[Bill Davis]

Not so minor, actually.

Mr Weiss self-described as a “journalist” in this very forum. So he’s positioning himself as a writer who should be judged by journalistic standards.

Heck, I spent 10 years as a contributing editor at a national circulation video magazine and I don’t presume to apply that professional title to myself.

And sorry, but going public with assertions that a critical new feature fails to work, then admitting that you didn’t even take the most rudimentary steps to confirm that before posting it is not confidence building.

In his defense, he was quick to correct the public record as soon as he realized that his experiences weren’t backed up by others public experiences – but that’s precisely the kind of thing that working in professional publishing teaches you to be wary of. I know my editors always challenged me to be sure that anything I wrote purporting to be fact as opposed to personal opinion had to have a solid factual basis before the work was published.

In the blog era, vetting for accuracy is largely a thing of the past.

Think it, post it – is the rule of the day as if these were private conversations between friends rather than public forum posts read by a world wide audience.

No wonder so much of what passes by on the web proves to be ill conceived….

Got to go now, II have to mail some money to the Ethopians so that they can send me my lottery winnings…

“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,

Then would it be equally smart to avoid presuming that the coders working on FCP-X might not have actually addressed and solved such issues?

The software has only been out for minutes for heaven’s sake.

And here we are making “pronouncements” based on unproven imaginings.

This is not how wisdom propagates – elevating gossip over fact.

We don’t know if XML implementations in the FCP-X revs will be wonderful or terrible.

So anything said by either side is speculative hot air. Period.

My personal hot air about XML in FCP-X is that it will work great for some users, and fall short of the needs of others. Just like every single other thing about the software I’ve seen to date.

Big revelation, huh?

“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]

Hold that thought Simon.

Make it your own.

Particularly since you’re so excited by it that while the software isn’t out yet and nobody’s even USED the function, you’re ready to let us all know that it’s going to fail for many.

Nice warning.

Let me play along and add one of my own…

Everybody watch out for the door latches on the flying cars of the future!

Killers, I imagine.

(teasing mode off)

“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]

Back on my paper route (before they decided that somehow kids on bikes were unacceptable and gave those jobs to middle aged folks in cars) I had a customer who had called the newspaper and annoyed someone enough to vocalize the target standard delivery time for morning news papers as 6am.

In truth, our papers arrived at our particular drop station around 5:20 and my route was large enough that those at the end of the route were lucky to get their papers by 6:15 many mornings.

Still, that customer would position himself at his back door at 6:00 SHARP every single morning – and if his paper was was even 1 minute late he’d glare at me as if I’d vomited on his breakfast.

I learned a lot from Mr. E. First, I learned anxiety. Some mornings I’d alter my route and ride to his house first, keeping him happy, but inconveniencing both me (much farther to ride with full paper bags!) and the other customers who were delayed in order for me to satisfy his inflexible needs.

As I grew up a bit, that experience taught me that trying to satisfy the needs of every individual is a losers game.

And that getting things right for the largest group is often a superior strategy over getting it perfect for a minority.

You want to parse Apple’s whispering for dates and make that your religion, feel free.

Maybe I can find out if Mr. E is still alive and you two can form a club?

Just sayin…

“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]

Much of the trend in on-line discussion globally seems to be to weigh in as quickly and as vocally as possible, to blindly support, or condem first, then see how the facts fit into our positions later.

Something of which I’m every bit as guilty as the next voice and the reason I decided to just be quiet for a some weeks awhile back.

What appears to be the case here is that while WE were all speculating, there was a team at Apple who didn’t take their eye off the overall ballgame.

They released the program when they felt they needed to. Let the market “shake it around” and try to wrap brains around the substantial and deep changes – then went right back to work on a list of targeted improvements that reflected the needs of the market they’d identified as most important to the software’s continuing growth and success.

This release should quiet the ill-considered but tempting “iMovie Pro” meme, since I cant see support for audio stems and XML integration as part of any rational design to deliver into that kind of “emerging pro” market.

Seems to me the FCP-X team is simply approaching the video content creation process by leveraging what computers do best – manipulate raw digital data as efficiently and as flexibly as possible.

