[Glen Hurd]

4 Sata Docks from China (thru ebay) at $19 each = $80 Docks
They’re reliable, portable, and great for swapping out drives.
4 2TB drives from PriceWatch at $90 each = $360

That’s 8 TB storage for $440 if you already have 4 sata ports. That’s just a little more than the price of the FCP X “suite”!

If you need a 4 channel Sata card – $200 on ebay right now Sonnet Tech Sata Controller
or $132 at TapeResources CalDigit 4-Port Sata

And I highly recommend purchasing SoftRaid at $125. Not for it’s raid capabilities.

SoftRaid uses some sort of algorithm developed by Google that predicts hard drive failures using SMART data – but does it far, far better than Disk Utility or other “typical” SMART status programs.

I’ve had it warn me a “perfectly good” drive was about to fail 2 weeks in advance of it going down – Disk Utility’s SMART status saw nothing.

When you’re working low budget and don’t want to invest in extra storage for back up (or client doesn’t want to pay for it), it’s great having a piece of software that will actually throw a pop-up at you, telling you it’s detecting a failure long before it happens.

Good luck on your edit, and as you may have already guessed, I’d vote for the transcode.

Transcoding doesn’t involve hair-pulling and teeth gnashing. In fact, it’s such a peaceful experience, many people choose to eat or simply sleep while it happens.

It’s not like humans run 24/7.

We’ll spend 6-8 hours every day completely unconscious and then complain that a planned project with mp4 footage slowed the edit down because it could only be ingested between 8 and 5! 😉

(Us “haters” also have a sly sense of efficiency. We’re old-fashioned like that.)

[Glen Hurd]

Just wanted to add that anytime you’re dealing with lifting video out of the mud, noise becomes your number 1 enemy – faster than if you’re dealing with stills. Especially if you want to keep contrast and push your saturation up to more natural levels. For $100, neat video has an incredibly effective solution with FCP. Check out https://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html.
You can download a demo, as well.
It takes some experimenting to bring out its best features (use the advanced settings), but it will allow you to be much more aggressive when lifting shots that would normally be borderline usable. And you will probably like what it does to the actresses’ skin as well.

Personally, I use the filter first, before doing any CC work, so any amplification is being applied to an already smooth image. It also lets you control what size details you want to preserve or smooth over, so you can soften subtle camera/skin noise, while preserving patterns on dresses, flowers, etc. Give it a shot. Your DP will thank you 😉

[Glen Hurd]

Communication implies commitment.

[Glen Hurd]

Indifference is hate – perfected over time. It is the form of hate that requires the least energy.

It’s not like Apple needs to create buzz.
In a business’ life cycle, the “any kind of press is good press” only applies to the beginning stages, when “brand awareness” is critical to marketing.
That worked best when people had limited access to other people’s reactions/experiences with a product. (Not so much anymore, when researching anything takes less than 5 minutes, and brand awareness is quickly converted to appreciation for Consumer Reports or Rotten Tomatoes for saving your a$$.)

[The only exception I can think of is in entertainment, where negative news about a tiger mauling a trainer might enhance the sense of danger to be experienced at a circus – for instance. But that’s because the product being sold is tied to the negative concept of danger. No one goes to a circus to see what’s “safe.”]

Once a business matures, or even becomes a stock darling, negative press is just bad. Once you’re at the front of the pack, the only place left to go is backwards. Especially when creating friction with your client base. Every mature business works at maintaining a structure that encourages repeat client activity – since the repeating customer is the most cost-efficient means of maintaining cash flow, while also having the subtle benefit of offering “word of mouth” promotion at the grass-roots level. Unless, as some have hypothesized, your client-base has become too “high maintenance,” in which case you lose them to save money. But that doesn’t fall under marketing, but rather a change of strategy.

Can you show me one established company that pissed off its client-base, and reaped financial rewards as a result? Even if it’s only 10% of the client base, which through marketing and pricing can be recovered, it’s not exactly the 10% you wanted to drop, not from a marketing perspective, especially.

Look at this another way. Prior to the launch of FCP X, an ad campaign by Avid saying they’re committed to supporting the professional editor would have looked lame. Now, thanks to Apple’s “successful launch,” their competitors can practically say anything that references client appreciation and loyalty, and make tremendous headway as a result.
Successful? I guess that depends on asking for who?
Prior to FCP X, competitors’ claims on “loyalty” and “appreciation” would be sadly pedantic. Post launch, such comments are actually refreshing.

The title to your thread was provocative – a good marketing ploy for generating comments. The activity in this forum has been slowing down.

You do know why, don’t you.

Indifference, my friend. Indifference.

