Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Bret Williams] “If Aperture is any example, the price will drop to $79 after awhile. Aperture was $299 at first. And it is definitely a souped up iPhoto is the same respect that this is a souped up iMovie. Now it’s $79.”
Apple dropped the price of Aperture when they put it in the App Store. Apple drops the price of everything when they put it in the App Store, presumably on the theory that it makes it so easy to buy software that they’ll make more money lowering prices and going for volume.
FCP X already has App Store pricing; there is no particular reason to expect pricing to drop further in the foreseeable future.
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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] “Actually, I’ve been thinking for a few days that Apple may have completely missed the boat on this release and pricing structure. They seem to honestly have thought they were introducing a professional application which would appeal to the pro market and therefore pull the YouTube set into the fold.”
About the only argument along such lines that makes any sense is the “FCP X proves Apple doesn’t care about pro users” argument. Yes, if Apple really doesn’t care about pro users, they’ll leave key features out of FCP X forever, and it will never be successful in the pro market. But I think there are clear indications that argument is wrong (which I’ve listed off many times at this point), and that doesn’t seem to be the argument you’re making here.
Assuming you agree with me that Apple intends FCP X to be a pro app, and will continue expanding the feature set to make it suitable for high-end workflows, I don’t see how you can reasonably say, ten days after its release, that the high-end market has permanently rejected it. If FCP X has solid support for high-end workflows in a year or two, most people will barely remember any of this noise.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Keith Rocheck] “True, but when you consider how far the iMac has come and how powerful it is would you not agree that companies are buying more of them for production work in place of the Mac Pro than they would have … 5 years ago? Keep that trend up for 5-10 more years.”
Sure. I mean, eventually towers will be about as common as refrigerator-sized computers currently are. But that will be because practically nobody, even high-end video pros, really needs them.
With Apple’s characteristic timing, they’ll get rid of them early enough to cause people to freak out, but not so early that people more interested in getting their jobs done than in freaking out won’t be able to so do.
[Keith Rocheck] “Thunderbolt does not change all that much. Reality check here, and I’m being serious, one Thunderbolt port is the equivalent of a single PCIe x4 slot. I can’t put a high end graphics card on that. I can’t put anything better than a 2x4Gbps fiber channel card on that, not even 1x8Gbps. Most professional I/O are PCIe x4, but use a hefty amount of the bandwidth in those 4 lanes. Notice how none of the Thunderbolt I/O devices manufactured by BMD and Matrox have loop outs? The iMac has two of these ports, but reality is that they need at least 1-2 more and that still is not the same. We need at least one connector that gives a full 16 lanes before I’ll give in to iMacs and MBPs being suitable to living in an edit bay. Offline … have at it.”
A single Thunderbolt port should provide the bandwidth to stream uncompressed 1080p or 2K in off of a RAID and send it out via a video interface. Remember, it’s full-duplex, and these two operations move data in opposite directions. Oh, and it should be able drive an external 30″ display at the same time as well, over the other 10 Gbps channel (there are two on each port).
About the only thing that really needs 16x slots are GPUs, and even that’s mostly only necessary for slinging large textures around in 3D games. The kind of GPGPU processing done by Resolve or FCP X presumably just needs to send a stream of uncompressed video to the GPU and get a stream back.
Honestly, iMacs seem pretty plausible in editing bays already, if they’re strictly editing bays. Tools like Resolve might need a few more years.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Keith Rocheck] “Since we already know they drop off hardware products that don’t drive a significant piece of sales”
Even these days, Mac Pros probably sell dozens of times as many units as the Xserve was selling. And Apple probably uses them internally.
[Keith Rocheck] “Back to your point … they are a ‘Mobile Devices’ company, but I have never seen a professional edit bay using a MacBook Pro for day-to-day with full I/O. It doesn’t happen.”
True, but I have to say I’ve noticed a remarkable amount offline editing happens on MacBook Pros these days, at least in the indie feature world.
And Thunderbolt changes a lot with respect to I/O on non-towers.
