[John Davidson]

Holy crap they STILL remove old applications by default. Considering that even this pas week I had to downgrade a project to 2014 just so I could work without crashing, this is insanity.

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

[John Davidson]

Maybe that’s a good thing?

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

[John Davidson]

Oliver, does the ProRes Quicktime export from FCPX match what you see on the screen? And is the video the same in your experience with Premiere and Avid as well compared to what they actually export?

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

[John Davidson]

Probably the most accurate representation of how FCPX is designed to show video would be through the latest iMac screen. I don’t have the most recent 5k iMac, but I believe it’s a wide gamut display. I don’t know if wide gamut has an effect on the image you see in playback, but perhaps it does.

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

[John Davidson]

Are you doing this test on 5k iMacs?

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

[John Davidson]

Here are some of the parameters you can set. Transfer file means uploading via FTP.

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

[John Davidson]

Hah, I was hungry and typing fast. You can have automatic workflows – similar to automator actions – that can be triggered when files are added to specific projects or with a right click. Like ‘Create Proxy media’, etc.

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

[John Davidson]

KeyFlow is called a MAM but I feel that is misleading. Basically, it’s a database of media and media locations with a lot of functions built-in.

If you have a lot of old hard drives or archive drives that you don’t want to always have connected, KeyFlow will add those files to it’s ‘library’, create mp4 or H264 previews of every file you want a preview for, and then you can disconnect the drive and put it away. KeyFlow will let you ‘see’ the previews of your files and tell you where it’s lives.

You can add/edit/remove finder tags on the source files. Drag/drop into FCPX, Premiere, AE, etc. OR – export XML’s of groups of files for FCPX or Premiere.

You can annotate all video files. This means adding markers, keyword ranges, etc. We add markers for dialogue transcriptions of shoots, and then keyword range those SOTS later to limit our imported keywords to things like ‘SOT PAUL, SOT TALENT, etc’. You send the annotated files to FCPX and they all import as markers and keyword ranges.

You can send fcpxml files to KeyFlow with or without media that you’ve added Metadata to in FCPX. I didn’t even know about that until last week. This doesn’t include added keyword ranges or markers. I’m not sure how much function it adds at this point, but they know it needs to add more capabilities.

You can build watch folders to auto-import files into projects or groups within the app, and assign a storage location for that media to get moved to.

You can import files inside the library, leave them where you have them, or have them copied somewhere else on import.

You can share this library with anyone on a local network easily.

Networked users can connect and edit the metadata of your library. Annotations, markers, tags, rename, etc.

With a little clever port forwarding you can also share your library over the internet. This is more limited to the speed of your internet. Users can play and do everything that local users do – except they aren’t directly connected to your server that stores the media. They will play the preview files if you have those created. They CAN however download high res originals.
This is something that still needs to be worked out, but I stumbled across it the day after my presentation and wish I had found it early.

Right now, preview files can’t be used for offline/relinking in FCPX. This is being worked on.

You can build lots of workflows to auto tag media with specific names on import.

Lots of features are being worked on and many current ones are being refined. I met them at NAB and the whole team actually came to the office in LA after NAB.
They’re super nice and very eager to work out solutions.

End of the day – this app has so much potential. The implementation of remote users editing the server in the recent 1.5 release is absolutely the best thing to happen to the app. It’s opened up a huge window for bigger functions later on.

There are things that do still need work. Relinking has a confusing UI, menu structures need to be revisited, UI dialogues are a little confusing at times (this is being fixed) – basically everything every 1.* app encounters as it grows up.

That help?

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

[John Davidson]

[Brett Sherman] “At the moment I’m considering Keyflow Pro since it does seem to work with Finder level tags. And it would allow me to search across projects. One rule for me is not being reliant on any one application because in 20 years it’s likely that application will not exist anymore.”

Brett, as kind of an unofficial PR guy for them, I think you’re on the right track. I’ve been working really closely with KeyFlow Pro’s developers. There are bigger things in development for the app, but also improvements for many other functions, like how they handle metadata. Right now, metadata added to files in FCPX can actually be imported into KeyFlow Pro using the FCPX Agent app. This is pretty limited – but full metadata back and forth with FCPX is planned.

Personally speaking, it’s a more user friendly app for novices. I had our office manager log with in/out and keyword ranges every SOT for about 8 hours of footage we’re working with this month. There’s something amazing about that living outside of the NLE forever. In terms of being reliant on a single app, I’ve expressed the importance of KeyFlow being able to export all data that users put into it in CSV or similar format. I believe this will happen within the year.

By the way, the KeyFlow Pro NAB sale is back online until midnight tonight for $199 because a lot of folks were traveling back from NAB and didn’t get the discount.

I wouldn’t expect to see this price again for a while.

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

[John Davidson]

This happened back in 2013.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/71/863688

Try ProRes 4444 w alpha (if that’s why you’re using animation) instead. It was a pain to deal with back in 2013 but we converted everything here under the sun to ProRes. It took a week or two but life was much easier.

You can also view these things in Compressor if needed. Not great but it’s bearable.

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