[Tim Wilson]

We prefer the term “evolving” but yes, it has happened a few times along the way.

It’s tricky, because forums start as places to solve problems, but over time, problems become less frequent, making critical mass more difficult.

The kind of consolidation you mention has worked for us before, for sure. We’re doing it for most of our storage forums right now, for example, for this very reason. Tell me more about some of the other ones you think might benefit from this approach.

Don’t forget. The word is “evolving.” LOL

Thanks,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “Vertigo is on my short list of the 5 greatest movies of all time”

After 50 years straight of Citizen Kane at #1, the Sight and Sound critics poll just this summer named Vertigo as the greatest movie of all time. With 864 critics voting this time, I think we can call this a statistically significant assessment.

But it’s also kind of hard to explain. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “on the other hand, they probably couldn’t get a job in today’s Hollywood, so what does it matter.
“

Hey, I wanna tell you about my new movie’s Kickstarter. It’s based on a French-language novel by these two dudes writing under a pseudonym…don’t worry about the name of the book or the authors because, trust me, you never heard of ’em…

….and well, to be honest, I was trying to get the rights to this one book of theirs I liked a lot, but I didn’t get it, so this is my second favorite book by them.

Also, I had this great idea for the female lead, fantastic…but she had to drop out, so I’m working with my second choice for that too.

The movie’s gonna be vaguely creepy and hard to follow. very subtle, see. Lots of symbolism and stuff. There’s, like, this retired detective, and he’s supposed to check up on the wife of an old acquaintance, but he starts falling for her, except she jumps off a tower, but he’s too dizzy to help her and she dies.

Then he sees this other girl, and it turns out that she was impersonating the first girl, so her death wasn’t a suicide it was murder. He decides, nbd, we can be happy, then THAT girl dies.

It sounds kind of weird, and it is, and the book is really hard to adapt. I hated the first two screenplays I got, so I fired both of those guys. The third screenwriter is doing okay….

…but yeah, that’s my movie. A creepy version of my second choice for adapting a novel you never heard of, starring my second choice for the lead, now working with the third different writer for the screenplay.

Did I mention there are nuns? Because there are nuns. I don’t know what they’re going to do in the movie, but everybody loves nuns, right?

Anyway, since the stalker detective guy gets dizzy, and because you’re supposed to feel dizzy when you’re watching it, that’s what I’m going to call it.

DIZZY, A Film by Alfie Hitchcock.

I’m trying to raise $11,500 to make it. For a pledge of $500, I’ll give you a nun bobblehead.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “I still find people who do not and I try to educate them, but the “prefect” roll out by Apple still has consequences.”

Thank you for that tip of the hat. LOL I continue to maintain that the rollout accomplished exactly what Apple intended.

Apple never feared “not for pros” label Quite the contrary. It’s something they already lived through with FCP. The “FCP is not for pros” drumbeat was relentless for years…until it wasn’t.

Sidebar: There’s a myth that persists that Avid guys missed the boat, didn’t get it, were out of the loop, etc etc — demonstrably untrue, in a broad way. To the extent that FCP made headway in Hollywood (which has admittedly always been overstated), it was driven by Avid guys. See as just two important examples: Walter Murch, and Mark Raudonis.

I’d argue that Mark was almost infinitely more important, because TV-style workflows are almost infinitely more relevant for the way that most people work in most markets.

I’ll further point out that Cold Mountain solidified the idea that FCP was definitely NOT ready for professional use. Avid guys read that book and said, “you gotta be f’in kidding me. No f’in way would I put myself through this”…whereas Mark’s experience at Bunim-Murray spread like wildfire — “THIS is a workflow we can embrace.”

Having worked personally with literally thousands of Avid editors, I can assure you that nobody is more aware, or more loudly adamant, about Avid’s limitations than Avid guys.

In fact, there was a massive wave of FCP adoption among Avid guys was as the online tool of choice before the new Symphony was available on Mac. The combination of FCP and Final Touch as the online for Media Composer offlines transformed a whole swath of the industry. It opened the door for Apple Color — ooops — and made Resolve a compelling business proposition for BMD.

What I still find myself resenting a little is the idea that this forum is somehow the epitome of X nay-saying. My assumption is that Steve, as somebody who is the epitome of someone who does NOT believe that 🙂 is underscoring the extent to which that’s just not true.

There are of course plenty of very articulate, highly professional, well-respected X-philes here.

That said, having read every single post in this and other forums for many years, I think I’m pretty on-track that the dominant profile here is people who are using FCPX for some projects and not for others, and therefore have some clearly, sometimes strongly held thoughts on FCPX’s deficiencies.

