Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Jeremy Garchow] ” It happens.”
Not saying it wasn’t a predictable occurence – it does rather look as though Apple didn’t predict it though, which is my point.
They were pinning their colours to the mast of third party developers in a big way and with the very first example of this in action, the very first, everything goes West in fairly short order.
How is that meant to make me feel confident that their business model of third parties taking up major parts of the slack is actually going to be something to rely on from one week to the next?
The big irony of this for me is that the week Automatic Duck defected to Adobe was actually the week I had earmarked as being the one where I would take the plunge and buy their product so I could start busing FCPX in anger. That option just went away for me – no OMF, no FCPX. It just won’t work for me without – period.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] ” You can also use the keyboard arrow keys to move the pucks around.”
This is actually the point that drives me the most crazy as I thought I’d mentioned – the increments when nudging with the keyboard are insanely huge, I mean just grotesquely huge! Can’t work with this.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” And the slider next to “Color Mask” adjusts softness, but it’d be nice if there was a little more softness.”
OK, so I missed the softness slider but then I was so disgusted by there not being a view matte option that I wasn’t really interested in exploring it too much. As always I admire the ingenuity of your workaround but it’s a pretty crazy sort of kludge, isn’t it?
I do dispute that this keyer is better than the old 3-way version – I really do. At least in its current state.
I think what offended me the most was the notion more or less explicitly put around by Apple that this way in some way a replacement for Color. Color was (and still is while it lasts) a really great grading app. The Color Board is a handy-ish tool for temporarily fixing up the odd shot for client approvals.
As for finding the quality significantly better than the old 3-way I’d love for someone to run some actual tests to verify the truth or otherwise of this widely held but unquantified view. Not saying it’s not true but would love some hard evidence.
Thanks for continuing the conversation, though!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Oliver Peters] “Because Apple has now demonstrated that they will only integrate “hooks” for external developers to use, rather than writing those modules themselves. View it in the same context as a plug-in.”
I’m sure there’s a good reason for this but as time continues to slip by I really can’t for the life of me see what that reason could be.
In fact, I have only two words for Apple on this subject right now …
Automatic Duck.
The first third party partner fell at the first hurdle – how well does that bode for the future?
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] ”
I wanted to revisit this. What control don’t you have?”I’m glad you asked …
It’s not so much the lack of control as the fact that the level of control is so coarse. The interface is absolutely microscopic which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, except that it means that very small movements translate into pretty big changes.
I really, really hate having to make very small mouse movements to adjust anything but with colour grading it’s especially undesirable. (Note that you can’t use the Cmd key to gear down even.)
Worse still is that although you can use the cursor to move the sliders, the increments are massive.
This is not the level of control I expect from a pro grading interface.
(I admit that I’m still working on a laptop which exacerbates the problem, but I think my point still holds.)
Then we come to the keyer, which is frankly a joke when compared to the FCP 3-way keyer which had a very decent level of control.
Here you have effectively none – you can add or subtract from your selection but that’s as far as it goes. You can’t see the key (major, major drawback), and you can’t adjust the softness. Not good – not good at all.
I won’t say anything about the lack of color wheels – maybe this is a better way, I can’t say. But the way it stacks up at the moment with the limitations above, it’s not the business as far as I am concerned.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[David Cherniack] “Even if X is presently something of a marketing disaster, it’s caused many of us to re-think NLEs and to question what we’ve assumed is their most efficient architecture.”
Absolutely agree – whatever our individual conclusions it’s been a fascinating eye-opener and has brought forth some genuinely insightful commentary on a huge range of related topics from some very clever people!
Maybe FCPX should be taught exactly because it is such a challenge to accepted ways of doing things – it certainly seems to get people thinking 😉
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Luke Hale] “I would hire an AVID specialist to edit in FCPX with no hesitation”
And I never would! Ever. “AVID specialists” are the most stuck in their ways and incapable of embracing new stuff of any editors out there – in fact, they are the most like the old school film editors who said they would never edit on a computer.
