Definitive AP vs. FCP Thread

[laguun]

This is a very exciting time. There are a lot of new doors that open... and the difference between doing it and not doing it... is doing it.

indeed.

 

[Zach Nelson]

agreed.

you're totally correct about the audio world. it was Pro Tools LE that got me into producing, nothing else was good enough at the time (cakewalk?). Now you can pick up a 24 bit, 8 channel audio board for $299, but it doesn't mean you can produce something people want to hear.

Good note about AP handling 4K vs. FCP handling 2K. I forgot I read that in another post. Personally I think the 4K-goodness is a bit (dare I say) overkill? But I want to shoot it so I can crop-down to 2K and be flexible if I have to be.

 

[M Most]

Hoffman: I'm kind of scared about the film industry. On the one hand I love what Red is doing but on the other, can you imagine the amount of indie films flooding the market 2-3 years from now? And they'll look outstanding too. .... Films are going to become a commodity and 10 people on your block will become overnight directors.

Maybe for about a month or so each, until they realize they can't make a living at it because about 99% of all of those projects you mentioned will lose money - most of them all of the money that was put into them.

The film industry runs on talent, not technology. Just wanting to do something doesn't necessarily make one good at it. Access to technology doesn't make someone a director, and access to technology doesn't make someone a writer, a cameraman, or an editor, no matter how good the technology might be. And personal projects don't usually pay one's rent. Reality does eventually set in, and that separates the ones who will make their lives in the industry from the ones who want to make personal projects as a hobby. Not to mention the fact that marketing a movie is even more difficult than making it, and that has absolutely nothing to do with what camera equipment might or might not have been used. I'm not trying to discourage anyone, but it's an unavoidable fact of life in a capatalist society that one must ultimately make a living. Making money-losing movies for the fun of it is not a really effective way of accomplishing that. If you're serious about the film industry providing your living, you can't be scared of a bunch of junk flooding YouTube for free, no matter how nice some of the images might be.

 

[laguun]

agreed.

Good note about AP handling 4K vs. FCP handling 2K. I forgot I read that in another post. Personally I think the 4K-goodness is a bit (dare I say) overkill? But I want to shoot it so I can crop-down to 2K and be flexible if I have to be.

I am more worried about 8bit only - that is generating -visible- artefacts faster than you can say banding.

As workaround FCP has YUV in higher bitdepths, but i don´t want to superwise a typical 5 stop postworkflow (ingest->roto->3d->vfx->conform->cc) with roundtrips and have yuv-rgb conversion in it.

 

[Zach Nelson]

mmost: I hear ya. People will go broke or otherwise realize they can't cut it and end up with their gear on ebay. There's just so-many people who blindly get started each year. I'd have to say for every person who bails-out there's probably 3 newbies coming in. A never-ending flood of bad movies.

 

[laguun]

Just wanting to do something doesn't necessarily make one good at it. Access to technology doesn't make someone a director, and access to technology doesn't make someone a writer, a cameraman, or an editor, no matter how good the technology might be. And personal projects don't usually pay one's rent. Reality does eventually set in, and that separates the ones who will make their lives in the industry from the ones who want to make personal projects as a hobby. Not to mention the fact that marketing a movie is even more difficult than making it, and that has absolutely nothing to do with what camera equipment might or might not have been used.

Yes, very true.

If you constantly produce films on a professional level, month by months, its really hard to shoot with a budget of below $100.000, even $250.000 is really really little then.

With $100.000, you have to limit
- number of roles
- shooting days
- locations
- few s/vfx
- skeleton crew
- very few props
- mostly shot on location, few sets
- and -no- generous pay for anyone.
just to name a few limits.

red helps - by bringing stock costs down and quality up - but the parameters above remain untouched.

 

[laguun]

I'd have to say for every person who bails-out there's probably 3 newbies coming in. A never-ending flood of bad movies.

we don´t need newbies for bad movies. proven in decades of filmmaking.
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/2935

 

[Zach Nelson]

hilarious i love it

 

[Thor Wixom]

AP

AP

znelson,

I have edited on both FCP (Lock n' Load - http://www.godfreyfilms.com/) and AP (just Google Thor Wixom and you'll find a lot of links).