Their day to day lives as professionals underscore the extent to which the “either/or” position that some people try to put them into is both facile and explicitly, incontrovertibly, WRONG.

And in fact, I’m one of the only people here NOT using X on professional projects, and I was an early and loud voice that it was fully professionally capable option, and for many contexts, the most compelling.

But there can also be the distressing, typically passive-aggressively stated contention that people who have issues, including showstopping issues with X either “don’t get it” or haven’t used it — as if it’s impossible for a cool-headed professional who HAS tried it and DOES get it might possibly say “Not for me.”

Again, demonstrably not true.

Leaving, in the eyes of some X-treme X-philes, a statement like “not for me” to be translated as a combination of “I haven’t tried it,” “I don’t get it,” “I think it’s not professional,” and “I think you must not be professional because you DO like it” — when not a single one of those might be true.

Okay, that’s enough of my whining. LOL

[Oliver Peters] “[Shane Ross] “FOCUS cut on FCX….did Apple mention it? That OJ Simpson doc on A&E cut on FCX…Did Apple mention it?”

Yes on “Focus”. There’s a big “In Action” spread. No on “OJ”.”

I still think that Shane rightly observes a sea-change on Apple’s part. The In Action section used to be huge, and spotlighted a lot more than Hollywood. It told the story that FCP used in many professional contexts that have nothing to do with Hollywood.

Especially unfortunate, because the expansion of what “professional” means is the most important part of what has happened in the industry in the past 20 years, and, speaking officially (the ONLY sentence in this post that I’m doing so), we’re proud of the role we’ve played in that.

But for quite some time, Apple has been trending in a number of ways, in a number of markets, to care less about anything but their own agenda. WHICH IS GOOD. I LIKE that, which is why I continue to insist that the launch of X did EXACTLY what Apple wanted to do, which is to say, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

[Andrew Kimery] “All you have to do is go to Apple.com, wonder why there is no software icon on the nav bar, click ‘Mac’ because that seems like the next best option… Nope, realize you were wrong, click back, look at the nav bar again to make sure you aren’t overlooking it, scroll down the Mac page because now you are getting frustrated and just aimlessly mousing around, stumble upon FCP X near the bottom of the page….”

THAT’s the thing. FCP and FCS used to be super-easy to find front page. Now, they’re just not, even if that’s the only thing you’re looking for.

[Bill Davis] ” it’s inconceivable that you’d want a strong back bench ready to help you.”

The point being made in many threads is that Apple no longer provides that back bench, and both Adobe and Avid do. Not even just for Hollywood stuff. There are literally DOZENS of Adobe guys posting in forums throughout the COW (okay, just two dozen LOL), and many, many Avid folks here and elsewhere who’ll move heaven and earth to help regular shmoes. True for many other companies throughout the COW.

Apple used to do similar stuff, and while primarily LA-NY-ward in FOCUS (see what I did there? LOL), it extended further…but now, is anybody seriously going to argue that Apple is committed to this kind of support in any context?

Which, again, bothers me not whit, and doesn’t say anything about Apple’s commitment to the MARKET at all.

Commitment to individuals across all markets? Compared to other companies? Several of whom are dramatically stepping up their game? C’mon.

[Tony West] “there is no evidence of that in their marketing and never has been that I have seen on their page from day one.”

Well-observed, but I’m not sure that Apple delivering professional software lets Apple off the hook for changing tack away from the trend of increasing customer engagement — even compared to Apple’s

But Steve’s original question was whether FCPX delivers the goods. I want to acknowledge Oliver’s critical observation that the answer “out there” is still regularly “no” — and I want to underscore that the answer HERE is largely a combination of “yes, and I think it’s the best one “yes, even if it’s not for me.”

And that’s okay with me too.

[Tim Wilson]

[David Lawrence] “Walter’s dropping hardcore science and I for one am learning a ton. It’s the COW at it’s best and why I enjoy this place so much. Stand by for more…”

(I may have to add this to that thread too.)

[Tim Wilson]

[David Lawrence] “t if Timmy likes, maybe a full article”

Timmy likes!!!!

Let me know what I can do to facilitate this. Maybe I could rewrite the article as if it was me, so that nobody at the mothership would know what we’re really talking about.

[David Lawrence] “I refer you to this thread in the After Effects forum, where you can read a little bit about what I’m currently up to. Go ahead, I’ll wait. 😉

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/1066289“

Stupdendous thread, as some of the COW’s big throbbing brains stride across the land like the giants they are.

[Tim Wilson]

[Tony West] “I would like to see if he changed his mind about X and using it if he knew more about it.”

