[Chris Kenny]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I prefer certain tools to others, and I can understand needing to teach a broad spectrum of tools and workflows, and I also get why one might not find fcpx suitable, but vehemently hate?”

It’s social signaling. The early narrative about FCP X was that it wasn’t suitable for serious professionals. Thus one way to signal that one is a serious professional is to disapprove of FCP X. The more thoroughly one disapproves of it, the more serious one is. Frankly this industry is full of this kind of thing — it’s unfortunately not just restricted to film students.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Herb Sevush] “Agree. I miss the color labeling too.”

Yeah, I don’t know how I forgot that one.

[Herb Sevush] “Since Quicken for Mac sucks while Quicken for Windows is great does that mean that OSX isn’t as good as Windows?”

In some sort of abstract, ‘fair’ evaluation of the platforms? No. If your primary use case for the computer is running Quicken? Yes.

[Herb Sevush] “Another point that has nothing to do with the viability of Windows as an operating system. I understand that it affects your particular workflow, but I could easily come up with different workflows that would work in Windows favor.”

Honestly, we have zero choice here. Literally the only occasions on which we ever get Windows formatted drives from clients are when drives come formatted FAT32 out of the box and clients erroneously neglect to reformat them (often causing problems with large media files). Maybe it’s different elsewhere, but that’s the reality of the NYC indie film post production world right now.

[Herb Sevush] “When I didn’t know what I was doing it took me days to set up my first Mac. There is no reason that setting up a Windows box should take that much time. I will agree that a Mac is Quicker, by about an hour or so, in setup time if you know what you are doing. I would suggest getting a VAR supplied box next time around if your having that much trouble.”

This isn’t a “know what you’re doing” kind of thing. I wasn’t installing PCIe cards in the wrong speed slots or something. It is, rather, a matter of things that are supposed to work a certain way not really working that way, and having to try various combinations at random until an acceptable solution is found. There’s less of this quirkiness in the Mac world, in my experience, and because there are fewer configurations out there in the wild, when there are quirky issues it tends to be a lot easier to find out about them.

Getting a VAR-supplied box wipes out a lot of the cost/flexibility advantages Wintel supposedly has. This odd period with no Mac Pro updates aside, if a VAR-supplied box is required on the Windows side, in many cases you might as well just get a Mac.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “I don’t argue the “eureka moment” premise, for someone who is fully engrained in post and likes to play with toys. But even as one of those people, I’m unlikely to pay the Mac tax just on the chance of that eureka moment happening for me. I got my first Windows machine in 20 years last summer, and can honestly say that the transition hasn’t been bad at all. As a loyal Mac apologist for those 20 years, I always felt that the extra money you paid for a Mac was worth it. I cannot say that I believe that any more. “

For what it’s worth, I’ve had exactly the opposite experience. We built a Windows machine primarily as a Resolve grading system given last year’s lack of a (real) Mac Pro update. I figured hey, I’m a Mac guy, but this system is going to pretty much run one app. How much difference can the OS make?

A lot, as it turns out. A few annoyances, some of which we anticipated, some of which we didn’t:

– Explorer just isn’t as ‘rich’ as the Finder is — you can’t have it calculate folder sizes in list view (just when hovering over a folder), there’s no column view, there’s no QuickLook, its search features aren’t as nice.

– Working with QuickTime media is frustrating — codec support is incomplete (no ProRes encoding, no XDCAM decoding, etc.), performance isn’t great. I guess this is in some sense Apple’s fault rather than Microsoft’s, but either way it does make Windows worse for our use cases.

– The whole way Windows deals with drive letters and file paths ends up requiring us to either manually assign mount points for every drive we use with the system (like a six step process that’s not easy to explain to interns), or constantly relink things when drive letters for external drives decide to change of their own volition.

– Virtually every client drive that passes through our hands is Mac formatted. We use MacDrive to work with these drives in Windows, and it’s pretty good, but just not quite as solid as we’d like, honestly.

– Ejecting drives is also weird. Windows is back where OS X was with this prior to 10.6, where often drives would claim to be in use, and the system wouldn’t tell you what process was using the drive or let you force eject it. Additionally, depending on what controller they’re attached to (and there are a couple on the motherboard, plus we’ve got an SAS controller installed), Windows may decide a drive is internal (even if it’s not) and not offer to let you eject it at all. I’m told there’s some registry hack to fix this; I haven’t tried that yet.

– Boot times are considerably worse than for any modern Mac, despite an SSD boot drive. Pretty painful if the system acts up and you have to reboot in a client-supervised session. Or (see previous point) if you have to reboot just to safely remove a drive.

