Kevin Patrick
Forum Replies Created
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[Chris Jacek] “Where did you get the practice exam from?”
I’m hoping that you either didn’t read my entire post, or that you are expanding on my parody of FCP X issues.
If not, I’m sorry to have led you to believe that I actually took a “trial” (my words) FCP X exam. I have no idea if there is in fact a trial exam, I haven’t bothered to look.
I have a tenancy to post things I feel are humorous, even though I know not everyone finds humor in what I post.
Sorry for the confusion. (which I created)
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[Tony Brittan] “That was funny!”
Thank you.
Finally, after all my lame attempts at humor, I wrote something funny.
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I wasn’t sure myself, so I decided to take the Trial FCP X Exam.
I should point out that I have a very specific workflow for taking exams. Apparently the new FCP X Exam now uses something called Magnetic Paper. Every time I spread the questions out, they just snapped right back together, leaving me no additional time in between questions. Sometimes I need a gap between questions.
Worse, I have to provide all my answers in multiple languages, so I need to keep each language in a separate row. As hard as I tried to keep all the languages separated, they kept magnetically attaching themselves to the answer in whatever way they wanted to. I suppose that would work, but it’s not the way I’m used to taking an exam.
Then I discovered there was no multi-pen support. How am I supposed to synchronize my blue and black pen?
Don’t get me started on no broadcast quality paper support. How am I supposed I to confirm my answers were accurate?
While I was taking the exam, I noticed other people around me complained about a spinning beach ball that kept getting in their way, making it impossible to do anything. Thankfully, I didn’t have that issue.
As I worked my way through the exam, I found myself slowing down to the point where I was almost useless. Apparently, the FCP X exam was consuming all my available brain capacity, making it virtually impossible to control any other functions. I could get to the point where I figured out the answer, but I couldn’t get myself to write it down. The instructor suggested I take a break and then restart the exam process. While this seemed to help, it was only a matter of time before I found myself bogged down all over again.
Eventually, when I thought I was all done, I went back to check my work. I was astonished to find many of the questions were no longer connected to my answers. The questions were there. My answers were there. But they weren’t connected. The last time I took an FCP exam, I could simply reconnect my answers to the questions. Apparently you can no longer do this with the FCP X exam.
When I finally got up and left, I noticed that the people in the other room were taking the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5.1 Exam. They were flying through the exam. No spinning beach balls. No magnetic paper. In fact, they could even bring in all their work from their previous exams. Even work they did on FCP 7 and prior exams. Incredible.
I would love to talk to the person who wrote the FCP X Exam. Clearly it is not written for people who pass exams for a living.
I decided that I’m not going to take this exam until they resolve all these issues.
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[Jason Smith] ” How did you ingest without creating an event?”
Sorry, guess I wasn’t clear enough.
I do have one, single Event. I did all my work on this one Event. All the clips were imported, as files, into this Event. Then I used Keywords to organize everything.
Since all the medias was going to be used for a single output, I didn’t see a need to use more than one Event.
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[Jason Smith] “ingesting footage, logging material, creating keywords, favorites, etc. I’m wondering is there any reason not to ingest all of my footage as one event? I would think that would create ease for the keywords. Is there a limit to how much material a single event can contain”
I’m not sure what FCP X’s limits are, but I have a project that consists of:
One Event
1,965 items in the Event
1,881 clips in the Event
61 Keywords
23 Projects (used as Sequences)All the clips are XDCAM EX files. I used Sony’s XDCAM Browser to copy the clips off the memory cards to my computer and XDCAM Transfer to re-wrap the files to *.mov. Then I simply imported the files into FCP X. All of the media is referenced, nothing is copied or moved to the FCP X Event folder.
I used Keywords to organize everything. I have only one folder to hold all the media in 8 different Keyword Collections. I sort of used these 8 Keywords like 8 Events. At first I considered creating 8 different events. But, I decided to use 8 Keywords instead of 8 unique Events.
