Chris Upchurch
Forum Replies Created
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[Gary Pollard] “It’s not as if ANY previous version of FCP was exactly instinctive. “
“The only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that it’s all learned.”
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[Gary Huff] “I think, then, that we are ultimately at an impasse which will only become clearer once someone actually makes it possible to import and we can all see what actually happens with the timeline at that point. Whether that happens or not depends on what the status is on acceptance of FCPX as an editor in those worlds come a year from now.”
I think it’s almost certain that some third party will build an import tool. There’s too much demand for someone not to try and fulfill it.
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[Gary Huff] “Apple’s “perfectionist streak” is merely an urban myth. FCPX being a point in that example.”
Really? Almost all the complaints I see about FCPX are either about features that weren’t implemented, or about features that were changed (particularly ones where the changes are perceived as dumbing down the fature for consumers). I see few (if any) complaints that features were implemented badly.
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[Gary Huff] “This statement is completely ignorant of the software coding process. You can’t open legacy FCP6/7 projects in FCPX because Apple didn’t want to spend time developing that. Period. No matter whatever fancy doodads you put in the UI, the end result is still clips, transitions, effects, ect. and there is no technical reason why there cannot be a FCP project import feature.”
I think the “It’s impossible” vs. “Apple just didn’t want to” debate misses the point. Apple has a notorious perfectionist streak. They are perfectly willing to leave out a feature rather than implement it in a way that doesn’t meet their standards. A classic example is the lack of copy and paste on the original iPhone. Cut and paste was an expected feature, one that was featured on many competing platforms and Apple got a lot of grief for not supporting it until version 3.0, two years later. It would have been much easier for them to implement some version of cut and paste and improve on it later, but they were willing to take the heat (and deprive deprive their users of copy and paste functionality) until it met their standards.
You may recall that when FCPX came out some folks digging around in its guts found references to an import function and took this as evidence that import functionality would be coming in the future. Since then Apple has said fairly definitively that it’s not. My guess (and I am speculating here) is that during development, Apple worked on an FCP7 import feature, decided the results weren’t good enough, and ripped it out. What the folks digging around in the released software found was probably the results of that experiment. Again, this is merely speculation, but it fits with the way Apple is known to do things.
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[Chris Jacek] ” In that same time, their hardware offerings (not even counting iPads and iPhones) steadily trended toward smaller, with fewer expansion options.”
Of course, this criticism could have been leveled at Apple many times in it’s history. Going from the highly expandable Apple IIe and Lisa to the original Macintosh, for example. Or going from the old Power Mac to the iMac and G4 Cube. None of them has heralded the demise of Apple’s high end offerings.
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I’m not a professional video editor. Heck, I’m not even an amateur (though I have an interest in learning). However, I am an educator in an area (Geographic Information Systems) that’s somewhat similar in that we’re both trying to teach students to perform a complicated task using very specialized and complex software made for a niche market.
When I took my first course as an undergraduate I was one of the last students to be trained on an old version of the software before a major revision. The difference between the old and new versions of the software probably wasn’t as big as FCP7/FCPX but it was pretty big, a lot bigger than your usual upgrade from one version to another. Effectively, my software skills were obsolete within about six months after I learned them. However, my knowledge of the underlying techniques remained. I might have to poke around to find out how to do something in the new software, but I still knew what it was doing, when a given technique as appropriate, etc.
Fast forward about ten years and now I’m teaching these things to students. Most of them come to class with the mindset that they want to learn to use this piece of software. I try to emphasize that they’re not just learning how to use a particular piece of software, they should be learning the underlying fundamentals. That way, when the next big software revision comes along and changes everything, they won’t be left behind. Or as Jeff Atwood puts it, “How lasts about five years, but why is forever.”
In this respect, I think that editing actually has an advantage over Geographic Information Systems. In my field, there’s one company (and one software package) that has about 90% of the market. I’ve got to make my points about the underlying fundamentals using just that one piece of software. The video editing market seems like it has several major players who are all fairly competitive (Avid, Adobe, Apple). If I had the luxury of multiple software packages to choose from, I would probably aim to teach students at least two of them. I would probably pick the two most different ones, to give students a broad a view as possible and to better illustrate how the underlying fundamentals exist separate from the software that implements them.
From everything I’ve read here, it sounds like FCPX is the odd man out. So, teaching it alongside one of the more ‘conventional’ products would probably do a better job teaching the students about editing than teaching the conventional product alone.