Final Cut Studio (2009): Frakking Documentation...

I suppose if the script converted the documentation built into the FCP package into a series of very long HTML files (with all the info hidden beneath those little blue disclosure arrows expanded), we could then use the Print command to convert them into a PDF.

The instructions would be:
1. Open the FCP package
2. Copy this directory elsewhere
3. Run this script, pointing it to the location of your copy.

@alex4d

and if you click on New Features which takes you to the web page where the color-coded tabs is mentioned there's NO EXPLANATION how to do it. At least I thought if I typed in those exact words "color-coded tabs" I'd find it in the HTML manual. I typed in "tabs" and it's not in the HTML explanation of tabs either.

The Ignoramus who approved this should be sent to Microsoft!

Michael Horton Wrote:
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> Alex
>
> My head just exploded.

Michael, we can put that back together as long as somebody other than Apple wrote the documentation about your head assembly.

I'm sure EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) may be interested in providing legal help should Apple take action.

You could post the PDF in Cydia so we'd jailbreak or iPod Touches and iPhones to download it.

You should send Apple a bill for your consultancy fee for doing work they left incomplete.

Lets remember everyone that Apple reads these posts and they are people like us who have egos. They do listen and will respond. Yes, it takes time but that is the culture and the way it is in most Global companies. So lets be kind and above all constructive with our criticism. People respond much better that way.

Michael Horton
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Well, we have to blow off steam sometimes. I just find it baffling; if Apple had tested that aspect with a single real editor -- and other improvements suggest that they had -- I think they would have immediately gotten protests along the same lines as here. Besides, it used to work just fine, and Apple found it necessary to tweak it for the worse. Nothing's more disheartening than something that wasn't broke getting fixed...and becoming broke in the process.


www.derekmok.com

It might of been the beta team completely missed it or thought it was simply part of the beta program and would change to a PDF at the release. Who knows. There is usually a reason for everything. Thats why third eyes are so important.

Michael Horton
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This help system does have a tag for showing the location of the PDF equivalent for each manual. At the moment the value is ""

If we positively keep explaining why we'd like a PDF version, and spend our energies on a system for each person to unlock the information on their own machines without breaking Apple's copyright, we'd stand a better chance of success.

Some might suspect that Apple doesn't want students to have manuals to stolen copies of FCS. However, the dongle for Final Cut is the Mac itself. That's why it is so inexpensive. Only when Hackintoshes start to get good enough to bet your business on will Apple bother to add serious copy protection to FCS. I don't think a lack of a PDF manual is their new revenue protection device.

They are probably in between documentors at the moment, this new system is designed for some sort of expansion.

This means that we're expecting Apple to spend a $XXK for someone to design a set of manuals for Final Cut Studio. How much would you do it for?

I think another $40K in the budget to restore Final Cut Studio's 'Pro' attribute is worth Apple paying for.

They're probably pretty surprised by this response.

If we are positive and supportive, we might get a slightly revised version in the 7.0.1 update:

- A version with all the 'Task' sections visible by default, so we don't have to keep clicking
- A version with each of the 122 chapters with their own page - not divided into multiple sections, so we don't have to keep clicking for the next section in the chapter

@alex

Elsewhere on the board, there's a fairly strong discussion of certain workflows, and whether Final Cut or Avid is better in those workflows. It went something like this: "When we do X, Avid handles it better than Final Cut." "But you shouldn't be doing X, you should be doing Y, which Final Cut handles extremely well." "But we're doing X for business reasons A, B and C, and that means we won't switch to doing Y."

Sound dumb? Yeah, maybe, from a certain perspective. But from the perspective of the person in that thread, business reasons A, B and C are really important, more important than the question of X-versus-Y. They're trump cards, if you will.

We all want Final Cut to come with printed or PDF manuals, or both. Okay, fine. But how will Apple create those documents? Using FrameMaker, presumably; that's what they've used in the past, and for years and years it was the very best tool available for that job. Everybody used FrameMaker to create their technical manuals.

But maybe Apple has good reason to have migrated away from FrameMaker (or whatever system they used for creating printed documentation). Frame is expensive, not all that well supported any more, and painful to integrate into other revise-and-approve processes. So maybe, and I'm just hypothesizing here, Apple made a business decision based on perfectly valid reasoning to do Y instead of X, to the dissatisfaction of customers.

Could the documentation in Final Cut 7 be better? Hell yes. No question about it. But it could also be a lot worse ? see After Effects CS3 if you don't believe me. And will implementing (or re-implementing) an expensive and complicated toolchain to produce nicely bound printed manuals (or their PDF equivalents) gain Apple any customers? Or will the status quo lose them any customers? It's doubtful.

