Brad Bussé
Forum Replies Created
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This reminds me of the last AZFCPUG meeting which was about ZFS.
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Thanks for the link, Bob.
Thanks for your candid opinion, Rob.
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Jamie, while you make some relevant points about the differentiation between the death of Shake and the current situation with FCP’s death and it’s replacement with FCX, I think your perspective is distinctly separated from those who watched the excruciatingly slow death of Shake at the hands of Apple. You clearly don’t realize the massive impact of Shake. It was the absolute industry standard for compositing for forever on all feature films.
Apple bought Shake, spent some time implementing some very useful utilitarian updates, and eventually abandoned it. From a monetary/PR/user install standpoint, FCP is a much larger deal. But, for those who lived and breathed Shake only to see it suffocated, the attitude of Apple now regarding FCS toward the professional market is a sickening deja vu. Shake users wouldn’t have been so angry at Apple if Apple had just said, “hey, we’ve given up on Shake because it’s now too small of a market and we can’t charge the exorbitant licensing fees that we had expected to, due to changes in the market”, or “hey, we’ve decided that we can make more money in the consumer and prosumer markets, so it makes no sense to continue supporting this product since we can make much more money in other endeavors, so we’ve decided to gut the stabilization and optical flow tracking technologies from Shake to apply to our AE ripoff which uses new technology which will revolutionize motion graphics with new flashy tech just like LiveType did, at the expense of end user customization (who needs freedom when you have cool templates!).” But instead, they let us all speculate for 3 years without a single statement about their future intent/roadmap, about the new-tech version of Shake code named Phenomenon, which Apple was widely rumored to have been creating. After awhile with no word from Apple, some users started to speculate that Phenomenon would be nothing more than an updated Motion with some Shake-organs implanted like a stem cell chimeric pig. Kind of reminiscent of the iMovie Pro debate, wouldn’t you say? In the end, Nuke took over, EOL for Shake, still no word from Apple regarding their plans for a professional node-based Shake replacementm, which of course never materialized.
For the record, the blog that Bob linked to is written by Ron Brinkman. Check out his about page; one of original founding employees of SPI, one of the early designer/dev team members of the original Shake, and the author of The Art and Science of Digital Compositing. If you’re not familiar with that book, it’s the Bible of compositing.
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[Gregory Butner] ” I think we are all far too ignorant to be calling for a specific person’s job at Apple.”
Agreed. I think it’s very important not to attack individuals, irregardless of circumstances (with the exceptions of perhaps CEOs when they run a company into the ground like Captain Ahab). Utimately, there are more people involved in both the design, budget and focus, and management. For all we know, Randy had a spectacular vision in mind for delivery, but he was pressured to get FCP X out the door and had to cut major features to be added later, due to only having enough manpower to get the redesigned framework complete (get the chassis and engine done, and add the doors and wheels later). I’ve read countless comments at the Cow about how Apple (which already runs with small dedicated teams of senior talent), has “borrowed” a lot of talent from the Pro Apps division to work on iOS over the past 2 or 3 years.
So, Randy, this isn’t directed at you, but given the thread I couldn’t resist:
https://www.theonion.com/articles/apple-employee-fired-for-thinking-different,773/ -
Absolutely. In one of the other threads, I said that I’m waiting a couple of months to let the dust settle and see what Apple’s response is. If they stay closed lipped without any definitive list of which missing pro features will be added and by when, I’ll have to assume that they’re treating FCP in a similar fashion as they did with Shake. I can’t be led along for 3 or 4 years with Apple not squashing Phenomenon rumors, before they finally kill it off.
Honestly, Apple, don’t forget that a lot of your consumer profits were built on the back of your reputation of being the company for digital creative professionals. Losing your FCP community will definitely harm your cool-factor reputation. We all know that Livetype and Photo Booth are trinkets for consumers, which have limited coolness since they’re based on novelty which wears out once the end user has used it a few times. Losing the FCP community will also severely impact your ability to continue pushing your choice of formats like .m4v and HTML 5 over Flash, Open CL over CUDA, etc. I generally prefer Apple’s choices since they offer better quality and/or open source access as an industry standard.
All that said, most post houses have been waiting on a next-gen NLE platform which is pro-ready out the gate, for well over 2 years. FCP X 1.0 is not it, and judging from the responses on this forum, many users don’t have the patience that I have in waiting it out a couple of months. I believe that you need to move FAST in responding to the community, or it will be too late.
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Well, to put it in perspective, it’s not quite as bad as how they handled Shake. They let that sit for about 3 or 4 years without addressing any of the well known rumors that Apple was overhauling it into a next-gen node compositor codenamed Phenomenon. Then they just EOLed it.
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For now I’m sticking with FCS 2 to see what lies ahead in terms of new Mac Pros, Lion, and Apple’s response to the community. Hey, maybe Apple will surprise us with a point release by August which adds all of the missing pro i/o features, and also includes an integrated node-based Phenomenon compositor, along with a $50 64-bit Soundtrack Pro. I’m not holding my breath on the last two parts, but it would be nice!
If Apple fails to address the complaints of the pro community, I don’t know where I’d look next. I’m not looking forward to going back to Avid’s archaic interface and some of the workflow (although I admit I haven’t used it in several years). I got to preview Softimage DS (Now Avid DS) before it was released at Siggraph ’99 and really liked that, but I don’t know how much of a community it has now. Most likely I’d head to Premiere Pro since that’s most likely where a lot of FCP users are likely to go, and if the community builds, then so will the support for the app from Adobe. Plus, I already have it as part of the Production Suite, and it would be nice to see what benefits there are to staying within the Adobe suite since I heavily use After Effects and Photoshop.
But I’m waiting a couple of months for the dust to settle and see what/if Apple has to say by then.
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bump
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The iMac is not currently a perfectly good editing machine. It’s fastest i/o port right now is FW800. Even if the current models had TB, they’d still be limited in ability. I do lots of work in After Effects to support my FCP projects, and on a recent project I was using the 2.93 quad i7 iMac w/ top of the line GPU available and 8 GB of RAM. It was extraordinarily slow, and the 8 GB of memory left me with several hundred MB of page outs.
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Well, theoretically, the price of an external RAID system would come down by the cost of the internal RAID card currently required – which for a solid card right now, currently runs about $700. But, an external hardware-based RAID also requires hardware on the external RAID itself, i.e. – the RAID controller card(s). If by “Flash RAID System” you’re referring to RAIDS utilizing SSD drives, then that cost is pretty much dependent on the cost of SSD drives themselves. Those are still pretty pricey if you’re looking into getting a good hardware based external RAID array that can be striped as RAID-5 for redundancy (4 drive minimum), especially if you need a reasonable amount of storage, say 8 TB (before formatting).