. Because the thinking behind it is both smart and forward thinking and there will always be a subset of people who will seek out then resonate with smarter thinking.

My 2 cents, 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

[Bill Davis]

Isn’t this the crux of the whole thing, Herb? You’re bound and determined to see it in light of X being a “replacement” for Legacy.

And many, many editors are still trying to compare and contrast the old with the new.

Others are doing what I think is more natural. Let go of what FCP was. Look at the new possibilities of what will be. And change ones thinking accordingly.

Once I did that, I could start to see where the new software will “fit” in a world that’s changing so rapidly.

Mobile, agile, flexible, less focused on “traditional” workflows – and more focused on what the new tools allow and what the entire new world of global, accessible, massive and constantly changing information requires in terms of a tool to ingest, manage, search, sort, aggregate, assemble and re-transmit visual information in a world awash with more of it than ever before.

Those who need to continue to work in the classic mode, are the ones rationally looking to switch to those classic style “monolithic editor” platforms. I get that.

But now everyone else has a whole new tool that is excellent for one new way of working.

I spent my weekend in San Diego and it took me about 5 minutes to set up my “editing bay” on the 32nd floor of the Grand Hyatt with nothing more than my MacbookPro and a small Firewire 800 drive.. FCP-X did an amazing job of letting me tag and start assembling selects out of 64 gigs of field data generated in a full day of DSLR shooting.

The footage looks wonderful. The travel gear profile made it possible to avoid excess baggage hassles (tho barely!) and I’m much, MUCH more effective for my clients than I’ve ever been before.

That’s the game changer, IMO. Not what this will do for the “studio-style” traditional work process.

I’m now confident that I could have done a very respectable “first cut” of the entire project had the client requested that. As it is, this will likely be my first “full FCP-X project” since I’m comfortable enough to feel like I can manage actual work with it now.

For fun, I’ve attached a 5d. still that I took Sat night in the wee hours of the view from my temporary “Thurs-Sun” edit suite.

Times have changed – and it’s increasingly clear to me that’s why FCP had to change as well.

(I could have sent this picture – OR an FCP-X cut of the days video – ANYWHERE on the planet in seconds. That is the game changer. Good and NOW will increasingly trump perfect and later for some kinds of work in some circumstances. And the world will move on…

“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]

If you can’t fight the light – use it. Position the subject so the window light is the key. Fill with reflector or active sources with CTB.

OR

Close the drapes.

Also, do NOT try to move the conference table. In modern boardrooms, these are typically “wired” with phone/data, etc and so are kinda “rooted” to their position.

Boardrooms are typically a pain in the ass location. since they’re seldom flexible to configure and almost always have a large fixed object in their center.

Here’s a still from a setup I did in a law firm in southern California recently. The idea is that you have to see what you have to work with, then use the room’s geometry and position subjects so they work with whatever you find on location.

This was lit with nothing more than 2 LED 600s – one to bring the background group up and one as a key on the “window side” for the partner to bring him up as the central subject. Given time and budgets of yesterday, I would have done something more interesting with the “black hole” side of the room, but today, we’re lucky if we’re given time to even light the main subject half-way decently.

Sigh.

“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]

Rafeal,

“The video industry is sick…” relates only to the historical view of the video industry based around large shops and a business model that revolves around selling high priced services to a small group of elite “re-sellers” who in turn gate-keep the content that the masses consume.

If you simply broaden your definition of the “video industry” you’ll see that not only is it “healthy” it’s astonishingly healthy.

YouTube is now the second most widely used “search engine” after Google. It’s “audience” dwarfs the aggregate of all the networks in the country.

And if you can simply see it in the light of it’s age, and understand that video over IP today is where broadcast was in the era of Dave Garroway and Bozo the Clown – eventually, the crap that clogs up YouTube will fade and the “keyboard cat” era will pass, like Howdy Doody did. In their wake will emerge a communications medium that will be something new and different.

And that’s a world where a tool like FCP-X will be more valuable than a tool like AVID.

That will happen, I believe because eventually the primary issue of driving people to video content won’t be about the nature of the content itself – it will be more about the ability to SEARCH it out.

So I’d rather bet on a tool that is foundationally structured on SEARCH capabilities – than one structured on ASSEMBLY capabilities.

ASSEMBLY is the inside game. SEARCH is the far more massive outside game. And you have to go play outside if you want to sell stuff.

That’s what I see. We’ll see if I’m right or missing the boat entirely.

“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]

Fine, Marvin,

Let’s extrapolate your brilliant concept into other areas…

The fine restaurant CHEF is the pinnacle of the culinary arts. So to anyone who wants to learn to cook elegantly and with createive flair, we MUST discourage them. Because we understand that only those with special training and the “professional” tag are worthy of our respect.

We should fight against the idea that millions of people in millions of kitchens, with lowly electric ranges will ever be able to satisfactorily meet our standard of what a “good cook” must be. Rather, we must cling to the idea that only our “Viking Industrial Range Equipped Chefs” can hope to advance the culinary arts. Only these professionals will have access to the finest ingredients, the freshest produce, and the spices from far flung and exotic places – as well as the “high level” skills required in order to elevate food to a higher plane.

Kinda sounds like “stuck in the past” thinking, doesn’t it? Yet precisely the same thinking keeps showing up over and over and over again in these discussions regarding the production of video content.

Escoffier’s day is PAST. Food preparation moved out of the “priestly” class. It caught fire around the “Joy of Cooking” era, and a few decades later, a “foodie” was anyone who wanted to take the time to dedicate their brain to elevating food preparation. The “tools” were similarly democratized. Need a “mandoline slicer” to make your own pasta? No problem. If you can’t find one in a local store, the internet has a thousand places ready to ship you one overnight. Need to secure leeks in preference to onions? Difficult yesterday, trivial today. Heck, in today’s world even if you want some total specialty item, say habanero chilis, elk sausage, or some kimchi – Fed Ex is ready to put it on your doorstep before 8am tomorrow.

Of course there are still great chefs in the “professional class.” but where once there were a few of them working in major cities and royal palaces, today every medium sized city has a hundred (if not a thousand) people who qualify for the title of Chef. And if you want to re-create their work in your own kitchen, or even do something at the same level given talent and creativity – you can – where before you couldn’t.

This IS the change in the video industry these days.

Let me say it again. ANYONE who wants to learn to be a good cook can do so today with nearly no barriers to participation.

Exactly the same as with video production for the first time in human history.

And everything will change in our industry because of it.

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