[Tim Wilson]

[Neil Goodman] “Actually meant to say “My diva ass needs a room! “

My diva ass already has a room, but definitely NEEDS ROOM.

Already working on the cross-stitch embroidery “My Diva Ass Needs Room” pillow for the sofa.

[Tim Wilson]

That’s actually the most succinct, beating-free summary of the situation that I’ve ever seen. Very nice!

And Mike, and others, that’s the heart of it. The boss hears words like “drives,” “storage,” “network,” and says, “Let’s call IT!” But it’s not an IT problem, and IT can’t solve it.

Not that an individual IT TEAM can’t solve it. As Bob notes, it’s very simple. But it’s not an IT-specific problem, and IT-specific approaches will invariably lead to wrong choices for every component.

Even before discussing which product is the right one for you — and as Bob notes, the answer could well be “any company on this page: pick one” — the problem to solve is, can you keep the IT guys away while you assess the product that will support your CREATIVE needs, and just have IT integrate your solution into the rest of the company infrastructure.

Bob has a baseball bat packed in a bag next to the front door, ready to fly to your aid at a moment’s notice to “persuade” anyone at your company that needs “persuading.” Just let him know.

[Tim Wilson]

[Kevin Monahan] “It was a small, friendly neighborhood called “Westwood Oaks” (actually in Santa Clara), which will now be a major thoroughfare to and from this behemoth…It’s not going to be to fun moving around the area any more with traffic, crowding, and pollution significantly increasing due to the volume of autos and trucks moving down Pruneridge Ave. “

And we’re going to be hearing for years and years about how this is the greenest office building ever. Just not for anyone who lives near it.

Not specifically an anti-Apple dig (not like they’re the only company blowing community-altering craters in the area), but I wonder what they might have come up with if they’d tried harder to “think different” rather than “let’s make it really big as long as it’s energy efficient.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Aranyshev] “FCP v.4 being buggy didn’t help too. You should remember that the first thing Blackmagic Design did was offering all hardware manufacturers to write drivers for their iron because those manufacturers proved they cannot do it themselves. “

You make my point for me. It took many years for Apple to create a stable environment of both software and third-party hardware. Not that it NEVER happened. That its failure to happen from day 1 kept it from being taken seriously as a potential solution for anyone working with SDI. It doesn’t matter who was at fault.

You and I agree completely except for 1 thing: I said that FCP 4 was the release that allowed Apple to turn the corner and have FCP accepted as a fully capable solution, and you say it was still buggy! LOL

Also, FCP was never, ever hardware agnostic. Its hardware requirements were very specific. It was also NOT hardware independent UNLESS you were doing FireWire. What it DID offer was more than one vendor for I/O, with the tradeoff that, in the beginning, as you point out, none of it worked very well.

NOW, as long as you choose from one of a very small number of vendors, those third-party solutions work well. This was simply not true for the first couple of years, when solutions required considerable effort. We at Creative COW humbly thank Apple for this. LOL Our archives are full of many thousands of posts testifying to the difficulties.

But none of this changes my first point. FCP did not START as a fully capable end to end system. It was simply not a realistic option for a wide variety of mainstream workflows It BECAME an option.

Likewise there are many FCP diehards for whom FCPX did not START as a viable option, but it BECAME a viable option.

My SPECIFIC point is that the viability of FCP and FCPX happened on a very similar timeframe — depending on your needs, it was roughly 3-4 years after their introduction.

But Final Cut Pro never worked properly with Media 100 hardware. If you found that it had, I wish you would have posted on the many threads in Creative COW where people tried and failed.

Here’s one that notes that it ONLY worked on the already-discontinued Media 100 qx card using Adobe Premiere drivers, and NOT the then-current Vincent card with Media 100 drivers — and it would ONLY work for playback, and NOT for capture.

You can read the 2004 thread yourself here, but I’ll quote the venerable Phil Hodgetts:

…The qx model was never developed for G4 nor updated for later OS revisions. If you create a FCP sequence to match your media 100 media settings it will play just fine with the media 100 hardware….