They “pruned the trees” ruthlessly in the initial offering – heck, they even tore up and re-planted some very old Oaks. I know that’s upsetting. But sometimes trees get old and they need to come down. Now they’re training the new growth into a new vision.

I’m looking forward to see what the landscapers have in mind when the garden reaches maturity.

Interesting times.

“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,

I appreciate your view. I just disagree. I think that the FCP-X rebuild is aimed precisely at business video. How else does one explain the database underpinnings?

iMovie is for non-professionals exploring the movie making arts and making ONE isolated movie at a time. (I imagine it’s superb at that tho I’ve never used it myself)

FCP-X on the other hand, is built for the serial content producer. Assets, type treatments, database logs, – virtually everything about it is “sticky” in that once you create them, you can access and re-access them time and time again. You can sort assets, search assets, re-combine assets with amazing ease.

Why build that in if you’re just serving a market doing THIS ONE video? It makes no sense.

But it makes PERFECT sense if you’re serving a market that will be doing business videos or training videos or blog style videos or anything else that keeps you in constant communication with an audience that you wish to develop over time.

I respect that Avid, and others, have great tools to do the same thing. Plus a lot of other tools that appeal to the big show centric workflow. But the truth is for everyone sitting at a screen cutting around the world today – only a very small fraction of them will ever need to deliver into such a huge, distributed workflow that they’ll need all the tools that even FCP-7 offered. I say this with confidence because as a corporate producer working on 5 and 6 figure videos for my entire career – but largely out of my own shop and therefor in a smaller footprint operation instead of a more traditional “agency” model shop – I seldom used more than 25% of the capabilities in FCP. (although admittedly the 25% in question varied from project to project!)

Look, I’m still cutting on FCP-7 for many things I’m working on today. Why wouldn’t I since I have twelve years experience at running it and it works great. I just keep trying to learn something new about FCP-X every day and learning its differentiating capabilities so that the day I have to cut something that can leverage the things it can do that 7 can’t – I’ll be ready to go.

Knowing two languages beats knowing one. And I think a swap from FCP-7 to Premier is like feeling that you have to change from American English to British English. Little new thinking required so it’s trivial and you can listen and communicate well right away. But someday you *may* find that second language useful. Particularly if it’s the language of a new place you someday find it valuable to visit.

Seems smart to me.

“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,

I haven’t heard even the most ardent supporters of the program imply that it doesn’t have problems.

Nor have I heard anyone in the positive camp say it’s appropriate for every task or industry. Clearly those who need deep and specific features – and even some who need common but not yet supported features (multi-cam and music video “sync to audio” workflows come immediately to mind) will not find this to be their preferred tool in this initial iteration.

But that’s not what the nay-sayers are constantly carping about. Many of them – based totally on their own assertions as posted right in this forum – got stuck arguing that the WHOLE of the software was fatally flawed, useless, toyish and irrelevant for EVERYONE’s use. They screamed (and are still to a certain extent) arguing only APPLE FAIL as if their superior knowledge of how video editing software MUST work in order to be useful is the right and proper view.

I just don’t think that’s true.

More and more I use FCP-X I see that there is a place for FCP-X in professional video editing. It’s just not the place the industry used to be. That does NOT imply that it will overthrow all else and become the new central core of all video editing. That’s silly. The big, monolithic, full-featured code library heavy traditional approach will have a solid place in editing for a long time.

But I believe so will a newer, more agile and task targeted software approach. And I think that’s precisely what FCP-X has been all along.

It’s Caterpillar verses Kubota in construction machinery. (at least to this casual observers view)

Once upon a time Caterpillar dominated the quality construction equipment market in the US.
Then suddenly, in the small neighborhood construction projects in the 90’s and 2000’s I saw a giant influx of Kubota equipment. They looked smaller, more fuel efficient, and easier to operate.

Better tool for the jobs being done more often, because for every big plant construction job that needed the major graders, there were thousands of school playgrounds, shopping center site grades, and small scale construction projects that could benefit from a smaller, more agile, more fuel efficient version of the older, larger, less efficient tool.

