James Culbertson
Forum Replies Created
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I’d say most of the folks I work around are still using FCP7 with a fairly even split of Premiere and FCPX otherwise. I would tend toward picking the best editor and motion graphics app independently of each other. For my professional needs that is FCPX and After Effects currently. Definitely you should settle on Cinema 4D for more editing/motion graphics friendly 3D needs. I am just starting to teach FCPX, After Effects, and Cinema 4D at a local high school part time. FCPX in particular is an amazing teaching tool. I’ve taught FCP legacy and Premiere in the past, but FCPX practically teaches itself… I’ve not yet quite figured out why it is so intuitive to today’s students. The day I was to begin teaching FCPX my projector went on the blink so I had to go around the room and work with each team of 4 students individually. All I had to do was point out where to access the import window and how to create a project timeline and they were doing basic editing without any further input from me. Some of them have subsequently gone on to try out Premiere CC and FCP7 so FCPX is a good intro tool even if you eventually want to take them to other editing tools.
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I guess I still don’t get it. I’ve always had to purchase lots of peripherals just like I have had lots of cables going this way and that. Remember when all our SCSI peripherals became obsolete? Graphics cards, RAM, hard drives all become obsolete within 5 years or so. What about going from OS9 to OS10 and having to purchase upgrades for all our software. PowerPC to Intel… and so on.
Every 5 years or so there is a new generation of hardware or OS that necessitates reving our entire working platform.
Things are very cheap compared to what they used to cost. I remember my first Philips CD Burner cost $2000. Now I can buy a Pioneer BluRay/DVD/CS burner for $200 or or less.
If someone in this business cannot afford to spend $10,000 in computer/peripheral costs every 3 years or so they probably need to get some business advice or move to another career.
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And to take it farther how did all you cable challenged pros deal with all the plethora of audio and video cables we used to have going every which way. I still have a lot of that snaking around.
And clients are constantly bringing in hard drives withe content to copy or use. Lately, I’ve been working off of daisy chained FW800 portable drives in FCPX because I don’t have time to copy the content over to my dedicated array.
Anyone who is all that concerned about cabling is probably in the wrong profession.
As far as I can see I will have less base cabling with the new MacPro and Thunderbolt peripherals. So it isn’t the case that all pros will have more cabling.
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[Herb Sevush] “If the price is right it could appeal to more customers overall at the cost of losing some of the high end workstation users, which seems to be in line with Apple’s overall strategy.”
Do you mean losing high end workstation users who are fixated on cables? 😉
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Cables never left. How many here have more cables plugged into your older MacPro than the setup on the right of that picture? I certainly do.
By my calculations I will have fewer cables with the new MacPro.
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I use After Effects extensively and I love FCPX. Just drag the AE file to the event icon, use a label like .gfx.mov with smart collection. Use Replace key command, or audition if necessary. Takes a few seconds to update.
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[Ryan Walker] “I then switched back from proxy to optimized and the beach ball showed up. It’s been on my screen for about 25 minutes.”
I’ve seen this happen when I try to switch from proxy back to full rez and it seems to be related to trying to close the preferences dialog before the proxy to full rez update is fully done.
See if waiting for a bit before closing the preference pane allows you to proceed.
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[Mathieu Ghekiere] “No, at this point it is not possible to select multiple clips and let FCPX sync them all at once.”
Not true. I just did a test of two different (two camera) multicam shoots on the same day. It synced them up perfectly in about a minute. And there was no continuous audio. It used the clips time stamp to make temporally accurate spaces between gaps and between the two presentations.
Seems like you could then just dupe the resulting multicam and delete footage to get separate/independent multicam clips from the master multicam.
In any case, make sure the Camera Angle is properly labeled and give it a test.
I just did a second kitchen sink test where I selected everything shot by the two cameras that day including product, crowd, and scenic shots from earlier and later than the two presentations. And not only was everything synced up perfectly where relevant, the other shots were placed accurately in time creating a timeline for the day. Not sure why you would want to do this but an interesting experiment never the less.
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I’m rendering something in FCP7 at the moment so I can’t remember the precise terminology. But in the FCPX event you need to make sure all clips ReelID or CameraID (can’t remember the precise event column names) are labeled uniquely, like “zoom audio,” cam1, cam2, etc. Then just select all the multicam clips in the event and do a make multicam.
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As one example, I received a two camera shoot of an hour long presentation shot with DSLRs. The main camera operator screwed up the zoom recording so we had no continuous master audio. There were 7 camera A shots and 16 camera B shots. I labeled the two cameras ReelIDs uniquely, then did a default make multicam, and the clips all synced up perfectly after about a minute using audio waveforms, and leaving temporally accurate gaps where the Camera A operator had to pause the camera (assuming no camera b overlap).