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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

FCP X Introduces Multicam and Broadcast monitoring....

R3D has been MIA whan it comes to FCP X.

But I have a ton of faith in RED and Apple.

It makes sense for both to have a really classy and elegant solution.

FCP X is to NLEs what RED was to Cameras five years ago.

lets not loose the spirit.

Believe me, going with FCP X has been amaverick move (some would say stupid) but they said that to me when I adopted RED early too.

Kiss and make up and blow the doors off post RED (like you have been doing with RCX Pro...




Eric Santiago said:
Like if the RRC works with FCPX?
Ive been out of the loop so not sure if that works yet?
Click to expand...
 
David Battistella said:
There was Davinci resolve roundtripping before today.

What I am lobbying for as an interm solution is that RCX Pro be able to read the FCP X xml format.

If I could:

Edit 720P PR Proxy media
Send FCP X xml to RCX Pro
Render Prores 4444 from RCX
Send back to FCP X For finish
or send that XML to resolve for finish of PR 4444 media
Or relink the R3D there then

Id be quite happy with this.


I think that people are over seling the Realtime r3d thing. So much horsepower has to go into decompressing R3D that i would much rather use atraditional offline online approach to RED.

The r3d file format is the bottleneck because the decompresion requires CPU and for offline taxing the system that much aint worth it (to me)

David
Click to expand...

Didn't realise that there was roundtripping to Davinci before today. There again, I have not had the time to look at depth into FCPX as I have been working on Premier and MC projects in recent times.

Your interm workflow David is very interesting....

;))
 
David Battistella said:
But I have a ton of faith in RED and Apple.

It makes sense for both to have a really classy and elegant solution.

FCP X is to NLEs what RED was to Cameras five years ago.
Click to expand...

You have got to be kidding me.

If RED had said they were making point and shoot cameras with auto everything, no more external monitor support, it only shoots 1080i, and it was only available at all Best Buy stores, you might have a point.

RED I believe in, because they make professional tools.

We are not the taret market for Apple, and it shows.

This "update" is too little too late, all the former FCPro people I know have already moved on.
 
i am so glad apple worked out some of our issues! when i logged in this was the last thing i expected to see, but i am very happily surprised!
 
Matt Gottshalk said:
You have got to be kidding me.

If RED had said they were making point and shoot cameras with auto everything, no more external monitor support, it only shoots 1080i, and it was only available at all Best Buy stores, you might have a point.

RED I believe in, because they make professional tools.

We are not the taret market for Apple, and it shows.

This "update" is too little too late, all the former FCPro people I know have already moved on.
Click to expand...

I think Battistella is dead on, "FCP X is to NLEs what RED was to Cameras five years ago.

Now, the argument that FCPX is not "professional" is one of the many claims that were made about the RED One back in 2007 and 2008. Now, I know that every little update that is made to FCPX is gonna make those who jumped the ship feel more and more like suckers, and no amount of bashing and ill wishful thinking is gonna stop Apple in the tracks if they've already decided how they're gonna build this NLE up to be the most effective and practical of the bunch; but in the end, we all win. I for one, I'm keeping the faith.
 
All this talk about FCP X not being professional. I just don't get it. At the beginning of the old FCP I heard the same stuff. It's not pro, use AVID.... It just gets old... I also don't get the jumping ship part. As for me, and the technicians in the team, we like to stay safe and "don't change a running system" if we are not forced to do so. Especially if you got a big multi TB server system up and running, why would I throw everything overboard before really looking into it?
I'm having a hard time to get transitions to the newer OS versions, because of the server technicians who like to wait and test before changing everything. To me, it's the same thing.

Everything was working fine with FCP but as soon as FCP X came out so many people were leaving without even truly looking into it.... Why? Why not just wait another minute and try out the new gear, and decide after the promised updates show up if it still suits you. But maybe that's not so many people thinking like me.

It's like buying an EPIC and going back to SONY because something in the current firmware isn't activated yet...


Sorry
Rant off :)
 
Matt Gottshalk said:
You have got to be kidding me.

If RED had said they were making point and shoot cameras with auto everything, no more external monitor support, it only shoots 1080i, and it was only available at all Best Buy stores, you might have a point.

