[Robert Brown]

Hi Greg, I’m in my forties and have been editing quite a while now. Unfortunately it’s pretty common to have to learn new stuff. Just this week they are having us learn Quantel stuff as it’s what the company decided to use for broadcast applications. We still have FCP but that will be phased out at some point.
It’s actually really common for products to come and go. The main question you should ask yourself is what type of stuff do you want to do? You can cut on your own system and use anything you want, or if you decide to be a free-lance editor for hire you might want to get good at Avid. If it seems like a struggle find a good intensive course and it will go a lot better.

And in regards FCS I had to reload mine yesterday as compressor stopped working for some reason. It takes a good couple of hours as they gave you so much media between Soundtrack, Motion and DVD studio. They are really only offering a fraction of what they used to give you. Adobe is much more comparable to FCS and better in many ways. AE is one of the best video programs ever made. But as of yet Premiere is still struggling with name recognition but hopefully that changes soon. But you could probably learn Premiere in a few days – it’s really easy coming from FCP.

[Robert Brown]

This really is a bizarre thing Apple decided to do isn’t it?

[Robert Brown]

I thought I would chime in since I bought a GTX 285 for testing purposes too. The difference is real. You see more layers being able to be scaled and moved, as well as keying over keyable gfx. Also you can do things like take a single shot, copy it above itself while adding a transfer mode and a blur in real time for some interesting looks. Some Sapphire effects will also play in real time depending on the rez and frame rate and Colorista uses the GPU so you could actually stack multiple instances of Colorista for additional secondaries all in real time. You get more response in a non Kona timeline which hopefully improves. Also previews render faster.

I mentioned on another post that the 9 box effect wasn’t exactly realistic because for one, how many times do you ever need that, and two can your raid deliver that many frames at once? But what is real is scaling, color correction, plugins, and keyable gfx. I think the overall workflow of Mercury needs some thought to optimize what it can do and can’t but I think it’s one of the most interesting things out there as they are finally using the power a modern workstation actually has – which is a lot.

[Robert Brown]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Apple’s godly perception of the market, what it means in their eyes, and what it means for the people pursuing that market as a livelihood is gone weird.
We are not, all of us, simply in a financial software skills petri dish of their making, to be mixed up in some future pot skills bunsen burner – there is some real stuff here.

Apple are gone a bit weird and they will, it appears, do just about anything that comes into their heads. Anything. Industry, craft or livelihood bedamned.
“

I totally agree. They should just get out of pro media and leave it alone. I remember reading some of the sad stories from Silicon Color people about people getting laid off after the Apple acquisition and now all of their hard work is a dead product. These companies are just playthings for Apple. They have a pretty big list of products they’ve acquired and killed once they got bored with them.

[Robert Brown]

Why would I pay $300 for what I can already do and lose half of the other stuff I do on a regular basis? I haven’t seen the new skimmer but I had no problem with any previous system.

[Robert Brown]

The 8 core 2.93 was rated as one of the best. The came out with other ones afterwards which didn’t rate as well. I think Barefeats has benchmarks but I’d look out for one of those on Ebay if I was looking.

[Robert Brown]

Yeah I’m really looking forward to that. It will be interesting to see if Apple even does NAB. I mean why would they? If there is no video out then it’s not broadcast.

[Robert Brown]

[Andrew Richards] “Such a technique is superseded by user-generated metadata marking clips as good, bad, whatever. I’m arguing selects reels are an outmoded organizational workflow in the context of FCPX or any other metadata-centric tool.
“

Metadata doesn’t supersede anything. It’s a tool to use as you wish. If you read Walter Murch’s book “Blink of an Eye” you will see that no technique has been outmoded. He’s worked with about everything out there and finds benefits in any system no matter how antiquated. It’s simply how you chose to work and the nature of your material. What tends to happen is that some material on first look may have seemed unusable but later on it saves your ass.

Where I work we definitely don’t use clip reels like we used to but use XMLs like a clip reel from our Dalet system. I don’t know how many times I’ve had somebody give me an XML of pre-selected shots where nothing was useable, and then by simply matching into the real and scanning forward and back a few minutes you find something much better. Like I said before, there is no substitute for actually looking at what was shot even if it’s already been evaluated and sometimes that means going through long reels.

I just got back from Taiwan working with the editorial dept on “Life of Pi”. It is still common practice for a director to not call “cut” and then just reset while still rolling. And then if you get into things like shooting young children and animals where you can have 10-15 minute rolls just trying to get the perfect thing. Metadata won’t help you with that. You might have to look through every bit of that material many times before you find the exact right bit. And feature editing is very much about going through EVERYTHING to make sure your using the best take you have. It’s pretty painful and you need something that scans smooth because you might be doing it for a while.

This is one reason why some people are rejecting FCPX. Apple acts like they have solved an old problem through their amazing technology but unfortunately that old problem is just the nature of the beast.

[Robert Brown]

[Andrew Richards] ”
I guess since I’m more of an engineer than an editor, I don’t fully understand the need for a persistent source monitor. Are you regularly playing back the two simultaneously, ganged? I never used that technique, and I’m interested in knowing why it is essential for feature work.
“

Are you talking about the 2nd monitor in the UI? If so it’s a simple concept. One monitor for footage you are reviewing, and one for the timeline. It comes out of linear editing, but still makes a lot of sense. You do have the option of turning it off if you want though which I never would.

[Andrew Richards] “Selects reel? Swimming upstream. This is what metadata is for. Unless the cam op is not stopping record on cut, the clips off the camera will be short by nature. Like I said, non-celluloid workflows are much closer to the pin.
“

Metadata is an addition to the process it doesn’t eliminate anything. Any good editor will want to see everything that was shot. Some segments go exactly as planned but inevitably as you get towards the end a project, you will have problems, or sections that aren’t working well and by seeing the footage sometimes you find something that can make it work. Having the computer scan and organize your footage for you is a gimmick – although it may be useful at times, but there will NEVER be a replacement for seeing the footage with your own eyes. That’s what editing is. Evaluating the media you have available and putting it into some sequence that makes sense or is compelling in some way. You have to see what you have in order to do that.

[Robert Brown]

This is an issue I’ve had with Apple for a while now. They show their products in the most flattering light. For example I was getting Motion training from an Apple trainer once and he was showing how well the vector based slo-mo worked. He used a shot of a cloud time-lapse. That happens to be one of the easiest possible shots for a vector based slo-mo and he gave that as an example of how well and easy it worked without doing real world demos of like a guy walking down the street or something.

They definitely have the tendency to only show where their product excels, and to not even acknowledge it’s shortcomings. I for one am glad they’re moving out of the pro market as they don’t deserve to be there. But I’ll still buy their toys.