Market segmentation in the classic sense.

And here we go again.

“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’ll give equal respect to your question and try to answer it as clearly as possible.

Once upon a time thousands edited video.

Today, millions do.

The vast majority of them are NOT suite based professional editors.

I suspect that if any of us could somehow draw a magic circle around where we sit and edit and expand until it encompassed 10,000 other people who have paid seats at which they sit and edit with FCP – we’d all discover that those 10,000 seats are often in corporate offices, ad agencies, small businesses, and yes, in the bedrooms of teenagers who got an educational copy and liked the tool so they’ve stayed with it in hopes that someday they can edit their great digital movie.

This is happening not just in America, but globally. The Supermeet in Amsterdam at IBC draws a crowd just like the one at NAB.

So video editing remains a rapidly spreading global phenomenon.

The FCP that developed from V1 to V7 evolved from a simple tool, to a massive, robust, feature laden suite. And many of those here have come to depend on it for high-dollar, high-stress work under merciless business deadlines. And, represented by many voices here, many of those pros are angry, pissed, and deeply upset by the direction that Apple took with it’s professional editing tool. They sincerely hoped it would continue on the same path of incremental evolution, adding capabilities to the code without losing anything they’d invested in learning.

Apple did something entirely different. They looked around and noticed that that type of editing workflow is diminishing as a share of the market. Whether it’s consolidation, market evolution, or simple smaller budgets and tighter constraints on time and resources, they saw that for every feature, or high end Madison Avenue commercial or Hollywood release that needs a broad and tightly integrated team of editors, colorists, sound designers and post professionals, there are probably a THOUSAND projects designed to feed the web, iPad screens, and smaller digital devices that don’t follow the massive monolithic team requirements.

THAT is what my sentence was trying to imply.

I was in a presentation day before yesterday where the speaker pointed out that the most popular “search engine” on the planet is still Google – but number two is not Bing, or Ask, or Yahoo – it’s YouTube, for heaven’s sake.

Those hundreds of thousands of videos are where people go to get info about anything from the local dry cleaner to how to bake a lemon pie.

Do you think that change in viewing habits ESCAPED Apple’s research teams?

People here are largely pissed because they expected X to be a simple evolutionary upgrade of the capabilities they had in 7.

We now know that it wasn’t that AT ALL. It was a rebuild designed to be something totally different and more attuned to what video (AND non-video based motion content) is rapidly evolving into. And for those who MUST toil in TV, or feature movies, I get that FCP X will likely not meet their needs today and may NEVER meet their needs.

But I’ve come to suspect that FCP-X just might be an even BETTER tool for the kind of work that the world is increasingly consuming.

Remember all the angst about how it’s harder cut to a fixed length in X? Guess what? There’s NO default fixed length requirement on the web, or on a file to send to a client to promote your business, or to load on your iPad to show someone at point of sale.

Apple “got that” way before I did.

Have you watched any of the very successful web videos that are largely just motion graphics with narration? Not a frame of video, but they communicate incredibly well. And with the new Motion/FCP-X integration, they’re likely going to be easier to create in FCP-X.

Does that help explain what I was talking about?

If you see something different happening, if you think that the biggest, richest, most “playable” game will continue to be Broadcast TV, Feature length movies that require large team workflows, or even monster dollar national commercial work – then by all means grab one of the other tools and join the smaller but perhaps richer group that will make their living working with traditional editing tools in the traditional editing style. The programs that do those well will also do lots of other kinds of work well.

But FCP X is designed to do a particular type of agile, revisable, compelling, short form eye catching work incredibly efficiently. It has tools not just for video editing, but for outstanding titling, quite robust “real world basic” audio handling and solid, non-confusing encoding and web delivery capabilities built in at a fraction of the cost of the offerings of it’s competitors. All that built around a database driven structure is designed to let you build a large persistent library of assets and meta-data that you can flexibly log, track, search, sort, and re-combine at levels only constrained by your ability to figure out the keywords you want to pull out whatever you imagine you need.