So on this one, I'd say choose your battles. I'd like Final Cut 8 to include a whole new media management framework that both builds upon and obsoletes Log and Transfer for file-based formats and that makes it easier to manage stills, graphics sequences and other non-footage elements. I'd like that more than I'd like printed or PDF manuals. I'm choosing my battles.

But hey, that's just me.

Jeff, in this case, this kind of documentation can definitely cost lost sales.

Imagine and experienced Avid editor sitting down at FCP and having to search. That's one Avid editor who will not only not change over to FCP, they may recommend others to avoid it as well.

Being in "the hot set" in front of an edit system which is your "second," not "first" language means your job is dependent on finding the tidbit that's not in your own knowledge. Every bad experience is potential lost sales.

There are other ways to make PDF documentation than FrameMaker even if a bit more cumbersome. Doing that work is not the biggest expense in the development process so even if it's someone with a good DTP package and Acrobat Pro, they can put something serviceable together.

BTW I do work with developers so I'm talking not just as an editor. Bad documentation can have a major negative impact with some purchase decisions. Downtime to learn/find answers is money. It's one of the reasons people stick with their main NLE.

I don't disagree, Craig. Not at all. The question is how many sales will be lost in the scenario you describe, and how does that compare to the cost, to Apple, to change the documentation system again?

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even if it's someone with a good DTP package and Acrobat Pro, they can put something serviceable together

I have absolutely no intention of being even the tiniest bit patronizing here, and I'm sorry I can't find a better way to say this. But that doesn't sound like you've got a lot of experience working on technical documentation in a large organization. It'd be relatively simple (if highly laborious) for an indie developer, but in a big company with requirements for review-revise-and-approve and stuff, it can really be quite complicated. Documentation management is a black art, and millions can be spent on it.

I'm not trying to defend Apple here ? well, at least that's not my purpose. I'm just saying that if I could sit down for a beer with the Final Cut product team, this wouldn't be high on my list of topics of conversation.

I'm doing it by copying and pasting into a Pages doc. Will convert it into PDF from there when I've finished with it.

Alex,

You're right. Everything could be worse.

Regarding manuals that's true as well. Years ago I help Adobe to create manuals for both After Effects and Premiere. This stuff was based on FMP and I was working on the manuals via "tunneling" with those guys in California. And me and other were having more than one beer with the development team. And we got some good stuff at the end - not me being happy with everything, but it was okay for everybody.
I agree that the current help for AfterEffects is not the best or even worse than the one from FCP. But you have to agree that it needs some kind of system upfront to create any kind of help or manual and there is no real reason why it should be more complicated to create a PDF rather than a HTML it's more the opposite.
As mentioned before HTMLs are easier to update, but who knows what's updated when searching. PDF was (is) a real good approach especially because of Apple's Preview app.
And to mention again community support like here will have a kind of lack with this HTML stuff, though you can always use the online web link to provide the 'page' when you're online and made sure you got the right one.
I don't won't to blame Apple nor I want to defend them. I think they made a wrong decision which easily can be fixed and which doesn't require a complete big team or to re-write the code base of FCP, Color, Motion etc.
As Mike said Apple is watching (and I do know that they are listening) and if there are enough people who are kindly asking for their 'semi printed' PDFs there might be change.
If not, bad luck. One still can live with it, and paste and copy like Tom suggested to Pages, but you never can publish and so everybody maybe does have it's own manual.

As you said everybody has his own battle field - but a good easy to use common manual could be the "Red Cross" place on the battle fields.

Regards
Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

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I'm doing it by copying and pasting into a Pages doc. Will convert it into PDF from there when I've finished with it.

Good Lord Tom. Talk to you in October when you are finished.

Michael Horton
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I don't disagree, Craig. Not at all. The question is how many sales will be lost in the scenario you describe, and how does that compare to the cost, to Apple, to change the documentation system again?

If it's a few hundred (and given FCP sales it may be) then it would be worth the effort

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But that doesn't sound like you've got a lot of experience working on technical documentation in a large organization.

But I have for smaller but note worthy developers and there are interim solutions until one settles on a built out intra and interdepartmental workflow. I have been one of those people who do go over documentation and makes suggested changes. Sometimes you have to go with an interim solution. I've dealt with the issue of HTML documentation when PDF is really needed and/or suggesting improvements in the HTML documentation. Even the HTML documentation, as it stands, in FCP7 could be improved.

When I search for a term, as used in their "what's new" and that does not result in finding the feature, there is a flaw. Joe notes he couldn't find it either. How about an Index? Can you find one? How about a Glossary where the words link to appropriate sections of the manual. It does in some cases but not for "tabs." These could be done in the current HTML form.

If you label the sequence in the browser, does its tab get colored in the timeline?

It's going remarkably quickly. Certainly a lot quicker than learning AppleScript.

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If it's a few hundred (and given FCP sales it may be) then it would be worth the effort

Let's call it a hundred, to make the math work out.

