[Paul Dickin]

[Simon Ubsdell] ” At what point did someone decide…”

Hi
Apple (= Steve Jobs) had a big ‘not-for-turning>turning’ moment in early 2007.
Jan 9th 2007. At the iPhone announcement he said:
” ‘You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,’ meaning that anyone can write applications for it and potentially gum up the provider’s network, says Jobs.”

May 30th 2007. This was being reported:
Steve Jobs: This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps… “

That was a big U-turn moment. Apple Inc going for exponential iOS development rather than as a subset of OS X…

As big a U-turn as Bill Gates’ “Internet Tidal Wave” memo in May 1995, when he binned his proprietary view of world networking (MSN) and embraced the web.

Ubilos showed off iMovie 8 later that year. I guess Ubilos had sole charge of ‘video edit/asset-stripping the Pro Apps’ strategy from that turning point.

[Paul Dickin]

[Rafael Amador] “I’ve to mention that I don’t edit since one year, and I don’t know if I’ll do it in the future (may be this is why I’ve been lately so picky in the forum -and probably out :-), so, NLEs are not my main concern.”
Hi Rafa
The best thing to be said about a mid-life crisis, whether from internal or external circumstances, is that it is just that – mid-life. Life goes on… 🙂
/GlassHalfFull mode

It is the job of an GUI to present complex mathematical data in a user-friendly way – 1 frame at a time if its rasterised video, and 1 pixel etc..
But because of the need to have sub-frame/sub-pixel accuracy the GUI needs to hide the 1.000000000 nature of one video frame, whilst letting me make a sample-level audio edit at 1.123456769 or whatever.
(Being of the same mind as Rafa means I have no off-the-top-of-my-head notion of how many significant digits I need to specify an audio sample accurately – that’s the GUI’s job…)

The heart of FCP legacy’s (=QT’s) media management problems came from its treatment of time-code exactly the same as linear tape’s control track counter methodology. Only the first frame seemed to have been t/c stamped, and then an offset counter for the rest of the clip.

For that reason FCP legacy (+QT) had to go. Whether FCPX (AVFoundation) is any better I don’t know…

Its unfortunate that at this time of revolutionary change in technical methodologies that Apple’s CEO had other things dictating the need to move things along (too) fast 🙁

[Rafael Amador] “…so, NLEs are not my main concern.”
Neither were they for Steve. 🙁

Are Lao Nagas the same as the ones in NE India?
I fell in love with Manipur on a visit earlier this year – might try to go a bit further sometime to buy you that beer… 🙂

[Paul Dickin]

[Christian Schumacher] ” …they have been disruptive lately.”
Hi
I guess the writing on the wall – that Steve Jobs would have to retire from active management sooner than he would want – has meant an increasingly accelerated advance to what Jobs sees as the future. Faster than might have happened without the ticking clock of his health problems.

I think one his better insights was that further development of OS X should be held back until the overall strategy for taking iOS forward had been determined – that commonality in the structural-code base is good, but iOS should be the leader in this as it will be the eventual successor to OS X.

Nothing in all this has to be feared – though the fast-track disruption is an unfortunate spin-off of the accelerated pace of the changes.

[Andrew Richards] “Apple did stumble on the transition away from 32-bit QuickTime…they now have the underpinnings … I’m more puzzled no one has seen this gaping hole in the market and attempted to fill it with a modern spiritual successor to QTPro 7.”

Hasn’t Adobe attempted a parallel path option with their Mercury Engine development. Not knowing where Apple would be going with AVFoundation, haven’t they came up with an alternative?

FCP X has to be a part of the solution to plug the ‘gaping hole’, but I was expecting the pace of progress to be faster in this. Why doesn’t FCP X (= newQT) handle ALL media types natively…

[Paul Dickin]

[Tim Wilson] “Color me impressed.”
Hi
Steve himself told us – in April 2010, a month before your quoted piece.
I quoted it a few days ago:

[Paul Dickin] “[Aindreas Gallagher] ” …he really meant it when he said in the email “its going to be awesome” Steve Jobs thought it was awesome.”
Hi
At the time everybody zoomed in on Steve’s “awesome” quote.
This is from the MacSoda article that broke this story:
“Mr. Jobs answered the three …questions that all video enthusiasts have been wondering aimlessly.
1) Does Apple care about Final Cut?,
2) Who were the Final Cut employees who got fired?,
3) Will the next release be any good?
Steve responded:
“We certainly do. Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome.”

