[Douglas K. dempsey]

This is one of the things that actually appeals to me about FCPX. I guess it depends on how your brain works. My wife claims that I don’t use hierarchy-organized filing well (folders within folders). I seem to only understand where things are when they are laid out in front of me.

Even so I have forced my self to keep bins and sub-bins in FCP7.

But I often find myself pulling clips into bins as a way of “selecting” and narrowing down, just as the article describes. EXCEPT that I often don’t like having to dig down into selects or specifically named bins for shots, stills, music, SFX etc that can actually be used elsewhere.

So I end up making the hated SUBCLIPS for my select bins, with the “parent clip” existing at the top level.

So the new method is better. If you use iPhoto or iTunes you quickly get used to the idea of searching your entire Library when you forget things. But most of the time, you have moved things into Events or Playlists, ordered as you wish… and then Duplicated, Renamed and Re-ordered as you further edit, winnow out, narrow down and re-purpose your material.

The only valid complaint I have heard about FCPX in this regard is the clumsy and unsophisticated Media Management when you want to duplicate a project, or give a copy of the project to someone else, along with your media drive. The Reconnect offline media issues sounds frightening. I haven’t tried it yet; I’ll wait until I see a workflow on COW’s FCPX Techniques forum.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Kai:

I am at least as old as you are, and have lived through every event you called out in your post.

Regarding your observations about iMac, Thunderbolt and DSLR — and Panasonic and Sony’s attempts to do “large sensor for video” the right way (no over-heating, no moiré, camcorder controls, pro audio on-board, etc) — I have made exactly those points elsewhere on COW. I agree.

And with the demise of DVD, Hollywood films (except the big EFX blockbusters), the online fragmentation of TV and all forms of mobile video… I think we really ARE entering a new phase of media, for which FPCX will begin to rule almost immediately.

I have speculated, along with others, that for the few pro editors who must continue to use the FCP7 functionality we’re accustomed to, we may need to work on PPro, Avid, Smoke etc etc. And for high-end work, post may once again be a specialty business as it was in the ’80s. You already see it in high-end special effects and animation, where software is a constantly evolving-in-house affair.

I have only one gripe: that yanking FCS3 as Apple did — probably for “clarity” as they want current and future users to think “iMovie” for free with the OS, or FCPX for all other editing — creates a logistical issue for many pro users.

Your brutal statement “they owe you nothing” is harsh. Good companies, especially giant ones who can afford it, often try to ease the transitions, and keep their evangelizing pro customers in the fold. Apple is not a small mismanaged outfit like Media 100. They are the leaders. They can afford to support FCS3 for a year or two until everyone adjusts. They can create an obscure link called “Legacy Pro Apps” that will confuse NONE of the FCPX users, but that will support FCP7 through Lion etc, and allow us to slowly and economically move all of our current projects to other apps during the natural flow of work.

As for not “owing” longtime users, that is a matter of corporate philosophy. Many companies DO recognize their base. Even the hated AT&T, who took so much grief they have revamped their Customer Service Department and now bend over backwards to treat me, as a longtime 3-iPhone customer, to all sorts of deals and favors. And Toyota, who has had trouble with their Prius (brakes, accelerator issues) has given me price breaks on electronic repairs, at the corporate level, thanking me for being a loyal owner (I have two of them).

You CAN treat your loyal base that way, if you so desire. In the pro edit world, we are talking about a few thousand of us who would like a little more time to sort this out, without pirating serial numbers, buying illegal FCP copies from eBay and relying on hackers to give us ProKit updates well into the future.

We pros have thus far been good emissaries for Apple — it was the graphic, music and video pros who got the company through the dark years when everyone else said “But PCs are so cheap, and they run a jillion more apps!”

When we used to do promo films for Ziff-Davis Publishing back in the ’70s (Car & Driver, Pop Photo, Stereo Review magazines), the concept was “the ripple effect:” If you sell to professionals, they will pass their recommendations on to the layman when asked for advice. That has been true about Apple forever and still is; every family with a kid comes to me, asks whether they should by a 13″ or 15″ MBP, should they buy FC Express or FCP and so on.

