[Chris Kenny]

[Andrew Richards] “Walster Biscardi reports FCPX is still very much instrumentum non grata and that Apple is either On Notice or Dead To Me for most editors he’s spoken with at NAB.

Terence Curren said he tried to line up someone, anyone, using Premiere Pro for film or TV work to come to this year’s pre-NAB Editor’s Lounge. But he said he couldn’t, even after calling Adobe. Was Team Coco unavailable?

Avid says they are losing money again, and it is the “creative enthusiast” market that is hurting them the most.

What gives? If every film and TV pro is flocking back to Avid, why are they back in the red? Was everyone waiting for CS6 to hop to Premiere? Does Smoke 2013 change everything?”

We provide dailies, color and other post services to a lot of indie features, mostly NYC based indie features. The Internet narrative about FCP’s fall and Premiere’s rise has no relationship to what I’m seeing on the ground. What I see is that FCP 7 and Avid projects are coming through in about the same ratios they did before FCP X. For all that people talk up Premiere as the solution to everything in various online forums, we have yet to even receive an inquiry about whether we can handle a project edited in it. We also haven’t received inquiries about finishing projects cut in FCP X, but in my capacity as our resident workflow geek several clients/contacts have at least asked for my opinion about it, which they haven’t for Premiere.

IMO the framing in the discussion of FCP X has always been wrong. It was viewed as an instant failure because it wasn’t a drop-in replacement for FCP 7. But it’s not FCP 7’s successor in any technical sense. It’s a new product. FCP X is properly viewed as a promising challenger that needs some time to mature, and I think people would have recognized this had it been from a company other than Apple or had Apple’s messaging been better. Viewed in this light, consider the fact that it’s radically cheaper than alternative apps and in many ways easier to use, it adopts interesting new paradigms for organizing media and sequences, it has been updated on a very aggressive schedule, and it’s backed by a company with virtually unlimited resources. Does this really seem like an app doomed to failure in the long run? In a certain light it seems to have better odds than Premiere — yes, neither app has really broken into the market yet, but Premiere has been around much longer — it has less of an excuse.

I find the idea that we’re going to see a meaningful resurgence of Avid to be highly unlikely. Will some people switch as a consequence of FCP X? Sure. But — and I realize that people who’ve been using Avid products for the last decade or more can’t, for the most part, really see this — Media Composer is virtually impenetrable to new users. We’ve seen this in-house. People with FCP 7 experience can pretty much just figure out FCP X, but are completely lost in Media Composer. I don’t think this is because of similarities between FCP 7 and FCP X, because there barely are any. Basic things (like, say, how to get a folder full of natively encoded media files into a bin so you can edit with them) are just bizarrely counterintuitive in Media Composer. As we saw with ‘classic’ FCP, the way to succeed in the long run is to get the ‘kids’ using your product today. Having user interface that new users bounce off of is fatal in the long run.

To sumarize my view of the market… I don’t think Apple’s “missteps” will do more than slightly delay Avid’s long, slow decline. I think that continued Avid decline and the rough introduction of FCP X will give Premiere an opening. I think FCP X itself is maturing quite rapidly and its price and easy app store distribution will make it the go-to option for many new editors. My guess is that in five years FCP X will be a major force, mostly battling it out with Premiere, and Avid will have further retreated into specialty niches.

And Smoke? Honestly, I want to find some excuse for us to buy it — it’s now in that sort of ideal price range where it’s cheap enough for us as a small post house, but expensive enough that most people won’t buy it for themselves, meaning some people might conceivably give us money because we have it and they don’t. But I can’t quite figure out what we’d use it for. If we did e.g. in-house end-to-end post production on music videos I can see how it would be an extremely useful tool. But for the work we presently do it seems like its benefits over our current tools would be fairly marginal. I don’t think we’re alone in this — Smoke seems like a tool that’s insanely useful to a particular slice of the market and nearly useless to the rest.