Honestly, I prefer the workflow of AP for my own projects, however, I keep up on my FCP skills because I have clients that request that workflow.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. Adobe makes the editing/compositing process nearly seamless with Dynamic Link, which allows you to share assets back and forth between AP and AE. The workflow makes it so you aren't re-rendering and re-importing everytime you make a change to your comp. You don't get this between FCP and AE on the Mac side, and there is no FCP on the PC side.

2. Adobe CS3 is the ONLY truly cross-platform solution between Mac and PC platforms, which means that the opportunities for colaboration are wide open.

3. AP numbers are on the rise precisely because of the reasons listed above, and the reasons that others have given on this thread. Adobe seems to have it together and their products are improving in leaps and bounds. Especially considering the problems that users seem to be having with FCP and Color (see the sticky on the main page) I expect to see a lot more editors giving AP a try. When they do, I think they will like what they see. Over time, I expect to see movement toward AP and CS3. There is certainly no reason to completely avoid it now that it is ported on both Mac and PC platforms.

These are the main reasons I work in CS3. There are others, but they are more subtle and based on personal preference. The above reasons are factually based, which is why they are the only reasons I bring up. Most other preferences for one package over another are probably more subjective than objective.

Just my 0.221476 Pesos.

-Thor

 

[Thomas Mathai]

That's likely to ask employee to decide employer. Employer should know what they want at the first place.

My 2 cents

This is assuming the employer is that knowledgable. That's why employers hire employees, especially experts

 

[Thomas Mathai]

Hoffman: I'm kind of scared about the film industry. On the one hand I love what Red is doing but on the other, can you imagine the amount of indie films flooding the market 2-3 years from now? And they'll look outstanding too. The DV advances in the past few years has really opened up the door but it's also made it alot tougher to compete. Alot of folks shoot relative garbage (in my opinion anyway) and it still ends up going straight to dvd. So sure $50K + equipment and suddenly you're in the movie biz. Now the garbage will just look better and it's going to make the market place even tougher. Films are going to become a commodity and 10 people on your block will become overnight directors.

Ummm have you seen how many indies have flooded the market so far? It's not going to be any different.

I doublt they will all look outstanding either. Just because you have a 4k camera doesn't mean you'll automatically shoot something that's polished.

There has been years of crappy 35mm films that are garbage visually and storywise.

 

[Álex Montoya]

The FCP users sound more and more like the Avid ones once did.

With Premiere (windows in general) is easier to access to the bones, to the files themselves and to tweak them if anything is wrong, and is more resolution independent than FCP.

You have to know yourself better with computers but it is easier to get things fixed if anything goes wrong.

 

[RivaiC]

Concrete, what do you mean by more resolution independent than FCP, which version are you comparing with.

And funny, i found QT is more accessible than AVI that premiere use. Tweak them if anything wrong need to be elaborate more.

--
The FCP users sound more and more like the Avid ones once did
--
Avid is the king last time, no strangers why Avid is the best and keep hearing about it, but FCP is slowly taking over now. So you would hear great things about FCP. If one day, premiere starting to beat FCP, you would face the same thing. That's normal.

 

[M Most]

znelson,
Adobe CS3 is the ONLY truly cross-platform solution between Mac and PC platforms

Avid is cross platform for every editing product other than DS Nitris, and has been for a number of years.

 

[Zach Nelson]

Does anyone have a comment on pre-rendering in both environments? Or perhaps needing to transcode before you can do xyz?

 

[Nook Kim]

Working with HDCAM it never was an issue for us. Now with red, it is:
Quality:
Adobe can do 4K RGB @ 10bit.
FCP can do 2K RGB @ 8bit.

Hi laguun,

This spec is true and looks good, but I wonder what kind of machine would I need to handle that data rate. Also, just my personal preference, I wouldn't
like to cut in 4K anything. I'd rather cut in 720 on the fly and conform back
to 4K. I don't mind cutting in 480 either. Less render, less wait.

my 2 cents

 

[Thor Wixom]

AP CS3 and Pre-Rendering

AP CS3 and Pre-Rendering

Does anyone have a comment on pre-rendering in both environments? Or perhaps needing to transcode before you can do xyz?

znelson,

I use an Axio LE card in conjunction with AP. It rocks. I rarely have to render, and I mean rarely. I do a lot of AE type work in AP (especially animated titles) because it's so easy and mostly render free.