[Keith Rocheck] “Let’s take a quick look at Wikipedia for some data. Including early 2009, how many times have the following products received updates:
MacBook Pro: 4 (Early 2009, Mid 2009, Mid 2010, Mid 2011)
iMac: 4 (Early 2009, Late 2009, Mid 2010, Mid 2011)
Mac Mini: 3 (Early 2009, Late 2009, Mid 2010)
Mac Pro: 2 (Early 2009, Mid 2010)”This has much more to do with Intel’s processor release cycles than with Apple. For instance, new Intel processors suitable for use in the Mac Pro aren’t due out until Q4 of this year. (Though there are rumors Apple might get early access, as they have with some processors in the past.)
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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 Richards] “Chris Kenny put it best; the old timeline metaphor is like using a spreadsheet as a database while the magnetic timeline is like a relational database.”
I think that was Craig Seeman, actually. But I agree with it. I’ve long had a bit of a metadata obsession, and FCP X fulfills it nicely. And positioning clips on different layers relative to each other, rather than positioning them relative to a generic container that spans the entire length of the sequence (e.g. a track) just makes more sense to me for most of the cases where you want to layer clips.
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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 is irrelevant though because time relates to written text in totally different form than to moving images.”
You keep making vague statements like this without grounding them in any specific critique of the magnetic timeline. I’m still at a loss with respect to how ripping by default in more instances is supposed to be a problem here.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Tom Wolsky] “A couple of years Steve Jobs announced at an Apple keynote that Apple is a mobile device company. There is no place for apps like FCP and Logic in a mobile device company.”
There is when Apple considers MacBook Pros with as much power as Mac Pros from a couple of years ago to be ‘mobile devices’. Which it does.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Is it just me, or does this forum get less and less reality-based by the day?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jonathan Dortch] “What is the benefit of being able to arrange video clips beneath the primary Storyline?”
This lets you leave clips that are conceptually part of the primary storyline in the primary storyline, but still composite them over other clips, if necessary.
[Jonathan Dortch] “How does one benefit from being able to place audio inside or above the primary storyline?”
Sometimes there’s sound but no picture. With the relational clip model, you’d have to attach audio to a gap slug in these cases. Just being able to place it directly in the primary storyline is more natural, I think.
[Jonathan Dortch] “Why do secondary Storylines lose all ability to composite, but secondary Storylines are required for transitions?”
My guess is that this is just a bug, based on the fact that opacity still works for clips in secondary storylines.
[Jonathan Dortch] “If the audio solution in a trackless system is tagging each individual audio effect — talk about a time waster.”
Not at all, because you can tag them in batches before they’re edited in. If you have an SFX library imported as an event, for instance, you just tag everything in it SFX to begin with. Now drop clips in anywhere, and they’ve still got that tag.
[Jonathan Dortch] “I’m curious to what a feature or documentary film “Magnetic Timeline” would look like. Would it be thousands of elements slopped around with no care or consideration for visual representation or placement? “
We keep hearing these theories about how the magnetic timeline will supposedly ruin everything for long, complex edits, but it actually provides far more organizational support. On a feature project, for instance, you can easily turn scenes into compound clips, at which point your main sequence is nothing but a series of clips with names like “Scene 1”, etc. I have literally no idea where people are getting this idea that the magnetic timeline is messy. It seems to me it actually discourages some of the sillier things I’ve seen editors do with tracks over the years.
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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] “Fine. And I’m saying this feature is inherently “non-professional” because it is designed to solve the problem no one regularly practicing editing ever has. Casual users of editing software on the other hand make cuts with accidental flash frames and gaps all the time.”
As an online editor/colorist, who sees a lot of other editors’ work before it has been extensively QA’d, I am quite amused at your assessment of the abilities of the average professional editor. These kinds of glitches — particularly single frames of black — are not all that rare.
But in any event, if you think Apple switched to an entirely different paradigm for sequence organization to prevent flash frames, you’re nuts. The magnetic timeline is about making the timeline less ‘brittle’ so editors can worry more about things like shot order and timing, and less about making sure clips play nice and don’t clobber each other.
Imagine if word processors worked in overwrite mode by default, and you had to be careful whenever you were rearranging or adding text to make sure you weren’t overwriting other text. People who worked with such word processors a lot would probably get pretty adept at doing that, but why should they have to? And would the existence of such systems really be rational cause to call systems that didn’t work this way ‘non-professional’?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.