[Chris Kenny]

[MIke Guidotti] “I baited you all, my post is really a question. A lot of people and of course Apple itself is saying it has changed the paradigm of editing. I am not sure I understand what they have done that is so revolutionary.

The software still follows the same basic drop clips in a timeline format of editing. Many features have been taken away but nothing completely new and unheard of has been added.

See this post. While it sort of looks like it does at first glance, FCP X doesn’t have conventional tracks (stacked linear containers for clips that run the full length of the sequence) besides the primary storyline. This is a pretty significant difference.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Pierro] “That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In the end, regardless of whatever is going on inside the editor’s head, the clips in a timeline always relate to eachother by at timecode. Clip A starts at x and ends at y clip B starts at y and ends at z. That is not that hard to get your head around. If they wanted to implement that, I can’t imagine it being particularity hard.”

This is not how clips outside of the primary storyline work in FCP X. ‘Connected clips’, for instance, have no direct, fixed relationship to each other; only to storyline clips they’re attached to.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Pierro] “That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In the end, regardless of whatever is going on inside the editor’s head, the clips in a timeline always relate to eachother by at timecode. Clip A starts at x and ends at y clip B starts at y and ends at z. That is not that hard to get your head around. If they wanted to implement that, I can’t imagine it being particularity hard.”

This is not how clips outside of the primary storyline work in FCP X. ‘Connected clips’, for instance, have no direct, fixed relationship to each other, but only to storyline clips they’re attached to.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Michael Pierro] “Yeah, but working in a company that does a lot of broadcast and has for years, I’ve had to open up older projects, from FCP 6 or 5. Being able to do that is critical. I may not use that feature everyday, but being able to do that has been essential. The fact that I wouldn’t be able to now is a huge deal breaker.”

But this is alleviated by being able to install FCP X side-by-side with FCP 7.

[Michael Pierro] “Obviously if I had FCPx I would start new projects on it, but that doesn’t alleviate the need for legacy compatibility. Say whatever you want about the lack there of, but frankly it seems pretty obvious to me, as I’m sure to a lot of people here, the people who created FCPx MUST HAVE INTENTIONALLY left out the functions that would make this app useful to any pro user. The things that are missing are just too blatantly obvious to just leave out…”

See my post here. The importing issue is not straightforward.

And I agree that certain features were deliberately left out… of the first release. I don’t agree that this implies Apple isn’t working on these things or doesn’t recognize that some people need them. It makes a great deal of sense to structure releases to focus on mainstream features first, then start selling a product suitable for most users while you continue working on features for the higher end segment of the market.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “I’d rather manually magnetize a timeline, re-connecting all the non-obvious connection points in an edit by hand, than not even have the option to import an old project at all. It may be tedious, but so is conforming an offline, and I’ve done enough of those. If manual magnetization is necessary, I’d do this, too.”

It’s not quite that simple, though. FCP X doesn’t have tracks you can stick clips onto, while you wait for the user to show up and explain what the connections should be. It literally doesn’t have conventional tracks above the first. Some of the items on what is (visually) the “second track” are connected clips, and can’t for instance, have transitions placed between them, because, since they’re linked to their underlying clips, the timing relationships between them could change if those clips were moved or cut differently. Other items there are secondary storylines, which are effectively tracks that group a specific related set of clips… but don’t run the full length of the sequence.

In order to emulate a normal multitrack editing app, as far as I can tell FCP X would have to import each track above the first as a storyline including all of the clips on that track and linked to the primary storyline at the first frame of the sequence. Unless I’m missing something, this seems to mean that with any sequence originated in FCP 7, there’s no path to a sensible FCP X sequence. Any imported sequence would be perpetually stuck in, effectively, a sort of ‘track emulation’ mode in FCP X.

[Walter Soyka] “If the global HDCAM shortage didn’t get broadcasters to change their delivery specs, why should the emergence of EDL-less FCPX?”

Apple thinks pretty long term. We are talking here about the company that, a decade ago, shipped their shiny new OS with a graphics engine so sophisticated that it took three years for hardware to show up that provided decent performance for it.

Anyway, in terms of deliverables, exporting EDLs shouldn’t be a huge technical challenge, because you’re going from a sequence format with more information to one with (much) less. And even with respect to importing EDLs, the single track case shouldn’t be a huge technical challenge. It’s really multitrack edits where things get tricky. The primary storyline in FCP X basically is a conventional track; it’s the stuff you can layer on top of it that’s not.