[Glen Hurd]

A lot of great responses here. Straightforward and smart. I’d like to add that if your experience with editing is based on only knowing one interface, you will very likely be feeling a lot of frustration in learning the Avid.
Ignore the frustration and just keep editing on it. In about 3 months it’ll feel as comfortable as English (you are learning a new language, after all).
But also spend a lot of time browsing the Avid manual. Just read it – like a novel. Not to memorize it, but just to put the Avid culture in your brain, so that when you do have a problem, you can trigger thoughts and solutions from having read through a lot of it. (I know, these days, searchable PDFs may seem to make all that moot, but I think reading manuals is still a great way to get very good at your craft – heh, heh).
Reading is also a great way to learn without pressure – you’ll end up “hating” the software less, because you’re reading up on solutions BEFORE you encounter the problems. That’s a powerful thing.
Avid’s definitely worth learning. Knowing several industry-accepted professional interfaces shows your clients/employers that you’re committed as an editor, and simply expands your options and your career.

Remember that tongue-in-cheek quip that “he who dies with the most toys, wins?”
Well, “he who dies with the most skillsets was never unemployed,” should be added to that. 🙂

[Glen Hurd]

It’s funny how much we’re tied to software – especially software that becomes central to a whole pipeline in our business.
It’s not enough to be overly familiar with each program’s idiosyncrasies, but we also make financial commitments to other software and, usually expensive, hardware that all must answer to that central piece of software.
In the ideal world, all major hubs (software) would be multi-compatible. So would hardware. If a central piece of gear stops being upgraded, you could easily replace it, and move on.
The ideal world doesn’t exist.
Swapping FCP for Avid still means acquiring new hardware, re-evaluating existing pipelines, etc. Premiere may be easier, but has other issues.
This is not efficient, nor is it good for business.
Yet we swallow it because we must.

Unions were set up to protect workers from business owners who had no deterrent for abusing them. Not that all business owners were bad, but without a deterrent, some could be. Greed seems to have a way of growing.
A world where software has replaced hammers and shovels is relatively young.
How long before industries, such as ours, realize the need for a new kind of protection. Not from over-zealous business men (in the employer/employee sense), but in the protection of the user from tool-maker.
As long as companies have complete control over the tools they build and the interfaces they run on, we are forced to struggle with their ideas. Normally, a free market answers to the consumer, but if that consumer is considered to be too small to consider, we then have disruption.

So, at some point, it seems it would be wise for an industry, such as ours, to commission its own tool-building enterprise. A linux of editing, as an analogy. Whether it be an open-sourced version of Lightworks, or whatever, it would become the standard by which our industry could establish what we like or don’t like. Financial contributions to make this software work would come from the bigger players, who in turn, are the biggest employers. So a demand for efficiency and quality would be built in as a result of the real needs for those working at the top of the spectrum.

This would offer several advantages.
It sets a standard for what we prefer our tools to do and how we expect them to operate within an editing ecosystem.
It forces the “competition” to answer to our standards, instead of, say, them imposing their own paradigms on us – culled from months of editing vacation videos and such.

Seeds for thought, anyway.

[Glen Hurd]

“Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl.”
-Stephen Leacock-

[Glen Hurd]

Good point. I think the betrayal is a result of perspective and history.
On the first go round, FCP was truly new, being built by a company’s first foray into the editing profession. As it grew, spurred by the input of an interested community, a whole ecosystem developed around it, almost like slow growing coral clinging to a common foundation.
But now Apple has put a giant glass box around that coral, and cut off all future for it – no path for migration or transition, just a “new beginning.”

Some regard Apple’s upgrade (and that must never be forgotten – it was an upgrade) as fresh and exciting. But these are the individuals or those who cater to individuals.
For those who built pipelines around FCS, pipelines that employed artists and developers over a broad range of disciplines, this upgrade is devastating – especially in this economy. It forces a migration, but a migration away from a company that has no shame in disrupting its most loyal clients.

So, yes, FCP X does face another upward climb, but ironically, it doesn’t have the benefit of coming from a naive company that needs to learn the ropes. And that is another hurdle. FCP X now shares a name with another product – the product that Apple, after two years of “development,” broke.

Even Henry Ford didn’t go out and shoot all his horses.

[Glen Hurd]

Thanks, David. You’re input here at the cow has been quite an inspiration.

[Glen Hurd]

Walter, I understand that many are still trying to understand. I’m not sure there’s much more to discover. This software wasn’t written in collusion with Walter Murch and the Coen bros. In fact, I have yet to hear of one industry insider that can say he contributed to what was released last month.
We do know the Jobs loved iMovie 8. And now we have FCP X for $300.
That’s why I poked a little fun at studying a child’s writings that is assumed to be e. e. cummmings. Yes, we’re hoping to find insight, but there may not be any. It might be as simple as “Steve made me do this.”

I enjoy everything David L writes. I wish he’d been at Apple when all this was going on. We’d still be lighting firecrackers and dousing lawn fires with champagne if he had been part of the production – no doubt about it. But he wasn’t.
So while his questions are intriguing, and his observations are educational, I can’t help but think he is also privately digging around the ruins of FCP, like an archeologist, hoping to find consolation for its sudden demise.