[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “no absolutely – I completely go with the long term build up to this – that’s all cool – basically there are five or six things the industry would love to know arising from that sneak peek – there are post facilities who badly need to know what is going on. I just basically think apple could have someone write a blog entry to dampen the fevered mood – with a few bullet points on the status of features like the clip viewer XML etc. It wouldn’t kill them – but I rather think they won’t – they’ll just let the industry stew for two and a half months. that’s my issue. “

Well, Apple doesn’t have a blog, and that aspect of their corporate culture is not likely to change soon. There is, no doubt, some schedule set up for an official announcement of FCP X (as opposed to that highly unusual ‘sneak peek’) that will come with more detailed info.

The truth is, the industry at large probably isn’t even paying that much attention at the moment — most of the industry folks I come into professional contact with in the real world were only vaguely aware of any of the NAB announcements or their implications, and certainly haven’t formed opinions about FCP X. This “fevered mood” is perhaps a few hundred people on Twitter and a few message boards working themselves up with little factual basis for any concern, and I’m just not entirely sure it’s sensible to expect a major corporation to change the structure of a carefully planned rollout for a product with a couple of million users on that basis.

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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] “see below – the feature request thread is pretty good, many participants.

on a personal note, I find it mind boggling that, in order to preserve mystique, apple are willing to literally torture an entire profession.”

Honestly, I think people are reading this in a rather screwy way, because of the sort of narrative that has built up over the last couple of years. According to that narrative, Apple was neglecting pro video because a) there had been no major Final Cut Pro update in a while and b) Apple couldn’t possibly care that much about pro video (or even the Mac) when they were selling all those iPhones.

But that narrative never made any sense. The lack of FCP updates was easily explainable by Apple quietly working on a major overhaul, which was what they obviously had to do at this juncture given the technical limitations of the old FCP, and which we now have confirmation is precisely what they were doing. Meanwhile, the “Apple can’t focus on more than one thing at a time” meme is bizarre nonsense that somehow never gets applied to other companies. Ever seen any handwringing about how Sony is going to neglect pro video cameras because PlayStations are selling too well? Me neither.

Well, despite the fact that the very existence of FCP X (arriving at about the time you’d expect if they’d started serious work on a major overhaul after shipping FCP 6) substantially undermines the case that Apple was ever actually neglecting this market, many people are still interpreting the entire FCP X announcement according to a mental framework in which Apple is neglecting this market, and picking at every little detail that could be read as supporting that. This has turned what was, based on the actual substance, an early announcement about a few interesting new features, into round after round of baseless speculation that anything Apple didn’t explicitly announce, no matter how basic and essential, might be on the chopping block.

Apple isn’t torturing people. People are torturing themselves. And it wasn’t, as far as I can see, Apple’s responsibility to design its announcement to comfort people who insist on torturing themselves.

—
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]

[Dennis Lisonbee] “And if you think I’m just some ridiculous old man who wants a fight, let’s get a pile of footage. I’ll simply take iMovie and you take AVID, Premier Pro or whatever you want. In short time we will see if it’s the software that makes the editor. “

Yup.

Truth is, video editing in pro apps like Media Composer and FCP presently involves quite a lot of tedious, noncreative nonsense. Eliminating some of this does make software more accessible to consumers… but it also makes it more useful to professionals. It’s kind of silly how much handwringing there has been over the former issue, when the latter is clearly all that actually matters.

—
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]

[Simon Ubsdell] “1) Robust implementation of OMF, AAF and EDL. (XML I almost never use and wouldn’t substitute adequately for any of these.) These are essential for transfer to and from AVID systems, final sound mixing in ProTools, sharing edit data with DI facilities, and so on. The nature of my business means I could never stay “in the box” for finishing no matter how sophisticated the NLE, so this is absolutely essential.”

EDL is still pretty essential today, but it’s worth noting that more and more DI and grading systems are starting to support FCP XML. Scratch, Baselight and Resolve have all just announced support recently, for instance (not necessarily shipping yet). Smoke has had support for a while. One hopes we’ll be able to move past the limitations of EDL in the not-too-distant future.

And there are also things on the horizon like the Baselight FCP plug-in, which in conjunction with FCP X’s linear float video processing, could make finishing direct from the NLE a lot more viable than it is today, at least for picture.

Speaking as someone who wasted about nine extra hours just yesterday on an online edit of a music video as a direct consequence of the limitations of EDL, you know, for all that people worry about future change, the status quo kind is not exactly ideal to begin with.

—
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]

It could also be this switch, from over on the left side of the timeline:

—
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] “i think one or both of them represent different states for the magnetise controller. so.. that’s nice, eh?”

This thing over on the right:

Good catch. The icon all the way to the right looks like two clips butting up against each other, with little magnetic force lines emerging where they’re coming together. And the blue/gray states of the other buttons make it clear these are toggle switches that control timeline behavior.

Edit: Hmm, on second thought, a think that represents snapping. The icon all the way to the right could easily be the magnetic timeline toggle, however.

—
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]

Apple appears to be doing with FCP X what they did with Aperture when they put that in the App Store: reducing the new purchase price to the old upgrade price, and eliminating upgrade pricing entirely.

So, no, you won’t need to buy or install FCP 7. FCP X will just be $299 in the App Store, regardless of what version you’re coming from or whether you previously bought Final Cut at all.

—
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]

I’ve never found it to be necessary to replace ProRes transcodes with Red proxy files before sending an EDL to Resolve. What does Resolve care? The ProRes transcodes have the same embedded reel/timecode info as the proxies, and that’s all the clip information that transfers through an EDL anyway.

—
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]

These are the EDL export settings that work for me:

Resolve shouldn’t care about whatever the folder hierarchy around the Red files is, as long as they’ve all been added to the media pool.

Make sure that under ‘Config’ on the ‘Project’ tab you’ve selected to use timecode embedded in the source clip and assist using reel names embedded in the source clip. Also, on the ‘Settings’ tab, check ‘Extract reel names from EDL comments’.

If you’ve already done all of that and it’s still not working, it might be the issue that got me a few days ago. Flip over to the Source tab and make sure timecode is set to ‘Absolute’. If it’s set to ‘Camera’, and the camera was set to show edge timecode, while the dailies were transcoded with the absolute timecode, nothing will match up. (Frankly, I sort of consider it a bug that ‘Absolute’ isn’t the default selection in Resolve rather than ‘Camera’. I can’t conceive of a reason why whoever is conforming a project would ever want this determined by the camera setting.)

—
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]

[Cade Muhlig] “So is it possible that FCP X will change things regarding this subject?
I don’t absolutely have to upgrade now, waiting an extra 2 months is not a big deal.
Everyone is debating, but I just get to sit back and learn stuff.”

Depending on your specific requirements, yes, it’s possible. FCP X’s ColorSync support should allow for accurate monitoring of video color on computer displays. How well Apple’s implementation of that works in the real world, and what other current issues with computer display monitoring FCP X may or may not solve, nobody can really be quite sure about. My argument in this thread was essentially that this sort of monitoring is technically plausible, and FCP X takes a step toward making it viable, not that it will necessarily be entirely workable once FCP X ships.

Personally, I’d say it’s wise to put off pretty much any non-essential video-related purchase right now, as FCP X could change a lot of things, both in terms of loss of compatibility with existing hardware/software (at the very least, plug-ins are all going to need to be recompiled for 64-bit) and in terms of new features possibly reducing or eliminating the need for other hardware and software products.

—
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.