[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “I don’t think you are understanding the situation well enough from an implementation standpoint. It’s not just a case of waiting. The existing licenses are being cancelled at their expiration date, with no option for renewal. That means that the tech support that goes with those licenses is also being cancelled, which is VERY important to many institutions. Do you really think “wait and see” is an option in that case? It seems like a pretty cavalier attitude if you ask me.”

I used to be involved with technology procurement at a public university in New York, and nothing moves as quickly as you’re implying here. The idea that some significant fraction of schools are going to be on Premiere Pro come late August if Apple takes a few weeks to deal with the educational licensing situation is just not credible, based on my experience, and for all you know the situation will be resolved by Monday.

This is just another variation of the some old apocalyptic rhetoric. People have lost perspective.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Aranyshev] “Why not? You’re arbitrary declaring magnetic timeline the future of editing and slapping “don’t get it” label on people who disagree because you can. I can express my opinion too.”

Actually, I’m saying there’s nothing inherently ‘non-professional’ about the magnetic timeline, and slapping a “don’t get it” label on people who say things that demonstrate they don’t get it.

[Michael Aranyshev] “No it is not. The whole “magnetic” thing is just same old insert mode. All other bizarre stuff comes under the “trackless” moniker.”

Things like this.

The magnetic features of the timeline are not meaningfully separable from the trackless features. All of the magnetic behaviors related to clip collisions — which enable the magnetic behaviors generally — are enabled by the trackless approach. Without this approach, the timeline doesn’t have enough flexibility for the app to safely move clips around in the way the magnetic timeline requires.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “We are in the middle of budgeting season for schools.”

And every school in the country will switch rather than just not doing anything this year, even the ones that had no particular plan to upgrade editing software any time soon?

I’m sorry, but people are blowing all of these sorts of issues entirely out of proportion. Will Apple lose some sales, as a consequence of the time it takes them to work through volume/education licensing issues? Yes. Will it be more than a drop in the bucket, in the long run? Almost certainly not.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Rich Rubasch] “Anyone pondering this?”

Yeah, I really wouldn’t bet on this. People are overly impressed with expensive gear and complicated software in this business. The truth is, the tools available these days — yes, even FCP X — are pretty absurdly powerful. You could go out today and shoot a feature film on Red/Alexa, bring it into FCP X as 2K ProRes 4444, edit and grade it entirely in FCP X, strike a DCP off an image sequence exported from FCP X (with free open source tools, if you’re technically inclined and don’t need copy protection), show it theatrically, and assuming you were competent, nobody would find any particular technical fault with it.

Oh, and you could do this on a MacBook Pro. (Might want to borrow a system with a Rocket for a day or to if doing Red transcoding.)

We’re not planning, mind you, to sell off the components of our Resolve suite any time soon, give up advocacy of raw R3D grading, or stop building custom in-house workflows for tricky projects. There are still advantages to higher end tools and more complicated approaches. But the truth is that the price point beyond which more expensive tools provide seriously diminishing returns is dropping substantially every year, and FCP X, with its ColorSync support, above-average software scopes, pretty-good-for-an-NLE grading tools, and GPU-accelerated 32-bit float rendering has, for all that people are insisting it’s intended to edit footage of your kid’s soccer game, just dropped it another notch or two, for anyone inclined to use it that way.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Jacek] “The fact that Apple did not already have educational pricing in place ON ITS RELEASE is proof to me that they are not committed to the educational market.”

These are app store teething issues that people are reading far too much into.

[Chris Jacek] “Even if they offer volume and educational pricing in the future, it will be too late for most. Decisions are being made on a daily basis. “

Really? If it takes Apple a few weeks to work out education pricing, “most” will have already gone elsewhere?

People are seriously exaggerating the time sensitivity of all of this. Educational institutions in particular often run years behind on updates. It’s possible some might jump ship depending on their internal schedules and Apple’s timing, but the idea of some kind of mass exodus occurring because of a matter of weeks is, yes, insane.

