[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “What I find weird is the “before and after” picture that Apple used at the Supermeet. Essentially they said, here’s the timeline in FCP7, and here’s the same timeline in FCPx. Any questions?

That was a bit of a tease.”

You’re being waaaay too nice. It could also be called bait and switch 😉

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[David Lawrence]

[Craig Seeman] “Motion is very good and unlike FCPX has gotten a good reception at about 4 stars in the App store.”

Deservedly so! Apple did a very nice job with the update to Motion. If they had approached the FCP update in a similar manner, I have no doubt we’d all be jumping for joy.

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[David Lawrence]

[Oliver Peters] “I didn’t get any answers or explanations. They implied that they could have done an FCP7-style mixer panel if they had wanted to, but didn’t. They also indicated there was a certain level of complexity caused by the compound clips – and potentially compounds within other compounds.

I have the impression they have boxed themselves in by the design of the application.”

[Oliver Peters] “I simply don’t accept the argument that they couldn’t put everything in because they ran out of time or because it’s a 1.0 product. Some of the choices were conscious design decisions.”

I completely agree. Conscious and potentially fraught with unintended consequences. The response Apple engineers gave you is telling as Larry Jordan’s report that none of the user feedback from industry pros who were given advanced copies was incorporated. Why would Apple ignore obvious deal-breaking deficiencies any advanced user would immediately call out during user testing?

My biggest concern is that Apple has painted itself into a corner at a deep level with this design. I’ve seen this happen before on large software projects. Initial assumptions driving development may not get tested against unexpected usage patterns. Thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars later, a project may wind up so far down the assumed path that it becomes impossible to turn around. Then you show your application to real users and get the rude surprise that your usage assumptions don’t pan out. What do you do now? Projects developed in secret are especially vulnerable to this kind of trap.

I get the impression that the UI/object model was never stress tested against the real-world needs of complex projects. Apple’s response re: compound clips is especially interesting. I’ve found that complex object groupings and manipulations are fragile. One of the easiest ways to crash the program is to try to do something unexpected with an object or container. I really wonder if the model scales.

I hope I’m wrong about this. I want to believe that Apple can fix it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

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[David Lawrence]

[Andrew Richards] “Seems to me the real waiting for “awesome” was less than two years (September 2009 till June 2011), not more than four. Trouble was, when awesome showed up, it wasn’t the awesome everyone imagined.”

Well said!

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[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think that there’s anything inherent in the self-organizing, trackless, magnetic, relative timeline in FCPX that gives it new capabilities that the previous standard manually-organized, tracked, absolute timeline had. Am I missing something here?”

Not at all. I’ve never encountered a situation that I couldn’t handle in FCP 1-7.

[Walter Soyka] “I do think that FCPX’s pervasive metadata opens up new capabilities by essentially placing an asset management solution within the NLE, but I don’t see any reason why this couldn’t be added to a third-generation NLE. (Even better would be separating asset management from editorial, because though they are linked, I think they should be separate functions.)”

Absolutely right. The new metadata-based architecture holds wonderful promise. File management is currently broken, but even that could wind up in a good place. There are numerous advances throughout FCPX, none of which required a radical UI paradigm change. A UI/interaction model is an abstraction. It sits above the underlying architecture and can be whatever the designers decide. FCPX’s timeline design is a choice. The big question is how deeply that choice is baked into FCPX.

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[David Lawrence]

[Andrew Richards] “I’ll be damned. It even places the playhead for you, and you get the colored line indicator of the selection duration. One click, JKL from there.”

Better! We’re down to two clicks. Now they just need to fix the range selection bugs and it might start getting usable… 😉

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[David Lawrence]

[Andrew Richards] “There’s nothing inherent to sorting media with metadata tags that precludes seeing all the original source and finding that hidden gem.”

It has great potential but the way tags are currently implemented is cumbersome. The UI needs to be much more unified and direct. In FCP7 a clip can be named, marked, have set in and out points, etc. All of this information is immediately visible and manipulable in the source viewer. Everything is at the editor’s fingertips in one place. It’s trivial to play past the in/out points to search for missed material which (as @Robert Brown, points out) is often exactly the thing that will make a scene work.

In FCPX, a keyword collection only shows selected ranges. To play beyond the keyword range, you have to 1) select the source event, then 2) view in list mode, then 3) select the clip from all the other clips in that event, then 4) click the disclose triangle to reveal the keywords then 5) select the keyword. Then you can do what would have taken one double-click to do in FCP7. Five steps vs. one step. This seems to be the pattern with FCPX.

[Andrew Richards] “Even in these cases, you can turn off the skimmer and have the exact same screening capability via JKL that you have in every other NLE.”

