[Tim Wilson]

[Charlie Austin] “[Walter Soyka] “Read the comments on that article for Case Sensitive Filesystems or Not: The Debate. It’s Thunderdome.”

My guess is it’s a tempest in a teapot. APFS isn’t even close to being done. The beta is an Alpha. ya know, like FCP X “release” was a beta. ;-)”

A tempest in a teapot doesn’t mean it’s not Thunderdome.

There’s also the distance between our version of a teapot and theirs. If you spend a career of 14 hour days writing code, case sensitivity is the exact definition of Thunderdome. That’s full contact stuff. Somebody gon get hurt.

To most of us, though, there’s not enough tempest in all that to fill a thimble, much less a teapot.

In general, that comment string supports my contention that even at its historical wooliest, I’d only have ranked the rancor here at about 2.4 on a scale of 10.

If you want some real fun, head on over to the Les Paul forum and start telling people you know the real story behind Jimmy Page’s Number One. My suggestion is that you should have all the children you’re planning to have before you do.

And certainly plenty of broken bleeding teeth to spit out of your mouth after a visit to any number of places at reddit.

What’s interesting to me is that Apple really has transitioned WWDC to an actual developers conference. It started off as basically Macworld minus the obeisance to a magazine that hadn’t been worth reading since the interregnum. New mice!

We’re over here feeling not as much disappointed with this event as ennervated by an unbroken string of such disappointments, stretching back to what turns out to be the last unambiguously ambitious play out of the infinite loop:

(wait for it)

Final Cut Pro X.

I mean, Beats/Apple Music was bold-ish, but it was also desperate because there was no internally- developed plan arriving quickly enough to staunch the bleeding from Apple’s music business.

(They also walked straight into Jimmy Iovine’s wallet with this. As he said after the sale, the only reason to start that business in the first place was to sell it to Apple. Well played, sir. I think he’s a genius, and that Apple is already giddy that they only had to pay $3 billion.)

Otherwise, it’s been years of mostly disappointingly iterative almost- news for anyone not a developer, and for them, only a little better than that.

Until this.

If it works right, as I suspect it will, this could be nearly the last time we speak of it. Soon, I’m betting we’ll talk about it even less than we talk about NTFS today, because it will work the way that modern file structures SHOULD work, and in other development environments already do.

Maybe this is another case of Apple showing up late because they wanted to get it right. Maybe they’re just plain late, but in the meantime, that comment string is mighty entertaining.

And maybe I just enjoy debates. LOL Nah, that ain’t it. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Tony West] “They all seem to feel like it was almost in insult for them to use iMovie. Like they were above it, even though they didn’t know the most basic things about editing.”

I agree, and it’s crazy to me. Not like they’re above shooting in an iPhone and editing on an iMac, maybe even an iPad. I say this with no condescension, but to underscore that Apple makestrel one or two okay products with “i” in the name.

I mean, to paraphrase an old proverb, you could argue that there’s no”i” in Pro, but there’s no “u” in Pro either. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

A reply to both of you at once:

Mel, ffmpeg is back on. We’re in the process of identifying forums for products that aren’t actively being discussed, where — as you note — it’s still worth preserving them for posterity. This had inadvertently been sucked into that list. Sorry about that! There may be some dust as we’re renovating. 🙂

John, the basics forums were created when there “the old guard” was angry about seeing beginners in “their” forum. Our belief is that most of the old guard has moved on to angrier pastures. LOL So as an experiment, we’re merging all the basics into the primary forums and we’ll see how it goes.

As always, we’re paying attention to feedback, so thanks for providing yours here!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Paul] “if you do news and big stories and what not I say AVID IS GREAT but for graphic heavy stuff in a combination together with AE I would say it doesn’t make much sense (especially if you are a tiny team) and Premiere would be a WAY BETTER OPTION.
“

There are obviously ways in which that’s just true. Full stop. Ease of interaction with After Effects is a big part of the story of why Deadpool and Gone Girl were done with Premiere.

That said, are you using Automatic Duck to get between Media Composer and AE? By no means as nimble as the PPro-AE interaction, but it was designed by a Media Composer named Wes Plate who also used a lot of AE, and wanted a sequence-level interop. It was successful enough that it became its own business. Adobe actually hired the guy to help them with interop, and he just recently went back out on his own to develop his next generation toolset.

I can also testify that when I worked at Avid, I was aware of an astounding number of Avid shops using AE. Way more than half. Maybe 75%? Maybe more.

I don’t think that this is any way a negative reflection on Premiere, but rather an affirmation of the desirability of After Effects to Avid artists.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] “But it’s sure fun to speculate!”

