Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[John Pale] “Uncompressed HD is out of the question for my work…if JPEG was an adequate substitute, Apple and Avid would not have developed their codecs. It is certainly within Adobe’s means to develop a good codec…they need to step up.”
I couldn’t believe it when they let CineForm go to GoPro. The only two explanations for that are 1) they’re already working on their own codec or 2) someone really, really screwed up.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[John Pale] “I think I can kind of see where this is going…Using the keyword and tagging capability of FCP X, you could identify what each of the audio items in the jumble of a magnetic timeline actually is. You could tag items VO, Music, SFX, etc. … and then on export, those tags are used to map to specific tracks in the AAF file.”
There’s an explicit clip metadata setting for ‘audio role’.
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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] “But Chris, by “better performance” I think they mean playback. And it indicates to me that they still may have some optimizing to do on their playback engine. “
Have you used the app? On decent hardware most things play back just fine before they render.
[David Cherniack] “You’re coorect that OpenCL was not quite ready when they wrote their CUDA engine but I’ve been told privately (long before OpenCL was known to be in Apple’s plans) that OpenCL was not quite as efficient as CUDA in their internal testing.”
Benchmarks of current OpenCL implementations show only fairly moderate performance differences.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Peter J. DeCrescenzo] “I suspect quite a few of the people reading this forum know a fair amount about software development, and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop discounting their knowledge and experience.
In any event, it doesn’t take a PHD is computer science to know that, given Apple’s _billions_ in cash, and specifically the cash cow formerly known as FCP-7, Apple could have created a much, much better FCPX by this date (today) than they have. “
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the implication that you can necessarily make better software by throwing more money at the problem is precisely the sort of thing you don’t want to say if you want people who have experience with software development to think you’re familiar with how it works. If money created good software, Windows Vista would have been the best software product ever released.
[Peter J. DeCrescenzo] “Committing the many, many decisions required to make all that happen simply doesn’t happen by accident. And committing that many _bad_ decisions doesn’t happen because “software is hard”. They happened because the FC dev team management is arrogant and/or out of touch, or worse.”
Could you be more specific about what these ‘bad decisions’ are? I’m hard pressed to think of anything objectively ‘bad’ about FCP X that can’t be attributed to an inability to implement all desired features prior to the desired release date.
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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 Roth Weiss] “If you can’t present your argument factually here, I certainly wonder how you’re able to do it on the job? On the other hand, as a button pusher by trade, you haven’t had to learn the principals fact-based writing, debate, or journalism, so I guess that gives you a pass to say just about anything.”
“Argument by being really patronizing” is not very effective. If people choose to believe Apple is lying to Hodgetts, Studio Daily, Pogue, etc. that’s their prerogative, but it doesn’t seem all that plausible to me.
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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] “I’m a little perplexed why they background render everything to Prores for performance if the playback engine is that good. “
Faster exporting, for one thing. If everything’s rendered already then when you go to export (if you’re using ‘current settings’), it basically happens at the speed of a file copy.
[David Cherniack] “Also, from what I’ve seen in the Animating with Keyframes tutorial above, the playback performance appears to be poor (dropped frames) compared to doing the same thing on a moderately powerful Premiere system.”
Hardly a good test without knowing specific hardware details (and with the system capturing a screencast while trying to play back). But in any event, raw speed isn’t necessarily the advantage I’m pushing for FCP X’s engine here. Its big advantage is OpenCL, which means e.g. current MacBook Pros have GPU acceleration in FCP X but not Premiere.
OpenCL wasn’t really a viable option when Adobe wrote the Mercury engine. It’s a nice example of how “more modern” actually translates into material benefits. (Though of course it wouldn’t be impossible for Adobe to add OpenCL support now. Their engine is new enough that I’d guess it has a fairly clean, modular architecture.)
[David Cherniack] “Nonetheless I found it iteresting that the Apple site made no claims about relative performance compared to Premiere or Avid. They may already know something that the rest of us do “
Meh. It’s not uncommon for a market leader (which Apple is, by market share) to simply pretend competitors don’t exist.
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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] “what? listen here you – that is a rational position to take given apple’s behaviour up to this point. FUD my ass.
I’ll tell you what Chris, there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty and doubt surrounding this software and do you know who has generated it?APPLE.”
People have built up elaborate theories about Apple’s plans and motivations based entirely on actions that have fairly mundane alternative explanations. Apple’s (entirely normal for Apple) lack of communication about the future of FCP over the last three years or so has allowed those theories to exist, certainly.
But when Apple does start communicating, attempting to cast doubt on those communications though various unlikely scenarios (like Apple having product managers give false information to New York Times columnists) is pretty screwy.
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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] “BZZZ – buzzer says wrong Kenny “
Wow, you might be the most obnoxious individual presently posting here, and that’s saying something.
[Aindreas Gallagher] “the man’s points refer to being able to see the bloody footage at all before he puts it in the timeline. I’ll let Frank Leeman take over and clear up your confusion – “
Did you not actually read my response? The bit about setting in/out points from the keyboard? You can do this in the browser. You can turn off skimming and essentially treat the filmstrip displayed in the browser the same as you treated the scrubber at the bottom of FCP 7’s viewer window. Use the mouse or JKL to find your first frame. Hit the ‘I’ key. Find your last frame. Hit the ‘O’ key. Hit W/D/E to perform an insert/overwrite/append, or drag your selection to the timeline.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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You can turn off skimming and you can still set in/out points from the keyboard. What’s supposed to be the 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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[David Roth Weiss] “To clarify this argument for you and others yet again, the facts are: unnamed sources, allegedly from Apple, are reported to have disclosed that new features will be on the way at some point in time, which has yet to be determined.”
And if that’s not FUD, I’ve never seen it.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.