– Windows just seems to be a little quirky with hardware support. The system sometimes, entirely at random, takes 15 extra seconds to notice the keyboard and mouse when it’s booted. Sometimes USB 2.0 devices don’t quite want to work when plugged into USB 3.0 ports, despite the fact that those should be 100% compatible. It took probably 30 hours of my time to really get the system up and running the way it should (all the right drivers installed, the right PCIe slot arrangements, everything properly updated), significantly longer than equivalent tasks have ever taken me on a Mac.

So… the system is fast, it was damned inexpensive by a Mac user’s standards, and it does fundamentally perform the tasks it was ‘hired’ for. But we will immediately buy any new Mac Pro, or any plausible replacement Apple comes up with for it. It will easily be worth the extra expense to make these issues go away.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Scott Smith] “A project shot in Red, was off-lined in ProRes with composites and effects in FCP. Client wants a 2K output. What is the best way of handling a Red conform with effects that won’t translate to Resolve? “

There isn’t really a magic bullet here. You probably want to grade off of the raw files, which means, of course, you can’t just flatten out the effects from FCP and drop them in. If they really want to keep the effects from FCP, graded footage is going to have to travel back through FCP at some point. You can either round trip the entire sequence back through FCP at the end and re-apply the effects there (FCP will work just fine with e.g. 2K ProRes 4444), or if you want to finish directly out of Resolve you’ll have to render out graded versions of the plates used by the VFX shots, take those back into FCP, recreate the composites with them, and then render those out to bring back into Resolve.

FCP isn’t exactly a serious VFX/compositing environment, though. Some filters/transitions will silently drop you down to 8-bit color depth, for instance. Ideally you’d want to export DPX or EXR plates of graded shots from Resolve and recreate the VFX in AfterEffects, Nuke, or similar. Not that we’ve never round-tripped this kind of stuff though FCP due to budget or time constraints, but we generally advise clients not to consider any VFX they do in their offline edit to be anything more than previz.

—
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[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “To me, the most interesting aspect of what’s coming will be how they handle the GPU.
All Thunderbolt computers to date have the GPU on the motherboard. Keep in mind that Thunderbolt is also the display out.”

It would actually be quite handy if a hypothetical new Mac Pro had decent on-board video. It would solve the problem of how to get a video signal over Thunderbolt. Plus, making a separate GPU optional might be attractive for some customers who have more CPU-focused workloads (that’s especially interesting if there’s a new more rack-friendly form factor). It would also be great for e.g. Resolve users — use the on-board GPU to drive your GUI display, freeing up a slot for an additional CUDA processing GPU.

Maybe a plan for something like this is why Apple has, over the last couple of OS X releases, been adding support for generic ‘PC’ graphics cards to OS X.

—
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[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “I’m not saying that the cheapest ($999) MacBook hasn’t been popular among students, but in reality I don’t see 50% penetration among the film students I run across.”

I find this entirely baffling. I cannot recall running across a single instance of a film student using a non-Mac system in years — and again, if you combine the general data on FCP market share with Adobe’s platform breakdown, it’s really hard to come to the conclusion that the Mac isn’t at 70%+. Maybe not in, say, 3D, but across video, graphic design, etc.

[Oliver Peters] “In any case, laptops are increasingly irrelevant. Probably too, the split between Mac OS and other OSs. New splits will emerge – iOS versus Chrome versus Android versus Windows 8. Apple’s Q4 2012 numbers show a decline in Mac sales and my guess is that in a few years, the traditional laptop will be gone in favor of advanced tablets – both iPad and Surface variants. Most people who own laptops these days use them as desktop replacements.”

This may be eventually (I think pro video will be one of the last holdouts on traditional desktop platforms for a while), but of course Apple is much stronger in the tablet market than the Mac ever was in the PC market, so it hardly represents an additional barrier to the adoption of software that only supports Apple platforms.

[Oliver Peters] “I don’t believe I ever said anything about this being a barrier to FCP X.”

That was the context of this discussion.

[Oliver Peters] “I also personally know of some broadcast groups who no longer will accept bids with Apple products, thanks to recent history with Xserve, Xserve RAID and FCS.”

Perhaps, but this applies to a numerically tiny slice of the general creative market.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “Computer sales in the video world are roughly 50/50.”

This number comes from where?

[Oliver Peters] “Based on what info? There are plenty of corporate, print and web users of CS that are only on PC. “

Based on the fact that Adobe’s overall sales are 50/50, and you’re crazy if you think e.g. corporate document management is as heavily Mac-based as Creative Suite.

[Oliver Peters] “A quote from 2007 is ancient by this point in time.”

Only if there’s some cognizable reason to believe Apple’s share of the general creative market has been dropping over the last several years, despite the Mac’s very good overall performance over that time period.