That is one benefit I've noticed about the Windows (PC) side, there are a lot of hardware vendors that add real time support.

However, it's a brave new world when it comes to Redcode and 4k. It is reassuring to know, however, that AP is natively 4k compatible.

But then again, you can't discount what Red is doing with Apple in terms of offering native Redcode editing. I'm a little jealous, but I know it will equalize quickly. Probably a matter of months instead of years like it used to be.

Still, my post before still applies. It's better to go AP and CS3 because it's cross platform. No other software package is.

-Thor

 

[Nook Kim]

I haven't used AP for about four years now, so I don't really know how much
it has improved til today. I will just write something that I like FCS about.

1. FCP lets me to choose how I'd like to perform a task during the edit. It offers
a lot of ways of doing one thing. You pick whatever suits your way.

2. I really like Apple's user manuals. For me, they are one of the best software
documents I've seen. Very easy to follow and includes a lot of information about
the software and general filmmaking knowledge.

3. I know people find some errors in Color, but once I got to know the workarounds
it doesn't really bother me. Also, I couldn't complain having once $25,000
tool for almost free. It is very impressive to me.

4. FCP & Color converts whatever format you throw at them into 4:4:4 YUV
color space so that you won't hurt your data (picture) when you manipulate
them. I don't know about AP.

5. DVD Studio Pro is very.. pro. The quality it creates hasn't disappointed me, yet.
As long as you go through Compressor, you will like what you see.
(One tip: you can put compression marks on FCP if there's things that you
want to compress more or less in your footage, and the compressor follows
your command.)

6. According to Ben Waggoner (Author of Compression for Great Digital Video),
FCP is the best NLE for handling colors.

7. May I say, Mac's don't get broken that often? Okay, I take it back. As long as
you make your machine THE editing suit (no internet!), this won't matter
too much.

8. Yes, I like working with Quicktime way better than AVI. The reason why?
Hmm.. It's better! :shifty:

9. I love how the timeline figures out what format I am working with. I love it so much!
You lay down any format on the timeline no matter what sequence setting you have,
it just adjusts itself for ya.

10. Unlike other people, I like it's time remapping. It's rather simple to use.
Also, key framing is very very easy.

11. I like how quickly FCP's R&D team implements new things into the software. I don't
like having to spend upgrade fee everytime, but it's still way cheaper than using
Avid with almost no updates. Okay, I don't hate Avid!


I will come back when I can think of more reasons. I will think of some things
that I don't like about FCS, too, so I don't sound like... something.

Hope this helps.

PS. Just so you know, I started editing with AP 6 years ago. I switched over
to FCP 2.0 and hated FCP, but I didn't want to go back to AP. Finally, I got
my hands on Avid, but I was just using it to prepare for my future.
I went back to FCP 3.0 and it was better than 2.0. Once Walter Murch used it and
provided his feedback to Apple, FCP 4.0 came out as a monster.

 

[Cail Young]

BTW, i like one thing in Premiere is having to type things you want to find from Effects or Filter Tab, and it will list it for you. I hope to have that in FCP

In the Effects tab, hit Cmd-F and you'll get a search function that searches the effects. It isn't live-updating, though. It is the same search that the Browser uses.

 

[Cail Young]

Does anyone have a comment on pre-rendering in both environments? Or perhaps needing to transcode before you can do xyz?

With FCP6, with a sufficient level of hardware (I don't know what it is offhand, but anything G5 or newer I've used it on works fine) every common format ((H)DV/DVCPRO(HD)/Prores422/Uncompressed SD/HD/etc) will play back in the timeline without prerendering. Audio can be finicky depending on your source-destination formats, but video is now 99% no-render. Dropping .3gpp video directly in a 'normal' timeline does require rerendering.

EDIT: I have noticed that this doesn't mean it will play 100% framerate or quality - but it will play back without rendering.