[Chris Kenny]

[Jamie Franklin] “If people don’t like the way it does things, why is the response always “they just don’t get it”…? “

He was explicitly using terminology that demonstrated he was thinking of FCP X as a traditional multitrack editor, which it’s simply not. It wasn’t “You must not understand this if you don’t like it”, it was “You must not understand this because you’re talking about it in terms that seem to demonstrate you don’t understand it”.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Tom Daigon] “”Interesting speculation on your part. Only Apple knows the truth in this situation and based on their track record only they will be privy to it. What they say (or dont say) to developers also falls into the same category.”

Please explain which part of my post was speculation. The fact that these features are coming has been conveyed by Apple to several reliable parties (including a New York Times columnist) who have relayed it to the public, and the timing makes it entirely impossible for this to be a reaction to the Internet outrage.

It’s hilarious to me the extent to which people will simply disregard or dismiss facts that are inconvenient for their arguments.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Oh for the love of Pete – chris, can you honestly tell me that you think it is a good idea, that when I place a clip on V2 that it glues itself immediately to the clip below?”

There is no V2. Your problem is that you’re thinking of FCP X as a traditional multitrack editor that’s broken, when it’s not actually a traditional multitrack editor at all. I think you need to try harder wrap your head around the conceptual model of the timeline FCP X uses, and give it a fair shot on its own terms.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Tom Daigon] “Interesting speculation on your part. Only Apple knows the truth in this situation and based on their track record only they will be privy to it.”

Apple has already told Studio Daily, Philip Hodgetts and David Pogue that they are, in fact, adding back video output, multicam, and XML or something that serves the same role. As I noted, Hodgetts was reporting this stuff on the day FCP X shipped, so it’s just reaction to the outrage. The idea that Apple shipped a minimal first release but always intended to fill these sorts of feature gaps is not speculation at this point; it’s established fact.

I know this is incompatible with the “Apple is deliberately abandoning pro users” narrative some people have had running in their heads for the last couple of years (originally as a consequence of having unreasonable expectations for how long it would take to write a 64-bit Cocoa successor). But that’s because that narrative is wrong.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Its designed to connect things for you without you asking”

This is not really a meaningful statement. When you place a clip above another clip in FCP X, you are asking for it to be connected. That’s what performing that action means if FCP X. All you’re really saying here is that the FCP X timeline doesn’t do the same things in response to the same actions as the FCP 7 timeline, which is not inherently a bad thing.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “the default behaviour of the timeline is that things get out of each others way either vertically or horizontally “

Because the app now understands the relationships between clips, it can make more intelligent decisions when clips are moved around. What’s supposed to be bad about this? Why should the software make you do something manually if it has enough information to do it for you by default? This is a particularly good idea if it also offers a way to bypass that automated behavior, which in this case it does (the Position tool).

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[Chris Kenny]

[Tom Daigon] “Damage control from a corp that thrives on silence and misdirection.”

Seriously, no. We know that Apple has been working with third-party hardware guys to add video output since before FCP X shipped. And This post by Philip Hodgetts was made on the day FCP X was released; Apple had already told him they were planning to add multicam and XML or some reasonable alternative.

Adding these features is not a reaction to the Internet freakout. This is just a typical case of Apple shipping a first-generation product with a stripped down feature set, with the full intention of building on it.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Nelson Torres] “I come to this conclusion after looking at this new Magnetic Timeline nonsense. To me in hinders my organization and workflow, but it’s there to make it easier for the novice.”

I don’t understand this claim at all. The new timeline, with clip connections, storylines, and compound clips, is actually more complicated than a bunch of generic stacked linear clip containers (i.e. a conventional multitrack approach), and I think it will take novices a longer time to figure out. Rather than being intended to make things easier for novices, I think this approach is intended to allow people who understand it well to work faster (the app can do more for them because it understands these relationships) and manage complex sequences better (because things can be grouped, collapsed, etc.).

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[Chris Kenny]

[Richard Cardonna] “Apple statement recomending automatic Duck and not devloping its owm solution makes me think that Apple is relying on developers to make the pro addons to fcpx. This sounds great at first but then when you think about it the cost can ad up into the thousands to have fcpx function like a pro app.”

I bet there will be cheaper options once Apple opens the API up to more vendors. And given that the base price of FCP X is about 1/8 of Avid Media Composer, there’s a fair bit of room to spend money on add-ons before FCP becomes uncompetitive in terms of price.

I actually really like the idea of Apple adding a powerful API and leaving workflow integration up to third parties. It will probably result in such integration working better, because the companies that handle it will be much more focused on it than Apple ever was, and solutions can be much more specialized. For instance, there have always been some things I’ve wished I could change about how FCP 7 exported EDLs, when I’m taking those EDLs into Resolve. With an API that allowed EDL exporting to be implemented in a plug-in, I could just write my own.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Grant Gomm] “I just read that there will be no DVD/Blu-Ray support for FCPX. Since FCPX also does not support decks, what is the intended final media? Not broadcast, Not DVD/Blu-Ray, and from what I understand cutting a feature on it that will be seen in every theater in the US is unrealistic…

Does this mean that it’s a web-only editor?”

Err… this makes no sense. The intended output of FCP X is a movie file or image sequence. DVD creation was never built into Final Cut Pro.

It’s notable that Apple is end-of-lifing DVD Studio Pro, but it isn’t strictly related to Final Cut Pro.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Harlan] “On the other hand, if you are a traditional broadcast editor whose focus is strongly project or episode-orriented, the event approach is not only not of use, but quickly begins to add needless clutter and overhead.”

I don’t really see that. Just create an event for each project or episode. We do feature film work, and even there the same footage is often used in multiple projects — the project files we use to prepare dailies, the project files created in the process or organizing footage, the project file actually containing the main sequence, the project file containing the trailer edit, etc. So even with something as apparently self-contained as a feature, there’s actually a fair bit of use in being able to import and organize footage in a library, rather than having to import and manage it in several projects.

This is also useful with stock material, etc.

On a somewhat related note, the ability to automatically group clips by creation date in the browser is extremely useful for feature work, both for generating dailies and for tracking down mislabeled footage.

[Chris Harlan] “tools are / are not there for the professional. I can’t do my job on it, but maybe others can do theirs.”

Apple has released information via various parties largely addressing this issue. There are solutions coming for things like allowing third-party software to access sequence data, Apple is working with I/O card vendors to get video I/O working, etc.

People are concluding, from the fact that these things are not in the first release, that Apple doesn’t care about them, but Apple has a history of shipping as soon as they’ve got something useful (and FCP X is useful to some people today, though you wouldn’t know to to read this forum), and building on it over time.

[Chris Harlan] “This is a program aimed at giving wings to the novice or non-editor. Almost all the touted gizmos are hand-holders for the insecure, especially the magnet timeline. I hate the thing. All of the simplicity is aimed at making you work in a very specific and guided way. I don’t find it freeing. To the contrary, I find it very confining. Others may love it.”

How much have you really explored the new interface? It’s quite a bit deeper than it looks at first glance. The whole storyline/connected clip/compound clip thing is actually more complicated than standard multitrack editing in a lot of ways, and I’m of the opinion it’s more oriented around allowing people who understand it well to work faster and manage sequence complexity more effectively than it is around making it easier for novices to pick up the program. Ditto for metadata; organizing clips into folders (bins) in pre-X FCP was extremely simple. Tagging is more complicated, but more powerful.

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