As far as the ‘aspiring’ market, Mac laptops have also become fairly ludicrously popular with college students — and again, you’re crazy if you don’t think that’s higher among film students and lower among (say) accounting students.

Again, the point of comparison here is classic FCP. To believe that being Mac-only will be a significant barrier to FCP X, when it (apparently) wasn’t to classic FCP, you’d need to show something like the Mac’s share among relevant user groups declining. Available data, to the extent that we have it, seems to indicate the opposite.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “The cross-platform suppliers (Avid, Adobe) generally admit to a 50/50 split between Mac and PC.”

Err… you do realize that if FCP is (or at least was) half of the NLE market, and if Avid and Premiere are 50/50 Mac/Windows, that’s 75% Mac right there, yes?

Also, I believe Adobe’s Mac/PC revenue is about 50/50. Adobe makes products other than Creative Suite. The Mac’s heavy use by creatives probably means Creative Suite is more Mac-oriented than the average Adobe product (like, say, their corporate document management tools). In other words, if it’s 50/50 overall, it’s almost certainly the case that more than 50% of Creative Suite sales are Mac-based. Adobe doesn’t regularly release such numbers, but here’s a 2007 source saying Creative Suite sales were 75% Mac — I see little reason to believe the Mac has substantially lost share in the general creative market since then.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Franz Bieberkopf] “- The 54% figure you’re quoting is FCP7 + FCPX.”

Yes, I know.

[Franz Bieberkopf] “The comparison of “more FCPX seats” included free trials and was to FCP7 seats – significantly not including upgrades (surely the lion’s share of FCP installs)”

This comes from an Apple briefing; it’s not clear it’s from SCRI. Apple would presumably have independent methods of determining something like this. Where are you getting the information that it includes free trials and doesn’t include upgrades?

FCP X is regularly the highest grossing app on the Mac App Store (excluding Mountain Lion, since, you know, it’s not technically an app), which suggests it’s probably doing reasonably well.

[Franz Bieberkopf] “- The sample size is unknown – either 1874 or 2500 depending on which quote you want to pull, but that’s the total for 6 different market segments of post (it’s unknown if all segments report purchases of NLEs.)
– They extrapolate from their samples to represent “the market”, but …
– Their statistical methods are unstated and unknown.”

These are essentially generic objections that anyone could raise about essentially any survey data made available to the public. SCRI is pretty much the standard source for survey data in this industry. Apple, for one, has been citing their data for many years — I don’t think this is a situation in which there are lots of surveys out there and Apple cherry-picked the one that happened to show what they wanted.

[Franz Bieberkopf] “- These fuzzy guesses are almost a year old.”

This is the main limitation — but, of course, it cuts both ways. On the one hand, there has been more time for those who planned to move away from FCP to do so. On the other hand, FCP X’s feature set has been quite substantially expanded over the last year, making it a much more plausible option for many folks.

I do wish we had more data. But in the absence of anything better, this is a hell of a lot more compelling than “I don’t like FCP X and here are some people on the Internet who agree with me”, which is practically a standard argument around here.

—
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[Chris Kenny]

[Shawn Miller] “First, you’ll note that I said “the larger creative community”. And that was in response to your statement that “… most folks in this industry, including those who are still just aspiring, do seem to use Macs” You didn’t limit your comments to editors.”

Honestly, I meet a fair number of people in the industry, I see what personal machines interns and students own, etc. and it’s very rare to see anything other than a Mac. Maybe it’s different outside of New York or something, but unless you’re talking mostly about 3D guys or something, the Mac seems to be overwhelmingly dominant.

[Shawn Miller] “I didn’t make an absolute statement, Chris. Just as I never said that switching NLE’s necessarily means switching OS’s. I said a number of editors (not all) are exploring their choices; OS, applications and hardware. As for evidence, may I suggest the following articles?”

I was already aware that there are some people on the Internet who don’t like FCP X.

[Shawn Miller] “So… are you calling me a liar then? Not sure what this comment is about.”

I think you’re advocating a particular position.

[Shawn Miller] “However, if you’re talking about FCPX in relation to the Creative Suite, then you’re making a case for the Creative Suite. “

Only if you think Jobs was making a case for traditional PCs.

[Shawn Miller] “And where did I say that there was widespread switching? Are you seriously meaning to imply that no one is switching from FCPX?”

Some people are switching. It’s not clear that the FCP universe (comprising both classic FCP and X) is suffering a non-negligible net loss of users.

[Shawn Miller] “For the aspiring artist who wants to explore motion graphics, VFX and editing, can FCPX match the same capability/value as the Creative Cloud subscription? “

The question is stacking the deck.

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