[Chris Kenny]

[Clayton Burkhart] “You are speaking about theory. I am talking about implementation. The mistake you are making is assuming that Apple wants to strictly institute accuracy throughout the pipeline.

They do not. At the end of the day they want the image to look “good”.”

FCP X can do automatic color enhancement, but there’s an explicit option for it (which is turned off by default), and the enhancement is obviously applied to the footage itself, not in the display pipeline. Doing it in the display pipeline would make no sense. It would produce entirely inaccurate color even for things like web deliverables.

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[Chris Kenny]

[J Hussar] “The big picture is IOS for them, consumer level products – that’s it.

This is inconsistent with several of the features of FCP X (e.g. high-precision floating point image processing, 4K support, DPX/OpenEXR export, pretty credible video scopes, organization features to support long-form projects) and inconsistent with what Apple has told Philip Hodgetts about future FCP X features.

Apple has had a lot of success in consumer markets. Some folks in this industry seem to determined to attribute every disappointment to that, somehow, but it really doesn’t make any sense. A year ago, the fact that FCP hadn’t been rewritten as a 64-bit Cocoa app was used as evidence that Apple only cared about consumers. Yet Avid Media composer also wasn’t (and still isn’t) 64-bit. Is that because Avid is also too focused on phones and tablets? Frankly, a lot of people just have very unrealistic expectations with respect to how long software development takes.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Pierro] “To me it looks like it has tracks in the exact same way FCP7 and most other NLEs do. The only fundamental difference seems to be that you have much less control over them. The programs decides where to put things for you. If the paradigm shift is towards less control then I’d personally much rather stay with the “old” one…”

Clips on a track have an absolute position relative to the sequence as a whole. Clips and storylines above the primary storyline in FCP X have a position only relative to the primary storyline clips to which they are connected. There is, as far as I’ve discovered, no way to just put a free-floating disconnected clip above the primary storyline. Even if there’s a gap in the primary storyline below the start of a clip, it will just attach itself to the gap (since gaps are sort of slug clips in FCP X).

This is fundamentally different from standard-mulitrack editing.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Clayton Burkhart] “An example of the kind of problems I am speaking about which are not addressed merely by the advent of floating point technology and colorsync:

“DVI/HDMI connections are particularly problematic when they originate from a computer graphics card. Simply put, these graphics cards are built to make your image look pretty, not accurate. However, something broadcast specific with an HDMI or DVI output that bypasses the graphics card of the computer in question (ie is connected directly to the computer) likely would not be subject to these same limitations and then you would have significantly fewer concerns.”
-Bram Desmet from Flanders Scientific”

Um… Flanders Scientific makes some great monitors, but that statement is just not true. It is simply not the case that graphics cards arbitrarily change RGB pixel data before passing it to the display. The traditional problems for monitoring video on computer displays, with respect to color, have been that a) the operating system messes with image data on its way to the display (I think this is where the confusion in the above quote comes from), and b) computer monitors don’t natively display Rec. 709 color. Adding ColorSync support fixes the former problem by taking control of the precise mechanism in the OS that was previously changing image data in undesired ways, and fixes the latter by mapping between Rec. 709 and the display’s own native color space. (And these days the display’s native color space, if it’s not a cheap piece of crap, is larger than Rec. 709, so this mapping is lossless.)

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[Chris Kenny]

[Clayton Burkhart] “I suppose if you are like Apple, you believe that the need for i/o YUV is already a thing of the past and that is my answer to the OP’s original hypothesis.”

Again, the use of linear floating point RGB processing does not in any way imply that YUV output through video I/O interfaces is not possible (once support for such hardware is added). In the digital cinema world, YUV output from software that works in RGB is extremely common. See, for example, essentially every DVD or Blu-ray you’ve ever watched of a movie that went through a DI pipeline. Video I/O devices already routinely let you select either RGB or YUV output regardless of the underlying footage format.

In the digital world, RGB and 4:4:4 YUV are just two ways of encoding exactly the same pixel data. 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 YUV are the same thing with some color resolution data discarded. There aren’t colors that YUV can represent that RGB can’t, or anything like that. In point of fact, all displays are RGB devices, so YUV is always converted to RGB before display anyway. If YUV could encode something that couldn’t be represented in RGB, you could literally never display it.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “Well, Lightworks is being open-sourced. EditShare may have a huge opportunity here, if they can move fast enough.”

Open source desktop software tends to turn out best when it’s in a product category that has a built-in revenue model (browsers, via ad sales) or that someone with money has a significant strategic interest in because (various parties with OpenOffice, so cause trouble for Microsoft).

