[Chris Kenny]

The current MacBook Pros are an essentially brand new model. There certainly won’t be new MBPs out by June, so you might as well buy now if you know you want a MacBook Pro. If you’d consider an iMac, you might want to wait until those are updated and take a look at what that update brings as well, though.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Craig Seeman] “Now the other feature is going back out to tape when needed. It would be nice not to tie the NLE up for that either but that would require a means to export timeline (XML?) and/or a means to batch capture when needed.”

I think built-in output is more likely than built-in capturing, because you absolutely need to support video output for monitoring anyway. Allowing monitoring output to be conveniently captured to tape is just a matter of adding some relatively simple deck control.

Plus, built-in output combined with real-time OpenCL-accellerated rendering opens up the possibility for FCP X to offer something like DaVinci Resolve’s PowerMastering, which lets you output to tape in many cases with no rendering step. If output can only be handled externally, then the entire timeline will have to be rendered out to a flattened file first.

But for capturing? Yeah, who cares if that’s built in. Back before most of our work went tapeless, we used to use a third-party app for capturing anyway.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Sergey Sergeevich] “Guys, could you please explain to me the situation? FCP-X for $299 – it is an update for FCP only, not for the whole FCS package, right? So… What about another apps? No FCS update? And, maybe anybody know, why Apple doing so – major update only for FCP but not for the whole FCS?”

Apple has not yet announced what’s happening with the other apps. If you look at the iWork and iLife suites, you’ll see that when moving those to the App Store, Apple unbundled them and is just selling the apps a la carte. I suspect they’ll move to the same model with the Final Cut Studio apps, which would create additional flexibility both for Apple in terms of update schedules (they wouldn’t have to synchronize releases across all the apps) and for users (they’d only have to buy the apps they needed).

There has been a lot of speculation about Apple killing off some other Final Cut Studio apps, but when you get right down to it there was nothing specific related to the announcement of FCP X that seems to provide any information one way or the other about that.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[walter biscardi] “Apparently according to Apple we don’t need Tape, Tracks or OMF’s anymore….”

How is that ‘apparent’? Because Apple didn’t demo capturing a tape on stage?

You’re basically trolling at this point.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Richard Dee] “Does anyone think the new lower pricing per seat will be enforced more strictly, (online activation, calling home, locked to a machine, etc).

I’m thinking it could actually be a good thing. Isn’t it better for the industry when >99% of users are actually paying, and that when you hire someone you know your getting a legitimate shop.”

I assume, since it’s sold through the App Store, that it’ll use standard App Store copy protection. Which is, essentially, no technical enforcement of how many computers an app is installed on (the license allows for either multiple machines used by one user, e.g. your desktop and laptop, or one machine used by multiple users, e.g. a machine in an edit suite), but each of those computers must be authorized on your iTunes account. As far as I know App Store apps don’t regularly phone home, but of course initially authorizing a given machine on an account requires connecting to Apple.

This seems to me like it strikes a good balance. It’s activation, sort of, but in exchange it relieves the user of having to manage serial numbers (unlike, say, Adobe’s activation system which still requires them), the user can re-install the app at any time from Apple’s servers with a couple of clicks, and it doesn’t obnoxiously enforce a limit on the number of machines that means you might have to call up and beg to be allowed to use your own software on a new machine if your old one dies without being deactivated.

It won’t stop people from buying FCP X and installing it on more machines than they’re allowed to, but it should stop casual redistribution beyond the machines under a user’s direct control (i.e. outside of a given company or household), because people aren’t going to give their iTunes account information out to random individuals, since anyone who has it can make purchases charged to your credit card.

Of course I’m sure the copy protection will get cracked (they all do) and the app will be possible to pirate, but hopefully the lower price and convenient App Store installation will encourage more users to go legit.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

Since it’s being sold through the App Store, it’s virtually certain that from a cost perspective, it’ll just be $299 for everyone, regardless of what version of FCP they have or whether they currently own FCP at all. From a technical perspective, it’s an entirely different app from FCP 7 and earlier versions, so I doubt it will be doing an “in place” upgrade of earlier versions (the App Store doesn’t really support that anyway); it’ll probably be a different thing that can live side by side with earlier versions.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Shane Ross] “Don’t do it. If you are trying to convert your 23.98 sequence to a 29.97 sequence, you do that either by outputting via a capture card, or exporting a full res movie, and using COMPRESSOR to convert…the FULL movie. Not the clips.”

If I understand the original post correctly, I think he’s got 23.98 footage that was edited into a 29.97 sequence, and he’s trying to rebuild that sequence as 23.98. In other words, the mistake you’re trying to warn him against was already committed, and he’s trying to clean up the mess.

And yes, the way to do this is indeed to copy the footage into a 23.98 sequence and then either extend or move clips to close the resulting gaps. (Which are normal, presumably a consequence of clip durations that round to frame numbers a different way in a different timebase.)

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “this isn’t about freaking out on twitter – I think apple have a professional onus to clear up some of the questions outstanding from the event.”

The reason people are freaking out is because they went into the event skeptical of Apple’s commitment to the pro market (despite the fact that the very existence of FCP X should have substantially dispelled that), and viewed the entire announcement through the lens of, essentially, “Based on what we’ve seen, what’s the worst thing that could be true that they’re not telling us”. I don’t think Apple has any responsibility to respond to people who deliberately choose to torture themselves by playing that game.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “am I mad or do red camera rushes represent themselves as virtual tapes in the metadata, with TC? does anyone know if say, FCP offline to scratch conforming R3D is an EDL affair?”

It has been, but Assimilate just announced support for FCP XML files in Scratch. Resolve and Baselight also have support, or will soon. It seems like we’re finally turning the corner with respect to the need for the ancient EDL format when moving edits to grading/finishing systems.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.

[Chris Kenny]

All of Apple’s current hardware, desktop and laptop, can run 64-bit applications, and this has been true for the last several years. It will be interesting to see what the minimum system requirements are for FCP X, but 64-bit isn’t likely to be a major sticking point.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.