Of course now I’ll tell them to get FCPX, possibly on a MacBook Air with Thunderbolt. I teach film/video in a private high school and that seems like an appealing setup.

The point is, everything you say is true and I agree. Except that it is NOT inevitable fact of life and force of nature that Apple HAD to pull FCS3 without any sort of notice or recourse. That just isn’t true. It is a choice, and their choice was simply, “Oh those whining, needy, finicky perfectionist pro users are a pain in the rear; let’s just ignore them and they will go away.”

That may be the brutal reality of too-big-too-fail global capitalism (are you a Republican by any chance?), but if they feel that way about me and my access to FCS3, why should I simply lay down and whimper “thank you for getting me to go cold turkey off the junk?”

It is only logical that we complain about that decision; it doesn’t make us FCPX haters or delusional about “the future.” It just means we were uneccessarily treated poorly by big business.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Joe – I am obviously of your generation and get all the references. I posted on this forum elsewhere a comment about “how to turn off audio scrub” by noting that when we used Moviolas we simply pivoted the audio head up, off of the track.

I went on to talk about exactly your point regarding adjusting to the new paradigm every few years, as we went to flatbeds and tape editing and eventually expensive NLEs, then cheap NLEs… and now the cheapest “Pro” NLE of all.

My gripe is simple: when we had to adjust to sea changes in the past, we had years to do it. The first flatbeds were for the lead editor only, with all of the assistants assembling cutting reels on sync blocks and upright Moviolas. So we had time to adjust.

But by pulling FCS3 and its support with no notice, Apple will cause many of us to take a serious time & money hit. We must keep working as always, PLUS strategize how to painstakingly convert all of our still-current projects to XML and then recreate them in Premiere or Avid. In this economy, in my small Mom & Pop shop, it is not possible to just stop working and spend the rest of the summer converting my project archive, against the possibility that FCP7 may start crashing under Lion.

I love the ideas behind FCPX, and will definitely adopt it as THE NLE to use in my high school film/video class. And I will start doing new projects on it as well.

But I hate that Apple, like many manufacturers of a perfectly good product, simply pulled FCS3 in one day. I have spent a decade of time and money on Apple software and hardware — and remember it is we graphic, music and video pros that kept that company alive and gave it the “pro” cache while Gil Amelio was trying to run the entire enterprise aground.

So I think a mega-billion corp could afford a little professional courtesy in supporting the Apple faithful through this sea change.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

I don’t doubt any of it. For our kids literally. My son just graduated high school last week. He has been making films since 6th grade, first on iMovie, then FCP. We are contacting his college media department to see if they are laying in multiple copies of FCPX — and if not, we are going to advise them to do so.

I meanwhile teach film/video at my son’s (former) high school. Perfect set up for students, that easily scales to pro work of the type you & I are speculating on: 27″ iMac, Thunderbolt to lots of storage, FCPX and a fast broadband pipe to the rest of the world.

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Remember working on a flatbed, where all you had to do was push the audio sliders down?

Remember working on a Moviola, where all you had to do was lift the pivoting audio head off of the track?

Remember working on a sync block…?

Back then, when you learned Moviolas weren’t going to be sold anymore and you had to upgrade to a flatbed, then tape, then EditDroid, then Avid…you were constantly learning that you were going to work faster, but it was going to cost you handsomely for the upgrade.

The last ten years have been a blissful downhill run, as you learned you could ditch your edit decks for an Avid computer setup, then learned you could ditch the expensive Avid for a cheap software solution called Final Cut Pro. And now we can go to a $300 solution!

Except, as I have said elsewhere on COW, we have apparently seen the last of Apple-supported really cheap fully functional pro edit & post suites. We may have to begin the uphill climb again (financially speaking), first spending time & money to convert any FCP7 projects we want to keep using well into the future, to other NLEs — or paying interns and assistants to do it — and then becoming a customer of more expensive software like Avid, Autodesk and beyond.

