[Gary Huff]

This is why you shouldn’t start a topic while drunk.

Hey, I’ll add the 🙂 so it’s not as offensive, right?

[Gary Huff]

[Bill Davis]Do you remember when suddenly everyone from Brian Williams to Anderson Cooper started trotting around with hand-held DV cameras in far flung lands and putting their footage directly into “nightly news” packages – the precise same thing that all the “professionals” were arguing was akin to “amateur” the month prior.

That’s a very poor example. What they are doing is trying to emulate that look, for the sense of immediacy that YouTube has given to videos that look like that. They would never shoot a sit-down interview with an important figure using those cams. It is done specifically for an intended purpose.

The tool does NOT define the professional. And if you think it still does, good luck with planning your career on that basis.

But in some ways it does. When you’re on your own, shooting weddings, family doctor web videos, or whatever, no one is going to care that you edit on Windows Movie Maker. However, if you want that recently posted editing job at your local news station or mid-level production house, do you think you’ll have any chance at all if you can’t say that you know FCP7/AVID? In certain environments, it doesn’t matter how cool a video you have on your reel if you did it in iMovie and your competition for the job has experience in a network-based AVID workflow, even if his stuff is not as flashy.

[Gary Huff]

[Bill Davis]You are correct in the sense that if your definition of “professional” is reduced to only those who create feature films or high end commercials – you clearly win the argument.

However, I’m sitting here in my own purpose built production studio surrounded by 600 plus 120 minute DVCAM tapes the production of which earned me an extremely comfortable living for decades.

Oh, Bill, I’m sorry. You said “ALL the people at the top” and I take “top” to mean those professionals whose work is broadcast nationwide or is shown in theaters. Can’t get more top than that.

I guess by “top” you meant anyone who works in video?

[Gary Huff]

[Bill David]I was there when ALL the people at the top TOTALLY DISMISSED 3.5 Mbps digital video as sub-standard, non-professional – and the mark of an amateur.

That’s right! And now you see all these great broadcast commercials and all these theatrically released feature films that were originated in DV!

Err…wait.

[Gary Huff]

I will be waiting until 10.7.2 or thereabouts before I switch. Can’t even play with it as my only Mac is a workstation.

[Gary Huff]

[Marvin Holdman]At this point, it would seem they’ve stolen a page from the Joseph Goebbels playbook… “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Not just you, Marvin, but I find the handful of examples in invoking Godwin’s Law on a forum about a piece of software to be quite humorous.

[Gary Huff]

A worthy experiment, but given that Crumblepop seems to be more of a software developer than a production house, I have to wonder at just how much their love of FCP X stems from the fact that they are developing plugins FOR it instead of videos ON it.

[Gary Huff]

You will definitely see FCPX for the iPad before you see Multicam in FCPX.

[Gary Huff]

[Chris Kenny]Apple didn’t kill DVDSP because Apple doesn’t care about pros… they killed DVDSP because they don’t care about discs.

So as a “pro”, you’re okay with telling a client, “Sorry, I can’t deliver on DVD like you asked, but I can get you a YouTube-ready version!”

[Gary Huff]

I think what he is saying is that instead of easily scrubbing through footage, where it might be possible to miss a shot or just not grasp the entirety of it, he prefers to have to really dig through it so that he is intimately familiar with all of it, should some really small and seemingly mundane shot/segment/take/ect turn out to be really important.