[Tim Wilson]

Just wait’ll you see what we post from Gary on Monday. 🙂 Buncha buncha good stuff coming.

Hey, great discussion on what it means to be a forum leader. Thanks for bringing it up and keeping it going. We should probably bring this up regularly on our most-trafficked forums.

In fact, we might add this to the imaginary to-do list for leaders in general — bringing up interesting topics to go with occasionally answering the urgent ones.

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Harlan] “My real comfort/enjoyment zone begins with 3 24″ monitors and grows from there.”

I couldn’t agree more. Editing with one monitor always felt like a parlor trick to me, some needlessly difficult “because I can” thing like batting with one hand. I remember the days when a fully configured workstation from Avid shipped with two monitors, no discussion — this is how you do it, period. Maybe still is, I don’t know, but frankly that IS how you do it. Two monitors, minimum. Both hands on the bat.

The key words for my ridiculous speculation/imagination were “dailies ready.” The final outcome might be a crazily rough cut, ready for some poking around before the real edit starts. But it might be more than a parlor trick if you could integrate it with some of the full-bore pro-oriented assistant apps from people like Tim Dashwood.

In the meantime, there’s a reason why the gold standard for on-set dailies editing is media ready for composing coming straight off the video tap into Media Composer. I’m still learning about on-set dailies grading, but so far I’m especially impressed by ASSIMILATE SCRATCH Lab (pretty please, no more all-caps names!) Tools like this are the right way to do it, and still will be after all that iPad parlor trickery might come to pass.

My points were only that it would be neato, and regardless, that FCPX on an iPad shouldn’t be seen as necessarily a bad thing. If the trend already well underway continues, people will tout their “works on iPad” solutions alongside their “works on a laptop” solutions.

[Tim Wilson]

The site works great on Windows. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Dave LaRonde] “it also sounds like the turn-by-turn directions to the Holy Grail of a Universal Multimedia Container are still etched in Jell-O.”

You don’t even want to know what Hollywood’s vegetarians are etching it in.

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Harlan] “I just might do an occasional extremely rough cuts on an iPad. I don’t see how this is a dangerous assumption.
“

I also don’t see how this is a bad thing. FCP has already been so accessible that any monkey can get it and use it. As evidence, I point to all the monkeys who DO have it and use it.

The fact is that, in today’s world, $299 is plenty of barrier. Crackers, hackers, and monkeys will in fact now have virtually zero access to it. It was easy to do with disks and serial numbers. It’s impossible with apps. I can tell you from 6 years of going to FCP groups around the country that a whole lot of people paid zero for FCP. At $299, they won’t bother.

In other words, don’t think of how far DOWN the price went. Think of how far UP it went.

So, now that I’ve paid for my FCPX app, and I have an iPad that I love so much that I carry it more places than I ever carried my laptop, well, why wouldn’t I want to use it?

I look at this as a huge deal on set. Have you seen all the great slate apps, Dashwood’s stereo 3D apps, controller apps for Broadcast Pix and Blackmagic switchers and servers? If you were at NAB, you might have seen 3ality’s new 3space rig. It happened to be loaded with EPICs with Leica lenses in 3ality’s booth, but in ARRI’s booth, it was loaded with the new ARRI M cameras.

And it can be controlled with an iPhone. Is that a crisis? Does it mean that 3ality, RED and ARRI are leaving the pro space because you can control them with iPhones? Or Blackmagic, Broadcast Pix and Dashwood because they’re on iPad? No. It means that they recognize pros are using iPhones and iPads, and see an opportunity to exploit that.

I can’t even tell you how many guys in sports trucks have told me they are using their iPads to control their broadcasts. They freaking love it. Any competitor they look at, they’re now going to be asking, “Yeah, yours only costs $60,000, but can I control it with my iPad?”

Now imagine you’re on set, and the metadata from the camera stream is sticking onto the clips going into your newly metadata-supercharged FCPX, coming in full res to your Thunderbolt-connected array. This is definitely coming. Then use FCPX on an iPad wirelessly (wireless iDevice control already available 3rd party, coming soon from Apple) control FCPX on your main computer, working with the full-res clips on your array. No proxies. No need for a “very rough cut.” You can get a full-blown dailies-ready cut with full-res 444 4K RAW files…from your iPad. And, uhm, assuming you can work with 444 4K RAW files…but still.

Just because monkeys can use it too doesn’t mean that ONLY monkeys can use it. And this kind of portable *companion* device for on-set workflows is well out of any monkey’s reach.

Well, except for all those monkeys making Hollywood movies. It can’t be true, but it seems sometimes like as many monkeys are showing their bright red rear ends in multiplexes as on YouTube.

We’ll know when it gets there, but FCPX on an iPad, with all the other pieces that I described, and plenty I know I haven’t imagined, gives Apple a chance to run the table on-set that they’ve never even had a prayer of before.

For the record, I have strongly recommended Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer and Sony Vegas on other threads. I think that when people have a chance to look at these — and Media 100 for that matter — they will discover that their entire foray into FCP was a massive waste of time and money. These other NLEs will make them much happier.

That may not be you of course. But speaking within the four walls of a discussion of FCPX on an iPad, and without commenting on the many features that YOU need RIGHT NOW that are missing from FCPX in general, I think that this has the potential to be the coolest thing EVER.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Step 1 – Stop lying. ;)”

Actually, that has never been a requirement, or even a recommendation. 🙂

The big thing is contributing toward civility, and, kidding aside, to insert a voice of experience.

Answering every post is explicitly not a goal. Let people who post less often get into the game.

In a forum like this, nobody can even READ every post. So we ask leaders to be our eyes. If you see something that you need us to deal with, please contact us directly.