(PS. I worked full time on Media Composer for ten years before there was any such thing as FCP.)
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Shane Ross] “That only proves that the kid knows how to put together clips on a timeline and tell a story. That’s only part of what we do as editors. It is a BIG part, don’t get me wrong. But telling a story isn’t the only thing we do. And the fact that he came from iMovie and got up to speed in FCX really quickly only goes to prove how similar FCX is to iMovie…and what user base FCX caters to.”
Yikes!
I only said that he, in common with loads of kids his age, is incredibly fast at learning stuff.
I absolutely accept that FCPX is not ready for professional use – I am also prepared to agree that it may never become suitable. Without OMF, it’s a completely dead dog for me – and I need EDL as well not to mention dual monitors and a a bunch of other stuff that is pretty non-negotiable.
My point was rather that, given the ability of this age group to learn stuff fast, why not throw everything at them and get them to learn as much as possible? Speaking as an employer, the one set of editors I have no interest in giving a job to is the kind that only know one way or working. Anyone who can show me they know loads of different applications (and not just NLEs, but mograph, 3D, audio, music, etc.) is always going to get my interest.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Michael Hancock] “Interesting, but hand him Media Composer and Premiere and have him come back in three days and evaluate how well he made the transition. That will tell you more about whether people who learn on FCPX can transition away from it easily or if it’s too dissimilar in its methodologies. That’s the crux of the issue.”
It would be an interesting experiment certainly if I could persuade his parents to let me use him as a lab rat – not sure that’s going to happen.
My feeling is that he would learn it all pretty quickly and be completely unfazed by an supposed methodological incompatibilities – I think what actually impressed me the most was that he was seeing past the software to the underlying principles in a very perceptive way.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Neil Goodman] “its looks like to me, in the fcp-x one , all your audio went out of sync ? The dialouge, and fx tracks are now with a differrent clip? Surely thats not what you wanted ?”
No, everything stayed exactly where it was meant to. As it would, because connected clips stay connected where they are meant to be. You need to look closely at the clip connections to see what’s happening. I have a dialogue clip that bridges the edit point that is attached to a clip after the edit point as I wanted to show how this worked as well.
Maybe I made the example too complicated for it to be immediately obvious how efficiently this works – though in the real world I usually deal with situations a lot more complex than this. But I have tried out lots of different scenarios for this and it behaves entirely predictable and accurately each time.
For me it’s a “jawdroppingly” elegant solution to a genuinely complex editing task that the other two NLEs don’t come close to matching.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Mark Morache] “FCX has such a radically different paradigm, it would be difficult for people trained on it to migrate to Avid or Premiere.”
Until this week I’d have agreed completely with this assessment – but the this morning I spent a couple of hours with a 16-year old work experience kid who has been using iMovie for a while and got himself the trial version of FCPX just last Sunday and started work with it on Monday.
He’d cut a couple of pieces on FCPX to show me (movie trailers for Avatar) and …
… I was completely blown away not just by how quickly he had got to grips with the software to a genuinely sophisticated level but how professional, well-thought-out and creatively effective his work actually was. That’s in three days!!!!
Oh, and he’d already got a handle on the basics of Motion 5 within that same time.
Granted this was an exceptionally talented kid, but it did confirm to me what I have noticed for a while, which is that below a certain age kids are so natively computer-literate that picking up new software isn’t a “learning process” as so many older folks find it to be, but a completely instinctual thing. The result is they learn at lightning speeds.
And my conclusion from that would be that they are more than capable of mastering multiple platforms at the same time – and will only benefit from the overview that exposure to different working models will give them. In short, I’m not at all sure anymore that learning FCPX would be a hindrance to learning anything else.
It’s the rest of us over a certain age that I’m more worried about 😉
On another note, I was very intrigued that this kid was asking a lot of the “big questions” about FCPX that have been vexing much older and wiser heads around here – his biggest gripe was the “visual clutter” of the audio clips in the timeline! Interesting …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com