[Bill Davis]

If your traditional “top down” analysis is valid, you will turn out to be right.

However.

From the advent of DV – a funny thing happened.

DV and Firewire and the MAC OS in very rapid order cut away the very foundations of the “top down” paradigm you’re describing.

I was there when ALL the people at the top TOTALLY DISMISSED 3.5 Mbps digital video as sub-standard, non-professional – and the mark of an amateur.

Many of us ignored that and simply saw that we could do work with less expensive tools and circumvent the prior era requirements of working in multi-million dollar shops with an active “priesthood” that while positively passing down the best possible practices, simultaneously had little interest in making their knowledge available to a larger pool of practitioners.

FCP always was and always will be a BOTTOM UP technology. Your so called “pros” were astonishingly late to the game. It wasn’t until a few guys like Walter Murch broke ranks and FINALLY came to the realization that you could work with non-custom hardware and off-the shelf software and do as well or better than the purpose built monolithic production house that personal NLE capabilities become a defacto standard across the industry. And Mr. Murch, himself, I believe, noted that what pushed him to adapt was a singular occurance where he was working on a project for Mr. Coppola had to work out of his house during an illness and so installed a functioning FCP system in his home.

The point is that your vaunted “top down” model is typically far less predictive than it is “reactive.”

The large players change only when it’s safe. And their reputational power very much protects them from needing to live on the cutting edge. The funny thing is that when Mr. Murch decided to make the change, he had to go out and find the very EARLY ADOPTERS that had adapted early – and these became the people surrounding him – NOT the guys from the shop who had kept cutting the old way.

Take whatever lesson you like from that reality.

But the truth is that in the modern distributed information access environment – by the time the industry adopts a tool, the guys in the streets have likely been using it for years. You can choose to be one of them – or not. Thats up to you.

If FCP-X should proved to be yet another “bottom up” evolution – and if history is instructive, listening exclusively to those “at the top of their profession” is a great way to slip significantly behind the curve. Facility pros, are often the MOST vested in traditional thinking and the slowest to truly adapt.

As a case in point, I saw a presentation by a very capable editor who works for a local public utility last night explaining why their shop is NOT moving to FCP-X. Bottom line? With their X-SAN infastructure, they’ve had to REMAIN on (wait for it…) FCP 6!!! purely for compatibility issues. He was very well versed in X as their shop was a beta seed site – and he could clearly see and articulate both great advantages and disadvantages to it’s deployment – but only from a perspective where change was functionally IMPOSSIBLE in his shop given his facility constraints.

Just different perspective.

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

[Bill Davis]

Janice,

Getting a “show idea” picked up is virtually impossible unless you’re an industry insider.

The way US copyright laws operate, producers – particularly those at the high end – literally must reject submissions unless they come through established channels so that they don’t muddy ownership issues if a similar project comes in from another source.

If you TRULY want to get into the “ideas for television shows” business – you pretty much have to move to LA or NYC and get to know the people inside the business.

It’s a pretty closed system for legal reasons.

Sorry.

“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

[Bill Davis]

You are of course correct.
My word emphasis practices are the entire reason my reasoning should be abjectly dismissed.
Congratulations on sussing out that my posts are the exclusive reason that everyone isn’t in lockstep with your view of FCP-X. .
NICE CATCH!
(Hey, at least I’m being consistent with those conditioned to see caps as always and exclusively as YELLING and unable to contextualize this practice as anything different…)
And yes, I was “yelling” FCP-X in the 3rd paragraph above!!!

Have a GREAT 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’Conner

[Bill Davis]

Walter,

While I moan the fact that I was raised in an analog video world where there were objective standards from studio camera to broadcast signal built around real standards like SMPTE bars and Vectorscope targets – the sad reality is that at the “eyeball” end of the chain, there is such disarray in the present functioning screen world that I’m not sure that yesterday’s objective standards even apply.

Walk into your average sports bar.

If your experience is anything like mine lately – you’ll find a dozen various age and technology driven Plasma, LCD and even projector screens showing the same game – and they will display a range of color shadings that typically run from the woeful to the INSANE.

I’ve seen the same jersey show in three TOTALLY different colors on three adjacent screen all presumably fed by the same antenna or cable signal.

I appreciate fully why the original signal should have a particular standard digital RGB numerical value that describes what that jersey color should ideally be – but in practice we can have little faith that said color will be displayed with any accuracy whatsoever.

THAT is the central sadness of this new era. There is simply no end to end consistency built into color delivery system in today’s ad hoc distribution systems.

All we can do is keep trying to do our work well – but all the careful lighting, camera setting, and production values mean nothing if at the point of some DA, comb filter or software transcoding hash table strips out our careful work and displays a MESS to the public.

I was doing some fashion work in the studio and noticed that on two adjacent LCD “professional” LED monitors the clothing colors were displaying significantly differently. The client asked me which was right. I had to drag out an old tube monitor before I could answer that.

Wasn’t the brave new world of “digtial video” supposed to make this stuff better? Sheesh.

“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

[Bill Davis]

You’re taking a lot of time – using a lot of extra equipment – and adding a lot of complexity to a process that will give you essentially the exact same results by simply having your interviewer stand directly BEHIND a single camera – and ask the interview questions out loud.

Yes, your way presents a video picture for the interviewee to respond to. But in my experience, it’s almost totally unnecessary.

I was in San Diego shooting interviews recently. We did 30 plus recordings over two days. Politicians, civic leaders, and lots and lots of “just plain folks” pulled off the street to give their opinions alongside everyone else.

The producer wanted exactly what you’re looking for. Responses directly into the camera.

NOBODY had a bit of a problem being asked simply to listen to the interviewer and respond directly into the camera.

I think you’re putting a lot of effort into solving a “problem” that isn’t really there in the first place.

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’Conner

[Bill Davis]

The most sensible voices I keep hearing are those who at least TRY to understand the larger realities of the re-build.

I have never said that the complainers (or the supporters!) are right or wrong. Merely that this thing is a LOT more complex than people first thought. It is NOT incremental. So those who judge it through the lens of, say, CURRENT PROJECT COMPATIBILITY are very much CORRECT to be disappointed.

The larger point, however, might be that until someone stops focusing on compatibility as the be-all and end-all of the question – and moves on to looking at what might have been gained by moving compatibility off the list – does a larger pattern become clearer?

I’m finally seeing a growing chorus of people who are diving more deeply to try to see the “what and why” of the decisions that this team of high-level professional video editing interface designers elected to do in the re-build.

If ALL that matters to you is opening up your prior projects – YES – abandon FCP-X. It does not do that. And they’ve clearly explained why it never will. So re-re-hashing that is, to me, like someone who won’t even consider if it’s a nice melody – since it’s being played on an accordian and the listerner HATES accordians.

The real juice right now in FCP evaluation is in figuring out whether or not it might do other things than opening old files in a superior way to what’s come before it – then judging how those NEW attributes might empower us to work to our advantage.

Time spent on what it’s NOT verses sussing out what it might become.

This might be the classic “glass half full or empty” debate – and everyone familiar with that hoary old idiom knows it says almost nothing about the glass OR the water level – and EVERYTHING bout the person looking at the glass.

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

[Bill Davis]

Wow, what a revelation.

Let me see here … why should I want software created by one of the worlds most successful and robustly capitalized companies? Wouldn’t it be MUCH better to work with smaller, less financially robust operations – the kind that have traditionally been acquisition targets where time and time again, software that people relied upon for their livelyhoods simply got discontinued without recourse because some suit decided to “streamline” the company or only bought the larger enterprise to gain a patent or process that they needed to fold into their existing products?

How silly of me to see Apple’s overall financial health as a positive for Final Cut.

“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

[Bill Davis]

I have a friend in LA who’s a keyboard technician that tours with a lot of the MAJOR music acts – the shows that pack stadiums.

A lot of artists at that level have keyboard players. Often, those keyboard players (who are VERY good at what they do) play either concert or baby GRAND PIANOS on stage. Clearly lugging a huge wooden baby or concert grand on and off trucks for a touring show is a significant hassle. But they do it because it’s part of the “expectation” of the audience.

Old proven tech right? Well, maybe not.

A significant part of his job is to physically REMOVE the keyboard mechanism from the shell of the grand piano and in it’s place BOLT IN a modern electronic keyboard.

Turns out the old tech (pianos with strings) are terrible to tour with. The underlying old-school design means constant tuning and re-tuning. And worse, if something breaks, the show stops. A piano SHELL with an electronic keyboard bolted in – means if you have a failure, the techs just pull another keyboard off the parts truck, pull out the screwdrivers and – 15 minutes later the show goes on.

What I’m saying is that at some point in time, the old way of doing things – as successful and revered as it might have been – can be counter-productive to on-going progress.

I’m BORED with the “this won’t work for me because it’s NOT the way I do things now – so I’m changing to something that makes me feel less scared.” voices.

I absolutely get what you’re saying. You are absolutely RIGHT for you and those like you that value safety over experimentation – or who simply can’t risk on-going work on something untested.. Go ahead and change to something more comfortable. It’s a PERFECTLY rational move.

Tour with your piano as LONG as you like – NOBODY is stopping you. It will have ALL the capabilities that pro pianos deliver to allow you to do what you want to do. If the company that makes your current brand of piano stops making them – by all means chose another brand of traditional piano and continue to play what you like.

Just stop trying to convince everyone else that the new-fangled electronic keyboard is “INFERIOR” to a Steinway. You WIN. Okay?

I’ll say it here publically, so we can put it to rest. FCP-X is INFERIOR to all the other editing software out there. I’ve said it. You’ve won. Your view rules.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend more time playing with my new keyboard. I understand that it’s merely a toy and absolutely worthy of your ire and dismissal – however, just on the odd chance that this first implementation of a new way of approaching editing actually IS a significant directional change and might someday add flexibility and portability and new capabilities that the editing industry hasn’t had up to this point, I’d like to explore it.

Good luck with YOUR choice to stick with the tried and true. I honestly hope it works GREAT for you.

But come on. I make my living as an editor just like a lot of you. And I’ve got to tell you that I’m just barely getting my brain around this change. The one thing I’m absolutely CONVINCED about is that making any career changing decisions (to abandon OR to fully embrace) something this different can ONLY be made once someone understands the subject.

The IM/instant chat/blog world is one where spin often trumps common sense. And great swaths of the public (video editors myself absolutely included) are as susceptible to heard instinct as the people PT Barnum used to extract money from with the big “This way to the EGRESS” sign.

Today, I know VASTLY more than I did a week ago about FCP-X because finally, the smart “non-knee-jerk” voices are having a bit of time to look beyond the instant “it doesn’t do X so it MUST be crap” thinking.

Please just let this continue.

Library rules would be nice.

Quiet study is what will make us all smarter here. Not more voices telling anyone else to ignore the new thing because the old thing is all they’ll ever need to do “truly professional” work.

Only time will tell whether the new electronic method (keyboard) in FCP-x will eventually be bolted into some, few, or ALL of the touring pianos of tomorrow.

And that’s the only FACT that we can all rely on.

My 2 cents for today.

“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

[Bill Davis]

Well, at least it’s slightly more graspable than “space/time can be folded in on itself.”

“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

[Bill Davis]

Or…

I’m getting very well paid to do the monthly corporate video report.

This month the CEO’s script requires 8 minutes instead of his usual 3. The other 4 area reports are also all over the time map…
Also, the art department finished all the new logos and wants them replaced throughout the piece so I’d like to manipulate the meta-data to tag them as the new standard graphics and have them repopulate all their respective occurances – full screen, insets, in composites, and in title screen – automatically – project wide. Finally, I’d like to confirm that the numbers in all the embedded charts that we use for each show are updated when accounting gets them done…

Since a lot of this stuff is time flexible – I don’t want to waste my time opening 25 holes in my timeline, pasting new clips, dragging all the titles and stuff into alignment and then closing up all the gaps I’ve just created everywhere – that seems inefficient and kinda stupid…

Wouldn’t it be SWEET to have a video editing app with a super-flexible timeline that also understands DATA naturally? Rather than just a linear stack of fixed state picture clips and unconnected layer clips that have to be re-built, relayed, and re-timed endlessly in order to do the same basic construction each month?

Oh, yeah, and I can use it do do Mom’s birthday movie every bit as well.

Works for 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’Conner