Nicholas Zimmerman
Forum Replies Created
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While I’d typically agree, this is only a three hour course where I have to get them from ingest to delivery. They’re actually quite eager to learn, but they are at the point now where they still aren’t sure why they have to shoot RAW instead of JPEG. They’ll get there, but it’s not like I’m going to have time to go teach them GOP structures or transcoding. Personally I’d rather this was a full course where I could ensure everyone got at least the basics of each part of post.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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Forgot to mention that I now loath using it for my projects. I can’t stand going back to the old way, and really do feel that it’s a slower, much more obtuse way to edit. That doesn’t mean it’s awful though, I’ve just moved beyond it and don’t want to go back to the way I used to do things. For Windows users it’s leagues ahead of most of the competition, and much simpler to learn than MC.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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I’ll certainly give Premiere a fair shake, and tell them about MC as well. I did a few projects in Premiere right after the release of X, and liked it well enough. If somebody came up to me and said “I’m looking for a powerful editor and I WILL NOT USE X, depending on their experience level and familiarity with 7, I’d recommend Premiere over Avid. I’ve actually recommended it in the last month to a buddy of mine who is a Windows user looking to make tutorial videos.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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I’m teaching a class on Premiere tomorrow and I absolutely despise using it! I switched to it (Pr) for about five months from 10.0 to 10.0.3, and reviewing it for this guest lecture has me going nuts. It’s for a group of photography students that have 0 experience with video. These kids don’t know what a codec is, they don’t care about timeline format, they just want to tell a story, i.e. edit. I’m doing it as a favor for a friend, and their lab doesn’t have X so it’s not even a real option for them, but I’ll sure as hell mention that for my work, I prefer X.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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[Herb Sevush] “If you think that Battlefield 3 defines the high end”
Nah. Just a proof of concept on the tech.
[Herb Sevush] “In your world, maybe. Just like tape is as good as dead, in your world. But in the rest of the “not you” world neither of those statements is true. And in that other, not you world, X is a step backwards, and using Xto7 to generate OMFs is a silly hack.”
Avid itself has urged people to switch to AAF, and I can’t think of any reason not to. There might be a good reason, I’ve just never been informed of it.
[Herb Sevush] “I’m not arguing that, I’m arguing that your definition of top seems to have the same ceiling that Apple’s does, while a higher ceiling does in fact exist.”
I highly doubt you’ll ever see OMF or Print to Tape return. Apple seems to be focusing on the future of the high end, instead of the past, which OMF and Tape are both in the past column. They still exist for fringe sectors, but workarounds also exist. They’re not always fun, but neither was transcoding every piece of footage before you could edit different formats. It was just a few years ago that we’d get an error in FCP5 every time we tried to mix anything that was even the slightest bit off. As far as exporting a master file before printing tape, it’s much faster to take that step in FCPX.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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[Walter Soyka] “Apple is pretty well absent in CG and compositing. The CPU performance gap is widening, and with next-generation single-CPU Mac Pro being half as fast for these apps versus dual-CPU PC workstations, I don’t see this changing.”
I don’t think it’s going to be a computational powerhouse for ray-tracing stuff. I’m torn on the single CPU thing, and at some point we might even see it change, but within the same/similar form factor. It seems like Apple’s intention is to have the artists working in OSX on a Mac Pro, and sending to a Linux farm for render.
[Walter Soyka] “I’m not saying you can’t do great work with FCPX or on Macs — of course you can — but look at feature sets for systems like Baselight, Flame, Mistika, or Pablo. FCPX has a long way to go before it reaches “the highest level.””
I don’t think it will every reach those levels, same for Premiere and Media Composer. I do think we’ll see better round tripping support throughout though, but that is mostly up to the other developers adding support, not Apple.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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[Herb Sevush] “The lack of PCIe slots in the new MacPro puts a definite ceiling on it’s abilities VS anything else out there. There is a niche of post production people who need more than Thunderbolt can deliver.”
