[John Davidson]

Cool cool. It ended up just being more cost effective to buy the plugin to take care of all future MXF conversions from that network by grabbing the Calibrated Software MXF plugin. Luckily/hopefully I won’t ever have to attempt that process you described :).

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

[John Davidson]

It was yesterday. The mac was a top speced 2013 iMac. First opening of this program seems to take quite a long time to get it to actually work as it initializes 15000 plugins or something like that. The initial opening of the application was also created on an 8 core new mac pro yesterday as well. I was opening it because I wanted to see if it was something I would like as I hadn’t messed with the CC version of Premiere yet.

I’m not saying that the timeline isn’t snappy or anything like that – it’s just destructive. There’s a fundamental shift in thinking towards working in the x timeline. When you get it, it’s not a big ‘AHA’ moment, it’s more like you just start trusting it to work as it does and forget to be pissed off about it. We are now almost 2 years into using exclusively. We’re fully entrenched – but that’s ok.

I probably shouldn’t mention that we’re mixing spots in Logic Pro X now, huh?

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

[John Davidson]

No really, they didn’t work. I was putting them in all the right folders, and even texting Jeremy G for advice while I was doing it. It just…didn’t…work.

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

[John Davidson]

2 weeks ago I had to download avid to merge some mxf files from an episode of a show into a single ProRes file for editing as FCPX wouldn’t open them. These were 17 mxf files, 16 for audio and 1 for video. They came right out of a network’s Avid. They would not import back into the avid. I spend hours trying it. Eventually I bought a $255 plugin and imported it easily into FCPX, created a multi cam of all the tracks, exported to prores, and moved on – and deleted Avid.

Yesterday I opened Premiere Pro CC for the first time on my mac. It took so long to first boot up I forgot I had opened it. When it did open, I went to create a new project. Beachball. Eventually I got Premiere Pro CC to open. Imported a bunch of episodes of a show. For a while they wouldn’t play at all. Eventually they did.
So I made some quick test edits into the timeline. You forget a lot of what used to be habitual when you go back to track editing. The biggest was dropping a clip onto another clip just blows it away. There’s no way I’m going back to that.

Once you get used to audio being merged into your video track, or clips in the timeline getting out of the way vs being blown away by a new edit, it’s really hard to go back. There are things I want added/fixed with FCPX, but it has spoiled me to the point of ruining everything else. That’s the absolute truth.

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

[John Davidson]

[james Lackleter] “Logic import is still broken, I find it hilarious that it’s still not fixed, (probably because I’m using protools) But this is a disgrace, and a slap in the face and quite a surprise for anyone who upgrades to Logic X. So yes Logic Pro X import is broken, please make people aware of this so they aren’t screwed when they try to transfer.
“

I don’t know what you mean by this James. We pulled in an AAF from FCPX into Logic Thursday. Are you talking about importing the XML? That resulted in a ton of layers so our AAF was the better import option into Logic. Or are you talking about sending a project from logic into FCPX? Because I’ve done that too. That actually worked really well.

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

[John Davidson]

Yeah Herb, the new X hasn’t set well with you since it’s launch so why not try Premiere? In terms of the CC rental thing, it’s not my favorite either. No matter what NLE we use, we should all have excellent submaster, multi-track audio QT’s of final projects. That’s probably the best thing that came out of using Blackmagic to lay back to tape – generating complete QT backups is just part of our final process now instead of an afterthought that might be (and often was) easily forgotten with FCP7.

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

[John Davidson]

That transition looks like the editor had indigestion!

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

[John Davidson]

I’m with Walter on this. We actually had the conversation about it this week with the team. If they want to get some side work, as long as it doesn’t affect our 9-5 work, they can use our facilities nights and weekends to make whatever they want. The rules are, don’t use anything copywritten that we’ve paid for and don’t keep your personal stuff on our servers. Our insurance will not cover these projects, so that needs to be clear. Other than that, have fun.

Walter, we may have similar past experiences working for CNN in regards to this. The best thing about working there was was using those facilities for personal stuff during off hours. It helped make up for low pay!

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

[John Davidson]

That’s a good list. You can sort of build multiple motion combo effects as a single FCPX effect, but it would sure be awesome/easy if you could do it right in FCPX. When I find I need one of those motion transitions, by the time you open motion, build it, test it, realize you screwed something up, go back, republish it, etc., you’ve forgotten what you were doing in the edit in the first place!

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

[John Davidson]

Thanks. We’re focusing on things we want Motion to do natively in coordination with FCPX right out of the box without plugins.

For example, say you make a fake transition in FCPX where one clip zooms in as another zooms out using scale and rotation. You have to build these using inspector/scale/rotation. How could would it be if you could range tool that home built ‘transition’, and then have an option to ‘save keyframe data as motion transition template’. That would be pretty cool!

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