I think the skimmer is cool but vastly over-rated. I’ve been skimming clips since FCP 1.5. Here’s how – I drag the playhead back and forth. When I see a section I like, I zoom in and skim that section or use JKL keys. You can do it in the source viewer or you can make a sequence drop the clip in and do it on the timeline. It works great, it works with clips of any length, and it’s optional. Skimming is cool but it’s not new and it’s not that big a deal.

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[David Lawrence]

[Oliver Peters] “There you learn things like part of the reason certain effects can’t work is because Apple won’t allow custom filter GUIs… One of the things they have done is to reduce the access the user has to things like key frame interpolation. “

Ugh, that’s the exact opposite direction I was hoping for. FCP7’s key framing interface and inability to expose 3rd-party UIs is one of it’s biggest current weaknesses.

[Oliver Peters] “…In other words, let a journalist do a rough cut or pull selects with iMovie and then let a “craft editor” polish it with FCP X. If that truly is a driver in the design, then the Storyline metaphor would make a lot of sense. And it can certainly be argued that this is very much a “pro” user.”

All very true. In fact I encountered this scenario first hand just a couple weeks ago. I was with my partners on an interview by a local KNBC team for a project we did in LA. The team was the reporter and his DP/editor. After the interview they sat in their van and cut the piece. The reporter logged quotes and the DP assembled footage. The editing gear was sad. An ancient PC laptop that took at least 7 minutes to boot. Everything in SD cut in windows.

Here in SF, the former NBC affiliate is even more bare bones. No DP, a single reporter does everything end-to-end. 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.

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[David Lawrence]

[Oliver Peters] “When I have directly challenged the “easier, faster” issue with Apple folks, I get two answers. One is that many current users of FCP 1-7 are frequently confused by timeline settings, easy set-ups, etc. and frequently get poor results. They were trying to fix this issue and not have them be constant support issues. The second is that they seem to discuss “faster” in terms of the total end-to-end session time. This means that the FCP X render strategy is part of their equation in saying FCP X is faster.”

Interesting. I’d love to have a conversation with those guys and ask them why that reasoning drove them to completely re-invent the wheel. I wonder how many of the UI decisions were actually driven by marketing i.e. the desire for sexy demos and pretty ad pictures?

[Oliver Peters] ” think they have both by this and the way the database/Events have been structured.”

Agreed. I haven’t gotten into the event/file management issues but I think they’re huge. Jeffery Harrell has some pretty strong words about it.

[Oliver Peters] “If you look at it in these terms, the changes aren’t as major as they appear. It’s just that they don’t seem to be implemented very well in actual behavior. That may be a 1.0 issue. If so, it should be fixable in the next 6 months or so.”

Agreed, tho I still think the frame-of-reference issue is big. The next 6 months will be interesting… 😉

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[David Lawrence]

Oliver – My pleasure, thank you for adding your voice and perspective to this conversation.

Your piece raised many issues I’ve been thinking about. Two points in particular stood out:

1) The use of the timeline as a scratchpad/open workspace.

I can’t overstate how important this kind of usage is to how I (and I’m sure many others) work. To me, this flexibility on the timeline is the core of non-linear editing. My experience to date is that the magnetic timeline simply does not support this work style. It seems to fights against it and ironically, feels like a much more linear approach to working.

As for compound clips and other suggested workarounds, I agree they’re not a substitute. The reason is because compound clips behave like nests, existing outside the context of the main sequence. Because of this context switch, compound clips are not as immediate or efficient for quick versioning or checkerboard style sequence building. It’s simply not the same thing in terms of flexibility.

What’s also ironic is that in theory, I should be an ideal customer for FCPX. I don’t cut features or need broadcast monitoring. I handle most of my freelance post work as an individual provider. These days I work almost exclusively in tapeless formats. I’m flexible and have no difficulty adapting to new tools. In fact, I thrive on change and being on the edge.

And yet…

I still hit walls with the X timeline. Even after learning the keyboard shortcuts and trying to work the way it wants to work. I can deal with it being different. But like you say, I have yet to see any proof that it’s better. Where’s the improved flexibility and efficiency? Please show me proof. I don’t think my problem is just ingrained habit or muscle memory. I think at a deeper conceptual/UI level, there are some real problems that are only become apparent in advanced usage.

2) The risk Apple is taking – Apple has earned extraordinary success through innovation, boldness and impeccable design quality. But it’s important to remember that Apple also makes mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Until Apple publicly says more about their intended product roadmap for FCPX, we can only try to understand and judge the product that’s in front of us. I wonder if Apple may have painted themselves into a corner with their UI decisions. Only time will tell as the product evolves. We’ll certainly learn much more in the coming months – in particular, I think the way they solve multicam will be revealing.

And who knows what may be possible under the hood. Discoveries like this give me hope that they can and will eventually make something for everyone. But I’m not holding my breath.

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