Simon Ubsdell
6
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Jeremy Garchow] “it’s one device, multiple uses”
I appreciate that part of it – and it’s already shown itself to be very cost-effective in this regard, but is cost-effectiveness really the best way of looking at this?
My feeling is there is a faulty argument that goes: the iPad can function as a controller; the iPad is cool and feels like the future; therefore the iPad is the controller of the future. I think there are loads of missing steps in this argument that are not really being explored …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Andy Neil] “That’s why the iPad 10 will have technology that uses electomagnetic force to mimic buttons and ridges, effectively tricking our sense of touch on a flat surface.”
Now that I want to see – brilliant idea 🙂
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “Once we can get formable electronic surfaces, then the computer touch surface is truly mature.”
I was actually thinking of that as a solution but felt it would sound too Luddite to mention it – if you’re putting back the tactile component, why did you abandon it in the first place?
Very interesting stuff, thanks for the derailment.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] ”
Now, imagine that the iPad or “tactileless” control surface could also be a “mouse” pad. By hitting a modifier (corner of the screen, edge of the screen, something really easy to hit) and dragging your finger, this now puts your iPad in mouse mode. You can then select a part of the interface to change (say, lift, gamma, gain, or chroma, or whatever) and divides your iPad in to the appropriate sections.”Great idea. I could definitely see how that would work – and I think would probably get round a lot of the problems. Now all you have to do is patent it and hope that nobody else reads these forums 😉
Actually I think Graeme Nattress had a really great idea with his very elegant Chromagic plug-in for the FCP7:
https://www.nattress.com/Chromagic/Chromagic.htm
I think there are probably some very clever ways of addressing these issues that will definitely minimize the limitations – I’m not convinced the limitations will quite go away.
I think as human beings we fundamentally like tactile response from our environment and our tools – it’s what gives us a feeling of control, ballistics, rhythm, torque, muscle memory, response times, it all speaks to something pretty inate in us and we know when these things don’t feel right in our hands. I can’t help feeling that that’s what’s the missing component from the iPad as controller concept.
I think it’s a very interesting area though.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “the Wave App was free and limited in it’s capabilities. it was very cool, I used it, but then I had to constantly switch back and forth as there was not enough control. It did make me want a Wave, which was probably the point of the App. :)”
It was definitely a great piece of marketing – and genuinely a lot of fun. I think the whole point of the exercise was actually to convince you of the clear necessity for a hardware panel, which sort of underlines my point I think.
[Jeremy Garchow] ” If the control pad and the GUI coincide, you could at least see what you are doing without having to look at the pad except to find the touch point”
Not sure how you envisage this happening in this case? Everything on the iPad? I’m not sure there is a solution that isn’t going to be a compromise somewhere.
I think Minority Report has a huge lot to answer for here – we have seen the future and we know it’s going to be touch screens everywhere. Maybe, just maybe, they won’t work as well for us as they did for Tom Cruise 😉
[Jeremy Garchow] ” I type much better on my iPad, just as fast as a keyboard with no tactile feedback”
I have to confess I just can’t get used to the iPhone/iPad non-physical keyboard thing, but I know that I’m probably dysfunctional because I do see people flying with them (not literally “flying” but I’m sure that’s coming in the next iteration but one!). I do like your idea of the 2/3 letters per button thing though.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Neil Patience] “All that said to tout it as a replacement for Color seems, to me at least, to be a huge leap of marketing hype rather than anything else.
For my money Color was the one App that really had Avid beat in terms of ability and functionality. Guess they just threw in that particular towel to Resolve and Baselight ?”
Completely agree with all of that – though I think they managed to imply rather than state that it was a replacement. Certainly there appears to be no basis to the rumour that went the rounds that somehow Color had been “rolled into” FCPX.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Hi Oliver
I’ve revised my Adjustable Frame Effect to be able to give you a crop and feather tool with quite a lot of control flexibility.
Using the Mask X and Y Position controls you can adjust the “crop”, which you can also feather using the Feather and Fall-off controls. There is also a Shear X/Y option to give an angle on the edge.
Note that the effect will also give you the ability to move/resize your source image, as well as move/resize the cropped image. There are controls for corner roundness of the mask, as well as border and background on/off.
To do the task you are trying to do, you will want to apply the Effect to a connected clip (the incoming clip) above the outgoing clip and animate as appropriate.
However, its the animation part that is not possible to achieve in the current versions of FCPX/Motion 5. All FCPX keyframes are ease in/out and there’s nothing you can do about it.
There is a canny work-around that can create a linear move between two points – but more than two points and you will again come unstuck. Very tiresome – I had hoped they would look at this in 10.0.1 as it’s a pretty basic thing but no such luck.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Gerald Baria] “I see a future, where an ipad companion app which will put FCPX’s color boards on the ipad,”
iPad control of Apple Color has been around for a while via the Tangent Wave app –
https://www.tangentdevices.co.uk/products_vwave.asp
– it was a fun idea for about five minutes until people started to realize that tactile feedback is really crucial in a grading interface, which is why dedicated hardware offers such big advantages.
The limitation of the iPad as a controller will always be that your fingers don’t know where they are (except in the most general sense) as there is no feedback from the slick flat surface of the screen. This means that you are stuck with having to look down at the interface to see what it is you are doing – and that’s no way to grade, or in fact do anything remotely precise in controller terms.
Clearly the Color Board has been laid out with the iPad in mind, hence the vertical rather than rotational movement of the controls – I frankly think this implementation won’t ever get beyond the novelty stage because of the limitations I’ve described.
Imagine trying to edit with FCPX if you had to look down at the keyboard and/or check the physical position of the mouse to make sure you were doing the right thing all the time – this would not enhance your editing pleasure one bit. Your hands and finger know where they are on the keyboard and the mouse which is why they work pretty well as interfaces. (A lot of people will also point out how much quicker they can type on a BlackBerry versus an iPhone, again on the basis that you’re getting tactile feedback from the keys.)
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Thanks, David. Someone has finally articulated perfectly my own workflow as regards audio – or rather has pointed out that for some forms of editing there can be no separation between the video and the audio processes.
As someone who works equally in sound and picture, I can say that DAWs are not going to be adopting a trackless model any time soon (please let this be true!!!!) – so many fundamental mixing processes depend on the track paradigm that any attempt to change this would be substantially more disruptive (to say the very least) than what has happened with FCPX and video editing.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Andrew Richards] ” I wonder if their (arrogant) attitude is something like “all interchange should be via XML, and all other interchange formats are obsolete.””
Yes, I do get the sense that that’s where they’re coming from – clearly everyone wants to have the interchange format that rules the world and it must always have narked Apple that they had to support AVID’s OMF …
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com