Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Andrew Kimery] “Going by that metric FCPX won’t be seen as ready for prime time for another 6 years or so. Then, once it really starts taking hold, it will languish for a few years before Apple kills it and starts the cycle all over again. Still not a very compelling argument for FCPX, IMO. ;)”
Heh. I’d imagine things would be a little faster this time, since FCP X is more technically capable (relative to market expectations) at this point than FCP was at a similar point in its lifecycle, and the underlying disruptive wave FCP X is riding — file-based, metadata-oriented workflow — is more applicable to the high end (mostly broadcast/feature markets) we’re talking about here than the underlying disruptive wave FCP was riding (DV + FireWire).
That said, I do think the slow pace of FCP’s rise is a useful illustration of just how conservative this industry is. As is the continued widespread use of Media Composer, really. Media Composer feels more ‘legacy’ than any other desktop app I’ve come into contact with in years — the labyrinthine interface, the bizarre approach to media management, the inability to perform pretty much any processing task without blocking the UI — and yet it’s still the dominant power in some industry segments. This is an industry that practically requires generational turnover to embrace change.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Lawrence] “Yep. Oh, wait.
Film Unit Behind Saturday Night Live Embraces Adobe Video Workflow”
We could probably match anecdotes all day. This is a market of several million customers; citing individual cases isn’t going to get us anywhere.
The closest things we have to systematic data are summarized here, and tell us that as of April of last year, there were more FCP X installs than FCP installs, and Apple’s share of the ‘pro’ NLE market had fallen all the way from… 55% to 52%. Basically margin of error.
This is all contrary to the hyperbole surrounding FCP X’s release, and much more compatible with the position I advanced, that Apple had considerable time to build up FCP X’s feature set and establish an ecosystem around it before the industry shifted very far toward competitors. And they have indeed been building.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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We-based polls with self-selected samples are entirely meaningless. Passing this link around a couple of forums with a skeptical bent toward FCP X could trivially produce these results.
As a post house, I think we get a pretty good idea of what indie projects in the New York market are edited on, and you know what? We’re still seeing the same mix of FCP 7 and Avid projects we were before FCP X was ever announced. Out of probably 100 projects we’ve had some level of contact with over the last year exactly two were edited in Premiere — nether of them features. We’ve also come into contact with one short film edited in FCP X. We seem to get more inquiries about FCP X than Premiere, interestingly, although I don’t know if this is because there are more people considering it or because, with all of the noise the Internet has made about it, people want reassurance that a post house can handle projects from it. For the record, we can handle them just fine. In fact, an X-to-Resolve workflow is our standard choice for internal projects now.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “yes, I’m really really sure it does. Also – Note the explosion in FCPX advertised jobs.”
Note the lack of mass-scale migration from classic FCP to Premiere or Media Composer. This industry does not move very fast, in any direction. FCP X is a completely new app. We know how long it takes a new app to achieve substantial adoption in certain segments of this industry, because we saw how long that took for classic FCP. If we go by time since release, FCP X is about where FCP was circa 2001, i.e. two years before Cold Mountain, which is usually taken as the start of its process of breaking into ‘more serious’ market segments. We’re starting to see the very leading edge of that now with FCP X, i.e. this very positive writeup in Filmmaker Magazine.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I believe you’re confusing it with premiere. the one with a tracked timeline.”
I’m reasonably certain that I’m not. While Premiere is cheaper and more accessible than Media Composer, it still doesn’t do nearly as well in those dimensions as FCP X. It’s not just about price and accessibility — though FCP X does beat Premiere on both of those. It’s also about the fact that FCP X simply belongs to a new generation of software that doesn’t involve intrusive copy protection, buggy installers, modal dialogs, contextual pop-up menus that barely fit on the screen, etc. I mean, look, practically anyone in a creative field ends up using some of Adobe’s software, and I think everyone respects the feature sets Adobe manages to deliver, but seriously, I’m really not looking to extend this into more aspects of my workflow.
As for the track paradigm, well, much like, say, Media Composer, as far as I can tell, that’s something that longtime users often can’t see the faults with, but that makes thins more onerous on new editors. The truth is, between roles, the ‘override collections’ modifier, the position tool, and commands like ‘Replace with Gap’, the magnetic timeline offers a superset of the functionality of a traditional track-based timeline — it offers intelligent, non-destructive default behavior, that can be overridden as necessary. I discussed this reasonable defaults view at length a year and a half ago.
This is not to say that Premiere won’t be somewhat successful on its own terms. Media Composer is an app that is, by any objective standard (i.e. according to pretty much anyone who knows what modern software looks like and hasn’t been using Media Composer since computers still came in beige) is well past its sell-by date. Even Avid itself recognizes this internally; they tried some years back to build a next generation editing app, but backed out over concerns about disenfranchising the existing user base. Avid’s prospects as a company also leave something to be desired, with possible implications for users. As the long, slow migration away from Media Composer continues, Adobe now may be in a position to pick up a respectable fraction of those users.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Frank Manno] “Selecting a range on an event then getting back to the OUT point of that range later seems a bit clumsy to me. Either that or it’s me who is clumsy.. 🙁 “
Mark > Go To > Range End, or shift-O.
If the timeline is active and you want to switch focus back to the event browser without having to click it, that’s command-1.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Cameron Clendaniel] “Sounds like a solid plan to me. Expose them to multiple NLE platforms and teach the fundamentals upon which all NLEs are based.”
This is, in my opinion, the only sensible approach. In particular, I’d teach at least Media Composer and FCP X; Media Composer because it’s the established power in a certain segment of the industry (which even the old FCP never quite managed to penetrate), and FCP X because I suspect it will follow a trajectory very similar to the one FCP followed, and eventually emerge as the dominant option across other industry segments.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “the success of FCP was based on the – then – apple engineers corp directly engaging their surroundings and delivering a competitive judgement.
FCP was their competitive judgement.But the point surely is that apple have felt no such onus this time around.”
I think the success of FCP was based on the fact that it was a) cheaper and more approachable than other available systems, and b) designed from the ground up for the then-emerging disruptive forces of DV and FireWire.
FCP X is a) cheaper and more approachable than other available systems, and b) designed from the ground up for the now-emerging disruptive forces of file-based acquisition and delivery.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Seeman] “2K ProRes4444 23.98fps 90 minute length is something like 230GB. That could fit on a small rugged HDD
FedEx can deliver it just as fast.”Alternatively, a 65 Mbps (upstream) FiOS connection (I pay $100/month for one here) can move 230 GB in less than nine hours.
As William Gibson said, the future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andrew Stone] “The lite version. 14 presets come up for DNxHD: 720p 8 bit to 1080p 444.”
Uninstalled, reinstalled, and now they show up. Weird.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.