I’m trying to talk here about what I’ve seen of what it can do right now. And how that might evolve. And to put that into context about what I see happening in the wider world of IT, communications design, and shifting market needs.

I’m not a pro in any of these except modestly in video and how to communicate with it – something I’ve been doing for the past 30 years plus.

But I keep seeing signs in FCP-X that what was done to it was done with PURPOSE.

How that vision plays out in the market only time will tell.

Hopefully that makes things clearer.

Sorry I’m always so long to explain things.

To mangle Blaise Pascal’s timeless thinking, if I’d had more time, I would certainly have written a shorter post here.

Hope that helps.

“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]

bigpipe.

No quarrel with that statement.

But the larger concept is where the INDUSTRY of editing is going. Once upon a time, editing meant one thing and one thing only. You HAD to go to a dedicated editing suite in order to secure access to the tools of professional video content editing. No individual could afford to own and maintain a rack of multi-thousand dollar decks, a Grass Valley switcher, an ADO system, the engineering team necessary to maintain it and the precision educated editors necessary to operate it.

Now, the common laptop does EVERYTHING that that system did. And much, much more. In addition, the software has made most of the base video editing functions so easy that a fifth grader can “cut” stuff. (saying nothing here about talent or judgement – which I honor – but merely about functionality and toolset access)

So like it or not, this surely bleeds off the need for the traditional business model and dedicated suite.

You simply can’t avoid that truth.

That model will likely hold on at the highest echelons, because it drives the FINEST results – but the world isn’t always asking for the finest results. The world is clamoring for choice and access and personal vision empowerment via images in motion that often (but not always) include a video component.

So FCP-X wins if it provides THAT. Not if it provides a cheaper path to the old suite-centric view of editing.

I’m meeting weekly with a group of editors who are all exploring FCP-X and at last nights session we got into a discussion of “round tripping” between FCP X and Motion. It took us about a half hour of discussion to realize that “round tripping” as a concept is GONE in FCP X. Not because they didn’t build the capabilities in – but because, once again, they changed the entire paradigm. When the lightbulb finally went on we all realized that round tripping is “gone” because they functionally built a subset of Motion directly INTO FCP X – and simply used that code as the FCP-X titler. So when you “go out” to the standalone Motion app (really, just load up the additional code), you’re just extending the capabilities of the built in titler – not actually going anywhere DIFFERENT. So once again, the old thinking is useless. Seen in that light, Motion works more akin to Acrobat vs Acrobat Pro. With the “free” version built into X you get a good chunk of the capabilities right inside the software. If you want more flexibility or control, the dedicated software launch EXTENDS the control range and gives you more choice. But the base capabilities of both are EXACTLY the same. There’s no longer a reason to exit one “program” and work in another when large chunks of the same code is in both places and the you can simply “hook into” the larger capabilities of the dedicated app and get the extended capabilities in the same workspace you’re already in. It’s a SMARTER way to work. No exit, No re-entrance. You’re always THERE, merely utilizing the subset or the full compliment of code as you like.

This is a good example of why FCP-X was so baffling to so many for so long. It takes a lot of time and exploration to start to reveal the WHY behind the WHAT they did.

Once you do, it makes a whole lot of sense. And explains how and why Motion went from a another bloated, huge standalone app, to a $49 app store add on. It absolutely is not the tool it used to be. Peter Jackson will NOT be using Motion for the next LOTR like mega-movie. But hundreds of thousands of FCP-X editors WILL be using it to extend their capabilities, make amazing titles and motion graphics INSIDE the editorial process and do very cool stuff that no other NLE package will allow them to do with as much agility or ease.

Thats a pretty compelling concept, if you ask me.

For what it’s worth.

“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]

You’re WAY to late to this battle.

The war is over.

FCP 7 is moving toward legacy status. (Still working fine but Apple is no longer developing it since the introduction of FCP-X)

FCP X is purpose designed to leverage core Mac processes that simply don’t exist in Windows environments. (Core Annimation, Core Graphics, Grand Central, etc, etc, etc.) Windows has equivalents and can certainly edit video quite nicely, but the underlying technology is TOTALLY different.

Simple as 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