[Walter Soyka] “I’ve seen the Henry Ford “faster horse” quote thrown out a lot with respect to FCPX. I think it’s important to note that both horses and cars used the same roads.
“

Not as much as you might think. Read up on the motivations for creating the US interstate highway system. It was, in significant part, a reaction to some military efforts (most famously in 1919) to determine how easily troops could be moved cross-country by motor vehicle, which discovered that the answer was “not very”.

Cars also, it’s worth pointing out, required significant new national infrastructure in the form of gasoline production and distribution facilities.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Eric Susch] “Businesses can’t just jump off a cliff with no connection to the past. They need to do their work the way the client wants, and many times that means building on what they’ve done with the client before. “

I have no idea what sort of work you do, but in our operation each project is essentially self-contained, or if there are elements shared between projects for a given client, they’ve things like stock media and motion graphics files that could easily be imported into FCP X. I’m just not seeing how the capability to move a specific sequence to FCP X is really critical for migration. Sure, it would speed migration up if FCP X could flawlessly open every FCP 7 project, because you could just switch immediately. But in the absence of perfect import (which would probably be nearly impossible with a whole new rendering engine, etc. even without the new timeline features), continuing to work on projects originated in FCP 7 in FCP 7 was always going to be the only sensible choice.

For most users, I think, if they just start creating all of their new projects in FCP X (once Apple fills a couple of feature gaps), 12 months later they’ll probably be opening FCP 7 all of once a month.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “You and I agree that FCPX has some great features, and we agree that FCPX has tremendous potential for the future — but it is simply not acceptable for the market leader to EOL their existing product and throw down a 1.0 release that flat out excludes many of the professionals that elevated Apple to their place in the market in the first place.”

So, Apple comes up with a radical new way to edit video, and… what? Never ships a product based on it, because it’s not directly compatible with the old paradigm? That doesn’t sound like Apple to me. The truth is, Apple is what is today in large part because the company has the guts to do things like EOL market-leading products when they think they can do something better. I get that people want the kind of innovation that flows from that, but without having to deal with any of the transition headaches it causes, but you just can’t have both. If you want incrementalism there are lots of other choices. Personally, I feel it’s extremely valuable for the industry to have a company that doesn’t feel constrained by it.

[Walter Soyka] “If what you’re proposing is true, Apple has just orphaned all our existing projects, and we will never see FCP project or EDL import, or XML-based round-trip with any external application. Very, very scary.”

EDL might well be screwed here. Though frankly, the industry should be a little embarrassed it’s still in use in the first place. Formats capable of carrying more data could be just fine, assuming third-party tools are willing to support a couple of key elements of the new approach — and with Apple’s market share they probably will be. Plus, if Apple really goes and does some of the Python stuff it looks like they might be doing, the kind of workflows that could enable would be so far beyond simple EDL/XML interchange that they could grow a whole new and radically different ecosystem around FCP X.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Walter Soyka] “If the FCP7/FCPX transition were analogous to the OS9/OSX transition, FCS3 would still be on sale, FCPX would open FCP7 projects, and third-party developers would have been involved during FCPX’s development.”

I agree FCS3 should remain on sale, but recall that it can run on the same system as FCP X. This is sufficient for a transition. Having FCP X open FCP 7 projects, now that I think it through, would be like demanding that OS X be able to run unmodified OS 9 apps natively.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Chris Messineo] “They’re smart guys. I think they could have figured it out.”

There is no “figuring this out”. Have you used FCP X, and really wrapped your head around the way its sequences work? They sort of look like they have conventional tracks, and at first glance it seems like imports would be easy, but once you understand what you’re seeing that’s clearly not the case. A competent FCP X editor, when creating a sequence, is creating all sorts of relationships between clips that FCP 7 doesn’t have any way to even represent. For FCP X to import a sequence and have it organized as well as a human would organize it, it would have to literally watch and understand your video….

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[Chris Kenny]

[james carey] “Had they spent the last two years added these new features to FCP8”

Technically impossible. A rewrite was necessary. Apple bit the bullet and did one. It will take some time for the new app to match the old app’s feature set.

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