Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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This criticism makes absolutely no sense. It’s easier to visually scrub through footage in FCP X than in FCP 7.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Robert Brown] “These are technologies that have existed for quite some time. Apple just doesn’t have the intention of fixing this stuff, it wouldn’t take much if they did.”
These things always seem easy in isolation, but you have to take into account the dependancies they have on other code, and the overhead of coordination with other team members. Attempting more ambitious or faster releases by adding more developers is a very dicy business. Especially for a first release, where the major priority has to be on implementing the fundamentals as cleanly as possible, because you’re going to be stuck with whatever architecture you create for a decade or more.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Bobby Mosca] “So if we’re saying, in the long run, I’m basically stuck using iDVD, I might jump off something.”
Heh, iDVD is also semi-retired. It’s still included with iLife ’11, but it didn’t get an update, it’s not sold in the App Store, and there probably won’t be a new version.
Apple didn’t kill DVDSP because Apple doesn’t care about pros… they killed DVDSP because they don’t care about discs. The same logic applies to the consumer product.
I’d say there’s an 80% chance the next round of MacBook Pros (which are, remember, Apple’s best-selling model line these days) won’t even have built-in optical drives.
I understand why Apple is killing DVDSP, but it’s kind of annoying. Encore is quirky as hell, in my experience, and is the closest thing to a reasonable alternative on the platform.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Conlee] “I think you’re correct about Avid’s predicament regarding high-end/size of market. That’s why they’re diversifying into consumer (Pinnacle) and audio (ProTools) and control surfaces, along with their own overpriced hardware. The studios will continue to purchase their hardware for the sake of robust reliability. But I think Avid is seeing the writing on the wall and are opening up to 3rd party I/O to move more licenses to folks like FCP fans.”
Diversification into other product lines might well save the company long-term, but it won’t necessarily save the product.
[Chris Conlee] “You might call Avid’s UI dated, but I still call it the most functional and quickest of the bunch. Moving to another app to cut is like eating razor blades for me after using Avid for nearly a decade. It just works.”
Sure, I hear this all the time… including the “after using Avid for nearly a decade” part. I can’t recall ever hearing a new user say “I’ve just started learning Avid, and wow, it’s got this really great UI!” This is a huge problem for the platform’s long-term prospects. And Avid is really between a rock and a hard place here. If they change the UI too much, their existing users will freak out. If they don’t change it, their market share will slowly (continue to) shrink through attrition as new editors choose alternative products. Even introducing a more modern product alongside Media Composer would run the risk of alienating Media Composer users who would (rightly) perceive that the new product, not their product, was Avid’s future. Indeed, we’ve heard from a former Avid employee that Avid actually started down this road, and then chickened out:
When I was at Avid, I worked on a few internal projects trying to solve this exact problem – we saw Apple coming after us from the low end and knew it was only a matter of time before they reached Avid’s capabilities.
We worked on building “next generation” editor software. New UI, new technical foundation that would take advantage of multiple CPUs and GPUs. Unfortunately these efforts ultimately went nowhere, since the company as a whole was too timid and worried about disenfranchising the existing customer base – exactly the problem Apple is facing 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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[Steven Gonzales] “There was no Mac Pro in 1999. There was Blue and White G3, cpu PowerPc family.”
Which is worth commenting on, in the context of the “Apple is abandoning pros” meme. Apple’s towers today are far more high-end, as compared with mainstream computers, than Apple’s towers were in 1999. In fact, Apple’s towers were mainstream computers in 1999 (B&W G3 towers started at $1599, which was an entirely mainstream price point in those days), whereas now the iMac is Apple’s mainstream desktop, and Apple has an entire hardware line above it pretty much exclusively for professional content creators.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Bret Williams] “Try Avid, it’s software from a company that knows a lot about Video. But not quite so much about software useability and interface design unfortunately. But it adds to the mystique because it’s so ridiculous to learn. It too has been trying to become an FCP esque interface in 5 and 5.5 iterations. But now they just have more buttons and keystrokes to accomplish a task than ever. “
Software development is really hard. It requires a lot of resources.
Now, think about the pro film/TV segment of the video editing market. This market requires quite complicated products… but it’s tiny. This makes it very difficult to develop high-quality software if it’s too focused on this market segment, unless you want to want to charge $50,000 a seat. You simply can’t raise enough money from such a small market to make the R&D investments you need to make to produce such a complex product at a high quality level.
This is basically Avid’s problem. This is why it has the oldest architecture and some of the most dated UI, out of the three major NLEs. People keep complaining that Apple isn’t focused enough on high-end users. But Avid is too focused on them, and there just aren’t enough of them.
The best outcome — and anyone who picked FCP over Avid Media Composer during the last round of the NLE wars implicitly agrees with this — is provided by an app that targets a significantly wider market, but also provides features for film/TV editors. Such an app can have a much larger and more vital ecosystem around it, and its developer can afford to invest much more in it.
Yes, FCP X presently lack key features for film/TV editors that basically take it off the table at the moment. But this will not be true forever. And once it’s no longer true, Avid’s decade-long hemorrhaging of market share will likely resume. I’m really not trying to spread FUD here, but people should be considering these market dynamics when making long-term decisions about what platforms to buy into.
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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 Alan] “The timeline is an interactive graphing of the canvas display. The part of timeline that can be seen horizontally displays X amount of time as the playhead’s point in time is displayed in the canvas.”
See, I would put this the other way around. You’re structuring data by manipulating symbols in the timeline. The canvas is a rendering of that structured data. It’s like writing HTML (structuring a web page) in an editor that also shows a rendered version of that HTML that’s updated as you type.
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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] “I am arguing that — but your argument was a strawman because you picked a ridiculous case for track usage and argued it as a reason not to have tracks at all.”
This “ridiculous case” is, in fact, a real-world use case. I agree that it’s ridiculous. The fact that it’s used is a symptom of a desperate need for more metadata in modern workflows.
[Walter Soyka] “True — but this is a corner case that’s a problem in all layer-based compositing.”
You don’t regularly online other editors’ offline projects, I think? See, for online editing work, everything that’s not a corner case comes over fairly automatically… meaning that 90% of the time is spent dealing with corner cases.
[Walter Soyka] “I think that the argument you’re making here, if applied to a node compositor, is that the software should arrange the nodes for you, because it’s only the signal flow and metadata that’s important. However, the ability to freely position nodes on the node graph is critical for comp organization as compositors work and pass work around.”
There’s nothing wrong with being able to organize objects in 2D space. It’s nice if you can get it. I just think… look, how many video tracks are you going to create for organizational purposes? Six? Eight? However many you create, you have to assign them roles that encompass everything happening in a sequence that could easily have over 1000 shots in it, that need to be layered in assorted different ways. I just think the spatial approach doesn’t scale all that well.
[Walter Soyka] “Out of curiosity, do you also think the new color board interface is superior to the traditional color wheel interface?”
I like the color board, though I wouldn’t say I find it especially superior. But not having three wheels does save a lot of screen space and make it much more practical in the context of the FCP X interface.
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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] “A timeline does not look like the media it represents, but it has a direct, one-to-one relationship in space to every frame in time.”
I’m not sure why you say this makes it a non-symbolic representation.
In any event, the focus of this particular subthread has been on tracks, which significantly interfere with the idea that there’s a one-to-one mapping between the timeline and the program (as seen by the viewer), because tracks allow things to be present on the timeline that are not present in the program because they’re obscured.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Aranyshev] “It does completely useless and redundant 3-point overwrite. Replace operation worth introducing dedicated command takes current frame in the master and replaces it with current frame in the source trimming source head and tail to fit the clip it replacing. Preferably without any need to set in, out or cue of any sort on either the source or the master.”
You’re not demanding particular capabilities here, you’re demanding particular extremely specific behaviors. At that level of specificity, you’re probably never going to be happy with a tool other than the one you’re using.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.