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[Chris Kenny]

It’s a shame licensing issues prevented (first-party) ZFS support from ever materializing on OS X. ZFS makes creating file systems as easy as creating folders — it would perfectly support a “one file system per project” approach with none of the overhead of disk images. Useful for Media Composer as well (which like FCP X also wants its media files to live in a special location relative to the root of the file system — and doesn’t even organize them as well as FCP X does.)

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[Chris Kenny]

[Oliver Peters] “You can laugh all you want about this, but the most friendly data interchange format is the EDL, largely because it’s so “dumb”. That’s what most DI houses want. It’s what a lot of color correction systems want. Moving actual effects metadata around between competing systems is flawed in almost every instance and only works partially at best. That’s why most post houses recommend that you offline and online using the same platform. Interchange boils down to knowing where the clips are and where the edit points are. Forget everything else. You’ll have to rebuild it anyway. So, ironically, this four decades old standard is perfect for a file-based world. Good that someone put this utility together.”

Yeah, there’s quite a lot of appeal to a format that can represent a sequence in a format that software understands, but that’s simple enough to be human-readable and manually editable. We routinely use XML between FCP/Resolve these days because it preserves things like punch-ins, but whenever things start going wrong, it’s useful to have EDL as a fallback.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Shawn Miller] “Sorry, I don’t follow. How does a smaller sensor limit the choices for wide angle lenses? A 14mm lens designed for FF (stills) or S35 or even MFT will still cover a smaller sensor or film format… the FOV will be more narrow, but it will still work. Am I missing something? “

It with cover, yeah, but as you say FoV will be more narrow. It’s going to be hard to get very wide on this camera. Although Tokina makes as well-reviewed 11-16 2.8 zoom for APS-C that might help. (Canon makes a 10-22 for APS-C, but it’s f/3.5-4.5, too slow in my opinion.)

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[Chris Kenny]

[Hector berrebi] “RAW DNG… at 2.5 K is about 300MBs… (if i’m not all wrong about it)”

2432 * 1366 pixels * 12 bits = 39865344 bits per frame, or 4.98 MB per frame (decimal megabytes). The tech specs page confirms this number. That’s 120 MB/s @ 24p. High, but significantly more manageable than 300 MB/s.

I do always wonder why these systems don’t at least use mathematically lossless compression, which would get files ~40% smaller with no impact on the data being recorded. The CinemaDNG spec says it supports internal lossless compression. Maybe there’s not enough onboard processing power?

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[Chris Kenny]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Is that an “integrated” (meaning not swappable) 90 minute battery?”

It seems to be, but it’s actually kind of clever. I think this intent is that you use an external battery when it’s practical (the DC port takes a nice wide 12-30V range, so you can power off of practically any battery system you might care to use) , which both powers the camera and charges the internal battery — and then if you need a really lightweight configuration for a few handheld shots, you just operate off the internal battery for a while.

I imagine the internal battery is integrated for the same reason Apple does this — when you’re cramming things into a small enclosure, you can fit a larger battery in if you don’t have to worry about providing access to it.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Margus Voll] “i really depends how you will use it. if you have all workflow in mind from raw to resolve you will be fine.
You can not cut corners on light anyway. i see here daily people use red or alexa and result is big pile of s… so it really depends who and how uses the camera.”

Yeah, can this camera match an Epic at its best? Obviously not. But I see Epic-originated footage on a regular basis that looks worse than some of Blackmagic’s sample footage. People have been saying for years now that talent trumps tech specs, but until recently it really was true that there were severe limitations to the sort of production values you could achieve with low-cost gear regardless of how talented you were. Those are mostly gone now. From what I’ve seen so far, this camera (and the raw workflow it enables with the bundled copy of Resolve) might be the final nail in the coffin.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Gerrit Van Dyke] “I believe you still can’t export a proper XML from FCP X that can be opened in FCP 7, Avid or Premiere right? That seems to be one of the big ones. As someone who doesn’t use FCP X, I’m still concerned about working with outside suppliers for colour grading, online and audio.”

