I read the blogs last night, but haven’t watched the videos yet. Definitely waiting to see more about how this affects the other Pro Apps. Speaking of which, where’s our new Shake; Phenomenon?
Looks like they hit my main desires; 64-bit, real multi-core support w/ Grand Central, improvements to the horribly inept keyframing of old, real speed ramping control (did they mention if optical flow is now integrated?). Did I miss the part about Open CL support? They did mention it, right?! Would also like to know more about Media Management. Did anyone see any menus hinting at all of the STP functionality (besides the auto-magic FCPX cleans in one click on import)?
I’m still out on the interface. I’d have to see the video footage. I don’t care if the interface resembles iMovie, as long as the workflow and under the hood power are all improvements, without loss of control. Overall, I’m intrigued, and holding out judgement until I know more. The interface and “X” moniker does have me a bit worried that it could end up going the Quicktime X route (flashy, but where’s my Pro export options?) And I hope that it doesn’t become overly simplified like Motion (look, GPU livetype particle previews, it’s the AE/Shake killer!).
Sure, I have some gripes with Apple’s Pro App line decisions and lack of progress in the past few years. But like I said, I’m holding out hope for the time being, and giving them the benefit of the doubt until I’ve seen more of FCP X in action and have more info. about the other FCS apps.
Posted by Brad B. on 04/13 at 09:44 AM
Great points Brad, I’m with you on most of it. I don’t care what the DNA is, as long as it’s powerful, elegant, and gives us the control we need.
I know what you mean about Motion/Phenomenon. Who knows if we’ll see what that could have been. I’d really like to see something groundbreaking, maybe like Motion plus the nodal power of Nuke. Trying to copy & compete with AE will be a losing battle.
I’d be happy to never need STP. I hate going to another app for audio sweetening. I cut on Vegas for a while (don’t laugh!) - it’s ACID heritage gave it amazing audio tools baked right in, which I hope FCPX has.
Count me in line in June! Oh wait, it’s in the App Store…
Posted by Allan W. on 04/13 at 12:06 PM
Well, I just watched the 2 part videos of the whole presentation (the one shot from the right w/ the whole screen showing in 720p). I have to say, I’m really damned impressed. I think this will make the cutting workflow tremendously faster, especially for really complicated projects. Honestly, after watching that, I have to say my worries are alleviated (mostly), and I think people who have watched the high quality video and are still on the “they’ve turned FCP into a glorified iMovie” bandwagon, well either they’re scared to learn new tools, or they’re primarily a technical editor rather than creative, and they’re worried that they’re less valuable now that it doesn’t take so many layers of knowledge to properly edit without screwing up the timeline by overwriting things, dealing with all of the workarounds to a proper workflow, like the current nesting. There will still be plenty of room for technicality in the edit bay with FCP X, from what I’ve seen so far. And the ability to be creative will be exponentially increased, due to the time of iteration to try new ideas (see Nick’s video blog about the 12-core computers over at greyscalegorilla.com).
Allan, yes, I don’t think competing with AE would be productive. That’s an excellent and well established product (although I would love to see many parts of the AE workflow overhauled from the ground up). It would be awesome if they reveal that a powerful nodal structure has been built-in from the ground up, like Softimage XSI’s ICE. That could be the basis for accessing both color corrections like in Color, compositing like in Shake/Nuke, as well as be used for establishing the relationships between sets of attributes (filters, color grading) of clips. For instance, the auto color match feature is cool. But, if you can have an AVCHD 8-bit 4:2:0 file that you’ve color matched to a native ProRes HQ 10-bit file, you’re going to run into limitations. It would be great to have a nodal structure to setup secondary corrections to make compensations on the AVCHD clips (and all others in the timeline which are linked in the color match to the master ProRes clip). That would greatly simplify both color grading, and also filter sets (so you don’t have to keep hunting for all clips to remove attributes, and then copy and paste back onto those clips, while worrying about loosing the gamma/3-way that you had to do on the AVCHD clips, just to have a consistent grade before applying the newly adjusted filters.
It would be great if FCP X was modular, with the ability to have other functionality from the additional FCS apps purchased on a per-licensed basis, and modular but fully integrated into the same application, with the core code running off of the FCP X structure, and the others apps adding in the secondary functionality, with the ability to adjust the approach to the timeline elements (like when they showed how you can show the audio waveforms only). But I’m not certain how that would work exactly, given how the effects in STP are applied on a per track basis rather than per clip basis. I think it may be possible to make the interface work, seeing as how they’ve spent so much attention to managing the relationships between clips and compounding, etc. Yes, it would be fantastic to see full STP functionality fully integrated in the same application. STP is horribly antiquated, slow and doesn’t allow auto-save.
Posted by Brad B. on 04/13 at 01:20 PM
Allan’s reply:
“Great points Brad, I’m with you on most of it. I don’t care what the DNA is, as long as it’s powerful, elegant, and gives us the control we need.
I know what you mean about Motion/Phenomenon. Who knows if we’ll see what that could have been. I’d really like to see something groundbreaking, maybe like Motion plus the nodal power of Nuke. Trying to copy & compete with AE will be a losing battle.
I’d be happy to never need STP. I hate going to another app for audio sweetening. I cut on Vegas for a while (don’t laugh!) - it’s ACID heritage gave it amazing audio tools baked right in, which I hope FCPX has.
Count me in line in June! Oh wait, it’s in the App Store…
Posted by Allan W. on 04/13 at 01:06 PM”
Posted by Brad B. on 04/13 at 01:25 PM
doh, is there no remove post function?
Posted by Brad B. on 04/13 at 01:28 PM
What I would love to drop a script and some reverse shots into FCP, have it read the script, voice match the audio and sequence the reverses to the dialogue so all I have to do is place inserts, 2-shots, etc into the sequence. That would have been cool. To me, all they’ve done is something we should have had a year ago. Another cool thing would be ghost tracks, showing the sequences being edited somewhere else by a co-editor, mo-graph artist, etc so I could see their work too.
Apple sees FCP as its OS for content (camera->FCP->iTunes/iTV). It’s going to be cheap b/c Apple wants creators pushing out high-quality (looking) productions asap so it can make the money on the content. That’s color and ease of ingest/interface, not ‘rethinking editing.’
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