Erik Lindahl
Forum Replies Created
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The SD quality-concerns of FCPX doesn’t affect you?
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We’re quite a small post facility in Sweden but are still using FCP7 – and probably will untill it breaks or something better comes along. A lot of people I’ve spoken to in the industry feels the same.
Most of the projects coming to us from agencies, directors or editors its primarily the same – FCP7. One or two projects have been edited in AVID, Premier or FCPX but very few.
We do both in-house, web and broadcast work and for us FCP7 is still very efficient so I see why people are reluctant to move on.
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Very interesting findings!
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When doing OpenCL work on the GPU the system can run into extreme responsiveness issues. What a next gen MacPro could do an iMac could not is dedicate X cores + 1 GPU for background rendering and leave the rest for the users front-end. As soon as user interaction stops it will use all 12 cores and 2 GPU’s for rendering.
The above wouldn’t be possible on todays systems with out severely sacrificing user-interaction performance. The new MacPro virtually has about 2-3 iMac’s of CPU power and probably 4-6 of it’s GPU’s. This opens up a lot of possibilities.
So, background rendering with out affecting “normal” working conditions would be a huge selling point for many I would imagine. If Apple goes that route. They have stated dual GPU as standard and even lower end FirePro GPU’s will provide quite a lot of horse-power.
There’s also been talk of what i/o the MacPro will have. We know there will be six Thunderbolt 2 ports and one HDMI-port but we don’t know exactly what all these ports will support. Will the HDMI-port be able to work as a real video-out port at up to 4K and is that HDMI-port going directly off the GPU, i.e. no more monitoring lag? This could for example lessen the need for a dedicated i/o box over Thunderbolt – again a selling point for quite a few.
Summary: The above would be unique MacPro features unless Apple opens up GPU-support for Thunderbolt chassis. That said, the above would probably work relatively good in a current-gen MacPro given you have high-end GPU’s. The next-gen will boot a lot of VRAM which helps for GPU-processing work (Adobe requires a minimum of 1GB for example).
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Can only say the same. Our secondary edit bay is an 2011 iMac with a Pegasus that’s been running since dec’11. No hickups so far.
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Well it’d be an “active” control and not just a HUD / info-strip. This is something really bad with FCPX today. You’re not “synced” with your media. You scrub on screen 1 and see the result on screen 2. Not very intuitive. Perhaps they’d need to add a “load” function like we have today. I’d prefer to have a “load” feature from the browser and then have the “scrub” feature active. This would probably help a lot with performance as well.
The above could keep the current form as well but I think the above would make a lot of FCP7-editors feel much more at home. Add back some proper timecode windows / data as well.
They should also rethink the secondary viewer. It’s now called the “event viewer” which really limits it’s function. I could be used for all kinds of “secondary viewer needs” – comparing frames during color correction for example or comparing edit A vs edit B (this would require us to be able to load sequences to either viewer A or B.
Like someone mentioned before the ability to lock a sequence to a given length is also good to have. It’s a bit to “floating” as is now given one can work with it. It’s great for edits that aren’t so strict but for 15 / 30 / 45 TC’s…
Visual roles or role lanes would be a great way to bring back flexible and yet more powerful tracks. We need them. Fine, a bunch of slacking editors will still have edits that are a mess but for us you like order it’s virtually impossible to get now. And I’m just doing short-form TVC’s.
The handling of sequences needs an overhaul. As stated I work with TVC’s. A given project can have 100+ final edits in various versions, languages etc. Either make it more manageable with loads of folders / sequences. That’s the easy way out. Moving the project-browser to the event browser might sort of do the trick. One less click at least to swap between different edits.
A better way would be to actually try to deal with “versions” in a clever way. Much like how we have “versions” in Aperture we could have “versions” and “masters” in FCPX. With metadata they can be tagged as “work in progress”, “edit OK, audio NOT mixed” etc. This would make the “project browser” more powerful. Today it’s just more limited than FCP7 for the most part.
To be honest – dealing with projects on the system-level is quite poor at the moment. It has a bunch of “requirements” (i.e. use FCPX to move or copy a project to another drive and / or system). which is very un-Appleistic). I think some have suggested the introduction of disc images and that FCPX should automatically create these as it’s “project file”. I guess there has to be some kind of negative side effect to that but as it stands FCPX is quite a mess on this part.
Batch Export. Please, this is needed. I’d really hate doing the 24 versions of a given project and then export them. PrPro has the same issue. FCP7 has not. Here it really doesn’t matter if FCPX is 5X faster than FCP7 in the rendering since the user-intraction part it 24X worse.
Other things that would be nice is image sequence support and improved color correction features. FCPX is quite good on the later but adding white-balance and curves would be two very welcome features. Sort out the scopes would also make the app very nice for online work (i.e. the ability to view 2-4 scopes for a given viewer).
GUI customization was and is a huge feature of FCP7. Give us back that flexibility please, we all have different setups and needs!
Video out over the video card still feels iffy and needs work. PrPro is way better here. Even if better responsiveness here means less realtime effects it’s quite poor at the moment. Again, FCP7 (and PrPro) doesn’t have the lag FCPX has.
I’ve heard a lot of people vocing Motion-support and / or AE to motion capabilities. I’d rather see an “open FCPX project in app X” capability. In my case FCPX to After Effects is what I’d like a better work-flow for. Today I can do what I do in FCP7 but it’s time-consuming and quite inflexible exporting each cut of each edit like I do.
There is probably more but that’s a few things I’ve noticed while evaluating FCPX. We’re still primarily running FCP7 still but testing FCPX and PrPro.
Much needed features.
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This isn’t true. A mini-time line could be the default in each viewer. It wouldn’t change anything except a much better overview of your media. I don’t see why adding a mini-timeline has to add more steps in “loading” media. It’s a much requested feature from my end for sure.
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We did a “smoke in a bottle” effect a few years back in AE. There our solution was to shoot smoke at high-speed RED against black and add / screen it into the bottles. We had to work quite a lot with coloring the smoke, getting the correct level of “clean smoke” and not a feeling of dirty or hazardous smoke. We also worked with masks to confine it to a given area as well as using various displacement / disorts. Sadly I can’t find a link to the given spot but the end result was very good.
If you can’t shoot new footage I’d start to experiment with a particle system. From my experience these always end up more fake than the real deal though unless someone really experienced is working the magic. Subtitle smoke tends to work this way (I’ve done that my self) but I always recommend shoot real or getting stock footage.
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Very interesting questions.
One thing Apple was very clear about at WWDC is the fact that the OSX QuickTime API is concidered obsolete but the QuickTime .mov container is still the prefered fileformat under AVFoundation depending on codec. They are not killing the fileformat or ProRes codec. Also, Adobe has complained about QuickTime being a 32-bit API for quite some time. Why not build their QT-support around AVFoundation? Still to immature? Lack of cross-platform?
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Roger, however, the specs Apple’s given points at 2xW9000’s.