[Mitch Ives]

[Jeremy Garchow] “These things matter not. None of this is impressive. Not a bit of it. This thunderbolt situation is grim, and the capabilities rather limiting. We have been able to do this for a decade, maybe more. I mean, all thunderbolt does is move data, right? My TI-81 graphing calculator moved data, too. I was capturing 3D on a laptop in the 80s. Let’s be realistic.”

Didn’t you forget to mention that this might be our only path to external monitoring? That might be enough to sell them…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Jeremy Garchow] “You aren’t allowed to be excited about technology anymore, especially anything that has to do with thunderbolt, or anything that’s brand new. “

I like new. I did notice that these drives are $799 each, so we’re looking at $3,200 in drives plus the cables. Somebody mentioned $400 in cables. If that’s true, were looking at an investment of $3,600 for a raid zero array. Interesting, but I think the drives need to come down a bit…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Steve Connor] “I don’t get it very often, but it does happen. Instead of doing a safety “save” every hour (which you can’t do in FCPX of course” just check your “undo” is working every hour. That way you don’t risk any more than an hours work.”

Yes Steve, I read your tip on the other forum. It’s encouraging to see people coming up with work-a-rounds. Still, that’s not as good as not having the problem.

The point I was trying to make, which Bill doesn’t seem to appreciate, is not that I don’t like FCPX. I do. There, let me say it again… I do. I see some real brilliance in what they are doing with FCPX.

No, my point is that this product is very “un-Apple”, in that they don’t usually release anything with things like an unworkable titler (fixed 4 months later)… an AutoSave that lets you loose work occasionally (because we can’t manual save)… etc. I expect more from Apple, that was my point… but then I can since I’ve been buying their products for over three decades.

Clearly this was rushed out… I don’t know if it’s because Steve was nearing the end, whether there was some legal issues with FCP7 (as others have suggested). I don’t know the reason, I just know that those of us that have Apple products since the late 70’s are accustomed to better dialed in solutions.

And I still maintain that my point is valid…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Jeremy Garchow] “I have no idea why Apple does this, but my feeling is that it’s a practical one. An iMac is not a practical DIY machine, however.

It’s not a big deal if you want to use an iMac. You shoud know going in that the iMac is a rather limited computer if you need to get to the guts of it, but thunderbolt opens it up to greater opportunities.”

I agree Jeremy, which is why I dot buy iMacs. However, if they kill the MacPro it’ll become kind of a mandatory thing won’t it? Then this kind of thing takes on new significance.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Bill Davis] “BS. Pure and simple. Mitch, we’re friends. But you’re assessment here is just plain wrong. There’s nothing “unfinished’ about software that has let me meet five different delivery deadlines with paid work over the past month. It’s finished, it works fine on my hardware. Period. Features for the future is a reasonable issue of contention. But if it’s not “operating” for you – you’ve got something wrong. Because it’s operating for me fine. “

So you’re saying that they didn’t ship FCPX with a Titler that didn’t save your changes and instead defaulted back to the defaults? Why are there threads discussing this then? Why did Apple fix it after 4 months then?

[Bill Davis] “[Mitch Ives] “The AutoSave doesn’t work, which wouldn’t be a problem if we had manual save, but we don’t. This is causing a lot of issues for a lot of people, as evidenced by the threads in this forum.
”

Again, sorry, but I have to disagree totally. AutoSave has not just worked well for me, it’s worked AMAZINGLY well. Whenever I start doing really complex or fast operations (particularly when I start chaining my mind rapidly, doing, undoing, then re-doing things – which yes, sometimes causes it to crash.) X recovers about as flawlessly as any software I’ve ever seen.

I”ve done that half a dozen times in the past month of high pressure work. And each and every time when the software re-loads, I’m back to almost the EXACT state of the project the second before the crash.

I’m NEVER seen “auto save” work like this before. And I think it’s one of the best features of the whole product.”

So any of us that shut down and then when we re-launch some of the work we had done is gone are some how delusional? Jeez Bill, even Steve Connor admits its a problem (to his credit).

[Bill Davis] “I suppose it requires some consistently in setup, system config, and hardware – but as you know, I’m not the best hardware guy on the planet and I’m running nothing but Apple Store basic rigs here. Nothing hot-rodded. I’m on a stock i7 MacBook Pro 15 running Lion – And X under Lion is the most graceful crash recovery construct I’ve ever seen.”