Quite so. 🙂

Did you look at the Macrumors article in my post above? They’re quite sure that there’s NO hardware, specifically refuting the monitor speculation. I like their track record for such predictions, but I wonder if Apple takes turns making these guys look like monkeys. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

MacRumors has a nice round-up, as speculative as anyone else’s I assume, but well argued that they think it’ll be new OS X (including iTunes, Siri on the desktop, etc), new iOS, new watchOS, and new tvOS.

I’d been wondering if there might be something Thunderbolty (Thunderbolt 3?), but this has apparently been ruled out by the readers of the tea leaves. (Those green leaves ARE tea, right?)

Take a look, lemme know what you think….

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “[Bill Davis] “It’s all Apples fault.”

Well now that that’s settled… ;)”

Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking? NEW FORUM NAME!!!!!!!!!

[Tim Wilson]

I know that we were taking a real risk by going with a theme dominated by black text on a white background. I’m not aware of any other websites doing it this way, so I’m not surprised at your consternation that we would take such a daring break from mainstream design. If black and white was actually readable, you’d think that more people would be doing it, right?

Anyway, we’ve always offered a variety of UI tweaks in your Account settings, which you can find at https://secure.creativecow.net/account/edit. You’ll find the palette options on the Extra tab, labeled COW Wrapper. The previous default is now named Legacy Golden Pasture Blue.

(And yes, naming it Legacy was my idea. I came THIS CLOSE to calling it Legend.)

Enjoy!

Yours in love and color,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Steve Connor] “BTW I like the style of the Tutorials Bill”

Me too! Important to keep in mind for what follows. 🙂

[Bill Davis] “Some folks may well have been “in the know” in advance of the intro, but I definitely wasn’t one of them. (Not sure if I’d done more than simply kicked the tires here at the Cow at that point What I WAS was very active in the FCP Legacy community – to the point I was at the inaugural LAFCPUG meeting and knew all the early players – was a regular on the early days of 2-pop.com when the OTHER Larry Jordan was running it – and had been with FCP Legacy since it was announced at NAB in 1999.

The point being, I wasn’t without contacts in the FCP community.

And nobody I knew let word ONE drop about what Apple was doing. “

Exactly my point, Bill.

You mentioned using FCP v.1? I was running the Macromedia beta on Windows.

My own involvement with LAFCPUG goes back not to the first, but to the third-ever meeting, which was my first presentation there in my capacity as product manager and director of marketing at Boris FX. To this day, I hold the record for most presentations by a non-Californian.

I was living in Boston at the time, and was THE VERY FIRST presenter at their VERY FIRST meeting.

I helped found the New York group, and recruited its original leader. I went to literally every single FCP user group in the US at the time.

But no matter how engaged you are with every other part of the Final Cut Pro community, you simply cannot possibly know everything important about FCP if you’re not in the COW.

Yes, you’re engaged with FCP, but you’re literally over 5 years behind some of the most talked-about topics in our history. You weren’t here for it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It did.

I think you just don’t understand some basic facts. You write:

Nobody in the broad spectrum of global FCP editing – 2 million strong at that point – had a clue about what was coming.

Bill, Creative COW IS the broad spectrum of global editing. How many people pass through LAFCPUG? A couple of hundred per meeting. How many people went to 2-pop at its peak? A couple of thousand per month.

Creative COW? Up to TWO MILLION PER MONTH, over 18 MILLION PER YEAR, from nearly 200 countries.

How many members do you think LACPUG has? We have over 300,000.

Looking at the most basic numbers, more people pass through the COW on a monthly basis than pass through all those other sites in a year, combined.

(And of course not all those numbers were driven by FCP…but until 2011, FCP was by far our biggest source, and if you read my history of the COW’s first 15 years, you know that it was very much brought to life by the first wave of professional FCP broadcast editors.)

In other words, THIS is what the broad spectrum of global editing looks like. Millions and millions of people. Right here in the COW. Not “out there.” HERE.

The only people who DIDN’T know this are the comparatively miniscule number of them at 2-pop.

I don’t mean to insult them, Bill, and I certainly don’t mean to insult you. As I noted, I was every bit as engaged in the FCP community as anyone anywhere, and I know you have been too.

But when you say this wasn’t widely known, you are demonstrably, quantitatively, unambiguously WRONG about this. The facts are the facts, and you not knowing them is irrelevant to whether or not they’re actually facts.

[Bill Davis] “he “hair on fire” nature of the reaction simply COULD NOT have come from natural internet chatter.”

Again, easily, demonstrably, quantifiably not true.

I said this before, and it bears repeating because I think you either don’t understand it or don’t believe it.

