[Chris Kenny]

[MIke Guidotti] “Wow Apple needs to fire the person that did the layout for this article! The giant picture above the headline shows —— 2 AVID Pro Tools Rigs AND an AVID Euphonix Mixing Console —- and no FCP setups… The other screens are the Euphonix automation system.”

The fact that FCP X can be integrated into standard workflows was one of the major points the article was making. “FCP X can’t fit into standard workflows” is a common part of the critics’ narrative. So it seems to me that showing a project originating from FCP X being taken into a high-end finishing suite is rather more relevant than making sure to use a shot of a couple of monitors with the FCP X interface visible on them. The fact that FCP X can display its interface on a monitor is not in contention….

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[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “While true, that’s still only specific to an FCP X workflow.”

Well, yeah, that’s sort of my point. There are productions spending many thousands of dollars getting footage transcoded because of the NLE decisions they’re making, where with FCP X they could simply take the footage off the mags, load it onto a MacBook Pro, and start cutting, as proxy media (which they could seamlessly toggle over to) was automatically generated in the background.

Of course as a post house providing such transcoding services, we don’t mind the standard approach too much (heh). But the next time I’m speccing the workflow for one of our occasional internal end-to-end projects, I’ll absolutely skip the traditional dailies workflow. Even despite the fact that we can do all of it without paying an outside vendor. Skipping it should save considerable time, and there’s much less that can go wrong e.g. taking a project into Resolve if the sequence coming from the NLE already contains references to your online media.

This is the future — digital cinema workflows with high-end media formats made nearly as simple as downloading and editing together some clips from your phone.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “Agreed. Also for Alexa files, the LogC-to-REC709 processing is a very useful touch.”

Yup, both this and the new reel name support are a big deal for indie feature film workflows.

Between this, the R3D support, and the built-in proxy/optimized media generation features, there’s not much of a case left for externally created offline editorial dailies. That’s a pretty big change in the feature world.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Daniel McClintock] “Any guesses if the company will exist by the end of the year?”

These kinds of shenanigans don’t generally bring down companies unless it turns out that pretty much the whole basis of the company is fraudulent (i.e. Enron). There are no indications that anything like that is going on here. So while this isn’t exactly good news, particularly with the other challenges Avid faces in terms of restructuring or growing its way to profitability, it probably won’t amount to much in the end.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “I’d think something like
“Tag Team NLE Wrestling Bood Bath”
or
“My NLE’s Red Hot, Your’s ain’t Doodly Squat”
or more simply
“NLE Death Match”
or maybe more accurate
“Grumpy Old Men” (quick, find the last post made in this forum by a woman).”

Let’s just call it “Fight!”

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Interesting article on how hilariously incompetent Apple are at managing databases.”

The article isn’t about databases per se, it’s about iCloud’s ability to transparently sync object graphs between multiple instances of an application across devices. Providing this as a generalizable system-level service is new, ambitious, and it’s honestly not surprising that it’s taking some time to work out the bugs.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “The company has simply not expressed any desire to fix Core Data syncing.”

The article that contains this quote also notes that many bugs have been fixed. I guess they magically fix themselves with no work on Apple’s part?

Core Data syncing is quite important to the multi-device computing model that seems to represent Apple’s vision of the future. The idea that Apple intends to neglect is is not especially credible.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Oh it does? it’s all based around core data? “

You’re mixing up Core Data, which has been around for eight years now and is quite solid, with Core Data syncing, which is only about 18 months old and still has some bugs to be worked out. FCP X does not presently use any of Core Data’s syncing features, although it’s possible they could, in the future, form the basis for collaborative editing capabilities.

Nice try with the FUD, though.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “There is no road back Craig, even if the software wasn’t barmy, which it half is in the timeline, there’s just no road available to them at this point.”

You have zero systematic data. At best you’re off in your particular corner of the market, reporting what you’re personally seeing with in the circles you have direct contact with — probably with a fair bit of confirmation bias, because, well, humans do that, even when they’re trying not to. This is an industry where most work comes through word of mouth. And sentiment toward particular software travels through those same social networks. Consequently, the NLE decisions you’re seeing in your particular circles are not independent, uncorrelated decisions that you can treat as a proxy for the wider market.

In the circles I have direct contact with — mostly indie film, some commercial/music video work, centered in NYC — I’m not seeing much FCP X either. But I’m also not seeing the market settle on Premiere and Media Composer. As a post house, we have contact with a lot of productions that make their own choices about what NLE to use. We’ve gotten exactly two inquiries about Premiere (neither for features), one inquiry about FCP X, and everything else is still FCP 7 and Media Composer, in the same proportions as two years ago.

So FCP X isn’t exactly winning, but it hasn’t lost yet either. And now that Apple and other developers in the FCP X ecosystem have had a chance to fill in key core functionality, this, I suspect, is where things start to get interesting.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jeremy Garchow] “If there was a definitive statement that Apple is not in the speed game, it would be the above.”

It’s not nearly that clear cut. Apple is in fact offering the fastest processors they can offer without sacrificing significant functionality. This suggests that Apple does care about processor performance… they just don’t care exclusively about processor performance.

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[Chris Kenny]

I think the really big flaw with Siracusa’s analysis here is that he’s analogizing the Mac Pro to a sports car. This is all wrong in the context of the current computer industry. Sports cars are sexy, prestigious, appealing even to people for whom the expense would be irrational. Back when the average consumer used a low-end or mid-range tower, a high end tower might have been all of those things. But the average consumer now uses a laptop — a 40 pound tower is irrelevant. The ‘prestige’ sports car in Apple’s current lineup is the 15″ Retina MacBook Pro.

The Mac Pro is more analogous to a truck — an actual truck, not a ‘luxury’ pickup truck or SUV or whatever. It’s a business tool purchased by people with specific requirements that mainstream users don’t have. It’s possible there’s some halo effect with, perhaps, pro users being more likely to buy Apple notebooks as personal systems if they can do their high-end work on a machine running the same OS. But in general, it’s very unlikely that the vast majority of average current or potential Apple customers notice or care what’s going on with the Mac Pro.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Look at Apple’s current i7 offerings, then look at intel’s i7 offerings. There are faster i7s available, there are 6 core i7s available. Are they in Apple hardware? No, they are not. They would be if Apple really wanted to play the speed game.”

The 6-core i7s are Socket 2011 — as has been extensively discussed, there’s no solution for Thunderbolt with Socket 2011 so far. iMacs are configurable with up to an i7 3770, which is in fact the fastest i7 Intel sells excluding the ‘K’ model of the same chip. (The ‘K’ series processors are targeted at overclockers and aren’t generally offered by mainstream OEMs. And in any event the 3770K has a base clock only 3% higher, an irrelevant difference.)

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