I would select the appropriate clips and assign one of the 8 Keywords to them. I dropped them all into a single folder. Then, I would scrub through all the clips assigning additional Keywords as I went. This is where all the organization of Keywords really worked great, since I could then further filter any other keyword set by entering one of the main 8 Keywords into the Event Browser’s search field. (I realize this either makes sense, or I’m doing such a poor job explaining what I did, it makes no sense at all)
The use of Keywords was great for organizing. I don’t think there would have been any advantage to having more than one Event. In fact, I think it would have made things more complicated. I probably would have wound up combining Events. Plus, when I launch FCP X, it loads the single Event and all the necessary media is there for any of the various Projects I was working on. This entire “project” was broken down into 23 actual FCP X Projects.
I never used Favorites. Not really sure why though. I found Keywords to work fine. Occasionally I had Keywords overlapping in a clip, which you can’t do with Favorites.
Scrubbing through all these clips and assigning Keywords was very fast and efficient. No dragging and dropping. Skim through a clip, mark In/Out and assign one or more Keywords, FCP X drops each In/Out reference into the appropriate Keyword Collection.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Sometimes I spend a little time looking though all the keyboard shortcuts”
What?
You read the manual?
Isn’t that what forums are for?
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[Greg Burke] “I cannot believe there actually killing off the entire group that made them who they are today.”
Not that I want to disagree with your opinion, but I am wondering why you feel that the Mac Pro made Apple who they are today?
It appears that Apple, or more specifically Steve Jobs, preferred systems that were closed to the consumer. For me, that was apparent with the first Macintosh. I believe it used Torx screws (or something similar) to close it up. Even thought the inside of the case had the designer’s signatures, most people couldn’t open up their 128K Mac. As opposed to an IBM PC which you could open up, install boards and add memory. This was confirmed in Job’s biography. Wozniak wanted the Apple II to be user expandable, Job’s did not. After Jobs came back, he relaunched the Mac, in a similar way to the original Macintosh with the iMac.
Today, about the only thing users can upgrade (outside of a Mac Pro) is memory. You can replace drives, but in some cases you shouldn’t.
Or am I too focused on the box and you’re thinking what people did with it?
I’d like to think that they are no longer selling Mac Pro’s in their stores, simply because of their low volume. I did notice a few months ago, they stopped selling graphic cards in store.
Still, I wonder if this is a sign that they are planning on killing it. It seems to me, if they are going to kill it, they’d just do it. I don’t recall any other product they dropped where they had a phased out approach. Don’t they usually just drop something all together?
So now what? You’ve got your Mac Pro user-fish, sitting in the blender. Apple hits the blend button … Ahhhhh! Nothing happens. Just kidding. Look, it’s not plugged in. (yet?)
More wishful think on my part I guess.
I have been poking around the tonymacx86 forum since some of this Mac Pros discussions started up again. I’m probably foolish enough to give it a try. Sometimes it’s bad to have a “I bet I can make it work” attitude.
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Keep in mind that renaming clips in FCP X is kind of a “from this point in time forward” convention.
Meaning, if you put a clip in a timeline, then rename it in the Event Browser, the clip will still have the original name in the browser.
So, if you do want to rename your clips for an entire project, then do so before you start using them.
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I haven’t read this thread enough times to get to the point where I can say “Ah, I see … ”
But, I was looking at some recent info on Intel’s latest high end processors, the Core i7 Sandy Bridge E. My take on the review this site did was that it appears to focus on increased multi-processor, multi-threaded performance. Which I assume applications like FCP X and After Effects. (referencing the recent benchmark data from Barefeats) The article notes that the first models will be 6 core, but the die clearly shows a layout for 8 cores. It also has 4 channels of memory, as opposed 4 channels in the current i7, providing almost double the bandwidth.
But it appears Intel removed the integrated graphics core. Here’s where I was wondering how this relates to what you guys have been talking about.
How does the removal of on-die GPU affect all of this?
What does this mean to systems that are PCIe based and systems that have Thunderbolt?
Or does it even matter?
Would this be the CPU that people have speculated Apple has been waiting for? Assuming of course they are still planning on updating the Mac Pro.