Those definitely were the answers we wanted to hear.”

Its really question 2 that was the crucial one.
How many Apple ‘support’ people does it take to understand the industry, keep the software engineers on track. To understand (= write) the Manual for Final Cut Pro 1-7?

I suspect those were the guys who were sacked. 🙁
Superfluous to Apple’s ongoing strategy 2010 on…

[Paul Dickin]

[Walter Soyka] “I agree that an importer could easily make an FCPX timeline that would play identically to the FCP timeline it was imported from. That just involves placing clips correctly in time. It just wouldn’t be ready to edit, as if the piece had been originally edited in FCPX with an FCPX methodology.“
Hi
I guess this may be significant – in legacy FCP the ‘project’ gets built in the project’s internal XML (or code} whilst the media ‘assets’ sit unchanged on the hard drives.
In FCP X the ‘project’ (=timeline) is built cumulatively into a database that is part and parcel of the AV Foundation asset database(s) – which is a developing process as the timeline is built in the editing process.

So the ‘database’ construction going on in FCP X seems to be a relational order of magnitude more complex than in legacy-FCP – and part of that complexity may relate to the interaction with AV Foundation data being created in the editing process that is additional to the sum of the individual media assets in the project. So which bit of legacy-FCP project data goes where in FCP X’s data structures may be problematic?

[Jeremy Garchow in his article] “Just recently, an Applescript was released by foolcolor.net called foolcut (https://www.foolcolor.net/foolcut). It takes your FCPX timeline and transfers it over to Adobe After Effects… This is done with scripting and no API..”

At this point in time legacy-QuickTime is inherently compatible with AV Foundation – foolcut’s Applescript FCP X database-querying powers show that – but will that always be the case?

[Jeremy Garchow in his article] “My biggest gripe with FCPX is the lack of native digital media format support. It is time to realize that the world is not a Quicktime world, and hasn’t been for some time, and that’s OK! …FCPX needs to embrace the non-Quicktime wrapped formats (MXF, R3D, MTS, etc) and allow for direct access to these audio and video essences, instead of wrapping them in yet another proprietary format.”

Is legacy-QT compatibility another ‘transition process’ – like OS 9 Classic was, or Rosetta? Something that will be withdrawn at a later date? As Jeremy points out there is some sort of kludge currently going on…

Apple maybe don’t want to allow something now that they know they will break further down the road?

[Paul Dickin]

[Ewan Lim] “i’m just wondering what is going to come after Lion.”
Hi
Cirrostratus.
Followed, in sequence, by combined iOS/OS X operating systems (ARM only?) called:
Nimbostratus
Altostratus
Cumulus
and cuminating in Cumulonimbus.

Something like that – designed to take the world by storm… 😉

[Paul Dickin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] ” …he really meant it when he said in the email “its going to be awesome” Steve Jobs thought it was awesome.”
Hi
At the time everybody zoomed in on Steve’s “awesome” quote.
This is from the MacSoda article that broke this story:
Mr. Jobs answered the three …questions that all video enthusiasts have been wondering aimlessly.
1) Does Apple care about Final Cut?,
2) Who were the Final Cut employees who got fired?,
3) Will the next release be any good?

“We certainly do. Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome.”

Those definitely were the answers we wanted to hear.

Its really question 2 that was the crucial one.
How many Apple ‘support’ people does it take to understand the industry, keep the software engineers on track. To understand (= write) the Manual for Final Cut Pro 1-7?

I suspect those were the guys who were sacked. 🙁
Superfluous to Apple’s ongoing strategy 2010 on…

So no. I don’t think Steve understood much about ‘editing’ beyond iMovie.

