David Cherniack
Forum Replies Created
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Looking for a meaningful distinction in the word “pro” seems to me to be a rather frustrating exercise. “Professional” refers to anyone who makes a living in a specific field. FCP-X is certainly going to be adequate for many who fit the bill. It won’t for others who work at the higher end of the industry and whose needs are greater than its capabilities. Therefore I always prefer the term “high end” to “pro”. It’s loose but for this discussion it’s more specific.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Battistella] “What’s BC Gold?”
Sorry. BC Bud.
Hint: you smoke it.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Battistella] “I think within 12 months all of the functionality people have been asking for will be built in.”
My own witnessing of the development of a few NLEs makes me wonder if you’ve been smoking BC Gold. 🙂
If they have the will to build in the changes necessary for the high end work place – fixed tracks and baseband video out – a good deal longer than a year. And that’s it they have any intention of it, which looks to me to be doubtful
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
This is true of all corporations and the behaviour of the particular corporate entity in the marketplace is determined by where they perceive they can maximize profits, given their expertise. Thus the initial release of FCP-X is directed at what Apple perceives as a broader audience than the higher end.
It remains to be seen whether X will perform the way they’ve intended. It certainly isn’t for the casual consumer…rather, in it’s initial release, it seems to be directed at event video making – corporate, weddings, seminars, churches etc. But most of those people are already using other software and have developed the infrastructure around it. Is there enough advantage in X for them to switch? I don’t know, but given that the vast majority of the distribution in that sector is on dics I would wonder.
Then there’s the question whether X will ever be suitable for the higher end of the industry without the addition features that it apparently isn’t designed for: the track based metaphor and baseband video I/O.
So at this time the real question, in my mind anyway, is whether, given its disastrous reception in the higher end and its questionable adoption by its intended market, it will follow other new-product disasters like the Edsel and New Coke into oblivion…a thought possibly impossible to its supporters here, but I’d bet if one looked up the history of the Edsel and New Coke you’d find they both had loud vocal adherents who were certain the product was a new paradigm for the future.
Time will tell.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[Craig Seeman] “You can say that about anything. “
You can say that about anything, too.
Sometimes, Craig, You may want to check your blanketing rhetorical style for inadvertant hilarity. 🙂
[Craig Seeman] “As far as video is concerned, FCPX does what I want when I want it, without focusing on too many steps and precautions to get there. Audio is another story though where the simplest tasks take too many keystrokes.”
It remains to be seen whether that’s true about video when the layering is complex and requires a lot of changes, as all complex editing does.
As Walter Soya has pointed out there was probably no need to abandon the traditional track based metaphor when they implemented an object-based collision avoiding technology. It’s not as if the traditional metaphor is less intuitive. In fact it may be more intuitive. I would certainly argue that is when organizing, overviewing, and manipulating the different layers of a complex timeline, especially en masse. For instance, with one mouse click I can turn off all the graphical super elements in an hour-long show for outputting a foreign language master, or simply create a new layer under them for another graphical element I may want to add to them. I suspect in X it would be more complicated than that, if not much moreso.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[Tom Wolsky] “Premiere is a complete and total dog trying to edit AVCHD. It doesn’t rewrap so you’re always struggling with it. Playback is simply painful.”
Tom, apparently it is on your system. Not on mine or anyone else’s I know, but I’m sure it must be true for you if you say so…though it may be wiser to phase your opinions within the subjective mood rather than as a universal generalization which is frankly, not true.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Sophisticated timeline searching is a useful feature that really needs to be added. As with all software development the more people requesting features, the more likely that they’ll be implemented. So don’t hesitate to ask.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
Steve, I think the counter to your argument is that there may have been in the tens to a few hundred people (and that’s pushing it!) using Premiere with Digisuite. How many thousands (tens of thousands?) are using FCP with a third party i/o card? Adobe didn’t kill any golden goose. I hardly remember a squawk among Premiere users when Premiere Pro 1.0 was released.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[David Lawrence] ” I think these situations are increasingly common, and certainly qualify as pro. Clearly, Apple is making a major play for this pro market segment. What remains to be seen is how big a market it turns out to be. Is it so big that Apple can disconnect from the rest of the industry and essentially redefine standard practices and language on it’s own terms? Time will tell.”
An analogy for this segment of the market comes to mind from baseball. The reporter/editors are toiling in the minor leagues. They’re certainly pro and there are many more of them than in the Majors but they’ll only move up if they have the skills, talent, determination, and luck.
There is a general rule I’ve found in software: “simple and powerful” is a rare, nearly non-existant, combination. Apple constantly aims for it and along with their innovative designs, cult marketing, and control of choice, they’ve created a perception that they achieve it more often than their competition. The truth is though, that “complex and powerful” is the usual combination of leading products of any segment of the professional software market. This is simply because any leading product has to be able to do more things.
It seems clear that at the present Apple has abandoned any attempt to play in the Big Leagues. They’ve ceded the ground to Avid the reigning king of swat, and Adobe, the triple threat aspirant to the throne, and headed off for the greener pastures where they’ve been earning the big bucks. X will be used by reporters and event videographers, higher end YouTubers, and others in the minor leagues. It won’t be used in the little leagues…or in the Majors much at all, unless Apple offers more choice and openness, something that goes against the grain of how they’ve successfully developed products.
This is a hard nut to chew if one has been an AppleThink fan for many a year…but those who criticize others for not being able to adapt to a new tool’s way of doing things are just possibly themselves not able to adapt to Apple’s new reality. If the old reality was still in place FCP-X would have been FCP8. They made a very clear choice. FCP-X is not aimed at the major leagues. At this point it remains more than a little doubtful that it aspires to even get there…despite the faith of its fans.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
[Lance Bachelder] “The Adobe PPro team seem to be responding well while they have this window that Apple has opened for them”
Lance, my take on it is there was a major sea change in Adobe after the problems with PrPro CS4. They got it. They started listening, especially to the pros. With 5.0 still on the horizon they began engaging much more with the outside word, proud of what they were accomplishing. They had a new-found stability with 64 bits, a completley re-written playback engine called Mercury that far surpassed anything in the industry, and CUDA real time power. The openess to the user base pre-dates the FCP-X disaster by almost two years.
Now, I’m sure they see even greater opportunity to accelerate their rise. But they announced their intention to get up there and compete at the top end of the industry before FCP-X was released. Who knows, maybe they read the tea leaves after Apples’ presentation at NAB.
In any case, these days it’s a pleasure interacting with them on public forums.
David
AllinOneFilms.com