[Tim Wilson]

[Craig Shields] “They could have avoided this fallout by just saying from the beginning what’s missing and what their time table is for getting it up to speed.”

There are business law obligations that prevent them from talking about timelines. You have to defer the revenue tied to the value of those promised features until the feature is delivered. It’s a pain to put a price tag on individual features, and Apple is NOT about delayed cashflow.

As for the “they should have told us,” they kinda did, by making sure that a hardcore pro like Gary Adcock is one of the people who got a pre-release version, where he says flat out that is not a release designed for pros.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/adcock_gary/FCPX.php

And fwiw, the Apple demo said almost as much….

[Tim Wilson]

[Simon Ubsdell] “FCPX “will do most of the day to day things you’re doing now in far better ways than whatever you’re using today”, so it’s got to be true ;-)”

It’s true and it isn’t. Depending on what you do, it’s either a complete non-starter, a nice diversion until a later version comes along, or something to get started with.

For details, take a look at Gary Adcock’s overview here in the COW Library, FCP X: Ready or Not, Here It Comes!

[Tim Wilson]

Gary Adcock’s article is coming any minute, I promise. 🙂

Here’s what it says about this:

INGEST OR IMPORT?
Since there is not a way to open previous projects, your best practice here is to start from scratch with the newest tapeless camera you have access to.

However, while Apple’s approach with FCPX defaults to ingesting the media directly from the camera, a reality is that we no longer shoot our projects on a single camera or a single form of media.That concept precludes using the camera as a media ingest device, especially when you consider that many cameras use USB as the only connection, yet I can transfer from SxS, SDHC or CF cards over SATA at 10x the speed of USB.

My main reasoning for this is simple- why bother hanging a camera when you can edit with the content directly from the cards while the transfer of media is going on in the back-ground? The only difference is when the media copy is complete your timeline playback be-comes noticeably faster.

Currently FCP X easily supports the DSLR cameras, Panasonic’s P2 and AVC-I format cameras along with any Apple Devices. My pre-release version of the software had some issues with importing of Sony’s EX and XDCAM formats, so I resorted to using the XDCAM Transfer Tool.

There is no support for any of the RAW camera formats or frame based workflows like DPX or Tiff working with this release. Workarounds for higher end cameras include using the QT reference files with R3D media, and just importing ProRes from the ARRI Alexa. However in both of these cases much of the camera metadata is ignored.

[Tim Wilson]

Pretty please, take FCP X talk to the FCP X forum. This question is being answered at length by a lot of people, including Gary Adcock, who has been working with the pre-release version of FCP X for quite some time.

The FCP X Forum: Check it out!

[Tim Wilson]

Just to tantalize you all while we get it ready to post, here’s the intro to Gary’s article:

FCP X: READY OR NOT, IT’S HERE

I’ll be honest. When I first opened FCP X, my first title for this article was, “What the @#%, Ap-ple?!”

Let’s get the hard part out of the way first. FCP X is NOT an upgrade to Final Cut Pro 7. This is a whole new app, literally built from the ground up. Here’s one thing that this means: upgrades traditionally allow you to open previous projects. That is not allowed here, so let’s just call this a whole new app.

This release is not for the professional editor, not yet. Apple knows this – BOY, does Ap-ple know, and they understand that if they want to make this useful for pro editors they have a short window to deliver some of what’s missing.

The main issues for most pro editors now: no support for any tape based capture, no third-party hardware support, and no third-party codec support. That means that you cannot send or receive an EDL or XML file for online editing or finishing.

Apple has been very specific, that this is not the final state of FCP X. Features are ex-pected to be added quickly, via the App Store, with some of them waiting to show up natively in OS X Lion and with support for Thunderbolt.

Once we get past the knee-jerk reactions (like mine was), the fact is there’s a lot to like about FCP X right now. The GUI has naturally received the most attention so far, but I’d like to show you some of what’s going on underneath the hood.

Some of it has to do with 64-bit speed that you’re not going to believe, but I’m going to start with our old friend, FCP media management. Even more important, is the information about your media, called metadata. The changes that Apple has made will change the future of non-linear editing for film, video and digital cinema professionals, with power that high-end pros have only been dreaming of.

+++
Okay, let the questions begin!

🙂

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[John Davidson] “I’d keep a bottle of spray seltzer near the server, just in case.”

Actually, we’re keeping a huge dumptruck on hand, to collect all the money. We’re going to name our next baby Apple. Just like Gwyneth and Chris!

[Tim Wilson]

Would Adobe Media Encoder work? Crazy faster than Compressor.

Of course, I don’t know if ME supports the file types you need, which is why I’m more asking than suggesting….

[Tim Wilson]

Zelin plays by rules
But rules of his own making
Someone might get hurt

Having said all that,
Those may be more like koans
Zen meditations

(A day of this now
I hear the entire world
Bounce in haiku beats)

[Tim Wilson]

Drop frame, non-drop frame
much easier to count than
dang 5 7 5

[Tim Wilson]

Why wait til Monday?
Every day is Haiku Day
–or Skipping Work Day