[Paul Dickin]

[Walter Soyka] “The APIs aren’t ready, which suggests to me they were a very low priority during development, rather than a valued, integral part of FCPX’s architecture.”
Hi
I think it likely that nothing these days at Apple gets ‘fast-track’ development ‘in isolation’.
When the joint iOS/OS X development is ready (in terms of Apple’s long-term OS goals) then things get shipped – another post-2008 change of policy-direction… 🙁

[Walter Soyka] “…what do you think we can look for from Apple over the next 6 to 12 months to indicate if they are truly dedicated to the professional (or “complex workflow”) market or not?”
Nothing, if your workflow is headed anywhere else than final delivery via Apple’s cloud to iPads or a forthcoming coloursync-managed Apple television set.

For those who persist in retaining legacy workflows (like most of current post production) then Apple will most likely just be happy to take their % cut of sales to the customer via the iTunes store.

[Paul Dickin]

[Walter Soyka] “I think they (Apple) simply chose to pursue a new editorial paradigm that needs more information to represent an edit than can be derived from legacy systems without reconsidering the magnetic timeline implementation.”
Hi
Thanks for your explanations Walter. Very helpful 🙂

[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think it’s because Apple has done something that we just haven’t understood yet …”
I wasn’t really referring to FCP X, more to the overall (software/services) plan of which FCP X is just a part (Apple’s Big Plan) – which doesn’t include current broadcast workflows/professionals, about which they seemingly “don’t give a damn” 🙁

[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think that it’s literally impossible to translate an FCP7 timeline to FCPX. I do think it’s a more complex problem than many have considered, and it would require some serious intelligence to look at the FCP7 edit, discern the relationship between clips from their placement in time alone, and encode those relationships for FCPX.

The magnetic timeline encodes an awful lot of context at the time the edit is made for later use. The translation problem gets a lot easier to solve if you remove some of the constraints that the magnetic timeline imposes.”

[Gary Huff] “You have, more than once, referred to FCPX needing to know things that, frankly, make it sound like it has some kind of Artificial Intelligence engine. It does not.”

The ‘choices’ that Walter refers to seem more to be a set of ‘rules’, rather than artificial intelligence.
With the new FCP X paradigm Apple has chosen to impose a set of rules that the GUI insists on, which seek to impose meaningful context on the layout of the timeline.

It appears to me that FCP X puts this timeline relationship data into its own database, which sits above, and ‘controls’, the lesser. simpler, sets of data that give structure to the AV Foundation assets that are brought into the various Events.

AV Foundation assets – AV Mutable Compositions – can be an order more complicated than the QuickTime file architecture assets they replace. FCP X takes full advantage of the new power that this complexity unlocks.
It is at the lower level database that David Lawrence’s time-defined track-element structures exist and get defined – at what frame which track element in which basic asset gets played.

The XML of an FCP 7 project maybe can only go as far as defining the basic data sets of the QT assets – which will need to be ‘translated’ into AVF assets.
Even an FCP 7 sequence probably just corresponds to an AVF data set.
Its only with FCP X’s ‘super’ database that all the lower level data gets coordinated into the edit as defined by the GUI and toolset that FCP X provides. And its ‘rules’.

So dealing with a legacy FCP 7 project will require an ‘application’ to handle the allocation of various types of data from the XML into the two databases, as per the new rules. That application isn’t – by Apple’s deliberate choice – FCP X.

I know most editors aren’t interested in this infrastructure stuff, but I think its only through having a basic comprehension of the overall methodology – the reasons they’re doing things – that those ‘ching’ moments can happen.

Like in the thread where it was mentioned that maybe the reason why in/out point don’t stick in the Event browser is that this is could be designed (eventually 😉 ) for multi-user cooperative workflows, so editing metadata should only be affixed to the asset in an individual user’s ‘project’ – as a favorite or whatever. The shared Event assets should remained unaffected…

[Paul Dickin]

Hi
Since the AVCHD standard has recently been revised to encompass 50/60p frame rates maybe Apple will incorporate that functionality into FCP X in a future revision.