THE INTERNET IS BIG. lol Seriously, Bill.

More important for this angle of my post, Creative COW is BIG. There were THOUSANDS of posts about this in Creative COW, Bill.

When we saw HUNDREDS of posts going up DURING the presentation (on average, 10 per minute – one every six seconds), we started this forum to handle the traffic.

And Bill, when there are thousands of posts a day on a topic in Creative COW, Google takes notice. Before the night was through, every single search for anything related to Final Cut Pro had Creative COW as the MULTIPLE top results.

You may not have noticed this, but there’s typically only about a 15-minute gap between when a SINGLE post goes up and when you can find it at Google. When there are thousands of ’em? Google knows that too. 🙂

Thousands of posts, millions of people, plus potentially billions of viewers on Google, YouTube, Vimeo — Bill, this information was EVERYWHERE…

…except for places like 2-pop and the handful of user groups you were running with who look mostly to themselves and a tightly-knit phalanx of closely-related bloggers for information.

Again, no disrespect intended. Those user groups were my life, and some of those folks will be my friends for life.

So state as strongly as you like the fact that “nobody I knew” knew anything about this. I can’t argue with that. If you say nobody YOU know knew anything about this, then it’s true.

But I’m telling you that it was WIDELY known. It was known to literally everyone who cared enough to do the most basic internet search. Hell, probably even Yahoo figured it out. LOL

And for folks inside the COW, it was impossible to avoid this knowledge.

[Bill Davis] “If there WERE a bunch of people who had a fair inside look and didn’t step up and push back against the ” it’s jus iMovie Pro) thing – shame on you.”

You’re not being fair to the people who still think that’s true. LOL Disagreement with you doesn’t necessarily equal ignorance.

You’re also not being fair to the fact that FCPX was NOT feature-complete on the day it was released.

It was without precedent that Apple talked about a product this far in advance. But it was also unprecedented that they immediately announced a roadmap for when Apple would deliver features that they KNEW were mission critical, which is why they SAID they knew these were mission critical features, and would be delivered in a timely fashion.

I don’t say this as criticism of Apple. Quite the contrary, I continue to laud them for doing this exactly the right way. Show key industry leaders in private, unveil at the key user event which you allow to be taped and disseminated, make a highly-publicized release, be transparent about what’s missing and when it will arrive.

Perfection.

The fact that people don’t like what they heard is likewise irrelevant to whether or not Apple did it right. Apple did it EXACTLY right.

Which also means that people are right to still be mad about the outcome if that’s the way they feel. It’s not the product they wanted or needed from Apple, and they’ve had plenty of time to settle into that position out of KNOWLEDGE, not ignorance.

So again, I submit that nobody who thinks they know what’s going with FCP and FCPX knows ENOUGH about what’s going on with them if they don’t include Creative COW as part of a well-rounded diet of FCP fandom.

And again, I thank you for continuing to make Creative COW part of YOUR well-rounded diet of FCP fandom. 🙂

[Steve Connor] “Type “IMovie Pro” into Google and you get to relive all those early reactions to it!
“

To be fair, if you sort by results for the past year, you still get an eyeful!

It hasn’t helped that even now, in this past year, you have FCP stalwarts like Larry Jordan and Steve Martin and Provideocoaliton doing tutorials on moving your iMovie projects into FCPX. I’m not saying that Larry, Steve, or Provideocoalition speak only to pros. Of course they don’t.

Nor would I suggest that pros don’t use iMovie.

But even now, the distinction being made between iMovie and FCPX ***by some highly respected FCPX trainers*** is….

….wait for it….

….wait for it….

…that FCPX is like iMovie for pros.

Which I suppose is different than calling it iMovie Pro, though, right? LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Bill Davis] ” I had heard nothing about any special preview. Then again, I wouldn’t have. “

U ppl need to read the COW. This was widely discussed here.

It was also openly discussed at the Alpha Dogs pre-NAB presentation, moderated by Creative COW’s Debra Kaufman. The panel included Creative COW OG Mark Raudonis,who was of course discreet and professional within the scope of what he was allowed to say. He was the first person I heard (apart from The Great One himself) utter the phrase “skating to where the puck is going to be.”

All of this was not only posted here, but discussed at length, complete with video.

I know that other sites, including Facebook, have become de rigour for FCPX info. I read them too. But if you’re not watching the COW, you simply can’t possibly know enough about what truly matters.

This mattered.

So please spread the word, and shave multiple years off your learning curve LOL by staying tuned in to Creative COW.

Yr pal,
Timmy

typed on my phone. always a mistake, but when have I ever avoided those?