[John Davidson]

Hah! No way! But I will say this – Apple’s going to want Lion to be the big news after WWDC on June 7 or 8. Considering FCPX will be a smaller headline, I’d say that increases the odds of FCPX release before WWDC.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

It’s entirely possible for FCPX to be released on Wednesday. How would that be for a preview?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Apple has iMovie for that mass audience you speak of. If Apple didn’t care about the opinions of pro users, they wouldn’t have shown it at the FCP user meeting at NAB – which is a very unusual step for Apple since they ignore NAB. Logic and Aperture weren’t dumbed down with their 64bit updates, so it would be pretty off the wall to do the same with FCPX. Because Logic and Aperture are as advanced as they are – there’s no historical basis to make the dumbing down assumption. In fact, everyone is going to have to do lots of homework to learn FCPX, which I think at it’s core is what has so many people upset. There will be no Final Cut experts when June comes.

If Apple’s going to stick it to someone, it’s going to be by requiring Lion for the install – both of which are due in June (however, didn’t they say it was Snow Leopard compatible??). By the time 3rd party plugins/cards have been updated to work with both the Lion OS and FCPX, most of the bigger kinks will be patched up with FCPX by Apple. If some miracle occurs and AJA cards work out of the gate, it will mean Apple has worked with 3rd parties on the development of FCPX – once again proving they’re not done with pro users.

Nobody is going to switch to Premiere. That’s the equivalent of threatening to call your old high school girlfriend when you fight with your wife. Premiere may do all these fun things, but as soon as your best client asks for you to dig out an archived FCP project in ProRes and make a revision, you’ll be back. And oh yeah, CS5.5 broke the AJA drivers, so I guess Adobe doesn’t care about pro users either.

And I really hate the term ‘High End’ – it implies that the speaker spends too much time on the ‘low end’.

I think I’m gonna have to get off this forum for a while. It’s like everyone’s got hysterical PTSD from a war that ain’t even happened yet.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I’m guessing there will be an AAF OMF file option like Logic does it as well as a traditional OMF. The locked tracks are probably going to be an option, too.
If you have Logic, go into that and look around a bit. It’s probably the best indicator as to what we can expect with FCPX as it’s the most advanced 64bit application outside of OSX that we can look at as an example of Apple’s thought process for new pro applications.

Last month we had a last minute mix that needed to be done and none of our OMF’s would work correctly out of FCPX in my mixer’s protools session. After about the 6th export, it occurred to me to try importing the FCP omf into Logic, and then exporting that as an AAF OMF. The referenced media was put into its own folder separate from the OMF file, kind of how FCP archived projects look in finder. The logic export worked perfectly and saved our collective butts.

While I don’t think Logic has a ‘lock tracks’ function in an OMF, our mixer was more than happy to have the OMF file with referenced media separate. In fact, he preferred it that way to begin with. I bet we can expect that same option in FCPX.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Without checking, it looks like paths have splines now like in AE. I’d put good money down that this is incorporated. And by good money, I mean somebody elses.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

For us, it’ll be more about how quickly 3rd party plugin makers adapt. Assuming Apple is kind enough to make older fxscript plugins work natively within the new system, we’ll be all over X right out of the gate. Our work demands lots of various transitions, so plugins are very important. The AJA/Blackmagic issues are less important, because we can always lay back qt’s to tape via FCP7.

For sure though, we’ll have one room fully FCPx’ed out on day one.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Wayne, I’m the biggest mac shill you’ll ever meet. I was mocking all the x bashers.

Bloody amazing that you responded point by point. I feel a little bad that you wasted your time doing that, but it does make it all much funnier now :).

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I like my editing nice and destructive, thank you very much!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Yep, you guys are right. I don’t know why I was thinking I had to get a router. I’m reading Bob’s article on setting up a machine room – which will come in handy when we upgrade our office space again. Any suggestions on which patch panel I should get that can handle rs422 (or Cat5 adapted rs422)?

For anyone who ever searches the forum and comes across this post, here’s the link to Bob Zelin’s article.
https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/building-a-professional-machine-room

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Our plan of attack will be to make it as much like FCP7 as possible initially with shortcuts, window setups, etc. If we’re really crunched, we’ll work with what we know best initially and then over time transition once we feel relatively confident about it. The basic concepts of editing don’t change, mostly we’ll all be dealing with navigating a new UI.

Hopefully things will work with AJA out of the gate so we won’t have to deal with hardware interface issues (knock on wood). We’ll be investing in new hardware at the same time, so we’ll already be in a ‘learning new things’ mindset.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.