This invitation extends to non-moderators too. We need your input to make sure we stay on the rails, and if there’s anything we need to do to make your trip as pleasant as possible — pillow? blankie? — we surely will.

[Tim Wilson]

[C. Park Seward] “Incorrect. From Apple: “Final Cut Pro X does support FireWire import for DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, and HDV.””

Of course you’re correct. So let me rephrase – no other NLE has gone as far in the assumption that tape is on its way out.

[C. Park Seward] “I run a business that transfers obsolete tape formats. There is still a lot of tape out there.”

I couldn’t agree more. I still know of city TV channels that play back 3/4 inch. And I know that’s why a lot of people were so upset to see how limited…well, let’s say “different,” the support for tape acquisition is.

In the long run, though, whether tape or not, I think that every NLE’s biggest issue is dealing with camera formats as natively as possible, with the greatest performance possible. Premiere and Vegas have this in spades. FCPX has the potential, especially if the camera vendors themselves are doing the heavy lifting.

[Tim Wilson]

[Eduardo Serrano] ” it will be a much harder fight to get rid of tape”

Think of it this way. FCPX is the first NLE in history to build itself around ZERO tape capture. That was one of the first things that people barked at.

As others have observed, it looks like ProRes will be just fine for the foreseeable future…although the time frame that we can foresee just got a whole lot shorter, eh?

But it really is the wild west for tapeless DELIVERY, especially in Hollywood, where SR was the universal language for mastering and delivery. ProRes is nowhere near becoming any kind of standard. It’s on the list, mind you, but I think that the upshot of tapeless is that the idea of A standard is gone forever. There are standards, and the client will tell what they want, end of story.

You know which tapeless format is coming on strong? HDCAM SR. Even before the tsunami, Sony’s recent SR gear releases have virtually all been tapeless.

My point is, there are dozens, if not scores of potential tapeless formats and workflows.

One reason why ProRes came on so strong is that FCP has never been very good at supporting camera formats. It has been easier for Apple to get companies like Cinedeck and AJA to work on outboard recorders, and ARRI and other camera makers to write to Apple’s own codec than get FCP to support theirs.

Here’s my guess, though: FCPX is going to work modularly. Camera manufacturers will either give you their software decoders for free, or they’ll be available as in-app purchases.

If this works as well as FXPlug has. Higher quality and better performance than anything Apple ever did themselves, for very low cost. While it has plenty of limits, it’s the best plug-in architecture that’s ever been built.

How cool would it be to have INSTANT camera format support? No waiting for Apple whatsoever. The fact is that Apple has ZERO financial incentives to build in codec support. Every new one brings more development costs, more support costs, with no chance of recovering those costs in incremental new sales.

A camera manufacturer not only has the incentive, they’ve already done the work by creating the codec in the first place. There’s no extra cost. Now if they could deliver it direct to you without waiting on Apple? Directly into the app? Yowza.

And rather than SPEND money to develop codecs, Apple would take a slice of every sale. This really could be huge.

All the other features and lack thereof are what they are — but for tapeless, nobody offers more POTENTIAL than FCPX. We’ll see.

[Dave LaRonde] ” Their goal is to develop an open-source, cross-platform, non-proprietary, universally-accessible multimedia container with excellent utility for professional use”

I think you might be thinking of IIF ACES: – IIF – Image Interchange format ACES – Academy Color Encoding Specification. There are many, many partners in the worlds of hardware, software, post and technology.

Pick an encoding format. Fast forward a few years. The file may not contain headers that George Jetson’s computer can read. George won’t know anything about the color space, bit depth, frame rate, or all the other critical metadata fields that will tell you what the file actually is or how to play it. IIF-ACES encoding and decoding carries all that.

That’s the archive component. The workflow component carries a lot of that same metadata, plus lens information, camera position, and so on. There are hundreds of fields in the spec. The issue now is that, no matter how many fields you fill in, most downstream applications ignore that, and write in their own fields. The Academy and its partners are trying to fix that.

One interesting possibility with FCPX is that there’s never been an NLE to support more metadata fields. Right now, FCPX’s approach is destructive, but it would be pretty slick if they’d just pass the source metadata right on through.

Anyway, that’s true regardless of codec, so you might be thinking of something else too. 🙂

For today, the heavyweights of native camera tapeless workflows are Premiere and Vegas. If FCPX stays as open as it looks like they could, with the robustness of their FXPlug architecture, well, we might have a contendah.

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Kenny] “Wall Street, if anything, worries about the opposite — that Apple has too few products, and therefore is overly susceptible to a single important product having an off quarter.”

I know nothing about Wall St….or much of anything else…but no Apple products have off quarters. 🙂 Even the decline in iPod sales that Apple reports every quarter has been lower than predicted, with no major impact in market share — and that’s it. Everything else is crazily up.

There’s also quite a diverse product refresh this year — Mac Book Pros, Air, iPhone, iPad, Lion, a cloud story that’s actually compelling….

The consensus has a 1 year target of 450-ish, from today’s 350-ish. I’ll take a 30% return, thank you.

That’s even in a world where Steve Jobs is not in the office, and no date given when he’ll return.

(Speaking from a family-only perspective, I hope he stays home. He and his family have more than earned the time together.)

So other than wondering about Apple’s future when Steve is actually no longer at the helm, I don’t see any holes in Apple’s financial future. Certainly not FCPX, which will surely make them a bundle.

[Tim Wilson]

From what I read, Color and DVD Studio Pro were specifically identified as EOL.

$995 is an amazing price for one of the industry’s most respected products, but since DaVinci Resolve Lite is free, no excuse not to try it. The main thing “lite” about it is that it’s limited to HD, but hey, Avatar was shot at 1920×1080, so don’t let that freak you out.