RED I believe in, because they make professional tools.

We are not the taret market for Apple, and it shows.

This "update" is too little too late, all the former FCPro people I know have already moved on.
Click to expand...

Matt


post reads exactly like film guys five years ago who said RED was a scam.

FCP X made a bold move. They made a NLE from the ground up and got rid of some old ideas like Source an Record monitors left over from porting a tape to tape mentality in a non linear computer space.

Avid, FCP and the very recent (usable) incarnation of premier all use a tape based mentality in a non linear space.

Keywords are important in a digital database world. Metadata gives way to technologies like Seadragon. Apple is thinking ahead and adobe and avid are going to have to move this way sooner or later.

But really. No one has to use it. I like it and I have delivered networ shows on all of them.

Its in REAds best interest to interface with all the NLEs out there either through native support or by providing the best most efficient way in and out of every NLE out there.

Four years ago it was "use FCP. For red" now it's " use premier". This flavor of the month thing is boring. It just has to work with everything.

In 18 months we will see large enterprise post and tv series talking about the new world of post FCPX has opened up with thunderbolt and SAN networks.


David
 
Hey Jarred, any news on the current software front between RED and Apple? :)
 
Blair,

You are correct. It is an island right now. But they are doing some very cool stuff that I think people will eventually adopt. It will get better

But right now you can Create OMF for any audio platform. You could even creat sag and go back to avid. In terms of vfx you can send vfx image sequences out to any app that can import an image sequence.

Its gotten better and they are releasing timely updates and delivering exactly what they said they would.

I think that us decent and commendable after the launch disaster.

David
 
These little improvements to FCPX make me wonder what Apple's stance is now, in regards to the Pro market. Is this an indication that they haven't given up on us? Perhaps a clue to what's to come. I'm still very hopeful that they haven't given up on a new generation MacPro. Fingers are still crossed.
 
Jake Bastian said:
Lets be honest here, even the people who do offer 'native' R3D support aren't doing it that well. As it stands if I'm shooting more than half a drive, AMA & Adobe get bogged down trying to transcode on the fly and it becomes more of a pain to look at RAW than it is to convert my footage to prores or dnx.
Click to expand...

This.

We mostly provide grading and workflow services (like dailies) for indie features. Projects that come to us are about evenly split between FCP (7, so far) and Media Composer (nobody has even asked us about Premiere). Despite Media Composer having had native R3D support for quite a while, we've not seen anyone in this market actually choose to use it. Maybe it's useful for short form projects that need quick turnaround or something, but the downsides to using it during the offline editing of a long form project are numerous. Even aside from performance issues, 30+ hours of R3D footage takes up a lot more drive space than 30+ hours of ProRes LT or DNxHD 36, and that's a hassle for the editor. And what's the point? Yes, you have access to all the data in the raw image, but that's not actually useful during an offline edit.

Some day in the future, storage will be so cavernous, and CPUs so speedy, that there's no reason not to cut from R3D. But today is not that day.

Jeff Whitehurst said:
:-/
Anybody else have the sinking feeling the plan for FCPX is iPhone video and Thunderbolt only monitoring?
I wish I wasn't so jaded about Apple lately, but after spending $10k on Apple and Matrox hardware and software, then
waiting close to a year to use it professionally with FCPX, it's hard to feel anything else but skeptical...
Click to expand...

It already supports PCIe monitoring. You can do this with a Kona card today, with beta drivers. More generally, people should really cut it out with this line. FCP X had features on day one that made no sense in a "consumer" program (4K ProRes support, float color depth, DPX exporting, fairly credible video scopes, extensive metadata features, etc.), and has now restored much of the key functionality that didn't make it into the first release.

And "close to a year"? It's 7 months.

Matt Gottshalk said:
This "update" is too little too late, all the former FCPro people I know have already moved on.
Click to expand...

Meh. In our market segment, we're seeing about the same mix of FCP 7 and Media Composer come to us that we were a year ago. I said it when FCP X first shipped. Most editors and especially large facilities don't run out and upgrade on day one. It's common for version migration to take a year or more. And people forget how FCP gained so much ground in the first place: it was adopted because it was cheaper and more approachable (for new editors) than other tools. It then moved upmarket over time. Well, the price and approachability gap between FCP X and Media Composer is still very large. I see little reason to believe the long-term trend toward FCP and away from Media Composer will be reversed. It's possible the FCP X transition might give Premiere a chance to establish a beachhead, however. (Which probably makes things worse for Avid, incidentally.)

Blair S. Paulsen said:
Its not the new paradigm FCPX brings that I have an issue with, its the difficulty in working collaboratively on the same project with people on any other sound/VFX platform.
Click to expand...

Now that FCP X has XML support, though, it's mostly just a matter of waiting for developers to pick up the ball and run with it. Some are already running pretty fast. There's the 7toX tool to bring in projects from FCP 7 (and even an Xto7 tool to go the other way around), there's now a $99 utility to take FCP X projects into ProTools, and Resolve can import FCP X's XML (and even carry over primary color grades).

And actually, come to think of it, I haven't tested this, but you should be able to get an EDL out of FCP X today by importing its XML into Resolve and then exporting an EDL from there. Resolve Lite should be able to do this, and it's free.
 
I like the look of this update very much. Real broadcast monitor support was the biggest thing I was looking for here, so that's awesome.

Adding more advanced controls to the chroma keying plugin is a good sign too - hopefully do the same and expand the other functionality in the same way.

I'll definitely have a look at trying to use FCPX for a project in another update or two.

Jeff Whitehurst said:
:-/
Anybody else have the sinking feeling the plan for FCPX is iPhone video and Thunderbolt only monitoring?
Click to expand...

Did you not see the bit where it says "Output video to an external monitor using third-party PCIe cards or Thunderbolt I/O devices."?
 
The simple error here on Apple's part was how this was presented to the world. It was a grand failure to be honest, one that didn't need to happen. The correct approach would have been to present FCP X as the perfect editor that can scale from small projects (home movies) to major feature film editing. They could have been upfront about their timetable. On day one, the software will be limited. Within a year, it will be feature rich. They should have supported the transition from FCP 7, allowing people comfort in knowing that Apple wasn't abandoning that platform overnight. Really, this was simple stuff. And they made a big error in judgement.

Now, having said that I stand by my original feeling about this - FCP X needs a year on the market to judge it. Putting aside their miscalculation, they can improve the perception. Obviously they actually do care about the pro market or they wouldn't be putting professional features into the software. Joe Hobbyist doesn't need broadcast monitoring, XML, or even multicam for that matter. So, if this was the intent from the beginning, there was no need to scare the pros off. They should have encouraged a gradual transition.

The success of FCP X in the professional market depends on perception. They need to convince those who use the editor in a collaborative, professional environment that Apple is in this for the long haul, dedicated to making this the best NLE on the planet, and ready to support it. It needs to play nice with other tools, including other NLEs, and it needs to avoid being an island. People go to islands for vacation or to retire, not to do work.

This is a very interesting time. I have three NLEs on my system. FCP X is the fourth. All with strengths and weaknesses and in some ways, all necessary. Is this a good thing? I don't know. The one good things is they are all affordable, share some hardware, and have some level of compatibility with each other. But there's lots of room for improvement. :-)
 
...And with Lightworks for Mac only months away, and already working with BMD/AJA cards and R3Ds, we're really getting spoilt for choice. Of course, if and when FCP-X will support R3Ds is a bit of a question. Back at the FCPUG preview last NAB, when I was still really enthusiastic about FCP-X, the one thing that bothered me was that they talked about pretty much every camera and every codec bar Red. Very conspicuous in it's absence. Seems that is yet to change.
 
In other news, the LA Final Cut Pro User Group has just changed its name to the LA Creative Pro User Group. I believe the intention is, they're going to expand their coverage to Premiere and Avid, and not just on FCP.

I know many LA post houses who are nervous about the longterm commitment of Apple to the pro post community, in terms of picture editing and sound mixing. This is particularly true for the Mac Pro desktop line.

I'm hoping that at NAB in April, Apple will make an announcement reaffirming what they'll be doing in the future.
 
If ProRes has a 4K variant, I wouldn't expect to see R3D support at all frankly. If you can do a primary correction in FCPX and then move to Resolve, conform to R3D and finish, i won't miss it.
 
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