[David Lawrence] “Audio is a second-class citizen on the FCPX timeline. As long as that remains true, I think it’s unlikely editors like Murch will be interested.”

This exchange. This one right here.

Tony, I don’t mean to suggest that you’re one of THOSE Guys, because you are NOT one of Those Guys, but it’s still a very easy easily to fall into the conversational habits of Those Guys, and use language that suggests that somebody choosing not-X as some deficiency on THEIR part — they haven’t tried it, they don’t understand, they haven’t tried it LONG enough, they haven’t tried the new version, they’re not flexible, they’re stuck in old ways….on and on. Take your pick.

Again noting that I know you get this…but it really is an easy habit.

But as David notes, Walter has very simple needs, really. Two of them. Picture and Sound.

The reason why I mentioned that IMDb lists him first as a sound guy, and the biggest films he’s worked on have been as a sound guy (exception being Apocalypse, in which he did the almost inconceivable feat of BOTH picture AND sound) is that the whole English Patient (won an Oscar for editing a picture he cut with Avid Film Composer)/ Cold Mountain (nominated for editing for a picture he cut with FCP) thing is obscuring the fact that HE’S NOT PRIMARILY A PICTURE EDITOR.

He obviously IS a picture editor, and a great one….but as long as sound is AT LEAST as important to him, and for some movies he works on, the MAIN thing…FCPX is a non-starter.

This is not at ALL disrespectful to FCPX. It has other strengths. But there’s no point in saying that this is one of them.

In a little fairness (and I’m rarely more than a LITTLE fair LOL), I’m not sure that there’s ANY NLE that’s equally adept at video and audio (maybe Sony Vegas?)….but at least Media Composer and Premiere Pro acknowledge that the best way to work with both picture and sound on one project is an organizational structure that works for both picture and sound, and robustly roundtrips with Pro Tools sessions in particular as a core value.

So it is NEITHER the case that Walter doesn’t understand FCPX or that FCPX doesn’t understand Walter. It’s that Apple absolutely DID understand what Walter needs, and used to provide it (!!!! no argument there, RIGHT?), and at a certain point, explicitly chose NOT to continue to provide it!!!!

[Ronny Courtens] “I felt I needed to set this straight to keep the discussion honest.”

Quite so. I continue my essay here trying to meet that standard.

We rightly talk about Randy Ubillos, and we should, but in doing so, we ignore somebody we should not: Steve Bayes, who has been the senior product manager for FCP/X since January 2006.

I just doublechecked at LinkedIn — yep, 9 years 10 months. Is there anybody at Apple who has managed a product that long? Not that I’m aware of. Maybe ever.

I’m not calling him out for any reason but to praise him. A terrific guy. Call him the father of Avid Symphony if you want o. He was at Avid for 10 years, becoming Principle Product Designer at Avid just after Avid bought Pro Tools. Before that, he was an online editor, and has a film degree from Northeastern (arguably the best east coast film program that’s not NYU), and was the world’s first certified Avid instructor.

(In a bizarre little coincidence, he interviewed me for the job I wound up taking at Avid in 2003, left before I took the job, and a year later, had taken the job I’d left at Boris FX!!!)

In other words, he knows EXACTLY how important sound is to picture….and the product team he leads at Apple CHOSE to go in a different direction.

[Ronny Courtens] “I felt I needed to set this straight to keep the discussion honest.”

Likewise. 🙂

WHICH IS FINE for Apple to have done. Product teams SHOULD follow their own visions. They SHOULD focus their visions over team. They SHOULD be willing to sacrifice products, features, and even business models AND CUSTOMERS if that’s what they believe it takes for them to reach their highest goals.

And it’s fine for those teams to expect US to follow follow THEM. I’m 100% onboard with this.

But more than 4 years into this thing, I’m sorry and a little surprised to not hear reflected more often that Apple knew what EXACTLY they were doing, and explicitly CHOSE not to meet all the customer needs they used to reach.

WHICH IS FINE.

And some users with those needs — intelligent, capable, bold, visionary, willing-to-try-anything users who love Apple — have acknowledged Apple’s choice to go in other directions, WHICH APPLE HAS, and have chosen from among contemporary options for their next project. NOT because of any deficiency in themselves, but BECAUSE of choices that Apple made KNOWING that Apple was leaving those customers behind.

And the not-X choosers like Walter aren’t necessarily riled up about it. They understand that it’s not all about them. It was nothing personal. But another alternative is in order.

WHICH IS FINE.

[Tony West] “I’m going to use it even if he never does though hehehe”

Which is also fine. LOL

I don’t take your choice as any kind of disrespect for other options, though. Nor do I assume that you haven’t spent enough time kicking other people’s tires, so to speak.