Open source desktop software that doesn’t match these characteristics is often not very impressive (GIMP vs. Photoshop, Scribus vs. InDesign, etc.), because projects just can’t get the resources necessary to really match commercial offerings.

Lightworks looks promising, but it’s not clear to me yet that it avoids this problem. Perhaps if they can make money selling support for extra codecs, etc. as they seem to be planning. But that kind of thing is always tricky. Leave too much out of the base product, and nobody uses it. Leave too little out, and the vast majority of your users will never bother to pay you any money.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Clayton Burkhart] “And that’s just the trouble. Who will be doing the profiling and with what?

I can show you 15 different products today on the market for profiling in the long standing graphic arts industry and if you were to make a profile on the same monitor with each of these products, no two would be the same, and this is for an industry which has been using Colorsync for many years.”

This problem is no easier to solve with respect to ColorSync profiling than with respect to calibrating broadcast displays. The same underlying technical issues are there. And actually, this whole problem is a lot easier for video than for graphic arts, because dealing with print and RGB/CMYK conversions is much, much harder. (CMYK really can represent things that fundamentally can’t be represented in RGB, and the way ink on paper behaves in terms of color mixing is radically different from the way RGB color works.)

[Clayton Burkhart] “Colorsync does not insure that your signal will be clean and free of these additional layers, it only says to your system that it will intrepet them. Ever seen what something looks like when it has been intrepeted 3 or 4 times?”

That doesn’t really make sense. To provide accurate color, all display pipelines have to map between numerical values in an incoming signal, and the physical characteristics of the display. Simple broadcast monitors do this with a fixed color matrix that can be tuned with some relatively crude controls. More advanced displays or display pipelines (the kind of systems you use for digital cinema) use LUTs. A LUT can be applied either by dedicated hardware the video signal flows through, by an engine in the display, or by the software in the host system. This is all ColorSync is really doing: it’s applying a LUT to the image going to your computer display. There isn’t really any “extra” color conversion here vs. what happens with LUT-based external monitoring.

People have tuned video monitoring into this dark and scary thing that requires all sorts of special hardware and magical incantations. And it sort of was, when you were working with digital data, but what mattered was an analog signal on an analog display. These days, though, it’s all just digital pixel data from end to end.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Oded Helman] “First I should point out that this only happens on my unsupported Macbook with GMA950 gpu, I copied the program from my iMac on which FCPX works great but on my Macbook it doesn’t show me video, instead it shows the static as seen in the picture attached, anyone have any ideas how to work around that??”

The GMA950 doesn’t support OpenCL. In other words, your MacBook physically lacks the hardware necessary to execute some of the code in FCP X’s image processing pipeline. I doubt there’s any way around this.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Grant Gomm] “Do you have evidence or sources that say “this is apple’s plan…”?”

Start here.

However, during my direct briefing, the Apple folk made it abundantly clear that the ecosystem was very important to them, and that there will be a new, and much improved, replacement for the current XML workflow. That’s entirely consistent with what I’d heard pre-release that there would be a new form of XML and that it would be accessed by some sort of SDK (Software Developer Kit).

So Apple essentially told Philip Hodgetts flat out that they’re working on the ‘ecosystem’ issue, which is the bulk of the problem with the 1.0 release.

From the same source, on multi-cam:

At the initial release of version 1, Final Cut Pro X does not have a multicamera editing feature, a.k.a. multicam. I was told that Apple have, with Final Cut Pro X, been re-examining everything to work out how to reimagine and improve it. Multicam will come in a future release, when Apple decide how best to implement it within the new application and architecture.

The other major problem is video output, but between possible AVFoundation upgrades in Lion and the changing peripheral landscape with Thunderbolt, there are all sorts of reasons why they might be taking a little longer.

See also my discoveries digging around in the FCP X binary file here.

Since then I’ve also discovered a framework included with FCP X called “MediaIO” that seems to contain references to serial deck control features. (Which I find surprising, really; it is fairly believable that Apple would be willing to leave advanced deck interaction to third-party software.)

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[Chris Kenny]

[Nevin Styre] “Just a note to people if you haven’t noticed yet, background rendering will stop if you are skimming anything. The S key is the new command-R.

I noticed this when I had background tasks open and rendering kept pausing itself.”

Background rendering pauses on any user interaction, to keep the app as responsive as possible. You can set how quickly it resumes after interaction in Preferences. (The default is five seconds.)

This is somewhat similar to how the Render Cache works in DaVinci Resolve.

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