It recovers from crashes better than any other program… maybe that’s because it has to?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Craig Seeman] “iMovie automatically marks the portions of clips as you add them to the timeline.
Imagine that. iMovie features that didn’t make it into FCPX.
OMG iMovie is so much more advanced that FCPX, that latter must really be the beginners tool.

My hunch, like so many other things in FCPX, they are NOT ports from iMovie. There are challenges with the database interrelationships. I would bet it’s coming soon.”

I hope you’re right. I’m trying not to be negative, but every once in awhile I get this nagging Harbinger feeling that tying everything to the database (which provides great functionality) could also hold up features throughout FCPX’s development. I’d like to be wrong on this one.

BTW, the same Incite software had a Consolidate function that extracted the used portions of clips and removed all the unused portions, freeing up considerable disk space.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Bill Davis] “We all “click in” to how things work at our own rate and only after we face the issue.

I personally struggled with keyframing in the timeline for the longest time, before I saw a guy invoke the clip based keyframe editor.

For months I didn’t even know that existed! I was adjusting all my keyframes in the un-expanded strip display which is a HUGE PITA.

I’m ashamed to admit how long I did it the dumb way.”

To be fair, we all have a story like that… no make that many stories like that. As Thomas Edison said “I didn’t fail… I simply discovered all the ways it didn’t work first”…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Nick Paonessa] “I’m having a huge problem trying to capture “true slow motion” in FCPX. When I slow the footage down, even with Optical Flow, I don’t get professional looking slow motion. It’s pretty good at 50% but if I try and slow it down anywhere between 25% and 1% I get the wavy rolling shutter stuff, trails and everything in between. It doesn’t look professional. Can anyone help me understand what I’m doing wrong? Please help.”

We’re having better luck doing it outside of FCPX, using Lock-n-Load…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Bill Davis] “Uh, it “gets it” right now. And much, MUCH better than Legacy ever did.

You open the keyword index that displays a list of every shot in your timeline. Select them all. Temporarily mark them as REJECTED OR FAVORITES (or if you’re using those tags for something else apply a BINGO tag or whatever until you can clear one of those)- it’s only temporary. Then use “Hide rejected” or Show Favorites to display every single clip NOT used in your timeline. You’re exactly where the “show unused clips” convention was in Legacy – but it becomes just STEP ONE in being useful. Now that you’ve got the “Class” of all unused clips ID’d – you can really have fun.

You can sub-group them (maybe selects, possibles and dump) or apply sub group tags to any or all. When you’re happy with your new organization, just go back to the temporary TAG you used, delete your initial temporary REJECTED or FAVORITE tags and you’re left with all the subsequent tags in place to help you work better from that point on.

Once again, it’s not something that X “can’t do” but rather merely one of a thousand things that the database can do rapidly and easily – if you just take the time to actually learn how to use it.

Most flat file NLE databases think of USED or UNUSED as the beginning and end of clip sorting. It’s now actually just a trivial “step one” for the X database. “

My god Bill, seriously? Look at this multi-step convoluted work-a-round you have described and you’re proud of it? In 1998 Incite had a simple one-step command that accomplished this. Apple can do better than your workaround can’t they?

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Mitch Ives]

[Don Walker] “If everybody on this forum would look at FCPX for what it really is, I think we could all sleep easier at night.

FCPX was / is a totally different but completely unfinished NLE that was pushed out the door at least a year early, by a leadership style, that wanted to upstage a competitor at a trade show.

When the big Q1 release comes out, I would suspect we will have a much better understanding of what X is supposed to be. I also suspect there will be a lot more than just external monitoring and multicam, out by the end of the year. “

My point exactly. At the risk of lowering the bar too far for people like Bill and Steve, my problem isn’t with the interface or the design criteria, it’s with the amateurishly unfinished nature of it. It was released with a titler bug that two guys writing software in a garage would have caught. Seriously?

The AutoSave doesn’t work, which wouldn’t be a problem if we had manual save, but we don’t. This is causing a lot of issues for a lot of people, as evidenced by the threads in this forum.

You can’t keyframe the color correction filter? Seriously?

And of course no external monitoring… and/or Multicam (which I acknowledge not everyone cares about).

For me, the next update will tell us a lot. It’ll tell us how serious Apple is about fixing defects and filling in the holes in the Swiss Cheese that is FCPX.

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill