Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Oliver Peters] “Reel IDs embedded into the TC track of a QT movie WILL NOT be read in FCP X.”
It’s kind of confusing that Apple would ignore this standard field and then rely on vendor-specific solutions. It seems like we’ve already got a situation where imported R3D clips come in with reel data in the ‘Reel’ field, but Alexa clips come in with reel data in a different Alexa-specific field. Why wouldn’t you want reel metadata in the same field for all media types?
Well, as long as people don’t rename the media files on disk it’s never that hard to derive reel names for stuff shot on modern file-based cameras. Still, that would be more of a comfort if we hadn’t had clients bring us projects where media files had been renamed.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “Adobe has a hidden advantage in price: if you need Photoshop/Illustrator/After Effects — and an awful lot of post-production can’t get away without at least one of these tools — then you get Premiere in the suite for free, and FCPX is suddenly at a $299 disadvantage.”
I have to say, though, at least for us the fact that you can’t split the different Creative Suite apps from a single licensed copy up over multiple systems significantly reduces this advantage. There’s not 100% overlap between the machines we need Photoshop/Illustrator/AE on and and the machines we want to edit on.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Gary Hazen] “Given that you have a very keen interest every time Avid’s share price or quartly earnings have the slightest hiccup. I was curious if you have any commentary on the latest financial forecast regarding Apple.
This of course is in the interest of being “Fair and Balanced” as Fox News might say.”
Meh. AAPL is still up 49% since January 1, the company’s profits are ludicrously huge, and their revenue now outstrips that of Google and Microsoft combined. Looked at another way, with Avid’s revenue of $127M in Q3, Apple literally takes in as much money about every nine hours as Avid does in an entire quarter. A 23% y/y reduction in revenue for Avid is hugely worrying — it’s the sort of trajectory that means there might not be a viable business here in a few years. In that eventuality someone would certainly buy its more profitable assets, but a) I don’t think we really know if Media Composer is one of these and b) software that gets acquired from failing companies by companies without significant previous experience in the same market (which is what would likely happen here) tends to fair quite poorly.
In other words, Avid’s financial underperformance poses a serious risk to users who are heavily invested in its solutions, which is particularly relevant in light of the discussions here about leaving Apple products because of uncertainty about Apple’s future direction. Basically, if you’re looking for security, switching to Avid seems like a terrible idea.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Dennis Radeke] “FYI – Premiere Pro got re-written again in 2010 with the shipping of CS5 which became a native 64-bit application on both Mac and PC.”
I don’t believe it did. A 64-bit port rarely involves a complete rewrite. Mostly it’s making sure your source code isn’t making any overly broad assumptions about pointer sizes and then setting a compiler flag.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Bill Davis] “But considering the pace of X development – I wouldn’t bet against it either.”
This is a really important point. I know a lot of people think everything Apple has shipped up through 10.0.6 should have been in 10.0.0. Maybe that’s even true. For whatever reason, it wasn’t. But what was in 10.0.0 doesn’t provide any useful any guide to the pace of development, as we have no really clear idea of exactly when Apple started development on X.
What has been added since 10.0.0 does give us an idea of the pace of development, and if you count up the major features there, it’s fast. Since a lot of this has been catch up, people haven’t given Apple much credit for it, but now that FCP X is mostly caught up, if new features keep showing up at this rate, it’s going to be quite a force.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “Not being an Avid shareholder I see this as great new – each loss brings us that much closer to Avid being bought up by BMD, at which point MC is issued for free, Symphony goes for $200 and Isis goes for a penny to the pound and they throw in a free BM cine camera with each install.”
Honestly, I know it still has a bunch of loyal users, but MC’s interface is utterly impenetrable to new users and the whole way it manages media is bizarre. The app generally has the feel of a program which has had far too much grafted onto it over the years and which has survived through a few too many major shifts in related markets (the rise of DV, the shift to file-based workflow, etc.), and I bet this is reflected in the coherence (or rather incoherence) of the codebase as well. Consider that both Apple (with FCP X last year) and Adobe (with Premiere Pro in 2003) considered it prudent to discard and replace NLE environments that weren’t nearly as old as Media Composer now is. Avid is even rumored to have started doing this with MC, but supposedly backed off out of fear that it would alienate its conservative customer base.
How much value would an app like this really have to a company like Blackmagic? It seems like almost the exact opposite of the NLE they’d build if they built one themselves.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Bruce Goodman] “If I copy this media to an eSATA drive and then use this as my source, I would expect a faster playback speed but would Resolve link to this different drive?”
Yes, but if it’s 1080p 10-bit uncompressed you’re going to need a RAID with at least two and more likely at least three drives to get full real-time playback. (A fast SSD might also do it, but of course SSD’s low capacity makes this impractical for any project of non-trivial length.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I’m seeing this exact issue. Config:
Windows 7
ASUS P9X79 PRO
Core i7 3930K
16 GB RAM
GT120 (GUI)
GTX 580 3GB (GPU)
RedRocket
DecklinkAny decode resolution with the Rocket enabled maxes out at just around 16-17fps. I’ve been working with Epic footage by disabling the Rocket in Device Manager and going to 1/4 res software decoding (which doesn’t look as bad as I was expecting), but it would certainly be nice if this were fixed.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “My calculations (based on Craig’s method) are 134K.
I don’t think they’re right.”
Again, your calculations rely on the premise that the top-ranking lists are based on all-time total downloads. We know for certain this isn’t true, or it would be essentially impossible for new apps to quickly rise on these lists, which is something that happens all the time.
At best your numbers are establishing an upper limit on how many copies of FCP X could have possibly been sold over the last few days. But that upper limit is very high — if we assume the rankings look at four days of data, your 134K implies annual sales of ~12M. That’s not very interesting — if we could establish a low upper limit it would be evidence FCP X wasn’t doing well, but an unrealistically high upper limit provides no real information.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “I think you mean “speculate” when you say “establish”, and “broad claim” when you say “degree of accuracy”.”
It’s simply not that hard to establish things like the fact that App Store rankings are highly weighted toward recent purchases. Pretending we can’t know things like this because we don’t know the complete ranking algorithm is silly. There are many fields in which we have woefully incomplete knowledge, but nonetheless have been able to establish certain particular facts to a high degree of certainty. Physics still hasn’t figured out what gravity is, but we don’t stand around waffling over whether things will fall when we drop them.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.