[Douglas K. dempsey]

I’m hearing with discounts and incentives, you can get the body and the prime lens kit they make for the camera, all at about $20K or slightly less.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

David:

I second your mention of the F3. It is apparently becoming popular in corporate, docu and commercial shoots, and does deliver tremendous image. An ideal indie feature camera as well. If you can rent an Alexa for your whole shoot, fine. But if you want to economize, especially on long project like a docu or indie film, you buy the F3 and basic lens package in the $20K range. Then you rent the other primes, zooms etc on shoot days where you need them. Of course, you can skip the XDCAM format and go directly out via HD/SDI to any number of uncompressed recording devices. Or you can spend another $20K on their upcoming deck to record “raw” using LUT for image control.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Guys:

Tell me if I am missing something in my over-simplification that follows:

Apple themselves have admitted that trying to XML/translate from FCP7 to FCPX won’t work without losing data. That makes sense; think of all the tracks, plug-in effects and other subtleties that won’t translate to the trackless, simplified FCPX. Meanwhile, how to translate limited metadate from FCP7 and create all the metadata and “events” of the FCPX workflow?

As Walter Biscardi has said in his recent article, if you have a big archive of important FCP7 projects, forget about FCPX. You can count on using a legacy FCP7 system, or translating the projects to Premiere Pro which he thinks is similar enough to preserve & implement most info of your FCP7 project. Forget ever importing complex FCP7 projects into FCPX intact.

MORE IMPORTANT in my mind is going the other way! All the new workflows that people are talking about — shoot with DSLR or HD smartphones, edit on MacBook Air (and eventually iPad we assume) with FCPX — this may be the future of ENG, at least in journalistic hot spots. Post to the web and you’re done.

BUT sometimes you will want to take your FCPX material and import it into FCP7 or PP or Avid — THAT would be useful. Say you work fast and dirty in FCPX, post your results, but on this ocassion you want the results for use in a more complex, track-assigned, heavily plugged-in, multiple monitor, broadcast-standard FCP7 or PP system? You will want to go XML OUT of FCPX, and XML IN to FCP7 — and have the (presumably) third-party translation app create your locked tracks, effects, transitions, perhaps even use the metadata & events info to create a series of bins and so on.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Chris:

I teach a high school class; we haven’t acquired X yet, so started the semester on FCP 7. My rational, in the absence of another choice, was to tell kids that the FCP7 interface resembles most of what they can see out in the world, Avid, Premiere, Vegas and many other NLEs. But that for those interested, we may be road-testing FCPX next semester.

My One-to-One instructors at the local Apple Store are digging X, and I can take the class there on a “field trip” for demos.

I’m wondering what decisions you have arrived at?

Doug D

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Wonder if the top NLE’s keep a list, “Cut on Avid,” Cut on FCP” etc — for Best Picture and Best Editing Oscars?

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

For sure, it’s not necessary to sit down at a Steenbeck. As I said, it’s kind of a grace note, to give you a visceral connection with the “metaphors” still in use. For example, “Hey Teach, why do they call it Final ‘CUT’ Pro?” “Well you see, they used to actually CUT a piece of film or a piece of tape.”

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Walter, re: starting at the base of your domain, this has been a proven methodology of teaching since teaching was first taught. What makes us think we have suddenly and magically short-circuited learning? We are still born earlier and less formed than any other species, so that we can learn our environment and its complexities from the ground up.

Many film programs, the smart ones IMHO let students who seem serious about the craft work on Moviolas and handle film. They don’t necessarily start there; they are not dogmatic about “walk before you run.” But at the appropriate time, once you have been exposed to NLEs in depth, the handling of film can create an epiphany, a realization of the “metaphorical” nature of GUI and digital tools. It can help you separate WHAT you are doing from HOW you do it. It can remind you that the basics of visual communications and psychology come from inborn mechanisms from ‘the ancestral environment’ — rather than something “invented” every year by each new software.

There is ALWAYS the danger with any experience that is automatic or does the work for you that, you may never learn how to problem solve in its absence. Is that a defect? Not if you never need to know how something works. Few people understand the basics of electricity and yet survive and prosper in the modern world.

I have watched my son (age 17) learn “organization” via the MacOS and Google. Whereas he mother and father are expert organizers in the hierarchial filing system, folders within folders, he locates everything via Spotlight, Google and other searches. I accused him of not being “organized” but it turns out he maintains a sophisticated relational database in his head of keywords that allow him to use his searches efficiently. Just as my filing and bin systems only work if I know what the names mean, and can visualize in my mind’s eye the logical path as I drill down into folder stacks.

So who is more organized? I think we just do it differently.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Walter:

Thanks for the great post on your formative workflow influences. I especially liked the clay-sculpting metaphor; this is how I work all the time in documentary — where you can go in so many directions, and so you need to gets your fingers in there and get the feel of how best to shape YOUR version of the story. Whether FCPX influences us, a new generation or no one, YOUR particular post is both familiar and inspiring.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Well I work in docu and I agree wholeheartedly with the methodology of scrubbing and thumbing through shots, looking for who-knows-what, and then it hits you. In fact the great Walter Murch also talks about this process…

This is a very common thing in visual editing: you categorize shots according to what you THINK they are about or how you will use them, but inevitably you are stuck with a narrative problem and you sift around until you find — exactly as the commenter describes — a shot that NO ONE thought would ever end up in the movie, and it becomes the perfect piece, re-purposed in a way not imaginable during ingest/organization.

HOWEVER, guys, if you ingest and smart-collection/keyword your stuff using FCPX, which I think IS a great way to organize material, you will benefit from the meta-data organization system of the new app for 95% of your work.

When it comes time to troll through all your collections in search of that random “miracle” shot, well you are free to poke around and scrub through everything waiting for inspiration to hit.

I don’t feel that any kind of FCP7 “inefficiency” ever made me accidentally work more creatively. The process described was ONLY done when I needed to solve something, and then yes, I might scrub through EVERYTHING on the theory that there is a shot somewhere that has been ignored but will now save me.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Chris, you have said many smart things about using FCPX on this forum. But whenever you say things like “unfounded paranoia” it undercuts your credibility entirely.

All of us who fret have experienced exactly these issues: a stable app that suddenly goes south for an indeterminate amount of time, upon upgrade to a new OS. Or even the ProKit updates themselves creating issues.

If you want to look one issue up that affected many of us, it was ProKit 6.0.1 which apparently contained various fixes for Logic, but in the process wrecked Compressor for a bunch of us. After much fussing and wasting mornings reinstalling, we had to trash the update and restore an older ProKit Frameworks folder…and then wait for the better part of a year until a newer ProKit update was released.

So we are justifiably worried that Lion will require fixes and updates to various apps. The concern is: if FCP7 completely “gone” or will it be updated if necessary via the continuing ProKit packages that Software Update send to your machine when it recognizes Pro App installations?

That is hardly paranoia, and it is more than justified. It is called practical experience.

Doug D