There’s technically nothing “proper” about FCP 7’s XML format — it’s not like it’s an officially ratified industry interchange standard. It’s just something Apple created and documented and third parties supported. Third parties seem to be stepping up to support FCP X’s new XML format as well, though it will clearly take a while for such support to reach the same level. But as someone who regularly writes internal workflow tools that work with FCP 7 XML files, I have to say FCP X’s new XML format looks a lot cleaner, which will hopefully encourage more tools to be written.

Interestingly, FCP X 10.0.3 can embed industry-standard CDL data in its XML files now. Resolve can use this to carry over primary color grades, and other grading apps that understand CDL could probably add support for this fairly easily as well.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Marvin Holdman] “I think the concern for a majority of network TV companies regarding remaining with legacy FCP7 is continuing to generate projects in a legacy program. While it is true that it still functions, it seems only a matter of time before they pull the plug on support of this 32 bit program. At some point, getting to your legacy projects is going to be a tremendous pain, the compulsion for facilities to migrate to another solution quickly is to mitigate this future problem. “

Supporting 32-bit apps on 64-bit systems is a solved problem. Some backwards compatibility features get pulled as soon as possible because it’s a hassle to maintain them or their existence requires compromises that negatively impact other aspects of the system, but this isn’t really one of those; 64-bit systems are going to support 32-bit apps for a long time. Of course unrelated compatibility problems could crop up with future OS versions. But the fact that FCP 7 can export XML in a format widely understood by other apps (including Premiere) removes many of the risks associated with this.

Anyone interested in risk mitigation is sort of in trouble in this industry anyway.

The risks of adopting FCP X at present are obvious. Apple has said they’ll deliver a bunch of additional features, but they haven’t done it yet, and there aren’t really proven high-end workflows around FCP X so far.

You could go to Media Composer, but the risks of standardizing on software from a company that can’t reliably turn a profit are also obvious, and Avid has been on a decade-long downward trajectory that it’s not at all clear will end with the end of classic FCP. FCP X could still succeed, or Premiere could simply take over where classic FCP left off eating away at Avid’s market.

You could switch to Premiere, but Premiere still doesn’t seem to have quite gained acceptance in many segments of the industry, which makes it awkward if you need to work with outside editors, DI facilities, etc. or if you’re a facility trying to hire editors. The risk in adopting Premiere is that it’s not yet clear when or if this will change.

There’s also a certain amount of additional risk with Premiere or Media Composer in that you’re betting against Apple, which might not be a great idea given their record of successfully playing the long game, and the promising foundation FCP X provides. You could go out and buy a few $2500 Media Composer licenses and replace your Macs with Wintel machines and then Apple could spend the next two years turning the $300 FCP X into a killer product that dominates the industry by 2016. I think it’s fairly likely Apple could do this if they were sufficiently determined, so betting that they won’t requires accurately reading their motivations and deciding they’re not that determined. Infering motivations like that is a dicy prospect with a company as cagey as Apple.

By the end of the year (probably more toward the middle) several things will be a lot clearer, like whether Premiere will reach critical mass, whether Apple will deliver on its promises of additional pro features for FCP X, whether the Mac Pro will be updated (and how viable Thunderbolt makes iMacs and MacBook Pros as editing machines if it isn’t). Given that there are various ways to move FCP 7 timelines to other apps if necessary, I just can’t see the ‘legacy file format’ issue as something that should drive people to make potentially expensive decisions before being able to see where things are going.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Marvin Holdman] “That comparison is not really relevant.”

Pages is reliably first or second bestselling (actual) app by unit volume in the Mac App Store. The only way comparisons to Pages could be irrelevant to determining an app’s success would be if the whole Mac App Store were a failure.

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