Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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Every one of these exchanges seem to start off with you making a statement that’s phrased as if it’s factual, and end up with you just expressing opinions and not believing that anyone could disagree with them.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Douglas K. Dempsey] “But by pulling FCS3 and its support with no notice, Apple will cause many of us to take a serious time & money hit. We must keep working as always, PLUS strategize how to painstakingly convert all of our still-current projects to XML and then recreate them in Premiere or Avid.”
This is kind of silly. FCS3 is not going to become literally unavailable any time soon. As I noted previously, some editors/facilities stuck with FCS2 for a year or two after FCS3 shipped. For some reason the forums weren’t full of people freaking out about how Apple was no longer selling FCS2, so if they needed to add any new seats they’d have the expense of migrating all their existing projects/seats to FCS3 for compatibility.
If FCS3 was working for you a week ago, it still is. If you need to add new seats, it might be a bit more hassle, but it’s still possible to find copies.
My approach is to keep using FCS3 (and playing with FCP X) until there’s a clearer picture of FCP X’s future prospects, and then make a decision whether to go with FCP X or Premiere in the long run. (I’m not a big Avid fan, for a variety of reasons.) I just don’t quite see what’s supposed to be so terrible about all of this.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I would argue that the dedicated viewer, the ability to call up material in conjunction with output, not replacing it is a key part of the mental practise of editing”
You appear to be describing something very specific to the way you edit, and assuming everyone works the same way so FCP X must be terrible for everyone. But this is not how everyone uses these tools. Many people tweak in/out points in the timeline, for instance, where FCP X can show you a two-up view when using the Precision Editor (check “Show detailed trimming feedback” in preferences).
[Aindreas Gallagher] “the knowledge that if you delete the slug things will slam closed on some level affects my perception of control as an editor”
There is no rational reason why this should be so. You appear to be very sensitive to changes in your editing environment, which is fine, but you keep turning “this works differently” into “this works badly”.
By the way, selecting and deleting a gap in FCP 7 also performs a ripple delete, which is even worse there because it’s actually inconsistent with FCP 7’s standard deletion behavior.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “FCP had assignable tracks, two up display with viewer and canvas, a wealth of import and export abilities, amongst a million other things”
With the exception of the import/export stuff (where, honestly, the most sensible way to look at things is that we don’t know Apple’s solution yet, because the absence of these features is so complete and conspicuous it’s fairly clear Apple is up to something), you’re focusing on specific interface elements, when what matters is capability. Basically, this is like a Windows user saying OS X is a completely unserious operating system because it lacks a Start menu, and everyone knows that’s how you’re supposed to launch apps.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “at its heart it is a 1V 2A edit application”
It does not have the limitations that description implies.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “all the key methodogy is purely intended for consumer use – the methodology of FCPX is the methodology of iMovie. It is the approach apple have taken when giving video editing capabilities to consumers – greatly simplified, dumbed down operation”
These things are not objective statements, and you’ve demonstrated a couple of times now that you aren’t really familiar enough with the new UI to make (meaningful) sweeping judgements about its capabilities. The UI is significantly deeper than it looks at first glance. I’ve seen people complaining there’s no keyframe editor. There is. People have claimed there’s no way to separate different types of audio clips, because there are no fixed tracks. There is. You seemed to be claiming there was no way to precisely select a portion of a clip in the browser. There is. I’ve seen people claim the look presets were indicative of a consumer app. Guess what? They’re Motion projects; they’re actually demonstrating really powerful FCP/Motion integration.
People need to really sit down with this app, explore everything that it offers, understand its way of doing things, and quit making broad generalizations about it until they’ve done so.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “X is a tool not fit for professional purpose designed for consumer”
Actually, it transpires that:
a) iMovie ’08 started life as ‘First Cut’, a ‘a professional-level “feeder” app for Final Cut Pro’ (designed to organize footage and provide an efficient interface for rough cuts, to be refined and output from FCP).
b) FCP X is not actually based on the iMovie codebase.
At least if you believe a guy who used to be on the FCP team.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Patrick Sheffield] “At what cost? If Automatic Duck is taken as an example, gonna get pretty expensive at $500 a pop… These were supported in the past by Apple themselves. Sure, Apple should make the API available, but perhaps they could use their own API to deliver some of the stuff they left out.”
To be fair, $500 doesn’t just get you a plug-in to export OMF. Pro Export FCP is primarily a tool for moving FCP sequences (not FCP X sequences, so far) into Avid. It also provides more advanced OMF exporting than is built into FCP 7.
If someone went and wrote a plug-in that just implemented the same level of OMF export support as FCP 7, I doubt it would be $500. It would be a much simpler product, and the developer could anticipate selling more copies, because basic OMF exporting is presumably demanded by many more users than advanced OMF exporting or FCP to Avid translation.
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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 Cherniack] “Now while I agree with the first part of the sentence, the “few hours” strikes me as unbridled optimism :)”
Heh. Well, the Ruby script I wrote to take an FCP 7 XML file and re-link everything it to clips rendered out of Resolve based on reel/timecode only took about 15 hours, and this should be a fair bit easier. (Again, assuming a sensibly designed, well documented API.)
[David Cherniack] “But I was refering to IO drivers and keyframeable plugins….if keyframable is going to be at all possible – hard to see how it couldn’t factor into their plans if they see it as a pro app. But is there a place for that in the present interface or will it need something that’s not yet apparent?”
The I/O hardware vendors tend to be pretty good about drivers. I mean, people with hardware more than a couple of years old are probably screwed, but that’s nothing new.
The plug-in architecture is just a version of FXPlug. Everything needs to be recompiled because FCP X is a 64-bit host, and I would guess there are some other changes that need to be made, but I think plug-ins probably won’t be a problem. And I’m not quite sure what you mean about keyframing. FCP X has perfectly serviceable keyframe editing that I would assume plugins would be able to use.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m just refusing to accept apple’s imposed reality – I’m sticking to the basic argument that editing is a multitrack operation and the software is supposed to respect that fact.”
Editing is a mutilayer operation. Tracks are just one way of laying.
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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 Cherniack] “Apple realy wants to make it a pro app it may take much longer than just a few months that many here are hoping..more like a year or two would be my guess, because it’s quite clear they’ll be relying on 3rd parties to do the grunt work, and they’re not nearly as well capitalized as Apple.”
A lot of the ‘grunt work’ is not that hard, though. If Apple releases an API to access sequence data, and it works reasonably, I suspect I could implement EDL exporting well enough for our internal needs in just a few hours. And by “well enough for our internal needs” I mean “better for our internal needs than FCP 7, which has some EDL quirks that have always annoyed me”.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.