A hundred units of Final Cut Studio ? assuming full price, not academic or upgrade ? comes to $99,990. That's gross. In order to guesstimate Apple's net revenue on that, we'll divide it by two. That approximation takes out the cost of duplication, printing and binding, packaging, shipping and stocking, the salaries of the people who make those sales possible, insurance, electricity, rent ? all that overhead stuff. And that might be an underestimate, but we'll call it half.

So a hundred units sold of Final Cut Studio earns Apple approximately $49,995. That's a pretty trivial sum to company that nets some four billion dollars a year.

So what if it's a thousand instead? What if this change costs Apple a thousand sales? That's half a million bucks, give or take. Surely that'd be enough to get them to sit up and take notice?

I dunno, man. Seeing as how Apple, as a company, books over five billion dollars in cashflow per quarter, it's hard to imagine that half a million bucks anywhere would garner much attention. And that's assuming that a thousand potential new customers decide not to buy Final Cut 7 based solely on the online help system.

Seems like a reach to me. But what do I know.

This along with the corrupt sound loops in Soundtrack Pro are the 2 most distressing aspects I discovered about the upgrade so far. I did the install last night & these were among the 1st things I checked. Went to bed rather dejected. It did my heart good to see that I am not alone in detesting this horrible documentation which requires far too much time to read than is practical.
With the PDF's in Preview you could annotate the text & page navigation was easy. What we have now is simply torture. I hope they are not trying to end of the line the pro apps.

Dave

Jeff my point is all they have to do is break even on cost to make it worthwhile in the long run.

One if one looks at each element purely for profit than one looses the perspective that the sum can be greater or less than the parts. The accumulation of corners cut because things aren't "profitable" can result in long term erosion of market share.

Believe it or not, the reason Apple is making it harder to get the documentation you need is for your benefit. Now that there is an established user base of Final Cut Pro, they are attempting to keep novices from learning it - so that you, the experienced users are more valuable. Large-scale system purchasers don't ask novices which editing system to buy, they ask experienced editors and consultants - people who already know how to use the system. And because you understand the "job security" you have in already knowing a poorly documented system, you will, of course specify Final Cut Pro.

This system is not new. Having documentation that is comprehensible only by people who already understand what it is attempting to convey was first pioneered by IBM in the 1980s, and continued by Microsoft to this day. Apple is simply catching up to the competition.

-Travis (Who daily fights with Apple, Microsoft, and Linux machines.)

Travis
VoiceOver Guy and Entertainment Technology Enthusiast
[www.VOTalent.com]

But this would mean that doing the docs in Hindi is best since it would keep support staff employed as you'd have to call them to explain things.

Of course I'm experienced and I still can't find how to do colored tabs. As a result I'd have to call the Hindi authors and this may ensure we all buy Apple Care support as well.

Joey ---

Good Lord! That photo bears an uncanny resemblance to the inside of my mind: old and confused, yet bearing a certain boldness within it's sad complexity.

Harry.

Harry Bromley-Davenport.

I tried sucking the site with DeepVacuum (that sounded rude, I know) for offline viewing but the Javascript doesn't work. I tried turning off javascript in safari. Individual pages will load on page-by-page basis, but who the frak wants to do that or use quicklook in the finder?

I also tried using the Web Capture feature in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Apple..What was the big deal behind NOT proving a pdf?! I just don't understand....

Oh , and the Color manual has hardly been updated at all... where are the in-depth pages on the new features (not the marketing web page)

There was a time when a new Final Cut arrive we'd all be playing with the new features and reporting.

Instead we're trying to find out how to make a serviceable manual so we can find the damn features. Sheesh!

... and I still can't find how to do colored tabs.

Craig, seriously? It may not be in the help, and its obviously not the serious point of this thread, but if you really haven't found out yet then all you need to select a bin (not tab) and use Modify menu > Label (or right click the bin and choose Label from the context menu) ... then select the color you want from the submenu and the bin (and corresponding tab) will be color coded accordingly. Pretty sure this was already mentioned above actually. Ps If anyone actually does find this in the help then feel free to post a link.
Cheers
Andy

I've done that Andy. The point is the ability to use the manual as a means to actually learn the program.

Well in that we agree completely .. the new html version is a shambles.

I hope Mike's right & Apple is reading this. The help files are a cluster$%@! (translation: no help at all).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

And I'd add it's not impossible to make good HTML documentation.

I've seen stand alone HTML documentation that opens in a browser of course.
I've also seen HTML documentation with decent search features.

This documentation fails on both counts.

It may also have deficits in its explanations but I can't say that with a certitude because it may be that I just can't find certain things with the search.

My intention is not to hurt feelings of Apple folk who may read this. I do have to wonder what the decision making/vetting process was though. Certainly many of us have signed NDAs and beta'd stuff so that talent is right here for the asking.