Stephen Bakopanos
Forum Replies Created
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[Geoff Dills] “You can. At the bottom of the timeline on the right is the Clip Appearance Window which you can switch to a variety of settings; one has no thumbnails for the video.”
Well there you go. Another gripe bites the dust. Told you I still had plenty to learn!
I think once we get XML, OMF and EDL a lot of concerns will go…
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Good post!
After giving it a go for a few hours myself, I think everyone just needs to take a deep breath, disconnect from the internet and actually sit down and use it for a few days.
When I first loaded the program I was going nuts trying to work things out – I couldn’t find the slip tool (turns out its been incorporated into the trim tool) and I thought there was no easy way to manage keyframing (select clip, Ctrl+V then use Option+Click to add new keyframes) – but as you can see, both tools are there and both are just as good, if not better than in FCP 7 (heck, anything’s got to be better than FCP 7 keyframing).
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Events and Projects, but I think I’m starting to make sense of it. I’m hesitant to let Apple control everything, so I’ve turned off all the “automatic” features. I then create an Event (read: project) on the drive I desire and drag and drop all my media into the “event” as I would with the FCP 7 project window (until there’s proper Canon DSLR support, I’ll either be using FCP 7 & E1 Plugin or Magic Bullet Grinder to ingest my DSLR media on to the drive, and I’ll be using FCP 7 to ingest footage shot on tape). I then create a project (read: sequence) making sure it’s on the same drive as the event. If you can keep your events, projects and media all on the one drive, you should then be able to move drive between computers without much hassle. I’ve found the best way to deal with the events viewer is to put it in list mode and enable sorting by “media kind”. I’ve also found that once you turn OFF audio and video skimming, the program starts to feel a bit more familiar and less iMovie-like.
Now, some gripes:
– Project Management: Projects (read: sequences) need to be grouped by Events or else I’m going to have one hell of a mess of unrelated sequences floating around in the project library. I know that I can manually do it by creating Bins/Folders, but in this new dawn of “revolutionary, automagical organisation” I don’t think I should have to. You associated the project with an event upon creation, so it should be categorised that way in the library. I don’t want projects from Client A mingling with projects from Clients B, C, D and Q – it’s confusing for me, and it’s unprofessional when you have clients sitting with you potentially looking at videos from their rivals (what can I say, my loyalty is to my back balance)
– Speaking of bins – BINS! Yes, I know I can use “Keyword Collections” in place of a bin, but I’d still like the option of dumping a bunch of files in a folder and NOT having to have some random keyword associated with them. I can live without them, but it wouldn’t hurt to have them there anyway, just for those of us who like to keep things old school. In the meantime, the best workaround is to use “Keyword Collections” in their place and to organise your event library by media type (for those of you who used bins to sort audio from images from video, etc).
– Colour Correction: Whilst I’m warming to the colour board (still not entirely convinced) and am happy that Apple realise that a round trip to Color is too complicated for the bulk of small to medium sized projects, I’m a bit annoyed that they didn’t bring any of the more advanced features of Color across. My biggest gripe at the moment is that it’s all well and good to have masks for our corrections, but I need to be able to track them on to moving subjects. What happened to the tracker? Bring that back and you have a pretty good tool here. Of course, anything SERIOUS should be sent off to a DaVinci Resolve. Which brings us to:
– XML!!!!!!!!! As much as Apple wish their products were the be all and end all for us editor, they’re not. We NEED to export to other programs. I need to be able to spit out XMLs to use in After Effects. I need to be able to create EDLs to send to colorists. I need to spit out OMFs to send my audio to Pro Tools. Without this basic functionality, FCP X is dead in the water. I can’t understand why it shipped without it. I reckon if the had included these three little things, at least 50% of the negativity we’re seeing now wouldn’t have happened…
– Thumbnailed Timeline: Don’t like it. Perhaps I’ll warm to it in time, but for now I’d like to be able to switch it off. It makes it so much harder to see edit points.
– Gaps: Yeah. I like ’em in my timeline. I want ’em in my timeline. Heck, I NEED ’em my timeline. Why does FCP X seem to hate them so? The only way I can get them is by putting a clip up on another track or by duplicating a clip and converting it to a “gap” (read: slug). Maybe I just need to understand the workflow better, but at present I’m finding it annoying.
I’m sure there’s more for me to rant about, but I’ll have to spend some more time playing around with it first.
For now, I think it’s safe to say that there’s a lot for me to like and a lot for me to learn. And for Apple, there’s a lot for them to add. Let’s hope they get to it…
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I think it’s possible to update your rating on a program. It’s highly likely that many people immediately gave it a 1 star rating before giving it a proper go, and then revised their ratings upwards. Either that or Apple’s fiddling with the numbers…. 😉
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It’s independent of FCP 7.
FCP 7 should still be on your system and should open just fine. The two can co-exist.
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[Tim Wilson] “Apple has been very specific, that this is not the final state of FCP X. Features are ex-pected to be added quickly, via the App Store, with some of them waiting to show up natively in OS X Lion and with support for Thunderbolt. “
Apple can’t leave us in the dark about what they will and won’t bring to the table or else the bulk of pros will jump ship to Avid or Adobe. They HAVE to keep us informed. I’m not going to wait for an unknown period of time for an unknown set of features. That’s just madness.
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No OMF?!? What the hell are they thinking?
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Doesn’t look like it but thankfully **puts sarcasm hat on** “all your iMovie Events and projects transfer seamlessly to Final Cut Pro. You can start your project with a quick rough cut in iMovie, then switch to Final Cut Pro for full-featured editing. Or if you usually work in iMovie, you can take your craft to the next level and leverage your existing work. Either way, you can keep cutting without a break in the action.”
YAY!!! Look at me ma, I’m a real editor now!
**takes sarcasm hat off**
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[David Roth Weiss] “This is what is known as a non-sequitur.
Larry has been talking (or at least flapping his lips) about FCP X for months while still remaining under the terms of the Apple NDA. Why should one more show from Larry suddenly be “the” meaningful piece of the puzzle that points to the release date?
“We’ve been told that FCP X will be released in June. Apple tend to release products on a Tuesday (and there’s only two left in June). And Apple’s last major announcement on FCP X was made at the Supergroup meeting in Vegas. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they released their product to coincide with the next Supergroup meeting where it can be demoed and detailed.
Given the dearth of information coming from Cupertino, all we can really do is look at the stars and check to see if they’re aligning.
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[David Cherniack] “FCP is just too prestigious an item for Apple to do a quiet release. I think you’ll see a big dog and pony show before or after the end of the month”
A show like this, perhaps: https://supermeet.com/ ??
If Larry Jordan intends on talking about or showing off FCP X, Apple are either making an exception to his NDA or they’re going to release it in the next 48 hours… If it’s the latter, then it will probably be on Tuesday 21st (Apple tend to release new products on Tuesdays), meaning we should have it in 36 hours or less…
Of course, it could just be the former, in which case it could be any time this month. Heck, it might even be next month if they decide to delay it.
Whatever they do, I just wish they’d hurry up and give us some information.
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The “garbage in, masterpiece-of-cinematography out” auto-transcode importer…