[James Sullivan]

Wishful thinking indeed! But they could still do it, so for now I am going to continue to believe they can make me happy again. I just worry their pushing into commisioning content is going to distract them from making hardware that lasts for more than ten years.

I dont want to watch your shows, I want to make them using your ecosystem.

James

Also let me plug an ipad pro into a mirorless dslr and show me what the camera sees and make me really happy! (Terradek does not count as it is more stuff to strap on and power)

[James Sullivan]

I am still waiting to see the next tower. I am one of the very stuborn holdouts who is hoping to leapfrog all of thunderbolt one and two, and the doorstop that trashcans now represent, and come out swinging with only having to buy USBc compatible kit to make it through the next ten years of post.

I cannot justify 13,000 on a computer that cannot be repaired easily and is attatched to it’s monitor. I also cannot justify maxing out a 2017 macbook pro no matter how much I want to have two terabytes inside the machine. Two generations in I still do not see anybody using the touchbar in neat useful ways. Because Apple went for small I am tempted to buy the 13inch maxed out but they still dont have enough full bandwidth ports to make that a wise decision either and make for a productive dongle life at the same time.

I am very much a small time owner operator and cannot just invent cash flow that would let me hand Apple that amount of money that quickly. (I should mention I am not good at the business side of running my business so chalk this line of hate up to having to do twenty jobs instead of just creating moving images.)

Now that Ives is done building buildings I hope we can see the next generation of laptops and towers that reflect a more “professional” upgrade and maintainence path that will keep people like me stay in the game. I am still on a cheesegrater and god if I could swap out to the latest kit(CPU and GPUness) and be on MacOs would that not be wonderful? Or even run some threadripperness just to keep Intel on its toes. Would that help keep the competiton happening and consumers seeing some benefit on the price end of things?

All wishful thinking on my part but as I am part of the team who uses these tools to make my living instead of create them from scratch I want to communicate what it is that would work for me and hope others feel the same way.

I feel like we have made so many improvements over all to workflows in general but it is still like hearding cats to try and get both software and hardware to play nice and make things orders of magnitude easier. Am I happy I do not have to own and maintain a HDCAM SR deck? Yes! Do I want to edit on a 15inch screen all day? NO! (bring back a 17inch laptop and take my money!!!)

just venting to peers and looking foward to other’s responses and their own reading of the tea leaves,

James

PS I am glad they put 10gb ethernet in that puppy. I hope that trend continues as fiber is still stupid expensive and fragile to run on a small scale still.

[James Sullivan]

Just to clarify my current round of criticism of FCPX UI. I was targeting the color board and how color correction works inside the application. I agree that the recent overhaul of the application as a whole was nice and shows some degree of making things better.

However, now that I have to apply color correction as an effect, then start tweaking means I am mousing more than I was before. having a color effect already on the clips by default was saving having to do that for every single clip which was nice. They fixed being able to change the order in which effects are applied(nice) but now I have to add an effect to start working.

There is more navigating around the color board as it is currently working then having everything lined up inside the lumetri panel. all of that time spent getting to the right tab lets your eyes adapt and undermines your ability to actually color correct effectively. (which is somewhat self defeating as that was what the we were trying to do in the first place)

The color board makes sense if you are on a tiny laptop screen sitting at a cafe but is poorly designed for grading day in and day out in a full blown grading session. I know that those are two ends of the spectrum but if one is going to stay within the app that is your current limitation that could be further improved with some more love by the development team and not crammed in from the wonderful people who make the plugins we all enjoy using. Rearrange it so that panel makers have the hooks they need to be able to manipulate more then one parameter at a time and then you have the speed ones needs to really grade. Then we can start fighting over how roles and grade managment will interact.

I want the tool to be better than it is. FCPX has come a long way and I still argue it has a long way to go before it will be on top again.

[James Sullivan]

I wish they would at the bare minimum increase the travel you need to affect color. I use a Wacom and if you blink or twitch the color board lets you make everything ugly very quickly.

I was in Priemiere the other day and was so happy with the sliders and general flow of the lumetri panel. It was very natural to have a stylus and just flip back and forth on each slider for just exposure and balancing of already pretty good footage.

FCPX is a freaking nightmare of mousing and switching between tabs. Now that you can have the inspector run the whole length of the screen they need to fix everything about how color correction happens. And No the touch bar is not the answer. (Please work with Tangent and kick BM where it hurts.)

I am still waiting for Resolve to let me map things to the panel I can afford. (Sold my elements before the new panels came out as I now understand they will never let that happen) The new BM panels are dead on arrival to me as they only work the Resolve.

James

[James Sullivan]

As long as the same crew shows up to drop some wisdom I will be happy. This is still the only forum that has the right balance of love and hate for the tools we use everyday.

James

[James Sullivan]

Thanks for the Lumafusion info and for listening to my ramblings. I looked into it already hence my pie in the sky dreams of having everything come with that honeycrisp polish we all enjoy. I can wait. I remember popping tapes in and out of decks that cost more than a car not too many years ago. I am so glad I missed linear editing everyday I get up and go to work. I feel bad for the first round of Avid owners though. That still has to hurt a little bit.

