[Herb Sevush]

[Andrew Kimery] ” I would have to add “Droidmaker: George Lucas And the Digital Revolution” to the ‘must read’ list.”

Great book, a great look at the history of digital film making. And you’ll learn why HAL was singing “Daisy, Daisy” in Kubrick’s 2001.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “I got skimming six years ago. A year or two back, it showed up in Premiere Pro.”

No matter how many times you say this, it still remains factually incorrect. Skimming was in Ppro by April of 2012, within a year of the X release, because it was being worked on concurrently. X got there first, but influenced nothing.

[Bill Davis] “I got a robust “proxy workflow with a click” in X ALSO six years ago”

Proxy workflows go back decades. Every time a new format (now 4K) shows up, with it’s heavy i/o demands, proxy workflows come back. Then disk speeds and capacity catches up, and proxy workflows die. Apple has influenced nothing in this realm since it predates the original FCP, let alone FCPX.

And I’ll get back to the main point. Nobody at the time of it’s release said – Wow, revolutionary, FCPX has proxy workflows, let’s throw everything out and start all over because this is something great.

The things that made X innovative were the magnetic timeline, roles, keyword ranges, & auditions. You’ve posted about how keywording has changed your editing life for the better, we get constant postings about how the magnetic timeline speeds up editing, Charlie Austin posts about how roles have dramatically improved his versioning requirements – these were the innovative tools unique to X at the time of release and are still unavailable in any other NLE to this day. FCPX made it’s statement and the rest of “the industry” has ignored it, at least up to this time. That isn’t a value judgement by the way, it is just a factual description.

[Bill Davis] “So I’m probably just over projecting, foolishly. Never mind.”

Bill you have, by your own admission, zero experience or interest in NLEs that don’t start with the letters FCP. You’re entitled to your opinion, but they are based on a singularly narrow viewpoint. You are the proverbial blind man describing an elephant after touching his tail.

[Bill Davis] “Even with Lumberjack, I might not have full and complete access to something I’ve left on their website as to an on-going “in progress” edit – but EVERYTHING on my X timeline that results from the rental continues to function perfectly with no further payment.”

And now we are splitting hairs. I don’t like subscriptions, I avoid them whenever I can. When I can’t, I use them. Either you own something or you don’t. If I drop my PPro subscription I still have every piece of media I have ever created with it, I have the timelines and projects that I can open on someone else’s system, I have whatever XMLs I decided to export. Just like with Lumberjack what I don’t have is the ability to use it right now. Which I can get back on a monthly basis whenever I pay up.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “I’d ask, can you move an “industry” forward, if the concepts you are promoting don’t actually spread across the industry?”

What exactly has “spread across the industry” from FCPX?

Hoover scrub? As has been pointed out X might have the best implementation but not the first. PPro had it within a year of FCPX’s release, which gives credence to the notion that they were working on it simultaneously.

Magnetic Timeline? Auditions? Roles? Keyword Ranges? – They are innovative, but they are as unique to X after 6 years as dynamic link is to Adobe.

So how has X “advanced the industry” to use your definition?

As for subscriptions – It doesn’t seem to bother you that Lumberjack is subscription only, so why single out Adobe in this matter?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Shawn Miller] “Lastly, everything you’re saying about PPro CS5 could be said about Motion today… does that mean it’s not a good or useful application?”

The statement under scrutiny is that Ppro5 was a better editing AP than FCP7. Nobody is arguing that Ppro was useless, just that an unqualified “better” does not accurately describe it in comparison to FCP7.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[andy patterson] “For the record even Premiere Pro CS 4.0 could edit AVCHD natively with a Core 2 Quad. “

So what. PPro 4 was a horrid piece of software. It didn’t begin to compete with FCP till version 6, which was still about a mile behind. It wasn’t until the CC versions began that a broadcast editor could begin to work with Ppro without pulling their hair out. I say that as someone who started working with Ppro ver1. The fact that it could handle a couple of codec’s natively that FCP7 couldn’t in no way justifies this sentence of yours :

“Premiere Pro CS 5.0 was much better than FCP 7 as well.”

Only true if the entirety of your workflow was ingesting and exporting AVCHD. If you had to do any actual, you know, editing, that statement is absurd.

Currently I work with Ppro CC and I’m quite happy with it, but lets leave the hyperbole out of this discussion.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[David Roth Weiss] “even if the renders were actually ten times faster, would that boost an editor’s productivity by 10X?”

I spend 1.5 weeks working on an episode before I export my first rough cut, so speeding up the render would barely affect me at all, especially since I output ProRes and then let AME handle any h264 I need in the background (it’s actually handled automatically by a second system networked to the first and using a watchfolder.) Since my deliverables are ProRes, and I’m’ guessing this whole Quick-sync thing is only for h264, it would have little effect on my workflow.

But if your deliverables are h264 and you can speed up the process by a factor of 10, then that’s impressive. It’s even impressive if you can ramp up the speed by a factor of 3.5.

It does show the advantage of having the OS tuned for the NLE, but again it’s Apple’s vision of the future – cutting video on a laptop, tune everything for Youtube, appeal to the audience watching video on their iPhone. Nothing in that description applies to what I do.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

Bill –

I’m looking at the graph and I’ve looked at the video and I still don’t see the 10X you mentioned. The Dell rendered the short file in 18:51, the 2016 MBP rendered it in 5:13 – that’s 3.5X better. The FCPX render doesn’t matter because it was using different settings and is not a comparable item. 3.5X faster is a major wow, but I don’t see how you get 10X out of those numbers. Unless your talking about X being 10X better than Adobe on a MBP, which of course begs the question, why would anyone bother to do that? Adobe is infinitely better than X on a Dell, since X is single system only, so maybe you can throw that onto your graph as well. Still 3.5X faster is a major wow.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “When Phil and Greg formed Lumberjack systems to leverage that exposure, they worked with both FCP X and Premiere Pro implementations.”

I have used some of Phil’s utilities in the past, they’ve always been great. When I went to the website it looks like Lumberjack is only for FCPX – I take it the Premiere implementation didn’t work out?

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bill Davis] “And X workflows can’t be this fast, because – (long pause) well it just because.”

Nice article, especially since the workflow is so similar to mine, as is the town it was shot in. The Quiz show format is a simpler version of the cooking shows I do, with the same multicam concerns and the 26:46 PBS spec for finished shows.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

I don’t see this as generational, but as individual.

I had a potential client in the 80’s that used me (I slowly figured out) to fill out their bid sheet – they knew who they wanted but they had to get 3 bids anyway. I was one of the 2 idiots who thought they were making a real bid on a large project, but we were just padding. Everything was nice and cozy till I delivered the written detailed bid and then I never heard back from them, ever, no matter how many calls I made. 5 years later I had totally forgotten this experience when I get a call from another corporate client wanting a bid, and after meeting with them something struck me as familiar with some of the people I spoke to even though I had never worked for this particular company. It was only after getting the same treatment that I realized these were simply the same people with a new name, and sure enough I never heard from them after the bid. Finally a few years later they called me a third time, and this time I turned it down, but gave them a lead on a competitor I really disliked, figuring for me that was a win-win situation.

Some folks don’t get back to you with bad news, some folks do. I haven’t noticed a particular trend either way with this over the years, but maybe I’ve been lucky.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf