Tim Wilson
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[Steve Connor] “always download the combo updater from the Apple Support site, don’t use software update for OS updates.
“Or better, don’t do anything until you hear from somebody else who ignored this advice. 🙂
I wasn’t kidding about what I said in my post above. Historically speaking every update of EVERYTHING from Apple breaks FCP.
It used to be especially hideous with QuickTime, whose updates were presumably at least partly for our benefit. Nope. iTunes is in some ways even more hideous — more frequent, annoying notices, slower to download but every bit as likely to break something in FCP.
My general rule is don’t update ANYTHING unless you HAVE to. I knew some guys who were both busy enough and hardcore enough that they wouldn’t even add fonts until a client was actually paying them to do it. If you’re making money with your system as it is, you’re taking needless risks.
Says your doddering old Unkle Timmy.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
Three words:
Barn.
Door.
Wipe.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[David Cherniack] “It might even benefit FCPX.”
There will be plenty of benefit to FCPX if these new releases don’t break it. Add the ability to not break with every new iTunes release and you really CAN call this a revolutionary new NLE from Apple.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[Tangier Clarke] “I’m thinking an Apple Cube 2 with thunderbolt”
I loved the Cube!!! But a perfect example of designing by “we think it’s cool” rather than “people can really use this.” We’ll call it “form over function” and be generous. More like “form stole function’s lunch money, pulled down its pants and shoved it in the girls locker room.”
BTW, I was in the press pit no more than 30 feet from Steve when he unveiled it at MacWorld NY in 2000. It looked like something that had come down from heaven. The only time since then that I’ve seen so many people gawking at a device MAY be the Blackmagic Cinema Camera…but I’m actually not sure I’ve ever seen so many people so enthralled.
But it appeared to crack almost immediately. (Apple swore that they weren’t cracks – just LOOKED like cracks, but, as Steve said at the time, “You’re looking at it wrong.” He didn’t really, but he might as well have.) Put a CD in, and it sounded like a rocket about to take off. Power supply problems, hard drive problems, boot problems….lotta problems.
Sales were so far below expectations that, when the report came out, Apple stock lost nearly 50% of its value in a matter of hours. Of course, the stock was at $50 at the time, so dropping to $26 overnight is what we call “a buying opportunity.”
One lesson learned is that people using lower-end iMacs didn’t step up to the G4 cube. G4 tower owners stepped down. While I continue to maintain that a new Mac Pro is coming…someday…I can easily imagine a nifty new form factor that allows Apple to all but crater its existing customer base and their needs for something that’s much more modern, while pushing the price for the new “pro” option way down to create something that will appeal to a potentially exponentially bigger audience.
Insert punchline here.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[Oliver Peters] “I’m not sure I agree.”
I don’t disagree with your disagreement. I was trying to be charitable. 🙂
Talking to one COW who’ll be writing about it for us soon, he said that he found FCPX unusable for his workflow, he now finds FCP 7 unusable for his sanity. He was forced to realize how unhappy he’d been with 7, especially on the performance front and how “un-modern” (his word) it has felt, for a very long time.
That’s the thing I think gets overlooked in the “What’s the hurry? X hasn’t even been out for a year.” Well, given what a minor release 7 was three years ago, and that the big thing in 6 was ProRes, you have to go back 5 years since there was a major change in the editing experience (multicam). It hasn’t been a “modern” NLE for a long time.
Anyway, point also taken re: Smoke…but as much as I love (and HIGHLY RECOMMEND) Media Composer and especially Symphony w/Boris Continuum Complete (you kinda hafta buy that just on principal, don’t you?), they’re not all in one solutions.
Even though they’re part of a suite, Premiere Pro/AE might be closer to what most people want from a single integrated product anyway.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
Bob Zelin has already said the same thing about the HP Z820, which we’ll be publishing soon. As he puts it, “OH MY GOD! This is the machine that Apple should build…but never will.”
He’s also fond enough of the ProMAX ONE to call it the Windows machine he’ll buy if he has to.
We’ll be able to do a better comparison that includes Dell when there’s more information available, but this is what it’s like to live in a world with true competition: people pushing each other to make better stuff.
I know that the HP Z1 has gotten grief because it looks like an iMac, but it’s also the iMac Pro that people have talked about…but more muscular than Apple will pull off. To start with, its stock config supports BILLIONS of colors, when Apple’s top of the line standalone display only does millions.
It also holds twice as much RAM as the top of the line iMac can(FOUR times as much as the entry-level one can hold), has multiple drive bays (want an SSD RAID? No worries – buy cheap drives, pop them in with no tools), and much more.
Fully loaded it ain’t cheap (about $4K), but it really is a workstation, and not a pretty box that’s being pressed into service that it was never intended for.