I am so close to having a camera system that will be small enough for me to use and shoot with that will all make it into one bag! It won’t look as good as an Amira but who can afford to drop any of the lenses that make that puppy sing in the first place.

life is good,

James

[James Sullivan]

I agree with all of your comments and thanks for clarifying what “in app add-on’s” could and would be.

I keep wanting to talk “with” instead of “at” the engineer’s who make the software I use to get paid so I can eat. Apple are still the only people who can design an NLE from the OS on up and I am very curious to see what the modular Macpro is going to be. (Not the unibody jam as it is too expensive for me to buy in one go) And just so we are clear of how far behind I am.

I just made the leap to Sierra last week on my cheese grater and can now have projects live on my storage thanks to Samba. I also just bought a TB of SSD for a cache and slid it right in. Years after I bought the tower off of Craig’s list. Is continuing to add things to a now 7 year old computer so insane an idea? Also hugs to everyone at Nvida for making drivers that let me use a cubix with stupid cheap graphics cards to try and render real looking things in 3D.

I just thought of the add on I would pay for.

1) Let me pull selects and tag on my IPad Pro via XML and TINY proxies that X made when I injested footage and synced via USBc cable so I don’t need the Internet to do it.

2) Even better, let an IPad pro be a shogun or sync to a shogun so again with the tagging and selecting while XMLing back to the full res when everything makes it onto proper storage and backed up to LTO. All while being able to lie down and with fingers instead of clicks.

3) Let me also dump a card onto said IPad Pro and have it make tiny proxies that would XML and reconnect to the same card injested on the big hardware when back at the office. Leverage the entire apple ecosystem and put Nexto out of business. (no offense)

(I want the iPad to break on the way back from shooting not the $8000 MacBook Pro with only 16gbs of ram and less buttons.)

in between gigs, feeling the heat, and composed on an iPad laying on my back,

James

[James Sullivan]

Just to get this out of the way. Yes! I will give you $50 if I can have some proper video lanes. (cough)

My only worry would be if I was working on somebody else’s system and they had installed all kinds of trinkets that make the whole NLE unstable and or sequences break when they switch system’s. Once an editor gets transition happy there is no going back.

But if somebody were to figure out how to add tabs or let us really modify the look and feel of the interface(make the UI text stupid big for example) I would fork over cash. All of the stuff I want through is really stuff that Apple should add though.

And just to argue with myself, I actually like how simple Final Cut X is. I just wish that I could pancake and I would be very very happy. That and the color corrector has got to be thrown out.

What add on’s where you thinking of? What would you want to buy from within the app itself? Wouldn’t the Apple ID that is associated with the install complicate things for houses bigger than 5?

fight,
James

[James Sullivan]

What I got wrong in that conclusion was the same mistake nearly everyone in technology makes: I assumed that, money being equal, having it all – or, more accurately, more than I needed – was inherently better than having less.

For me this is the takeaway from the article Oliver linked to. I always over engineer things where in reality I did not need to. Just because you have access to an Alchemist does not mean that running crappy Youtube Gopro footage through it is going to help kind of thing. Drop that clip into your timeline and double the size and call it a day. When FCP X came out though it was shown to a room full of complicated workflows that could not immediately jump on board. People got spooked and now we have a documentary about it.

I like that I can shoot stills on the device I have on me, (iPhone) and the quality will be good enough to hack out some graphics with. I like that the new Mac Pro laptop is freaking tiny and light weight, but if that were my only system it would be too clunky to work at for 12 hours straight without building it out with a monitor, full keyboard, tablet etc.

So to Olivers question, I think that Apple has done a great deal to simply things and has given more people access to being able to create stuff to the point that civilians don’t know how good they have it. (Remember DV!) I just hope they keep listening to us and keep some of the important complicated bits so that when you need to reach for that tool you can without bending over backwards. I still believe that as nice as Davinci Resolve has become it is still not an AVID DS or FLAME for that matter. Having separate applications that do what they do well lets the human pick and choose. It keeps things flexible and of course requires knowing more to be able to manage such a dance. As long as I can get out of Final Cut when I need to I will keep using it. Photoshop is overkill for cropping an image but you still need it for everything else kind of thing.

Another way of saying it would be keep Fusion out of Resolve, or After Effects out of Premiere. NLE’s need to be able to playback footage not be linking to a file that the second the NLE touches it, your system dies and instability keeps you from actually doing stuff.

Keep it simple, but I still want it all.

[James Sullivan]

Oliver,

I tried bringing in 4K from a Sony F5 on my ancient 17″ laptop and it had to copy and manage the media whereas at work where we have trash cans they just let everything sit where it is.

I also was forced to copy avchd footage for another project. Because the audio and video were separate for that camera FCPX forces the copy as I guess it has to wrap everything together for it to behave well for editing. I then went out and got Editready and made prores and ingested that instead.

I love that FCPX is up to date on all the new formats and wierd camera card folder structures as getting footage into Legacy was getting to be a major pain.

James