Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Sheesh,
Just hand them a thumb drive with a QuickTime file.
In all likelihood, it will plug directly into the boardroom projector..
If not it will CERTAINLY plug into any laptop – which in turn can drive any boardroom projector on the planet via VGA.
That DVDs are not entirely dead yet just speeks to how technologically illiterate many companies are.With it’s horrible MPEG2 encoding, DVD is about the last way I’d choose to show critical content if I had any other options. Who misses having to rely on arbitrary pre-set chapter marker jumps and using the “fast forward” and “rewind” controls instead of jumping to anywhere in the video stream with a mouse click?
DVD is the INERTIA format. The industry has moved WAY past that. Heck, load the clip on a freekin iPad for heavens sake. You can drive VGA from that. At least you’ll look like your in the current century in your clients eyes.
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’Conner
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I’m going to disagree.
I’ve delivered precisely 13 High Def spots for local network affiliate broadcast over the past 3 months.
On the first 3, I was scrupulously and obsessively careful to use scopes and make sure everything was “broadcast safe.”
By the time I got to 4 and had talked to the back room guys at the head end of the upload links, I started relaxing.
Perhaps the encoding software I use (Telestream Episode) is doing all the signal clamping and color monitoring in the background somewhere – I don’t know about that since I just set the output the way each station tells me (and every single station is different, by the way) – but not a single one of those spots has had a problem. And lest you think they were simple to begin with, they were composites of 5dMkii footage with Photoshop created client logos – and all had art-directed “corporate color” specified logos over “solid white” FCP generated closing screens.
Lots and lots and LOTS of places where the digital outputs could have gone over limit and out of spec.
Yet none of them did.
And Mitch, I know for a fact that like me, you’ve spent a lot of time suffering through trying to get things like computer generated titles to display properly on broadcast rasters. What’s the point of all that anti-aliasing if TV resolutions are equal to computers? In point of fact they’re not. My Cinema Display is cruising along at 2560 x 1600 without breaking a sweat. Which, unless my math is bad, is a lot MORE PIXELS than the 1920×1080 US SMPTE 274M HD TV standard – and a LOT more than the 1280×720 “720p” standard used by most broadcast stations.
And even that ignores that the VAST majority of what gets broadcast is compressed further at satellite head ends, and in stations before delivery. So broadcast now and for the forseeable future will be a process of fitting an original computer raster into the coarser one that HDTV demands. When you look at direct computer to computer delivery, theres’ no need to “dumb down” the original resolution other than to accommodate smaller file sizes. And in my experience, web delivered “computer video” is a WHOLE LOT better than broadcast TV – including “High Def.”
And yep, one of the 4 most recent direct to computer downloads I’ve recently watched was probably done on FCP-X, Steve Martin’s FCP-X guide. And the screen shots are OUTSTANDING. Plenty of details even in shots of a computer interface with tiny elements.
I shudder to think what that would have looked like back in the SD video days.
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’Conner
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If the interviewee is “drumming their fingers” it means one thing and one thing only.
An incompetent interviewer.
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’Conner
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You need a screen for an interface. You might LIKE 2, 3, or 4 screens for the way you work, but you NEED a screen.
You need a keyboard. You need a mouse. You might need a tablet or a trackball. All of these can work prefectly well via Bluetooth and so don’t need to be physically attached to anything.
You want to drive stuff with your iPad? More bluetooth.
Packaging this stuff into a tall box (tower) or a flat box (laptop)? It’s a matter of “convenience only” when you don’t need to house and cool a mass of adjacent components to achieve physical closeness to optimize data transfer.
You need storage. With Thunderbolt spec’d up to 100 TIMES the speed of Firewire 800 in it’s planned purely optical iteration – storage can be located anywhere on the net without penalty. Same with video processing (video “card”? – maybe, maybe not). Same with PROCESSERS for heaven’s sake. Want more? Buy cheap boxes with more and stick it in a closet.
Giant super fast pipes mean that the old concept of a CPU needing to be physically adjacent to the I/O busses for data throughput becomes functionally obsolete.
At that point, a laptop is just a node. The “computer” is the system you’re attaching to. More computers, with more cores, add to the AGGREGATE processing capability of the system.
The computer as “BOX?” Old thinking. Pick your sub-systems and plug them together – drive the result with your desktop keyboard or your laptop keyboard – doesn’t matter – because anything can talk to anything – lickity split.
Software in the cloud – hardware as “nodes” to enable it.
That’s the BIG change coming down the road, I’d bet.
Fun to imagine.
“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’Conner
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What would be the PURPOSE of a dedicated graphics card in the CPU box in a world where you could link 24 (or 100 for that matter) – cheap CPUs together on a massive ThunderBolt data superhighway and control that stream from any connected laptop?
The only reason for a GPU was to OFFLOAD graphic raster processing from an overburdened CPU to improve performance. In a Thunderbolt wired world, you could likely buy a small box with a super GPU chip (if you wanted it) and put it in a closet 20 feet away – and every laptop in your facility could call it as necessary.
MASSIVE pipes change EVERYTHING. The location of nodes becomes unimportant when the data FLIES around an optical racetrack as fast as the one envisioned in the TB future roadmap.
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’Conner
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From what I hear from industry insiders, the form factor – laptop OR desktop – is increasingly trivial today to how computing will function in the future.