My feeling about Thunderbolt is that, as cool as it is, it’s also a workaround for a problem that none of these machines have. Just like FireWire, everybody will have it eventually…but seriously, if you have a Thunderbolt device that you hafta hafta hafta use today, plenty of adapters…but also seriously, for the stuff most pros own, problem solved with loads of the slots you need until T-bolt comes along….
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[Oliver Peters] “It certainly should never be an “either-or” scenario. However, there seem to be three models shaping up for many…..
2. The everything-in-one-app. That’s largely the Avid approach, especially with Symphony. Consider that with Symphony, you get BCC8, AvidFX and quite a few audio plug-ins – all of which run inside the NLE interface.
Boris Continnum Complete doesn’t get mentioned often enough in the Symphony crossgrade. By itself, BCC runs $1595, and for all that it offers, a very good deal…but it’s like, “We’ll take $600 off Boris Continuum Complete and throw in Avid Symphony for free.” A really truly astounding deal
Admittedly a bit prejudiced having worked at Boris FX (but not on BCC)…but also at Avid, having also helped put together the suite of tools named Studio the year before Apple STOLE THE NAME…LOL, I don’t agree at all that it’s an everything in one app. In one box, yes, and quite a compelling combination of tools…but not all in one.
To me, that title goes to Smoke. It’s especially interesting to me that, among its many other features, Smoke can import FCPX as well as FCP 7 projects, which offers a way to redeem both a possibly deep heritage in Legacy, as well as much as a year of experimentation. 🙂 And I think that Premiere/After Effects also comes a lot closer. Anybody who uses After Effects really owes it to themselves to dig deep into a Premiere trial, ESPECIALLY if you’ve tried Premiere before and been unimpressed. You’ll be impressed this time.
But here’s the thing. I understand why FCP blowing up in some people’s faces might create a “never put all your eggs in one basket again” outlook, but the fact is that there are huge advantages to an all-in approach. Most clients really don’t care, and spending weeks or months learning something that adds a nice flavor to your work now and again seems less important to me than actually getting the work done.
Avid folks pioneered the “stick with the old version until you really REALLY have to move.” By the time I left Avid in 2006, I still knew people working with NuBus machines on OS 9. I hear that some of those folks are still around. In nearly every case I encountered, it wasn’t a matter of being an old dog not wanting to learn new tricks. Many of those people admired, sometimes outright envied FCP…but there was not an extra penny to be made by switching, so why put themselves through that? It’s about being a dog who doesn’t create unnecessary hassles when something works.
FCP 7 will be usable until a new camera format requires a change…but otherwise, the same people who have been all-in with FCP can follow in their Avid brethren’s footsteps and continue to be all-in with FCP for many years, doing what they’ve been doing up until this point and NOT learning other NLEs for the sake of learning them.
Not that there aren’t good reasons to switch. I think there are, and there are compelling alternatives. I also think that when people look at those alternatives, they will in many cases realize that FCP was NEVER the best choice for them. They’ve been waiting for years for features that have been elsewhere for years. They would have been better off somewhere else all along.
On that level, it’s insane not to take the Symphony deal, and most people should be at least subscribing to (if not buying) CS6 anyway. Dipping a toe into these, and Smoke, to explore is fine, and fun…and potentially revelatory, even career-changing if you find a new home….
…but whether the choice is to stay or go, I think that the “learn everything” approach, to “put everything you can into the toolbox,” actually forces a lot more untenable compromises than the “commit to one and dig deep” approach does.
Me, I AM an old dog, but I felt this way even when I was YOUR age. LOL
See? I’ve learned new tricks….like smilies and LOL….
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[David Cherniack] “I share your enthusiasm for the awesomeness of the Warp Stabilizer but have all your clips been shot by a drunk monkey?”
You got a problem with drunk monkeys? Don’t make me start a forum called Drunk Monkeys Or Not: The Debate!
Wait, I forget – did we do that already?
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[Jeremy Garchow] (sort of) “Boy. Now that’s a business plan.
Hide the battery to sell more [iPhones]?
There are days that we don’t have access to chargers. So now we need to buy four [iPhones]?”
Yeah, a phone costs less, lasts longer, and isn’t as critical, but the point is the same. People live with a product’s design limitations when it helps them overcome other kinds of limitations they deem more important.
Not that people shouldn’t take limitations into account. But we can start with the limitations of any number of cameras, formats, workflows — people trade off some things to get to other ones. They HAVE to. It’s the nature of the biz.
With something that looks like this much fun to them, or has as much potential, and overcomes a number of the limitations of other cameras in its general class, paying this amount of money for this amount of camera isn’t a hard call. Especially as a B camera, this seems like a no-brainer to me for an awful lot of shooting scenarios, and not a stretch for an A camera in a bunch of others.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
Coincidentally, I just got a note from MC Hammer, wanting his parachute pants back. I told him what I usually tell him, and will probably tell him the same thing next time too.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou