Jeebus, When will the FCP bashing ever stop on this blog? What if that sloppy piece of work had been done on an Avid with it’s Color Corrector?
I’m just tired of the anti-FCP bias in your writings Scott. Change the record man.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/21 at 03:16 AM
Marcus, I specifically say in the post that one can do great work with Final Cut Pro. You see great Final Cut Pro work on television every day. I use Final Cut Pro on a very regular basis myself and love it. It’s how people use this tool that is the problem. Since it is so cheap people who really don’t understand what they are doing use FCP and create some real crap, that’s not FCP’s fault.
The reality is that there is a lot more bad videos and programs created with FCP than Avid. Is that because an Avid user has more extensive training in proper post? Maybe. Is that because it’s cheaper and in more hands? Probably.
As for FCP bashing ... I bash because I love. FCP is at version 7 and to still have many of the bugs and lacking features is, IMHO, inexcusable. If we don’t tell Apple how to make the problem better then how will they know? Believe me I’ve sent bugs reports and feedback via official channels for years and years and years .....
Posted by Scott Simmons on 09/21 at 07:02 AM
I think this article is more of a position statement to arouse a little bit of controversy than reality. There has always been low end stuff.
Yeah, there is more of it today. If anything, what’s happened is that the mid level market has declined. That’s where you still get the technical stuff right but the artistry doesn’t rise to the same level as big budget stuff.
There is now and there will always be the expensive high end stuff.
Lower budgets for professional work are partly to blame. Youtube is not. Edit systems are not. Editors are not.
It could be argued that the low cost of some editing software has allowed inexperienced people to do work they are not yet ready for.
Back when the gear was much more expensive, way before Avid or any other non-linear system, the only people who became full fledged editors were those that could “make the cut” so to speak. It wasn’t even a weeding out. You had to have some
stand out skills or talent. If you didn’t, you got into some non-creative part of the business.
Or you just got out.
Now those same types of individuals hang on for much longer before they either learn some good skills making bad projects better or realize they need to move on to something else.
However, all this really falls squarely on the shoulders of producers more than anyone.
We all know producers who know a good cut when they see it (and demand it). And we all know some producers who wouldn’t know a good cut if it hit them on the head.
You gotta figure out how to find the ones you want to work for.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/21 at 09:10 PM
Marcus, maybe Scott went a little overboard with the FCP reference, but get a thicker skin.
You know, the kind Avid users have gotten from taking so much crap from some FCP users.
I know it’s been said so many times that edit sytems are just “tools”, but ya know, they kind of are.
Peace, and happy cuts on whatever system you are using, my editing brethren. Especially to the folks using Edius, Premier or Vegas who get dissed
simply by being left out of the conversation.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/21 at 09:21 PM
Yes, I do feel sorry for the Vegas, Premier et al. Especially Vegas as it has some wicked features. The thing is , I work in an Avid facility with over 20 edit suites. I’ve seen the failings of Avid at the high end (instability!) and of those who use it for offline (lack of technical know-how, some lack procedural stuff like track laying etc). But Scott has become known for his pro Avid focus; fair enough, you love the tool you love, but it’s become *tiresome* to see “the other” side get a consistent kicking from Scott. The platform wars finished long ago, I thought the “my NLE is better than your NLE” war died out as users matured a bit, but Scott seems to want to beat a dead horse over and over. Its like I’ve come to know Scott as the “Anti-FCP -Guy” and I’m 100% certain that Scott can write about other things more important and far more interesting in the editing world, if only he could resist the urge to take a bite out out of the Apple so to speak.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/22 at 05:23 PM
“When will the FCP bashing ever stop on this blog?”
Try being a Premiere Pro editor…I’ve actually had other editors (whose work isn’t that great BTW) smirk and give a small laugh when I tell them what I cut with…
As for what Scott wrote - I agree with a lot of what he says. The ironic thing - I’m actually in the middle of editing a project for a large corporate client - all shot by them on a Flip camera.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/22 at 05:31 PM
Thanks again for any comments Marcus. Sorry if you really feel that I’m bagging on FCP too much. If you look around here on PVC, at my work on Studio Daily and the old home of the Editblog you’ll see there tons of Pro-FCP writing as well. Is there more FCP bashing than Avid bashing? Yes. FCP has had a decade to fix a lot of nagging issues which they have not fixed. There’s a lot to like but there’s also a lot of stuff the engineers have not fixed. I will give credit where it’s due but I will not play the role of an Apple or FCP fanboy. I think my FCP critiques are accurate. If you disagree then address them in a specific post and we can debate. I just want Apple to continue to make FCP better and fix problems ... not just neglect or mask over them. It took 7 versions to get a Timecode Viewer window and while nice it’s could have been a whole lot better. If it had come along in version 2 then it would be perfect.
We have to hold the companies responsible for the products they make and let them know how to make them better. I’ve had a lot of negative to say about Avid, though mainly the company and mainly on Studio Daily as the Media Composer product is very feature rich and solid. More than that Avid has been upgrading like crazy the last couple of years and really addressing specific issues. They have been doing this much better than Apple. Let’s try to keep pressuring Apple to make FCP even better. It’s pretty damn good now but could be better.
Eric, thanks for the Premiere reminder too. I think there are more of you out there than it seems since all we seem to talk about are Avid and FCP. And don’t feel bad, I did a corporate piece all shot by the company on a Flip camera earlier in the year. It’s everywhere!
Posted by Scott Simmons on 09/22 at 08:15 PM
I don’t agree entirely with the Wired article.
For one thing, yes, the Flip is a cheap camera, and that at the end of the day is why it is so popular. People can take it with them on extreme sports etc. However you can’t really make a company promo video with it, or television.
I don’t agree that people don’t value quality. One of the things I hear over and over from people who own cameras like the Flip is that they wish that the picture quality wasn’t so cruddy! They value the Flip because of its benefits *for what they use it for*, but the *don’t* as a whole value it over a high quality camera that they would really use had they a choice.
Imagine there are two Flip style cameras. One was $180 and recorded highly compressed 640x480 video. The other was also $180 and recorded 1920x1080 to, I dunno, XDCAM EX style compression. Which would most people see as the better value for money?
At the heart of this is price, pure and simple. It isn’t that people don’t value quality, it’s that they don’t want to pay hand over fist for it if the quality isn’t the overriding factor compared to practicality.
The problem for us as professionals is whether clients value our skills enough to pay for them. I see a lot of businesses making YouTube series and promos that are clearly very amateur. They don’t value the point of paying a professional to make them look good.
Even some professionals are starting to go for the ‘its good enough’ vibe. And it is affecting potential day rates. I met up with a guy who runs a highly successful company that deals with all aspects of multimedia, animated logo branding, video and the web for clients that included the BBC. it was interesting what he had to say as he was hoping to include me in his list of vendors.
Trouble was that he he wanted things done yesterday (yeah, this happens on every job I know) but he didn’t really care if the quality was great or not. He said as much. Speed was far more important than production value, even though the videos in question would be used in situations where quality really should have been at the forefront.
What was worse was that the rates he was offering were pitiful. In fact to be able to work for them would be incredibly difficult. It simply wouldn’t be worthwhile being in business.
More and more the rates are being driven down and in those circumstances you cannot really be sat there polishing everything up. You simply aren’t being paid for it.
Posted by Simon Wyndham on 09/23 at 09:54 AM
I happen to think Scott is right about the “good enough” mentality.
It’s because it is inherently an issue in the ether that cannot be rigidly measured that makes it a difficult subject to tackle in any meaningful way.
However, I agree with him, mostly as a viewer. I am a news Junkie (I capitalized the J on purpose)!
Since I was 6 years old I’ve been watching CNN, and missed a lot of great cartoons as a result. I’ve noticed in the last 5 years or so that quality has diminished; or at least it feels that way.
When all of the news channels regularly started using WEBCAMS for their correspondents, I nearly fell over. And I love tech. I thought it was so cool at first, because we got to see things we might not have been able to see before. I think this started during the recent wars.
However, after they started using it on occasion for Europe, White House, and domestic US cities, I asked myself how hard would it be to get a proper cameraman? Why would they do this?
I think the answer is in Scott’s posit. It was good enough. My guess is that the producers thought, if we can get an Emmy using webcams for middle east footage, why not use it more?
I think part of it is also appealing to younger generations. Look at how feature films look more and more like video games from the future. These are, of course generalized statements, but I think we can agree if this topic is to be discussed, that is what we are limited to until we can find rigid criteria beyond anecdotal evidence.
This is a grandiose topic, and I think it should be explored. I think like any major change, has to do with many things. Society in the US is becoming more A-Social, I’ve noticed this in Canada as well. Younger folks worry if the Earth will be inhabitable in 50 years, and we wonder why everything looks desaturated in movies.
Any medium contains aesthetic that is influenced by the world around the artist at the time of its creation. Even if it is a simple news report. I personally think we are dealing with a side effect of the changing world, and something far greater than the availability of cheaper acquisition methods.
As far as AVID versus FCP. If you like AVID go for it. I edited in AVID for 5 years, and it nearly drove me to suicide with bugs. I hate them with a passion, BUT again, to each his own. But I can tell you it was bad enough I switched to Mac as a result, and I was a PC fanboy for 16 years. Now I use both.
I like Vegas a lot. I went to FCP out of necessity, but it’s definitely not perfect. For ME, I found it to be a much better fit. I do still like the Avid interface a bit better, but it’s just too buggy, even on the certified, and hardware driven systems. I also found the Avid community to be much less helpful, and rather snooty. (Again this is my experience, and in no way a representation of what IS or IS NOT in fact.)
Will the Avid users pray for me, as I have a job coming up that requires Avid!?! (It’ll be the first time in 2.5 years.) Dear G-d I implore you, I promise to fast this Yom Kippur if my suite does not crash, memory leak, or corrupt data!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/25 at 02:10 AM
“It’s the economy, stupid.” Or the budget…
Honestly, the budgets are shrinking for everything. If a one hour program is only budgeted for 12 weeks vs 40 weeks, there’s just not enough time or money to make it completely “perfect.” in 12 weeks. If you got 40 wks, I would expect it to be more than “good enough.” I think it’s just as simple as that.
Assuming you have a good crew/post team, 24 wks will yield better results that 12 wks. Generally speaking.
Chuppy
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/26 at 08:25 AM