On the other hand, broadcast TV and features may die a slow death, along with publishing houses and newspapers, PBS and lots of other traditional high-end media outlets. Maybe FCPX will meet the future in the middle, and video will be exactly like music — meaning you make it in your house and it goes around the world and people consume it for cheap. And you have to make public appearances to support your video for any kind of profit! Back to four-walling your feature!

Doug D

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Excuse me, but who made the decision to make FCPX the ONLY Final Cut, and retire FCP7?

THAT’S the person who should be fired. Let FCPX take it’s course. I will embrace it to teach my high school students.

But I resent that, in order to create a “clear path” for the befuddles prosumer, Apple thought it necessary to completely junk an app that many of us will need to keep using, unsupported, for quite some time.

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Thanks, Greg. Yes, it will be an FCP7 “Community Support Network” to keep the old NLE working for enough time to adjust.

In my case, I have many sequences that are constantly re-used, updated, modified etc. It would be a huge inconvenience to re-create these from raw media in another app. So regardless of what I create in the future in FCPX, I need to keep my FCP7 projects alive until they can be converted to FCPX or PPro, MC etc.

A perfect example is a 3-camera shoot of a weekend-long conference that I did for a client. The multi-cam project is all built, sorted, selects have been binned, and audio “from the board” has been synced up with the 3 cameras’ independent audio. Whenever the Client’s budget allows it, we go back into the multi-cam sequences and create new releases of material. This will go on over the course of a couple years.

If a job is big enough, I would just freeze the computer, hard drives, Snow Leopard and FCP7.0.3 and dip into it when needed.

[Douglas K. dempsey]

A practical question: if I decide to install my FCP7 on a different computer, say I want to work on my iMac 27″ instead of my laptop, I will have to install FCS2 and then my FCS3 upgrade on top of that.

But how do I get from FCP v7.0 to v7.0.3, which in the past I did by using Software Update, which would tell me there is a ProApps update for my software?

Has anyone tried this? Am I stuck migrating or cloning my MBP internal drive in perpetuity as I go from one machine to the next?

Looks like my “Mac Museum” may have another dedicated machine, a 2010 MBP 17″ running OS 10.6.7, FCP 7.0.3 until it dies.

I am even nervous about updating to OSX 10.6.8 now…

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Richard, couldn’t agree more. One thing you will learn if you cruise YouTube, Vimeo and the web: As in sports, music, politics, science and most fields, the percentage of people who “get it” and excel in any particular discipline seems to remain roughly the same.

Word processing did not dramatically increase the number good writers; NLEs has not increased the community of good filmmakers.

Rather, when everyone begins doing it, the “language” of communication becomes more universal, more diversified, more nuanced… you have a larger audience as a story-teller because more people understand and appreciate the form itself.

Nothing wrong with FCPX. The only problem pros have — and don’t lecture me on workarounds — is that we have invested in a product that has suddenly gone AWOL and it is going to cost us grief and resources to retool.

Sure, that’s reality in the world of unregulated capitalism. The big corporations always win. But it doesn’t mean we should congratulate Apple on delivering to its shareholders at our expense. Call a spade a spade; our professional niche, after a decade of buying software and hardware, has suddenly been declared expendable.

[Douglas K. dempsey]

Remember Craig — and I know you are a mostly positive guy who was excited to see what FCPX v1.0 would be — the key issue in my mind is “stick with FCP7” because many of us fear the writing is on the wall, that it won’t be supported for long.

I will buy FCPX for the high school class I teach; it will be perfect. And maybe by the time those kids graduate and get through college, FCPX will be the defacto standard NLE.

But my concerns are whether the discontinued, no longer available except as unauthorized copies, FCP7 will work on Lion and beyond?

So in self defense I will need to set aside time to migrate (Automatic Duck) FCP7 projects to Premiere or MC, in case my FCP7 stops working. Right now I can’t afford to “freeze” my machine (MBP 17″ 2010) and dedicate it to FCP7, though that may be the cheapest solution eventually.

So you’re right, I will have to learn a new interface or two: FCPX for my video class, and perhaps PPro or MC for my work.