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[Chris Kenny]

[John Chay] “Can you just admit that this is a huge flaw right now instead of “I imagine Apple can as well?””

In point of fact, we’ve already seen a glimpse of Apple’s solution: tag clip audio with metadata.

[John Chay] “Why are audio tracks all of a sudden “rigid”?”

Audio tracks aren’t rigid, but having to place specific things on specific tracks is. One example: let’s say effects are supposed to be delivered on tracks 5-6, and I’m creating a soundscape that requires me to overlay three effects. Oops. In practice the solution to this problem is that audio gets edited using a more freeform approach (typically not in the NLE) and then mixed down to meet these deliverables requirements. With metadata, you can put anything anywhere, and still have it go where it needs to go when you output.

Mind you, Apple’s first implementation of this, coming this summer, might not get everything right. But I think the approach is fundamentally sound (no pun intended).

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[Chris Kenny]

[Shane Ross] “This new version shows that they didn’t get any input from professional editors. “

No, it does not. It shows that they decided to ship the product when it was useful to a substantial number of people (including some professional editors) rather than waiting to implement features required only by certain high-end workflows.

[Shane Ross] “They set loose a guy who designed iMovie”

And the first three versions of Premiere, and the original Final Cut Pro. While it’s possible he’s completely lost it this time around, and an Internet mob knows better, it’s not exactly a foregone conclusion.

[Shane Ross] “You obviously don’t deliver shows for broadcast…nor do you cut promos. We need split track audio, with all the elements separate. Both to deliver, and to take in. And in order to do that, I need to keep my tracks separate…VO on 1 and 2, sound on tape on 3-8, sound effects on 9-12, music on 13-16.”

We do deliver material for broadcast. I am entirely aware of this practice. I can also, however, imagine ways of providing this ability without having to rigidly structure audio tracks in the NLE. And I imagine Apple can as well.

[Shane Ross] “But you can unlock audio from video. And when you do, if you move out of sync, there is no indication that you have…much less by how much. When I make adjustments to video and audio, I do it separately primarily. L cuts, J cuts. I turn off the LINKED option…and when I need it, I use a key modifier to adjust both. The new methodolgy is wrong for my needs.”

I don’t really understand why. In FCP X you can trivially make L cuts and J cuts without unlinking audio, so it can be done with no danger of anything slipping out of sync, and thus less of a requirement for sync indicators.

[Shane Ross] “But it had a keyboard. Not a funky weird one where the keys were in all different places. And it didn’t leave out the texting option, the ability to make a call AND surf the web at the same time. It didn’t take out google maps because “we’ll let third party people give you a map.” It wasn’t a toy phone.”

Well, this goes pretty directly to my “people won’t remember this in a couple of years” argument in the other thread….

The first iPhone actually couldn’t do data and voice at the same time. It had mapping, but no GPS, and in the first release of iOS not even tower triangulation. And while it had SMS, it didn’t have MMS. It also lacked support for third-party apps, tethering, and a bunch of other features widely considered by be ‘standard’.

This idea that Apple might launch a product with a minimal feature set and add features later is not some wild-eyed fanboy optimism. It’s a consistent pattern that Apple has followed.

[Shane Ross] “Trying to improve something by completely changing it.”

It has worked for Apple before. The more I use the new timeline, the more I realize just how carefully considered these new behaviors are. While some people will hate it forever, I think in the long run the initial overwhelmingly negative reaction to the magnetic timeline is going to be seen as knee-jerk. Assuming anyone remembers it happened.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Aranyshev] “It doesn’t have non-ripple Cut and non-ripple Paste.”

You’re right. It doesn’t provide every editing feature of FCP 7’s timeline. But it does provide quite a few features that FCP 7’s timeline doesn’t. You can’t just arbitrarily declare that FCP 7’s features are just the right ones, so FCP X must be less professional, or whatever.

[Michael Aranyshev] “Discreet edit, Fast/Pinnacle/Avid Liquid, Sony Vegas, Avid Media Composer”

I wasn’t actually asking for a list on NLEs, but for some kind of documentation of the fact that they implemented a substantial fraction of the behavior of the magnetic timeline. Because I seriously doubt that. I think what you really mean is that they had modes where they’d ripple by default, but with the magnetic timeline that’s just one piece of the puzzle.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Marvin Holdman] “What they said was they are going too (at some unspecified time) add XML EXPORT. Read it again and tell me where it says XML import?”

People keep playing this game. First it was “It has no XML export and Apple will never add it because it’s a consumer app”. Then it was “Yes, Pogue says they told him they were adding it, but it’s not validly source information” and/or “OK, so maybe they’re planning to add it, but it might be a long time”. Now it’s “Sure, they’re planning to add this feature in a few weeks, but that doesn’t prove they’re not abandoning pros, because they haven’t said anything about this other feature”.

The truth is, there are a whole bunch of people who went into this release already believing Apple didn’t care about the pro market. They believed this before FCP X was ever announced, ironically largely because Apple hadn’t rewritten Final Cut as a 64-bit Cocoa app yet. But despite the fact that the very existence of FCP X undermined the chief evidence for that belief, they went right into its announcement and release already believing it, and looking for things to validate it.

I’ve pointed out a bunch of times, FCP X already has a whole mess of features that make no sense in a consumer app. People are ignoring that, focusing on a relatively small number of missing pro features, and then treating Apple’s abandonment of the pro market as a fact and making long-term projections from it. But you can’t just arbitrarily choose what features you look at. I could use the same methodology to argue FCP 7 wasn’t a pro app. Oh, sure, it had deck control, which makes no sense in a consumer app, but many of its effects rendered in an 8-bit color space. That’s hardly professional, right?

It’s all nonsense. Looking at the entirety of the app and the context surrounding its release, it’s fairly clear that FCP X was released when it was because it is useful to some users now, not because Apple believes it has the full feature set it will ever need.

[Marvin Holdman] “It will never see the market share that it had on June 20th again. What it MAY see is a larger market share of a NEW market, prosumers who find new and interesting ways to use video to make a buck.”

It’s like everyone has completely forgotten the route Final Cut followed into the professional market in the first place.

[Marvin Holdman] “But it’s going to be another generation before big business ever has a modicum of trust in Apple for mission critical operations.”

It is my belief that you are substantially overestimating the extent to which anyone will care about any of this, if Apple fills in the gaps in the feature set over the next couple of release cycles.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Shane Ross] “Why insane? We can see instantly that the app doesn’t do what many professionals require.”

And you can also see that it never will?

[Shane Ross] “the interface doesn’t do what we need. Tracks are important, magnetic timeline farks things up, no dupe detection, no notice that you are out of sync. One Viewer…fine. But the skimmer is far from precise. The high end pro market, and corporate market, see the writing on the wall. This app doesn’t do what we need in order to get things done. Schools see this too…so they won’t go there.”

In order:

I understand all the things that tracks presently used for. I don’t see that tracks are necessarily the only solution to that set of problems.

The magnetic timeline is badly misunderstood, largely as a consequence of people approaching it with a track-oriented mindset.

It’s much harder to throw clips out of sync in the first place with the new UI, and anyway sync indications and dupe detection are minor missing features, not major unfixable architectural flaws.

The skimmer is not the only way to select footage. JKL and the keyboard commands for setting in and out points still work just fine. And personally, I’ve found the skipper, with the browser in filmstrip mode, to be much more efficient for scanning lots of footage than any other interface I’ve used.

This is all exactly like people writing off the iPhone in the enterprise market in 2007 because it didn’t have a hardware keyboard, Exchange support, or centralized management features.

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