Glen Hurd
Forum Replies Created
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Jamie was being sarcastic. He’s taken a lot of heat for pointing out the obvious to those who prefer a rosier tint when observing Apple’s recent activities. So, in the effort to keep his comments sharp, like a good cheddar, he hid the sarcasm – maybe a little too well. But still enjoyable, nonetheless.
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The irony.
Apple’s famous 1984 ad was a slam against those who walk in lock-step – while covered in dust and sitting on hard benches.
Remember the voice on the screen?“Today, we celebrate the first glorious rewrite of Apple’s flagship.
We have created, for the first time in all history, an editor of pure ideology.
Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing timelines.
Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any gathering of broadcast editors on Earth.
We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause, one project . . . and . . . for many of you . . . one client.
Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion . . .
as long as I prevail!”
Too bad the girl with the hammer isn’t wearing an Avid or Adobe logo on her shirt.
Or it could just be blank, to show how free her mind really is.🙂
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Heh, heh. OK. This is a joke . . .
but can you imagine a future where we all have Avid and Premiere tags on our business cards and websites, Avids in view of the main walkways, Premiere on display near our entrances . . .
but in the darkened rooms, in the back, where the clients never go . . . a small coven of editors in dark capes are still churning out product using FCP 7.
Running on Hackintoshes, though, just to get even.PS. Yes, coven. ‘Cause editing is magic . . . just wanted to clear that up :p
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NP 🙂
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[Jamie Franklin] “And I will take exception to this playground mentality until it ends. I will agree that the customization that 7 offered may have spoiled us, but at the same time, it’s no less legitimate to suggest losing that is a step backwards for many here. Including myself.
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Heh heh. This does remind me a lot of politics. There is one side, in particular, that loves to accuse the other side of being driven by fear, and essentially just being emotional and stupid.
Ironically, the act of calling your opponents fearful of change, is in itself so simplistic, I can’t imagine a single collection of technophilic professionals falling into that category. Methinks there is an emotionally driven contingent in this discussion, but they aren’t writing with your clarity or logic. 🙂 -
OK, quick answers.
Then I’ll let it go.
In my experience, those who resist change are those who have already invested a significant amount of money and are merely hoping to maintain whatever niche they have developed. It’s usually financial. If FCP X would allow a few basic things, it would be a song on everyone’s tongue.
That Apple left those features out, and didn’t even leak that those deficits would be there, makes Apple look manipulative, and insecure.
In my experience, editors, as employees anyway, have always been the ones looking around the corner, looking for what’s new and exciting. At least that’s been my experience.
When FCP was released, there was no way to get Premiere to digitize with any frame accuracy – even through firewire, without buying an additional $500 plugin – which I can’t remember the name of, but it was unreliable and prone to crashing. Fast forward 6 years, I try Premiere again, and again discover it to be too unreliable and prone to make simple things difficult – especially with compositing – although I did use it for a year as an uncompressed video system. Very very difficult to work with, and after a year, went back to FCP. So it wasn’t, in my opinion, just “talk” that kept the adventurous editors from endorsing Premiere as quickly as they did FCP.
My comments on “professional” are out of frustration that it is such an all-encompassing word (one who makes a penny from efforts rendered – if you will) that it’s hard to specify the source of angst when describing the short comings of “professional” software. By those loose terms, any software is possibly pro, and if anyone is making a penny off it, the rest should sit quietly and go about their business as before. I chose to narrow it down to where the bulk of the money is, where the most investment has been, and ask why those needs have not been addressed- except through Apple shills, who I don’t trust at this point.
You say broadcast is dying. I say paid content will always require work and certain standards and certain workflows. Even product released straight to DVD has to be scoped for consistency and quality for the end user’s experience. FCP X doesn’t allow that, but it’s “awesome.”
But I think the big twist in expectations centers on your opinion that this is not an update to FCP, although it bares the same name. Instead, it’s a brand new product, designed to eventually replace the old FCP.
And that’s where the frustration really builds. If FCP 7 has been dead for the last 2 years, and this is a new beginning, then the whole upgrade train has been broken for 2 years. Of course FCP 7 will continue to work. And of course FCP X will eventually be useful in a broadcast environment – assuming Apple wants to eventually take it there.
Had we known, 2 years ago, well we wouldn’t have held on this long. So we’re caught with our pants down, because it’s never about now for us. It’s always about the future. And if this is Apple’s idea of “awesome” then why wait to find out what else is “awesome.”
Perhaps it’s just as well. It did kick Adobe to work at giving us compatibility. And Avid is already supporting AJA hardware, so maybe Apple’s 2 year bluff paid off for us – in that it pushed the competition harder.
If I were them, I’d be grinning ear to ear. Talk about snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.
From your bird comment, I could construe that you feel yourself to be quite superior to those of use disgusted by Apple’s move. From calling us fear-driven and xenophobic, I’m surprised you didn’t use the tried and true dinosaur insult too.
Well, enjoy yourself. -
When I hear a point of view derided as a form of xenophobia, or a whole profession lumped together, as in “It’s change editors fear,” I feel like I’m listening to the commercials we all have to endure just before election season. Quick little quips, painting with broad brushes, to make the speaker seem smarter than everyone else, while at the same time bringing to many people’s attention, that no issue can be so easily swept away with the now over-used “fear” tangent of lazy communication.