When power computing required a HUGE power supply, slots for large cards, and more slots for basic I/O functions like monitor drivers and external drive busses a tower was an advantage over a laptop. But that’s likely to change radically over the next few years.
I was talking to a Phil Hodgets a month ago and he was describing the effect that Thunderbolt will have in version 2 and 3 (on the existing Intel development roadmap) and how that has the potential to transform how computers will work in the future..
When info-pipe technology breaks down the need to have everything inches from everything else for pure speed of data transfer, the whole IDEA of what a computer is can change.
It likely becomes a modular concept where adding a couple of multi-core inexpensive MacMini’s can double or triple your processing power cheaply. Where the big screen on your desktop (with that thunderbolt port) just takes over from the laptop screen when it’s plugged in and becomes part of a system where bits SCREAM around wherever and whenever they’re needed.
The computer itself becomes more the “sum of it’s connected parts” rather than a physical BOX sitting somewhere.
Thinking has to change here folks. The future will NOT look like the present. Not in software – not in hardware – not in workflow.
That’s just how it is.
“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’Conner
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Sorry, but I still think you’re playing the wrong game, Mitch. I think you’re getting stuck trying to fit FCP-X into the “traditional video market.” – the one being being HAMMERED from all sides.
Legions of working editors in the future will create content without EVER using external monitoring. Why? Because they’ll quickly learn that most of this “un-monitored” video can look EXCELLENT via web delivery using nothing but the tools already built into the software NOW – in version 1.
The web, for example is a delivery medium with no “broadcast standards” but BILLIONS of eyeballs. This will make people money. Potentially LOTS and LOTS of money. Heck, I just spent $49 bucks for another internet delivered educational download. I can guarantee it never saw anything outside of a computer monitor because it was never INTENDED for any other viewing experience. It was in SUPERIOR resolution to any broadcast file – precisely because it had never had to be “dumbed down” for broadcast. But it worked for it’s function BEAUTIFULLY. I learned TONS. And paid FAR less then going and sitting in a classroom. The entire delivery path was computer – to the net – to another computer – and as a result, money changed hands. That’s a compelling broadcast negating paradigm right there.
Also, don’t wait too long for that “perfect monitoring link” – because in one very real sense, it’s ALREADY sitting there on your desktop – by virtue of simply adding a “quality check” step of taking a QT file into your old suite when a particular project needs to be made “broadcast ready.”
That will suffice and is COST FREE And if they don’t I suspect that like DVD delivery – at some point it will become functionally unnecessary over time.
Right now, DG-Fastchannel, ExtremeReach and other services will take a digital upload and both conform and deliver the content to any broadcast station on the planet. Do you really think they aren’t smart enough to write up and post output standards directly from the FCP-X desktop that will allow them to do what they need to make a digital video file “broadcast ready?”
Dream 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’Conner
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Because every single person on the FCP development team are among the lucky elites in the software coding industry. They’re working with an industry leading, wildly successful product – and for a company that commands resources that rival any company on the planet.
To accept your view, I’d have to believe that the hiring managers for this team are so fundamentally stupid that they are willing to employ and award access to the code base of this hugely successful product – to people willing to write and install code that allows “cool” to trump functional.
Sorry, but that’s NOT intelligent thinking, IMO.
I base this on KNOWING that while FCP-X works very differently from what came before it – it also works, very, VERY well to do the vast majority of things that the average video editor needs to do – and does a lot of stuff that has formerly been IMPOSSIBLE to do anywhere near as efficiently and easily.
Does it NOT do popular and important things that the earlier verision did? Absolutely. It took 10 years of development to put all those feature rooms under the FCP roof. X is a starter home with a couple of years of development and a couple of months of life behind it.
In presenting this package to the market, Apple elected to lose attributes that smaller segments of the users class have VERY passionate feelings about – but that aren’t CRITICAL for everyone.
I personally think this is going to be a massively winning strategy.
But 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’Conner
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Robin,
A whopping percentage of the structure of FCP-X works differently from 7.
Honestly, just clicking around and trying to figure how it’s different will likely be an exercise in frustration.
I’d highly recommend you take one of the beginners classes that will surely sprout up pretty soon. Or, better yet go explore one of the on-line overviews. Steve Martin’s Ripple Training FCP-X On-Line is a great overview and will save you many days of wandering lost. If you can handle the $49 bucks it’s a great learning accelerator – as are other similar programs I’m sure.
I would NOT recommend people just download it and start clicking – particularly if you’re experienced with FCP already – there’s just too much new thinking in this compared to the traditions of what NLE operators have become accustomed to over recent years.
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’Conner
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The FCP X team massively re-thought SOME of the fundamental processes of video editing – obviously starting with the basic plumbing stuff and how what they considered the most core and foundational aspects of editing might be improved. (like the astonishingly “ah ha!” moment I got upon seeing how they folded keystroke driven alternate scene (Auditioning) into it!) That function being yet another clear signal of a continued focus on the way serious “work for money” happens with layers of auditions and approval steps before an edit can be locked – something that simply does NOT happen with personal home videos.
I totally get how anyone with a personal editing workflow that lost capabilities could focus exclusively on their losses.
But anyone who can’t see the massive additional possibilities of the new approach, IMO, has blinders on.
I’ll still use 7 till I can grasp everything going on here. But every day, I’ll be reading, learning and practicing with X.
It looks more and more like the future every time I uncover more about how it really works.
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’Conner