[Marcus Moore]

[David Lawrence] “Sure, but as you know, this prevents you from being able to do any mixing in context of the overall program. Stepping in and out of CCs is a bag of hurt.”

Exactly. And I’ve often wondered about the an option to play an compound clip “in context” of it’s parent timeline. Not as an overall solution to the mixing problem, but just generally as a feature.

[David Lawrence] “Yes, something like that would be great. I just don’t see a clean way to do it without making the window the time frame-of-reference.”

I agree. It would seem to be “mixing metaphors”. The thing is, for most purposes, I find connected clips to be unbelievably more intuitive than what I was doing in 7 (but not for visual organization at present). Of course, there are always exceptions- but I rate those on the scale of the whole. Overall I think the magnetic timeline structure is allowing me to work faster across a whole edit, weighing the pluses to minuses. Audio organization and Mixing is undeniably FCPX’s weak point.

[Marcus Moore]

Yup. Just another one of the MANY times I’ve suggested nesting so solve all timeline ills…*

*If you’re looking for a non-snarky answer, see my answer below to someone who’s interested in carrying on a decent conversation.

[Marcus Moore]

I shall try.

We have Easter up here in Canada this weekend, so I expect to have some time to pound out the second half of my ideas. The challenge is making the time to mock up some screen grabs. A lot of this is very difficult to explain just with words.

But to tease it a bit, to my mind, Apple has already solved their timeline problem in how they structure Events…

[Marcus Moore]

If that’s what you’re looking for, then I’d almost recommend you compound clip the audio, then within the compound clip all the audio elements would be attached to a primary slug.

I believe a lot of this would be covered with a “connect to time” override. This would also be useful for broadcast standard commercial slugs.

[Marcus Moore]

I have a giant blog post about Roles as a data structure for organizing the timeline that I’m desperately trying to finish before I head to NAB. I’ve been wanting to get these ideas out for almost 6 months.

But I’m too darn busy cutting in X!

[Marcus Moore]

[David Lawrence] “Yes, but doesn’t the tilde key modifier only affect the connected clips attached to the primary clip you’re manipulating? Is there a way to make all connected clips stay put if you want? Something like Shift-tilde? That would make a big difference for me.”

How are you manipulating more than one primary clip at a time? Or are you just looking for a “tilde-lock” option?

[Marcus Moore]

[Walter Soyka] “I respectfully disagree.

No amount of PR could have papered over the unexpected workflow-shattering product cancellations and discontinuities we’ve seen in the last couple years.

Apple had been establishing trust from about 2000 to about 2010, and then they broke it — now they have to establish it again — with products, not PR. “

Products first- but I think PR is important. I think FCPX was a PR disaster more than anything else. I’ve stated my case before that if Apple had approached the FCP7 to FCPX transition more like the one from OS9 to OSX,I don’t think you would have seen nearly as chilly a reception. I’m sure some would still have knee-jerked at the iMovie-esque interface; but a delineated transition period from one to the other, rather than an abrupt EOLing of FCP7 would I think have jangled a lot less nerves.

Thanks for the DF link. That’s good reading.

[Marcus Moore]

[Chris Harlan] “I never said that it did. I said that they already had plans and prototyping to fall back on. “

If that’s true, then how committed could they have even been to EOL’ing the MacPro at all? If Apple had a plan to move out of this space, then they would have stopped designing next-gen towers years ago. And I’m no computer engineer, but I don’t think you can just pick up a, let’s say, 2010 design concept- pull it out of the box and pop next gen processors in it.

And honestly, I don’t think the tech backlash was THAT intense that it could account for a 24hr turnaround in Apple’s product development roadmap at the executive level.

Undoubtably, Apple should never have put a “NEW” tag on the MacPro after WWDC. It wasn’t an update or a refresh- it was them swapping out one component for another that wasn’t being manufactured anymore.

Apple’s biggest sins in the last few years [MacPro and X] hasn’t been what they’ve done, it’s how they’ve miss-positioned those things to their intended audience. Basically their PR has been crap.

As I mentioned before, weeks before WWDC, Jim D of the Loop made the statement that the MacPro wasn’t going away. Jim isn’t a rumour monger. He only speaks on stuff he has sources for. Perhaps Apple knew there was going to be backlash on the MacPro, so they wanted to get the word out that this internals switch wasn’t another sign that the product was waiting to die. That seems more logical to me than the 11th hour switch your suggesting.

[Chris Harlan] And there is one of many perfect examples of one side of Apple not knowing what another side is doing.

I think that’s a gross over-simplification of really complex issues. What’s the alternative? All Final Cut development stops while they dev team waits for the OS-level engineers to decide on Carbon vs Cocoa? I’m not sure what the rational ultimately was in 2010 to end 64 bit carbon development, but decisions like that take years to way the pros and cons of. It was a late-stage decision from all indications, and a far-reaching one. FCP just happened to be a program in the wrong stage of development when that happened. Or the best, if you like the result (which I do).

But overall I think that the product itself when released will answer a lot of questions as to what’s been going on with it’s development.

[Marcus Moore]

Hardware design doesn’t work like that, you can’t just throw people and money at the problem and make it go faster. Just like with software design, after a certain point, more people doesn’t help.

If there’s no serious hardware design change, you might have a case to make. Otherwise, you’d be nuts to think they can design, prototype, finalize, set up overseas manufacturing lines, get them up to speed, and start manufacturing units in 12 months.

But if Apple had planned on ending the MacPro, then last year’s non-update makes no sense at all. And that’s beside the point that the well-connected Jim Dalrymple had already stated before WWDC that Apple wasn’t ending the MacPro line.

I think what we’ve had here, as others have mentioned, was an unfortunately confluence of timing and priorities for Apple.

Perhaps very similar to what happened with X, where it’s development cycle was artificially lengthened due to the mid-stream decision by Apple to abandon 64bit carbon.

[Marcus Moore]

It will be relatively easy to tell if you’re wrong once the machine comes out.

Any substantive design or philosophy changes will mean that it’s been in the works well before WWDC 2012. You don’t turn around development on brand new hardware in a year.