If editors fear change, then how ironic they choose a profession where every day, the goal is to communicate an idea in a brand new way. How ironic that those who fear change would work hard at avoiding the cliché, at resisting the temptation to be drole and boring in an effort to save time, while working tirelessly through production after production. Hmm. Politicians? Yes. Editors? You have me gasping in disbelief.
Sure, there have always been those who taunt new technology as it strains to make an entrance into a world that requires confidence to generate money. But this is not a case of questioning new tech. It’s a question of confusing new tech with bare bones functionality. An upgraded airplane with a powerful motor cannot be celebrated if it is missing its wings. When Final Cut was introduced at version 1, it offered frame accurate digitizing and lay-off to tape for a fraction of what an Avid cost. Yes, with a $250 converter and an asb to serial cable, I could even get it to digitize from my BetaSP, and view footage over a scope! So, inferior or not, there was a benefit that was unmistakeable. And many of the “fear-laden editors” jumped for it. How else did it get to be such a success? You could do broadcast work with it and it had potential!
Which brings up another point. If editors live in fear, why are so many willing to take risks on new tech? The migration from Avid to FCP demonstrates that.
Also, why has it taken so long for Premiere to gain traction? Because those same editors, who I would characterize as forward-thinking technophiles also have standards that must be met in order to survive. So they don’t just jump for anything. It does have to have its merits in the broadcast world.
So maybe broadcast is a cleaner way to define why FCP X is disappointing. Maybe you’re confused by the use of the word “professional.” You do understand, most people don’t organize their businesses around the dictionary. We don’t care what “professional” means in a white room with pointy-headed faculty room types sitting around discussing their next thesis. What we mean, in a street sense, by professional, is that arena that generates the most money and offers the greatest opportunity for the greatest number of people. And like it or not, that arena is broadcast. It’s where reputations are made, it’s where the most clients with money reside, and it usually aways requires a somewhat seasoned skill-set to maintain a connection with that brand of production.
So if “professional” is a stumbling block for you, then swap it out for “broadcast” and maybe you’ll begin to understand the source of frustration (not fear – omg).
Some compare this to Ford’s comments on not wanting to build faster horses. I think that’s false. It’s as if Ford was building cars, but with no place to sit, and no way to see, while reminding everyone of their independence from hay (32-bit) and freedom from cleaning up manure (background rendering).
If you want to compare this to past tech, compare it to the Apple Cube, or Apple’s obsession with motorolla processors, or the Newton. Not all that’s new and shiny is all that carefully thought out.
So, until this tool, that cannot meet mission-critical requirements for any form of broadcast, gets its act together, it cannot be touted as a successor to a previous version.
And since it’s introduction spells the end of FCP7 – in sales and support, many of us are faced with having to get a new understanding of how our future hardware and software purchases will fit.
Your use of the word fear is so degrading, reducing us to mere animals reacting to primal instincts. The funny thing is that in studying animals of varying intelligence, we find the dumbest ones are the ones that walk up to a cliff, watch the pebbles falling off, and then fearlessly walk off. -
OK. I was grouchy. Thought you were promoting the idea that FCP X sins can be forgiven simply by exporting quicktimes, heh, heh.
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Usually game changers take something that was weak, or didn’t really belong in a particular field, and make it strong enough to compete with products considered to be far superior. And they do this by adding unexpected functionality. Apple has taken something that was quite successful – market share wise – and made it weaker, removed essential functionality, and revealed their own ignorance by calling it “awesome.”
By calling it an upgrade and referring to it as awesome, they have demonstrated ignorance about how essential it is that edit systems be capable of sharing projects – if not with other edit systems, then at least with previous versions of the same system. They are ignorant about how we evaluate our color work. They are ignorant about the importance of being able to share files – or referenced files/clips – within an environment where more than one person and more than one program is involved in perfecting a story.
When they called it “awesome,” what they really meant was “We have no clue, but someone somewhere in a basement is going to have a very easy time putting stories together that he can post on Vimeo.”
So it is a game changer in that the topic of the emperor’s clothes has been re-ignited . . . and apparently Apple isn’t wearing any.
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That’s nice. You see, you have a job laying files out to tape. Good for you.
How about if a client comes in and asks you to edit. For broadcast. And it involves footage shot over several days. From 2 different cameras? Now, you won’t need multi-cam – but how are you going to color-correct? And what if some of his audio needs cleaning up. Not all of it – just say half. And up till now you’ve relied on Waves Noise-X filters in Logic or ProTools to give you the best results. What are you going to do? And let’s say that some of the footage needs a little roto work, and since it was shot at 24P, you’d like to work with those particular cuts in their native format – but not the entire clip – just the length of the cut. What are you going to do? Or are you going to give him a chair and ask him to do it himself, after which you’ll export the file and send it to tape?
I guess it works if the client doesn’t care that you can’t use a vectorscope and waveform monitor with it. I guess it’s OK if the client doesn’t mind you jumping through hoops exporting every single clip that needs special treatment outside the FCPX universe (which is very small). I guess it works if you’re satisfied that everything you do within FCPX must then be limited to FCPX, since there’s no way to get the project out to another non-FCPX edit system.
So why are you satisfied with this? You do realize that the longer you wait for Apple to get its act together, the more time your competitors move further ahead of you. Not the competitors that don’t know what a broadcast monitor is for. The other ones -that make the big bucks.