But capture doesn’t work, it’s not terribly stable; media is not managed the same way and a whole host of other issues basically makes it an unworkable solution.

Other threads note unusable color shifts when trying to use media captured in one application in the other, if the formats were even compatible — and they often were not.

ALL of which supports my first point: FCP did not BEGIN as a completely viable solution for somebody working ONLY in SDI, but it BECAME one.

And likewise, FCPX did not BEGIN as a viable solution for quite a few mainstream workflows, but in many cases BECAME one.

We may debate many things, but I doubt we disagree on this: both FCP and FCPX BECAME far more capable than they were at release.

We may disagree with this additional point, but I believe that members of Creative COW were unambiguous: neither FCP nor FCPX reached critical mass until they became ABLE to reach critical mass, roughly 3-4 years into their growth. The X uptake curve WILL increase because it CAN increase.

This has nothing to do with the delusions of dinosaurs or the neighing of naysayers, and EVERYTHING to do with changes that Apple ACTUALLY MADE, and made SPECIFICALLY to address those EXACT concerns.

In fact, in a number of key instances, with absolutely unprecedented candor, Apple revealed that they KNEW that certain key features were missing, but said those features would be coming. Never happened in Apple history, which underscores just how seriously took these deficiencies.

I continue to say that Apple was entirely right to ship at the level of maturity (or immaturity) that they did, and that immediately cutting all ties to FCP 7 was the only possible move for them that made the least bit of sense — but please let us not pretend that Apple didn’t ship software that they thought was 100% ready. They did NOT think it was 100% ready. They TOLD us that for SOME workflows, it was not ready at all! The features just weren’t there!

Until they were. Later.

If it was a matter of appeasing the psychology of a bunch of timid old men, Apple wouldn’t have lifted a finger, nor did they. Apple made the changes to FCP and FCPX that those old men insisted on, because those features BELONG in that software.

The supposed dinosaurs were right about an awful lot, both in 2001 and 2011, which is why Apple addressed those exact deficiencies.

And once that happened, the whole idea of “dinosaurs” should have become extinct. It simply didn’t apply to the mainstream of Creative COW’s members, and it never really had.

What DID apply is that mainstream COW users were not free to change their workflows willy-nilly because Apple’s new thing looked neato. They had to wait until the new workflows it enabled were actually helpful.

Once more people COULD use FCP and FCPX for well-established mainstream workflows, more of them DID use FCP and FCPX.

Which brings me full circle. The whole idea of hate was overstated then, and is all but entirely inapplicable now. There were indeed some actual haters, but they have gone their un-merry way. The remaining concerns of the remaining holdouts among us have largely been established as entirely accurate.

And, as little as the “yay”-sayers care to acknowledge it, the debate does in fact change as Apple does in fact do what early “nay”-sayers said Apple NEEDED to do.

It also profoundly disrespects the reality that the overwhelming majority of “nay”-sayers here had already been through this rodeo 10 years ago, and knew better than to say “nay,” as much as they were saying “not yet.”

And they were right.

And Apple acknowledged it from the very first day.

[Tim Wilson]

Hey guys, a reminder that we can’t have full crash reports posted here. If there are specific values that are helpful to look for, by all means, share them, but there is frequently code in them that breaks the code in the pages here. That was the case on this thread, so I disabled those posts.

Apologies for any obstacles that this creates for your problem solving journey, but it’s not one we can work around.

Regards and best wishes nonetheless,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

You’re not banned, which is how you were able to post this. 🙂

Your account looks 100% in good standing on the admin side, and I see no sign of issues with any posts. Look for an email from me in the next minute or two to follow up on this.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeff Markgraf] “I think I recall my mother saying, in a similar context, “My, what a lovely thing to say.” Or something along those lines…

But then, she never visits the COW.”

Hey man, the COW is nothing but pegs and holes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP_68prpJK0

[Tim Wilson]

[Sebastian Alvarez] “Apple dug themselves their own grave with these new MacPros.”

