[David Lawrence]

Software patents are bogus.

Picasso had a saying – “Good artists copy, great artist’s steal”. And we’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas. — Steve Jobs, 1996

I’m going to destroy Android because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. — Steve Jobs, 2010

So which one is it?

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Here’s a post about what I DO like about FCPX’s management. It needs work, it needs refinement, but if I can step away for a second, look at the big picture and the big ideas, keep in mind that this won’t get real good until about v2.5, they aren’t so bad, and actually, these ideas are decently good. “

Great post Jeremy, thank you.

FCPX has so many good ideas. Especially in media management and organization. I wish the “Anchored Timeline” paradigm wasn’t a deal-killer for me but unless and until it gets much better, I have to pass.

Maybe by v2.5…

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[David Lawrence]

[Bill Davis] “You can quibble with an item here or there as “unworthy” of the patent issuance, but Apple has spent heavily on R&D for a long time. They’ve been awarded lots and lots of patents based on their efforts – each reviewed by the same body that grants all American patents using precisely the same process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1s_PybOuY0

Software patents are bogus. If Xerox PARC had patented the graphic computer interface they invented, the Macintosh simply would not exist. Software patents are bogus.

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “”The spine represents a primary sequence of media, which, in some embodiments, does not have any gaps. When a clip is deleted or removed from the timeline, the media-editing applications automatically closes the gap created in place of the clip.”

yep. thats the new iOS rubber banding alright – the world and its aunt will be after this one.

brain damaged ripple delete: cupertino knocks it out of the park.”

I noticed they refer to it as an “Anchored Timeline”. That seems curiously appropriate to me. Though not for the reasons they think…

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Herb Sevush] “I don’t doubt you here at all, but different is not necessarily better and better for you might not be better for me. “

I think this has been my key takeaway about FCPX from the past year. FCPX has some very powerful and appealing tools and features. But if they don’t fit your editorial and workflow requirements, then the drawbacks from all the things missing far outweigh any benefits. On the other hand, for those who can take advantage of FCPX’s new methods. the benefits seem huge.

“Fastest” and “best” are entirely subjective.

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Steve Connor] “You are correct, in this context the skimmer is no advantage at all”

Thanks Steve 🙂

But for visuals, I totally agree it rocks. And yep, better than PrP6 hover scrub.

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

Interesting thread.

The skimmer is an awesome tool for quickly going thru tons of visuals. Great for finding B-roll.

For interviews, I don’t see any significant value. If you have hours of interview, at some point someone has to listen to them. Maybe up to doublespeed, but you still need to hear what’s being said. I don’t see how the skimmer helps with this in any meaningful way. A talking head looks like the same talking head no matter what’s being said. Sometimes there are no shortcuts to playback. Just saying.

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Oliver Peters] “So it leads me to just end up saying “don’t sweat the details” when it comes to color. It’s never right at the other end. I can only hope that it’s reasonably close ;-)”

Boy do you have that right!

This just happened to me on the project I finished yesterday. It’s an art video with a very specific color palette. The artist and I carefully tuned the colors on my computer monitor, but when we played the finished piece on the 46′” displays that will go in the gallery, there was this one very deep purple that looked blue. This was a critical color in the artwork and it really *had* to be purple. The remote gave us options of different white points but the white point that made it purple enough made the white too yellow.

In the end, I went back and tweaked the purple in the video after testing some screen grabs on the display to make sure it was exactly right. We wound up making two video files. One is graded for the monitors in the gallery, the other is graded for computer displays, Youtube, etc. The artist is very happy.

There’s just too many variables beyond control on the end-user side. All it takes is one button on the TV remote to totally mess a carefully planned color scheme. “Don’t sweat it” is about the only thing guaranteed to work every time! 😉

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[David Lawrence]

[Walter Soyka] “Don’t confuse empty space with the lack of information.

Graphic design offers us a few tools to convey information in 2D space — notably here, alignment — but FCPX’s self-collapsing timeline totally disregards them.

I have argued here that the self-collapsing timeline removes visual cues from the edit. Imagine working a nodal compositor that continuously and automatically reflowed — or if your physical desktop did, or if your kitchen’s spice cabinet did. Our brains are wired for spatial thinking, but FCPX fights this.

If FCPX must ignore human-centric concepts like space, it could at least leverage computer-centric concepts like sorting. How cool would it be if FCPX could sort and re-sort your timeline based on user-defined criteria?”

Well said, Walter.

I have to say though, I find it ironic that Apple – the company that defined the age of human-centric computing – has gotten uncharacteristically sloppy with Human Centered Design in recent years. FCPX is one of the more extreme examples.

The guiding philosophy behind Apple UI design is that computers should work the way people intuitively expect; that the computer should adapt to the human, not the other way around. It goes back to the Human Interface Group and Human Interface Guidelines. Note the emphasis on human rather than computer interface. This language is intentional and it’s what set Apple apart from other computer companies when graphical computing became mainstream.

From Apple’s OSX Human Interface Guidelines:

“Mental Model

The user already has a mental model that describes the task your software is enabling. This model arises from a combination of real-world experiences, experience with other software, and with computers in general. For example, users have real-world experience writing and mailing letters and most users have used email apps to write and send email. Based on this, a user has a conceptual model of this task that includes certain expectations, such as the ability to create a new letter, select a recipient, and send the letter. An email app that ignores the user’s mental model and does not meet at least some of the user’s expectations would be difficult and even unpleasant to use. This is because such an app imposes an unfamiliar conceptual model on its users instead of building on the knowledge and experiences those users already have.”

Maybe the ProApps team should try reading that document.

One of the reasons I consider the current FCPX timeline a UI failure is because it seems driven by abstract engineering principals rather than an understanding of how editors actually work or how people actually think.

For example, why can’t transitions be applied to connected clips? Why can’t clips connect to secondaries? Why only one primary? And so on.

All of these constraints seem driven by the FCPX data model. I’m sure it’s elegant from an engineering standpoint, but I don’t think is has anything to do with editing. I’ve never met an editor who described their work in terms of creating “clip relationships” or gave a minute’s thought to a timeline’s data model. These are engineering concepts and they tell a lot about the FCPX UI design thinking.

Someone’s bound to say that tracks have constraints too and of course this is true. But the constraints of tracks are much more easily understood in terms of their physical metaphors. FCPX’s abstract “relationship” model has no real-world corollary.

Yes, it takes skill to get good dealing with track constraints but once you learn them, they’re universal and easily transferrable. At that point, it’s a matter of taste. Changing muscle memory is totally different than re-wiring your brain to an entirely different paradigm.

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines have stood the test of time as a benchmark of good design philosophy. The magnetic timeline fails the HIG at the most fundamental level.

This is the reason why I think Apple’s bet on a trackless model is a very steep hill to climb. I know many folks like the new timeline model and I recognize its benefits for some editorial tasks. But more than a year later, I still see no reason why all of those benefits couldn’t have been applied to a tracked environment or delivered in a trackless design that gave everyone the best of both worlds.

The magnetic timeline is an interesting experiment — something only a company like Apple could try and still be taken seriously. I’m sure it’ll do well in Apple’s intended market, but I’ll be very surprised if it ever achieves the ubiquity of Legend. I see FCPX as a niche product. The question is how big a niche that turns out to be.

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David Lawrence
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[David Lawrence]

[Herb Sevush] “It is a good article and a good explanation and it lays out the editorial limitations of the thinking behind it. Both assumptions, the primacy of the visual and the primacy of the “b roll” conception of editing, do not work for me nor for many others. Again it is not that this concept doesn’t work, it does work quite well for many editorial situations, the issue is that it doesn’t work as well for as many types of situations that a tracked environment does.”

Bingo.

[Herb Sevush] “Why assume that in a a tracked environment B-roll clips are “locked to a specific track? While I’m working I rarely think of shots as “B” roll – but when I do they can be on any track. The sync indicators in FCP will alert any following editor to the nature of the clip, you don’t have to use tracks to do that. You can use tracks that way, but you don’t have to. You can use them that way for part of the show, but not others. You can use them that way and then change it as you go. You can organize you material in many many ways – visuals are never locked to a specific track. “

Well said.

[Herb Sevush] “Why this emphasis on vertical clip relationships. I place much more emphasis on horizontal clip relationships. “

Exactly. For me, the only relationship that has any meaning is a clip’s relationship to time. And even in FCPX, time is represented horizontally.

Clip connections are a form of grouping. The main advantage of FCPX’s connected clips is collision avoidance. You can achieve similar results in Premiere Pro by simply grouping clips together. You don’t get the collision avoidance behavior, but you can group anything to anything so the group relationships are actually much more flexible and potentially meaningful.

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David Lawrence
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