[Herb Sevush]

Which works fine when building consumer oriented devices, but does not work fine when building specialized commercial software. Talk about someone using the wrong side of a hammer to hit a nail.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

“Apple software. Generally regarded as “top of the class.””

Lets see, Avid basically invented (along with EMC) the modern NLE, Adobe developed Premiere, Photoshop and Illustrator, and Apple has Keynote, who backstage people will tell you is better than Power Point, although it’s not remotely the category leader. Yes, I can clearly see how Apple is “generally” regarded as top of the class when it comes to application software.

PS

And Bill, if you’re going to quote Sandra Day O’Connor, you should spell her name right.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

I don’t loath Apple I admire them greatly. But just because a company is great at some things doesn’t mean it is great at all things.

Apple is great at the nexus of hardware and software – nobody is better at thinking about the future uses of computers and designing the operating systems that interface with users, with special emphasis on consumers, the type of users who don’t want to know how or why something works, who just want something that works.

However software applications are not any of the things I have described, and they are not something that Apple has ever been great at. Name one category leading App they have ever designed themselves – a word processor, spreadsheet, financial program, sound editor, image editor – anything. No Word, Excel, Quicken, Photoshop, Pro-Tools – no software that was not part of the operating system ever caused anyone to jump up and shout.

Actually, I mis-spoke, there was one category leader that only Apple sold, and that was Final Cut, a program created by Macromedia. I will give Apple credit for nurturing it and improving it and making a category leader out of it. But then of course you know what they did with it — they dumped it. As they have done with a room full of other software they bought and mismanaged to death.

So if I were to objectively look at Adobe, Apple and Avid and ask myself who has the best track record for creating innovative media software, Apple would be at the bottom of that list. And that’s just the facts.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

I agree with and understand everything you said, and I appreciate your taking the time to explain it. The only thing I will add is that something is better than nothing.

Apple has insisted on nothing at all, and whether or not a simple translator with many limitations would have cause them a lot of headaches, providing nothing at all is provoking a lot of anger.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Jeremy –

If I can interject here, I think what Gary is saying is that if you simply wanted to play down the FCPX timeline, without making any further edits, it wouldn’t matter how X incorporated it. The problems would all come if you tried to edit with the incorporated footage – at that point mistakes in interpretation would become evident, but if all you are trying to do is create a project containing the proper clips, and have those unedited clips play out the right way, most of these issues would not be crucial.

For someone familiar with X you’re probably thinking, yeah but why would you want to do that? The answer is it seems like it would be a good place to start.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Jeremy –

Assume in any of your scenarios that the translation guessed wrong, that what should have been a connected clip was put on the second storyline, or vice-versa. How hard would it be for the editor to manually fix things, now that the basic clip info was in the project? (that is a real, not rhetorical, question, I personally have no idea.)

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

“Effects plugins are a far bigger hurdle than the timeline itself”

Effects Plug-In rule #1:

Except for re-timing filters, no other filters or plug-ins will be translated.

Now it’s no longer a hurdle.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

“The reason “Hollywood” still loves Avid, is based on workflow”

Hollywood is actually one of the most conservative cultures around when it comes to editing. By the late 70’s everyone was using flatbed’s except for Hollywood, where old time editors were still marking cuts on uprights while their assistants were splicing away on rewinds. Avid had made a huge inroad everywhere else before Hollywood timidly got on the NLE bandwagon. For every Copola, Lucas and Murch there are dozens of experienced editors who can’t be bothered with “keeping up.” Since most technological advances are about ease of use and speed, these have very little relevance to the glacial pace of feature film editing.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Walter –

I’ll now propose a translation algorithm.

Video
FCP7 Track 1 = Main Storyline
Track 2 = Secondary Storyline
Track 3 = Connected Clip (this holds for all tracks above 2)

Audio
Any clip becomes connected to the first clip it is in sync with. I don’t know how to arrange the rest of the audio in a trackless universe, but perhaps some automatic metadata tagging, labeling clips for their original FCP7 tracks would be the answer.

It wouldn’t matter if the FCPX relationships were wrong, obviously the editor would have to go through it and re-assign relationships, all the X guru’s keep pointing out how easy and flexible it is. This way, however, all the data would come across. I don’t see why something like this couldn’t work? (then again I’m often described as being dumber than a stone.)

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Herb Sevush]

Life is thrilling enough without inviting some chaos in for a visit. That’s why I never understood thrill seekers — you want a thrill, go raise a kid, that’s enough adventure for a lifetime.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions