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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 :)

It's time to STOP bitching!

Tim Morten said:
Just to stir the waters for all you passionate FC fans: do you really want to trust the future of your editing software to a company whose primary business is selling telephones? The institutional focus of an Avid seems preferable, or at least an Adobe. Maybe there's a reason that FC has fallen behind... :)
Click to expand...

Why do you never see people questioning Sony's commitment to pro cameras because they happen to also make game consoles? FCP might not make the kind of money for Apple than iPhones do, but it's a major driver of high-end Mac sales. And the cachet that Apple derives from playing in flashy creative markets like video production is important to people's perception of the Apple brand, which helps sell all those iPhones. It's hard to imagine Apple deciding to walk away from the world's most popular video editing application.

In my opinion if Final Cut has fallen behind a bit, it's mostly just a consequence of development cycles. Remember how bad Premiere looked compared with Final Cut before it was replaced with the almost entirely rewritten Premiere Pro? Final Cut has now reached a similar stage in its lifecycle. The foundations need to be ripped out and replaced, and that takes a while. FCS 6 was released three years ago, and three years is about the minimum amount of time one could reasonably imagine for a major Final Cut rewrite. They could easily go another 18 months without it being too worrying. (Annoying, yes, but it wouldn't make me think something must have gone horribly wrong somewhere.)

Mind you, as I discussed over on Indie4K.com, I fully expect a major Final Cut rewrite to annoy the hell out of some existing users. They're going to do the usual Apple thing and design it by taking a fresh look at market requirements and questioning everything, rather than giving it a strict superset of Final Cut 7 functionality.
 
Chris Kenny said:
Why do you never see people questioning Sony's commitment to pro cameras because they happen to also make game consoles?
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Maybe Sony would have better cameras if they weren't distracted with other markets... or better game consoles (PS3 is in last place right now).

I'm just stirring the waters, but it is something to think about. Apple's commitment to editing may wane (as may their commitments to Macs) given what a small percentage of their revenue each is becoming. Or they may pull it together; just wild speculation at this point.

Avid on the other hand has a lot more to lose if they don't keep up/innovate.
 
shashbugu said:
I personally don't think there any FCP or Avid Editors who don't have AE installed somewhere in their studio
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I don't use AE. I think your statement is far from true.

I use Motion for my simple tasks. I found it faster than AE or other applications for titling and the like, plus quite flexible. My main issue is that I hate timeline based compositors.

For my "real" compositing I have been using Shake. I haven't been called on to comp a lot lately, so I still have Shake as my main tool.

If I start seeing a lot of comp work again I think Nuke is in my future, as I don't expect to see a Shake replacement from Apple.

I think I may also install AE.

CS5 has been the first Adobe suite to interest me since the original CS product. Mostly because of Mercury. All told however I am installing a new version of Photoshop and Illustrator. I am very interested in Mercury with Media Encoder, so that may become part of my workflow, as will Encore... because DVD Studio looks like it will never support BluRay and I am starting to get client inquiries.

I'm just playing with Premiere and AE because they'll be in the box. I hope to use them on some test projects and maybe some personal stuff. Basically I am hoping to learn more so I can have some real insight into what the tools can do.

I'm not alone. Most Avid folks like to comp in the Avid product line, or they move compositing to very high end tools, like Flame or Nuke.

FCP users do a variety of things though. Mostly and increasingly they use Motion. AE, Combustion, Shake, Nuke, Smoke all seem to get lots of play from FCP folks as well. Shake was the biggest for a while after the last version was released, but that has started tailing off.

Ultimately my resistance to AE is its lack of a node based interface for working with the project. Obviously it works for others to use a timeline interface, but I work much better and faster with a node based interface.
 
Gunleik Groven said:
In short: yes we disagree.

I love the ability to take an edit on a 3 year old laptop on the road, without worrying about my originals getting killed in an accident on the road.

...

Where we DO agree, is that when I do my own stuff, I often just basically stay online a lot of the time. And if I edit from cam-proxies, I just know what I can do with the RAW in Color. I don't care if it looks bad in FCP at that stage - for ease of use. But I have come to like the security level and flexibility of an online offline approach even for my own projects.

Seeing disks die on a regular basis does something with your mindset...

I personally can fix most problems and know when to bother about what - sorta.

But that knowledge isn't in the wild and the important thing for my customers when I advice on a workflow, is that it is solid, tested, familiar, safe and fast.

Online/Offline fits all these criteria.

And I get a hell of a lot less frustrated calls after my initial advice.
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I think my main disagreement with all that is that I would expect my remote users in circumstances like you describe to be using a full online copy of the footage... never the originals.

Its just the same as working offline... except that you have online quality.

Now obviously, if the footage is RED, I can certainly use a copy of my camera media as the masters... but in a portable system I am rather easily limited to offline quality with RED today. (Mobile Rocket hasn't proven robust, and I don't think that current laptop video cards really let you get "online quality" with RED even with CS5.)

Our differences are not so great.

(Note to self:
OK.
Made my point.
Move on!)
Click to expand...

One day I'll learn that skill.

One day...
 
David Battistella said:
Terry,

My basic belief is that all of the software is the same and does teh same things. They are all inching in here and there, but essentially its a basic route to the same end.

One does this, the other does that. This new feature that nspeed bump, blah blah.

I don't think you are a dick, but I will clarify. When FCP was getting ready to steamroll AVID I heard of many AVID editors refusing to work on anything but AVID. I think that is a dick move. I never forced a client to go with a piece of software and there was a time when AVID editors were shitting their pants because they had just shelled out 100K for a "system" that did less and was less flexible than FCP.

Or they claimed that they could not "edit as well" with a different piece of software. I take the position that no piece of software represents my talent as an editor so I do not want to be a slave to it.

This is why I will be all over lightworks if it is release as FREEware.

Better to have many tools for any situation than the one tool. Free the mind a bit, that is how I feel.

David
Click to expand...

I basically agree with you David.

Where I differ seems to me to be that I appear to work more often in large groups, hence I need Avid and FCP's tools for handling that.

As to the rest, cool tools are fine. Mostly I buy into new versions for their support of new formats.

I am still on FCP 6/FCS2 in my home studio- on a dual G5! I only miss RED and ProRes 4444 from FCP 7 on that machine. When I get a new machine in the home suite, I'll also get CS5 for it. No rush though, as you can see from its statistics, that suite isn't a high priority.

If a client came to me with a budgeted project, and wants to edit on any given system, then I will if it makes business sense. I won't buy a Quantel to edit a 30 second spot they want to pay me $5000 for because I'll never get an ROI, but I'd happily use Premiere CS5 if they asked for it in my home studio for that same project. I wouldn't break even, but I'd probably get most of a new Mac Pro and a copy of CS5 in the deal.

Its just business in the end, and whenever I can I try to work with my clients to give the best result and satisfy their odd requests... so long as they are paying.
 
Thanks folks. Glad you found the articles helpful.

One additional thing I didn't mention in the Avid article, but that I did run into, was that Avid's AMA had trouble with RED files inside folders with illegal characters (/ #) in the name. It acted like it saw files but couldn't open them. Adobe CS5 didn't have this issue. When I changed the folder name, then Avid AMA was OK and could open the files.

- Oliver
 
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