I’d love to see more people who chose X assume that people who choose anything else are as reasonable and forward-looking anyone was in choosing X.

A final observation following Ronny’s exhortation to keep the discussion honest:

[David Lawrence] “I would like to be surprised but I wouldn’t bet my business needs on being happily surprised by Apple.”

There ya go.

[Tim Wilson]

The first thing I have to say is that I adore Dropbox. Adore it.

I know I was an early adopter, so I just looked it up – I joined in the first month. (I had no idea that it was only September 2008. It has been so much a part of my everyday life that I thought it was much longer than that.)

I honestly can’t imagine doing without it, or using anything else, which is why I’m frustrated right now.

[Walter Soyka] “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today.”

You know how long it takes to plant a tree? Like, an hour. LOL If I have a big one, it might take me a half day to rent a backhoe, plant the tree, and return the backhoe.

Or, the way it actually works, I pay a guy, and don’t spend ANY time…yet I have a yard full of trees. LOL

I get what you’re saying, Walter, but my issues with taking a month aren’t just conceptual. One is, I’m only guessing that it’s a month. The more files that went online, the longer Dropbox’s estimate was becoming. The estimate of a month is when I pulled the plug.

Another is that I’m using my home network. My wife, like me, also works remotely, so we rely on a certain level of network performance just to do our jobs — and the one month+ estimate Dropbox was giving me was based on using Dropbox’s unthrottled speed. If I was using the “stay out of the way of other network traffic” setting, it would surely be taking a couple of months.

Uhm, no. Soooo much easier to buy a couple of $80 1TB drives for multiple redundancy.

Anyway, In looking at Dropbox user forums, this is by far the most common complaint. (Turns out that forums are a great source of information about what are other users are experiencing. Who knew? LOL) Like me, the overwhelming consensus is that it didn’t used to be this bad. It has only been the last 18-24 months that it got this bad, currently topping out at just under 1mb/sec. This is virtually universally reported.

(Admittedly, you can do a little better than that using the web interface, but that one’s limited to 3000 files, which isn’t enough. And you can’t do THAT much better, and you can’t see what’s going on, because Dropbox copies over the directory structure before the actual files – of course — meaning that if the transfer is interrupted that you have to open every folder to see where you’ve stopped before you can load up the next batch of files because it can’t handle transferring the number of files you have. Excruciating.)

Certainly in the past, I was completely okay with Dropbox upload speeds. The COW’s original Dropbox was massive, and none of us had any issues with how quickly it was populated.

I still LOVE Dropbox. Other than program files, I have literally not one single local-only file on any of my computers OR my phone. I even have a junk “I’ll deal with it later” pile called Desktop-X — so even the unsorted crap that I used to leave on my local desktop is now on Dropbox!

And thanks to Adobe, not even all my application files are local-only. Frankly, I’m going that way with MSFT Ofc on my next computer. I’d rather not have ANYTHING local-only, and am moving in that direction as quickly as I can.

Seeing how well it has worked for me, my wife has also moved her company onto Dropbox.

The one issue she’s found is one I’ve found too, and seen others mention in the DB forums, for people who are quite capable at their jobs, but not super technically-oriented: people don’t understand that the files are BOTH local AND on the network. They try to exclusively use the web interface, or refuse to use it at all because of “security issues” (uhm, no), or fear that someone is looking at their computer, or some other nonsense that grinds collaboration to a halt…

…but that’s user misunderstanding. Maybe it could be addressed if team leaders or Dropbox owners could rename the local folder (name it after the company or something) and say to everyone else, “You see this folder in your Documents folder that has the company name on it? Put everything there. And don’t be surprised to see some stuff in there that you didn’t put there. We’ve all got that same folder on our own computers, and we’re all contributing to it — but don’t worry, none of us can see what’s on each other’s computer unless we invite them to see it.”

Something like that. Leave the internet out of it, and ideally, leave the word “Dropbox” out of it.

Again, I love Dropbox, but it’s still not feasible for me to transfer a couple of hundred gigs in under a couple of months from what I can see.

PS. It’s also a little complicated for me because I don’t have enough free space on my local HD, which is rather considerably smaller than what I need to transfer. (I’m a laptop-only guy, and because of Dropbox, 256GB has been more than enough space.)

I’m fine with the Sync Selected Folders feature to manage local space — the one power feature I most regularly point out to people — but that only works with what’s already up.

To load files that I don’t have room for on my internal drive, I have to move the Dropbox local folder to an external drive, upload the files, turn off syncing for that folder, then remove those folders from my local external drive, then move my Dropbox back to its original place on my internal drive.

Not rocket science by any means, but a rock just big enough to get in the way of me planting the tree there right now.

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Provide the hooks (FCPXML, Motion templates) and keep the cost low. Let third-party developers create what Apple deemed as niche tools.”

I’m a fan of this approach, actually. Keep the core development focused on core values.

It doesn’t even need to be niche features. I’d originally thought it would be cool to have Apple outsource codecs, for example. Just do like After Effects and say, whatever you hand me, I promise not to mangle.

AE has this down to a science of course, and few NLEs have ever pulled it off consistently. “Introducing fields when rendering 720p/50 footage? Done! You’re welcome!” But I thought it’d be slick to have 100% codec support from Day 1, automatically, from not having to wait for Apple. THAT would be revolutionary I says to myself.

[Oliver Peters] “That’s why I’m not very optimistic to see any of the major requested features that make so many lists added to FCPX.”

I agree that this is the most likely outcome. I’m happy to be wrong (I’ve certainly got plenty of practice), but I don’t see any sign that Apple has even been working on better hooks for third parties.

I’m sure they have something up their sleeves — right? RIGHT? — but the trajectory for the first go-round was having all the major features in place halfway through the development cycles. Year 6 of 12: multicam. After that, refinement, including the admittedly major Pro Res in Year 8, but really, 6 years in was it.

So within the conversationally acknowledged 10 year product life cycle, we’re probably within a release or two of everything currently on the whiteboard. Have the last couple of releases reflected any hurry to cross off some big requests as having been fulfilled?

I’m not asking rhetorically. I honestly don’t know, but as a spectator, it doesn’t appear to be the case.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “The new, bottom-up model suggests that the Murch/Coen/Fincher NASCAR drivers of the world are benefiting from new family car designs.

I don’t think innovation only goes one way anymore.”

I could be wrong, but I think that the race-car proving ground model is largely gone. Now, racing is mostly marketing to a passionate, attentive audience with money to spend. I’m more of a funny car guy, but racing is fine by me.

So I’m thinking about virtually every improvement in cars in the last few years that means anything to me or my loved ones…or to the many many people I hate LOL…and I’m coming up with things like backup cameras and Bluetooth.

Do NASCAR drivers use Bluetooth? If so, they surely don’t need sat nav. “Left turn approaching. Left turn approaching. Left turn approaching.”

They don’t need automatic parallel parking either. Frankly, I don’t NEED my car to park itself for me, but have you done it? It’s like a mini-Disneyland. I use it even when I don’t have to because it makes me giddy.

But it’s also cool tech, based on simple math. The car knows where the curb is, knows what its own turning radius is, knows how to operate the accelerator and brakes — once you know the very few numbers to plug into the very few formulas, even a chimp could do the calculations. This is what smart cars SHOULD be doing for us: simple math and low-level adjustments.

Parallel parking is almost a distraction from the lifesaving innovation that comes from applying this principle of “my car has eyes and hands and feet and can do math.” Cars stopping themselves when they’re backing up if they sense an object in the way, bringing themselves back into lanes, etc.

Anyway, you get the gist. The most innovative work that car companies are doing is no longer in the production vehicles and race cars. It’s going straight into driveways.

(BTW, have any of y’all seen the Tesla autopilot? Holy cow. Outta the way, Google. Timmy like!)

If we’re really going to take yet another car analogy a little further, let’s do it. Maybe we can say that X is the example of innovation that can only occur once you start ignoring the needs of the high-performance driver.

Not that it’s an either-or in real life as applied to NLEs, but for Apple, I think it still comes back around to the idea of low-hanging fruit.

Apple will gladly take every customer they can get, provided that that customer doesn’t want anything out of Apple beyond what the product and AppleCare can provide.

That is, when Apple ignores pros who could benefit from the kind of direct help that Apple USED to provide, and that dozens of companies represented in Creative COW still DO provide every single day, in every segment of our business…

…I don’t think Apple ignores video and film pros more than it ignores anyone else. I think they ignore us all equally. We’re ALL low hanging fruit. Apple does what it does, and is happy to harvest any of us that they can, as long as they don’t have to change their direction to do it.

At a certain point, I think we have to embrace that we don’t love their stuff in spite of that. We love their stuff BECAUSE they ignore customers, since that’s how the stuff winds up so awesome.

The idea that it would be even better if they DID cater to us is strictly academic. In order for us to test the hypothesis, Apple would have to start catering to us. LOL

Of course, we’re all about the academic arguments and untestable hypotheses.

And cars and guitars. LOL

At least according to Apple, and I’m willing to take their word for it.