Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Nate Weaver] “I have not checked to see if it’s there on export. Doing a full-screen viewer I could tell that the engine was taking some liberties with the sharpness of my footage, so it truly maybe a preview issue (something not unheard of in 7, either).”
There’s a preference to play back at high quality. (More likely to drop frames, of course.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Vincent Varga] “I don’t feel that FCPX should be called a piece of garbage just because it no longer meets certain needs. I believe Apple is somewhat changing gears with their target market. “
It’s too early to say that. For all we know in six months we’ll have Thunderbolt I/O devices and a Python API, which on top of the 32-bit float OpenCL/GCD rendering engine and the powerful metadata system that are already there, would make FCP X a very powerful professional tool.
The truth is, while the features that are missing are critical (to some workflows) there aren’t all that many of them, and they’re not that complicated compared with what has already been done. I think a lot of people are losing sight of just how much of a radical improvement FCP X is, if you look at the technical implementation of what’s there instead of focusing on the features that are missing in 1.0.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Ron Pestes] “I have been reading the manual and it says it does not support JPEG stills. Lots of other formats but not JPEG. That really seems dumb considering most people shoot in JPEG on their still cameras.”
Must be an error in the docs. I have no problem importing a JPEG still.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Russell Lasson] “I’m I crazy? Can I really only have one sequence per project? This whole events vs project thing is seeming kind of convoluted.”
Yes, it’s one sequence per project. And because clips are organized in the Events window, a project basically is a sequence, and nothing else. I’m surprised they even still call them ‘Projects’ and not just sequences.
There are a couple of things to keep in mind here. One is that you can open projects directly from the FCP X interface, so if you do need to work with multiple sequences, this doesn’t mean you have to keep going back to the Finder. You can also organize projects into folders directly in Final Cut, if you need to group related sequences.
The other thing to remember is that FCP X has far more powerful support for what are, effectively, nested sequences, in the form of Compound Clips. Between this feature and Auditions, a lot of the things that were best done by organizing clips across multiple sequences in FCP 7 can easily be done within a single sequence in FCP X, once you wrap your head around the new organizational tools.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I haven’t done side by side testing with decent looking H.264 footage (I’ve mostly just been messing with various ProRes formats here), but FCP X has a much more advanced rendering engine and supports ColorSync for display, so both of these things are plausible.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jeff Bernstein] “There is a lot of focus on those ho already have FCP7. Just don’t upgrade. Fine. But happen to thbose folks that already have a couple of seats of FCP7, work on a SAN, need those features in FCP7 that are missing in FCPX AND need to add more licenses?”
Even though it’s no longer for sale from Apple, software products, with the cost of production being so low, tend to ship a lot of units into the channel, and they’ll probably be kicking around and generally available for quite some time. Particularly since FCP X actually is a suitable replacement for FCP 7 for some users, and from a licensing perspective FCP X is not an upgrade to Final Cut Studio 3, so those users are now, as far as I can tell, perfectly free to sell off their copies of FCS 3.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Russell Lasson] “So sometimes I like to throw a clip at the end of a sequence or move clips later in a timeline and have a gap. In FCPX, do I have to add a gap to make that work? Can I just turn off the magnetic timeline and slide stuff around so that I have gaps or do I always need to insert a gap to make it do what I want?”
Flip from ‘Select’ mode to ‘Position’ mode, and clips will go exactly where you drag them, overwriting other clips or leaving gaps as necessary. To delete a clip and leave a gap, use ‘Replace With Gap’ instead of just deleting normally. (‘Replace With Gap’ is assigned to the forward delete key.)
A couple of more useful semi-related features: if you drop a clip on another clip in the timeline, a contextual menu will give you replacement options. Also, you can now insert specific (named) placeholder clips (with Edit -> Insert Placeholder), so things you intend to fill in later don’t just have to be gaps named with markers anymore.
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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’t resell App Store apps, but backing them up and moving them between systems is no problem. Not that you really need to back up; you can just re-download from the App Store for free at any time. In fact, you can install on a new system by just logging into your App Store account and downloading there.
The copy protection is super low-key. You can install an App Store app on any number of systems authorized on your iTunes account. With pro apps like Final Cut you’re required to buy one copy per user or per multiuser system (so for instance, you can use your personal copy on a laptop and desktop, but in a facility each edit bay should have a separate copy purchased for it), but this appears to be on the honor system, so you’re not going to have some issue in the future where you can’t run software you’ve paid for because the copy protection system has gotten cranky.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andrew Richards] “Yeah, still working on deciphering the hex blobs”
Hmm… They seem to be binary plist data, pretty clearly serialized objects. If you paste the hex from one of them into a hex editor and save the file out with a .plist extension, you can open it in the Properly List Editor and get something sensible, or as sensible as serialized objects are going to be. Still a lot of work to figure out the structure and all the relationships, though, and possibly quite pointless given that the Python thing might provide much easier access sooner or later.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jonathan Dortch] “So without manually archiving/moving the Events in that folder, do they want EVERY Event ever created on the drive to load EVERY time FCP X is launched?”
It’s almost certainly just loading a database, though, not examining all of the media files, so I don’t think there’s any particular reason to worry about performance here.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.