I’ll pull back a little from “dug their own grave,” but when we talk about various debates, I don’t think we give this one nearly enough wait. It was certainly a huge deal at the time. I think that there a lot of people who saw the long-awaited Mac Pro as the sign that their interests and Apple’s had irredemmably diverged.

This is clearly not the universal feeling, but that doesn’t invalidate it. There are forks in the road, and you gotta pick one. There are scads of die-hard Apple-ites in the COW and elsewhere who, after finally seeing the Mac Pros, suggested that Apple finally fork themselves.

Waiting for FCPX to catch up to their needs, or interests, was one thing. I really do think that more people saw the lack of meaningful updates to FCP, the arrival X, and delays to a new Mac Pro as a handful of straws…but the Mac Pro was the final one.

[Tim Wilson]

[Noah Kadner] “I’m amused by the resistance to major change from folks who make major changes as their profession.”

I know that we have a reputation for that, especially outside the COW — but based almost entirely on the first year+, when the specific things criticized where in fact exactly correct.

For the last year or two, I just don’t see much of it at all. Instead, I see a number of editors who have been gradually making the transition as their fast-paced environments have allowed. Doing it all at once was simply never a luxury they had.

Having seen him playfully called out for the opposite, I’ll highlight Jeremy Garchow as Exhibit A. A very flexible dude indeed, whose business has largely been built on adapting cutting-edge technologies, and whose early objections to X were built on specific and ENTIRELY ACCURATE grounds…which are largely being overcome by Apple…

…which amounts to a tacit admission by Apple that Apple had in fact fallen short of the full range of capabilties required for some very mainstream workflows.

So while I won’t argue the point that some people are stubborn about FCPX, I strongly disagree that it’s necessarily arbitrary. There are still key components of X’s workflow that half-baked or entirely missing, even while there are hitherto unimagined advantages — which are irrelevant in the face of accurately described, specific deficiencies.

I certainly acknowledge that your generalization wasn’t directed at the COW per se, Noah, but in objecting to how sweeping that generalization is outside the COW, I think it is far more accurate to say that those people are out of touch with the COW than that any individual in the COW is rejecting FCPX arbitrarily or on principle, rather than based on a crystal-clear understanding of its inadequacies for THEM.

We are many years past a single meaningful thread suggesting that FCPX is inadequate by its nature. It’s in fact remarkable how quickly the tide turned…which I regret to observe that even some folks in the COW have sometimes missed as they characterize this particular forum.

EDIT:

As a PS, I’m going to harken back to the introduction of FCP, which entered the fullness of its first wave in the earliest days of the COW.

(Noting that the COW’s previous incarnation was founded 20 years ago this month!)

There was not one single soul who objected to the IDEA of FCP, or that a cheap, software-only NLE that incorporated meaningful compositing features wasn’t an awesome idea. People WANTED it. The earliest, most enthusiastic supporters were people who HOPED to be FORMER Media 100 users at the earliest possible opportunity.

But FCP was firewire-only, and the then-current crop of fw-output cameras simply weren’t up to replacing DigiBeta, no matter how much the FCP of Bust insisted that it was.

So there we sat. No SDI, no FCP. The COW was indeed adamant on this. Then lo and behold, along comes SDI, and FCP is on its way into broadcast almost immediately, led by COW enthusiasts.

Indeed, I defy you to find a more enthusiastic group of early FCP users than COWs using Pinnacle Cinewave. You won’t find such a group because it doesn’t exist. And, turning the corner into HD, there simply wasn’t a more enthusiastic group of FCP users than the COW at all.

But it took TIME, and it took APPLE recognizing that APPLE’s work was not yet complete to meet the absolutely basic, rock-bottom, non-negotiable feature set REQUIRED for mid-to-high level post. Apple fixed things on its side, became aggressive in their support for third-party IO, and the game changed.

But not before Apple stepped up. And once they did, nobody was more on onboard than the COW, with a “yay” much stronger than their “nay” ever was.

It took until version 3 to version 4 of FCP, though…which was, what’s that you say? Three to four years after FCP’s introduction? Almost exactly the timetable to widescale embrace of X here.

[Tim Wilson]

If I may quote:

What’s the point of this article? Nothing really.