I’d be really surprised if Red didn’t bring out a thunderbolt RedRocket. Same goes for the vast majority of PCIe cards. PCIe hardware scopes, RAID cards, Fiber channel, etc. I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about throwing everything in a chasis, unless you already own it. The transition will take time, but I think CES and NAB will be chock full of Thunderbolt versions of what were once PCIe cards. Hopefully the manufacturers will actually make proper devices, and not just take their existing products and throw them in a chasis. I hope. As far as “what Thunderbolt can deliver” it’s bandwidth is plenty for pretty much everything but GPUs, and even then most GPUs don’t use their 16X pipes completely. Case in point, the kid that got Battlefield 3 running maxed out on a MacBook Air using Thunderbolt.
[Herb Sevush] “FCPX has a very long way to go to match Avid in collaborative editing, many broadcasters still need tape delivery, and having to go thru FCP7 for OMF is a joke.”
I recently had a chance to tour CBS’s west coast studio and check out their control room. The guys complained about how they were transitioning to file based for everything. Tape deliver is dieing very quickly, and if you need it just use your I/O card’s software. I’ve found Black Magics offering MUCH better than the wonky print/edit to tape in FCP7. OMF isn’t dieing, it’s good as dead. I regularly take my projects into Pro Tools using X2Pro, and my composer takes the same files into Logic for scoring (Logic X XML import hasn’t worked well yet).
[Herb Sevush] “All of the high end features they added back were added back in the first year, I don’t see any great development pace over the past 12 months.”
That is very true. It would make since for them to save it up and combine their marketing of the Mac Pro (the Xeons it uses come out early September), Logic X, and a major feature overhall for FCPX. I hope.
[Herb Sevush] “They might do this and they might do that, but apparently I don’t read the tea leaves the same way you do.”
Once again, I hope. R&D isn’t cheap, and they’ve delivered three very major (and probably expensive) professional projects in the last few years. I hope that this recent push for professionals is rooted deep within the company, and at the moment it seems to be. Look at OSX, it’s new features are very power user heavy, things like dual display improvements. That doesn’t benefit the average consumer, but is deeply beneficial to power users and professionals.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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While I can see where it seems they aren’t aimed at the highest level, I think they may actually be. The rate they’ve added back in high end features to FCPX, the changes in Logic X, and the design of the new Mac Pro all lead me to believe that Apple is serious about the top end professional, just not catering exclusively to them. I hope I’m right about this, but what if Logic X was the face of things to come in FCPX. All of the power of Logic 9 is there, but it’s so much cleaner and more efficient. Another thing that gives me hope is that The Foundry was featured at WWDC, and Apple seems to be working closely with the Resolve team as well. With so many people still using FCP7, the 10.1 update to FCPX could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and gets people upgrading to X.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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Here in Dallas I’ve seen a lot of people either staying with 7. Some small production places have moved to Premiere, but not nearly as many as I’ve seen move to X. Our ABC affiliate recently moved to FCPX, as well as our “alternative” newspaper, The Dallas Observer. The local FCPUG is ~90% X, and I think a lot of that is due to exposure and education. A lot of producers and small shops heard X sucks two years ago, and nobody has told them how much it improved.
As far as MC goes, it’s always been here, but it’s mostly at our “Hollywood” facilities, i.e. ReelFX & Post Asylum.
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FCP X Certified Pro, Level Two
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If you are conforming 60P to 24P you don’t really have to worry about them. However, they are very important if you try taking your footage any slower.
Those options allow you to adjust the frame interpolation on footage that’s been slowed down. Back in FCP7 you’d have to just deal with frame blending (layering each of the frames together with partial transparency). The only way to achieve high quality frame interpolation back then was to use a plugin (BCC Retime, Twixtor, etc.) or an external application (Motion, AE, etc.) We are very lucky to now have this built directly into the NLE.
What an optical flow algorithm does is look at multiple frames and try to figure out what the realistic flow of motion would be. This allows you to slow down footage that was shot 24 down to 20, or 16, or hell, 2 fps. Now it’s not magic, and it can easily leave visible artifacts. If you’ve got a copy of Silver Linings Playbook laying around you should check the tail-gating scene. It’s all slowed down significantly with some form of optical flow, and it’s pretty noticeable.
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Avid MC, PPro CS6, FCP7 – wasting away on my SSD.
I just can’t quit X.
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