[Chris Kenny]

[Dennis Radeke] “Like what?”

No GPU acceleration on ATI GPUs.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Robert Houllahan] “I think EDL export from Final Cut is much less robust than from Avid…”

This isn’t a problem with the EDL, though, as far as I can tell. The EDL in these instances is accurate. This is, as far as I can tell, a Resolve bug. The algorithm it uses for checking whether a given timecode range is contained within another timecode range doesn’t seem to understand clips that cross the midnight barrier. So if it’s looking for media from reel A001 starting at 00:00:01:00 and going through 00:00:10:00, it doesn’t understand that it if there’s a reel A001 clip that runs from 23:59:58:00 to 00:01:10:00 it should look for it there.

It’s easy to see why. In all other cases, if you’re looking for a clip that encompasses a given timecode range, that clip’s start timecode will be less than the start timecode of the range, and its end timecode will be greater. In this case, the former isn’t true, and the code wasn’t written with that edge case in mind.

(Vaguely-related rant: I don’t understand why the industry hasn’t added day, month, year, and camera identifiers to TC/reel information by now, to give every frame ever captured by every camera a globally unique code. That would solve a lot of annoying post problems.)

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “With virtual cluster and batch processing?
Compressor isn’t just used for FCP export.”

Realistically Compressor is probably 95% used for FCP export, if not directly then conceptually, e.g. when you export a ProRes file from FCP via the ‘Export’ command and then transcode it to three different formats via Compressor.

It isn’t uncommon for Apple to optimize for the 95% use case and leave the remaining 5% as a “third-party opportunity”.

That said, it wouldn’t be very hard for Apple to add batch features to FCP.

If by ‘virtual clustering’ you mean the practice of running multiple instances of Compressor to get better CPU utilization on machines with lots of cores, I doubt any such thing will be required in FCP X, given its apparently widespread use of Grand Central Dispatch. With respect to actual physical clustering, that’s absolutely a small enough niche that Apple will have no problem ignoring it. Remote job submission is probably used a little more commonly, but not commonly enough for Apple to be overly concerned about it, I think.

Frankly, Qmaster (which provides all of these clustering and remote submission capabilities) has always been a little screwy, and I’d be surprised if Apple didn’t take this opportunity to get rid of it. The overhead of having to deal with the complexity of a system that enables these capabilities is detrimental to many more users than actually benefit significantly from these capabilities.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “This is why Compressor has to have a major overhaul. You can’t pronounce disc as dead and then neglect the alternative they claim is the vital future.”

Fair chance Compressor just goes away as a standalone app, in favor of an expanded ‘Share’ feature in FCP X.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “I think FCPX is designed to sell iMacs. Whereas Avid may take eons to get to a Thunderbolt approved device, many facilities in this era of tight budgets may consider FCPX and iMacs to add some edit bays even if it might be “feature compromised.” At the very least it’ll be able take on certain projects. Of course Adobe Premiere can jump on support.”

The quad core Sandy Bridge iMacs introduced today are almost certainly faster than the quad core Mac Pros. With Thunderbolt for fast disk and video I/O all the way through 2K, they’re really looking quite plausible as video editing machines.

[Craig Seeman] “Intel has already said no Thunderbolt PCIe cards. The chip must be built into the motherboard.”

As far as I can tell, what Intel was objecting to was data-only Thunderbolt PCIe cards. But given that Thunderbolt integrates with the display system, how does it work on systems without on-board graphics like the Mac Pro? The obvious answer is it’s implemented on the graphics card. So it seems plausible that future graphics cards will integrate Thunderbolt, and some of these may be installable in current or past Mac Pros.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Andy Mees] “plus we saw in the “oh look its out of sync” section that Randy “stepped in” to the clip item in the timeline to resync the attached audio track which suggests that the clip itself was either a nested sequence itself or was just being represented as one in the timeline to facilitate editing.”

Yeah, this was really interesting to see. I’ve always found it frustrating in FCP that if a merged clip is slightly out of sync, you can’t just pop it open as if it were a sequence and slide things around to fix it. FCP X definately seems to blur the lines between sequences and merged clips, and I suspect it handles multiclips the same way as well. That’s extremely powerful, I think.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Andy Mees] “That said, perhaps an existing FCP 7 multclip might be mapped as a unique FCP X sequence itself, the collapsed multiclp in the master sequence as a clip collection (nest) … then again, Apple being Apple, they’re probably wrapping the whole thing up as something far more complex and clever, so get ready for “Dynamic Auditioning” (you heard it here first folks, lol).”

I agree that tagged ranges essentially eliminate the need for subclips. But multiclips and, particularly, clips created by merging dual system audio and video, seem like they’d need somewhere to live other than within sequences. I mean, say you’re editing a feature film shot dual system. You might have thousands of merged clips. I don’t think you can just dump all of them in a sequence and work from there. You have to be able to work with them the same way you can work with standalone clips, prior to editing them into a sequence.

Apple has to have some solution to this. The most obvious is that I’m wrong that virtual clips can’t exist in the Event Library. People have noted the odd icon in the “Phantom Ahead” clip that appears in various released screenshots. Perhaps it’s an indication of a virtual clip. In fact, now that I think about it… that’s a Phantom clip. The Phantom doesn’t record audio, and that clip has attached audio. It has to be some sort of merged clip. Unless Apple went and embedded audio in the ProRes transcode before importing, but that seems a little nuts.

[Andy Mees] “Going into slightly unhinged speculation mode, whilst it seems unlikely, we may yet discover that some of the really pervasive “Effects” from FCP Classic (like the 3 Way Color Corrector, that would appear to have been wholesale replaced in FCP X with the Color Board ) may yet also have been ported as “Effects” in FCP X, strictly to provide such compatibility (and familiarity). Ok yes, padded cell moment perhaps.”

Apple has always been pretty aggressive about ditching backwards compatibility. I doubt they’ve done anything that elaborate. I suspect they make an effort to translate applicable settings for filters that have a corresponding implementation in FCP X, but this is probably like Color’s ability to import 3-way correction done in FCP: a starting point, but not even really trying to be an exact match.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Paul Dickin] “So to import a FCP 7 project is going to require a mammoth reconversion process to create the new AVAsset ‘compositions’ needed to work with the old FCP 7 project converted into a FCP X database.”

I have no specific familiarity with AV Foundation, but I do have a fair bit of general programming knowledge, I have written Cocoa apps, and I’ve written quite a few tools that do various things to/with FCP 7 XML files.

There’s nothing being described about AV Foundation that makes it sound like conversion would be especially problematic. Clips correspond to AVAssets. Sequences to AVCompositions. AVCompositions have AVAssetTracks, suggesting the “trackless timeline” is a user interface feature, and internal representation still uses tracks.

There isn’t really a “mammoth reconversion” here. At least, not an extra one. To understand why, one needs to know something that I don’t think would be at all intuitive to non-developers, which is that on-disk representations of data sets are typically independent of in-memory representations of those same data sets. If you have a large, complex data structure in memory representing, say, a sequence, you generally can’t just call a saveToDisk() function on it when you want to save it to a file. You have to write code that sort of steps through it, and says “OK, here’s an object representing a clip, let’s write the XML representing a clip out to this file”, etc. And when loading a file, you have to do the reverse. (There are more generalized solutions to this problem, but they likely aren’t relevant to this discussion.)

So, yes, FCP X, based on AV Foundation, will no doubt represent things in memory very differently form the Carbon-based Final Cut Pro 7. But this doesn’t matter, because FCP X will never see FCP 7’s in-memory representations of anything, only the files it writes out. Sure, Apple will have to write code to read those files in (and to write out XML files, etc.), but there is no unique challenge here. FCP X won’t really be doing anything when reading/writing those files that isn’t conceptually equivalent to what FCP 7 already has to do. And the things represented in those files — clips, tracks, sequences — map very well onto the data structures AV Foundation offers.

I do see two potential issues for file conversion here.

One is that as per my speculation here, FCP X might not even have project files. That’s fine for sequences — it can just ask you what sequence you want to import, and then save it out as an FCP X sequence file. And it’s fine for regular clips. They just like in your footage library. But what about ‘virtual’ clips — subclips, multiclips, etc. that don’t exist as discrete entities on disk? How do those get imported? For that matter, how do they exist at all in FCP X outside of the context of a sequence, if it really doesn’t have project files anymore?

The second is that, of course, some filters present in FCP 7 might not be present in FCP X, or may render a little bit differently. Or take, for instance, the color corrector — it seems to have been totally changed in FCP X. Will corrections from the old FCP come in at all? I suspect you won’t, on complex projects, quite be able to export an ProRes file from FCP 7, then open that project in FCP X and export a second ProRes file that looks frame-for-frame identical. But these kinds of issues across versions are not all that uncommon (page layout software can even reflow text, etc. after upgrades), so while I’m sure there will be a lot of griping at the cleanup required, history suggests this sort of thing is not the end of the world.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

Nobody has anything constructive to add on this subject, because there is no information. This sort of baseless speculation simply amounts to trolling at this point.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

Hey, so I don’ have any specific information, but I’d like to point out that we don’t know whether or not Final Cut Pro X causes cancer. That would definitely cause utter chaos in our shop. We would have to keep Final Cut Pro 7 running for years to avoid dying horribly.

Seriously, the “What’s the worst thing that could possibly be true about FCP X?” game is getting really, really old. Maybe Apple has cut all sorts of essential features… but there is absolutely no information indicating that, and in the absence of such information it’s rather more reasonable to believe that Apple is not, in fact, carrying out an elaborate and expensive suicide in the pro video editing market at this time.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.