Robert Brown
Forum Replies Created
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[Jim Glickert] “My reason for coming here is simple. Having used FCP for four years, and having so much time and resources invested in it, I’d like to know what experience others are having with FCP X before I decide whether to jump onboard, or head off in another direction.”
Yeah kind of funny. A lot of people are probably here because it seems beneath Apple to offer a 30 day demo. I know I’m not slapping down $300 based on what I’ve read. But as a FCP user for several years now I’m still curious. Plus Apple bashing was more fun than I thought it would be.
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Workin on Sunday, nice! Have things been busier over there?
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Hi Ewan, I’ll just give you some info on what I did and maybe it’s useful to you. I’m in the same boat regarding FCP. At the end of last year I bought a new 12 core Mac Pro. I got it with the ATI 5870. After this whole FCPX debacle I started to take a look at PPro. I have been an AE user for a long time. I wanted to do a test of the Mercury engine, so I just recently bought an Nvidia GTX 285 on Ebay. You can still get those New for around $370 and it’s a very well reviewed card and holds it’s on in comparison to the Quaddros.
I think something like this, or even an 8 core, is a very good way to go as of course I can still use FCP,
and have CS5.5 all on the same system. And also I use bootcamp and so put Win7 64 on my system drive.
I also have a Kona 3. All of the hardware I have works great in both OS’s. Probably the main benefit to the
OSX side is by having FCP installed, you can use Pro Res even in Premiere. Plus I personally like OSX a bit more because of things like Quickview but they are very comparable.As for my impression of PPro, what a lot of us are hoping is that it picks up where FCP left off. In many ways it is superior to FCP. Using Canon 5D footage is so easy you can’t understand why FCP chokes so bad on it. It has extremely good scaling and deals with multiple rez files much better than FCP, and you can get a lot of real time performance with effects and color correction etc.
One thing worth looking into is Colorista if you haven’t, and it works very well in PPro. One instance of the plugin has a single secondary CC, but you just add more instances of the plugin for addition secondaries of you need, and they are all accelerated by Mercury and so it’s real time. It’s a pretty powerful CC tool.
Also PPro will do things like drop in lower 3rd files in Animation codec in realtime even on top of layers with scaling and color correction.
Some of the editing in PPro is not quite what FCP has, but they keep encouraging comments and suggestions and so hopefully v6 will get there. But a lot of PPro performance-wise blows FCP out of the water.
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[Lance Bachelder] “I would stay away from the built-in fx – the Adobe 3-way corrector is easily the worst plug-in ever devised by man”
Well I wouldn’t go that far but Adobe should take a look at the Smoke color warper or maybe have a package deal with Colorista. I think if Adobe managed to put a kick ass color corrector in Premiere with real time scopes etc. that would get a lot of people’s attention.
The CC as it is now needs some serious work.
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Smoke is still a different animal. It’s hands down the best package for doing final to air stuff and is used heavily to conform feature films – Mac version too. But not really optimized for off-line editing. But it blows the other guys away as fas as quality of output and what it’s capable of doing. But it would be great if they jumped in more heavily and dropped the price etc. I bet it will happen at some point.
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There’s never been a better time.
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It’s kind of interesting because in a way Windows offers more stability time-wise. I mean how long did XP last? I still see computers on Windows 2000. At one point it seemed Windows pace was too slow but for me Apple has come to represent change whether it’s needed or not. Just change for the sake of change and it’s almost like watching people high on something.
The great thing about buying Macs is you can dual boot and so have both worlds, but maybe next time I’ll build a “Hackintosh” so I can still run OSX but save a couple thousand bucks. Over the last couple of years the pendulum seems to be going back the other way and it’s good that there are competitors so you can still get what you need and not have the latest whim jammed down your throat.
I think Apple’s biggest threat right now is just running out of relevant new ideas. That’s what I thought when I say Cloud introduced. Why bother? They seem addicted to trying to change everything but at some point it’s like I think I’ll just turn all of this crap off and read a book.
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If you want good results it’s a no brainer – CS5.5. I too have tried to like Motion but it’s keyer almost never gives the results I want. Keylight that comes in AE is a top notch keyed that also ships with programs like Nuke. Plus you get Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe Media Encoder. There is no comparison.
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[Michael Hancock] “That’s why I’ll leave FCP7 and not use FCPX. If FCPX grows into an app that will work in our facility, maybe it will get tested. But by the time that happens we’ll already have established new workflows around Premiere or Avid so there really wouldn’t be a need to switch. It would have to offer a substantial savings in time (exponentially more efficiencies) to get me to come back. I don’t believe it will do that, at least not fast enough to stop us from switching.
“Yeah that’s the interesting thing. In order for X to become viable for pro use, it will have to significantly surpass Avid and Adobe in some major way and while Avid and Adobe will have had a multi year head start. And it seems Apple doesn’t even really plan on doing that.
The X proponents seem to miss that “being different” is not only, not necessarily better, but often a severe liability. I personally think Apple runs the risk of innovating themselves right into obscurity. People will only take having their lives re-designed so far and just start ignoring them after a while like many are now.
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“Nobody goes there, it’s too crowded” Yogi Berra