Curious what direction LAFCPUGers are going? Remain with FCP or switch?

It's actually very Apple. I don't remember them selling FCP 6 when FCP 7 was released, but of course, the problem is that FCP X doesn't work in many post scenarios, which now has many clamouring for FCP 7 licenses.



www.strypesinpost.com

Well also your FCP 6 projects moved forward to FCP 7 so there was no need to keep 6 around.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

I won't question the wisdom behind that move, because there isn't any. But those using FCP as a standalone machine now finally have a first ever NLE that completely stands alone.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah, removing FCS3 was the height of hubris. And it continues to be.

Can you imagine the difference in perception of FCPX if they'd continued to support FCS3? People would say, hey, it's not ready yet, but that's okay, we get it, it's in it's infancy. People would still gripe, but nothing close to the fury out there now.

I calculate that right out of the gate I'll be losing about $6k a year just from one contractor job as one of my teaching jobs will now become Avid only, after my fighting against it for a few years. I'm not qualified to teach Avid, almost positive they won't install FCPX, and they're not going to want to teach FCP7. It's hard enough keeping up with what students might need to learn by the time they graduate, let alone starting them on something that's EOL before they begin.

Please bring back FCS 3. Give us time to transition.

Well, if I was to calculate the amount of avid jobs I got in the past year against FCP jobs.. Let's just face it. Solely by that statistic, I would have to wash cars for a living because no one will use FCP X here as it can't function as an NLE. I won't say it threatens my livelihood. Just a nudge towards the unknown, but it would probably fall on deaf ears. Maybe we need to do more satire videos so Apple gets the message. Maybe we can insert the title of "FCP 7 editor. Next time Avid" into the rolling credits. Just a thought, yea...



www.strypesinpost.com

I have made the FULL switch to Premier cs5 as of this week. I was using it as a pass-thru to AE before FCPx.

It was strange to me not having to do an intermediate codec or render on every other effect & grade. Very nice workflow. Round trips are nicer in PP. I am unsure if Sound booth is as powerful as SoundtrackPro but i am sure CS6 will be a large jump in feature due to Apples BIG mistake.

The one thing i miss is the fast inching you could do by selecting the clip and just typing the numbers +/- X number of frames. Premier seems to take this as seconds.
They probably have it also but i am a newbie again ... kinda.

Now i will use FCP7 as a pass thru to color until i get Resolve, though i will say that you can do some very nice grades in AE.

Maybe, the forum has to change eventually to a ProEditors forum period. LAFCPUG - Pro Editors Forum and open discussion to other editing tools.

Adobe has the chance to really grab the market and i am sure they will not make the same mistake as Apple. I hope Apple doesn't discontinue the towers.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Just logging in with my plans: same as most, sticking to FCP7 until I get tired of renders and 32-bit, which will be easy since I've been on a 64-bit Xeon Mac for two years now.

Will be watching the feature upgrades to X. If they don't flower, and I need the features, off to Avid for new projects.

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Temporarily mix down audio tracks with Command-Option - R !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide? Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Our shop will probably stay in FCP7 til the end of the year and then we will evaluate what happens then. Since most of us have years of Avid experiences before FCP, I'm guessing that's where we will transition to unless something drastic happens with FCP X. I'm curious about Premiere especially since it works with our Blackmagic and AJA cards but Boston is pretty much a FCP or Avid town. I wonder if this will make Avid more or less likely to keep opening their hardware options to Matrox/BM/AJA or if this will make them circle their wagons again and clamp down on their own overpriced hardware. That's the only negative I see to going back to Avid.

Chi-Ho Lee
Film & Television Editor
Apple Certified Final Cut Pro Instructor

Chi-Ho

Export an xml file from something you did before. Not sure if you keep stage files for your projects, like having a seq for each stage (1st cut, Final Cut, Color, Graphics) but if you have a project there, try opening the xml in premier pro. Then finish it there. I think you will like the workflow.

Avid is a great system but costly.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

I describe Avid (affectionately) as a Lear jet with birds occasionally flying into the engine.

- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Temporarily mix down audio tracks with Command-Option - R !

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide? Power Pack
with FCP7 KeyGuide --
now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

It's true that most towns are Avid or FCP centric, but I think this is going to bump Premiere way up there in the future.

Adobe for sure is the kind of company that can deliver to the market - we've seen this with Photoshop and after Effects for years. I think it was just the earlier versions didn't stack up against early FCPs, so they got metaphorically knocked into the hobby market. I tried Premiere Pro when it first came out and was surprised at how much it had grown to be like FCP. It doesn't work in every way like I would like it to, but I imagine there going to be a rush of input from the Pro market that will change it up a bit.

Avid, yeah, the lear jet with the occasional bird. Fast and solid until it ain't. I also don't like how restrictive it is. Would rather go with something a bit more flexible, if possible.

I'm not sure about Premiere. It has been around for quite a while. Why do most people use FCP? I have very limited experience with Premiere. About a year ago, I got called in to work because some guys from the graphics department were trying to send out a DVD and the DVD looked quite aliased. They were working in AE and used Premiere to assemble the scenes. This is fine, since AE is quite bad at doing an assemble edit. It turned out that they rendered Quicktimes (Animation) from After Effects with an oddball frame size of 1024x576, and Premiere wasn't using a particularly good scaler, so everything looked pretty aliased. I couldn't find a way to export a same as source (or current settings) QT so I could run it though Compressor or After Effects to scale the image properly. In the end, I brought the cut into FCP via EDL and manually relinked the shots one at a time, and exported it Compressor to encode to Mpeg 2. It is quite a workaround, considering that both FCP (not X) and Avid is able to export same as source (aka current settings). Could be user error since I hardly use Premiere.



www.strypesinpost.com

1-What about the specific hardware (video cards) that is necessary with Adobe's 64 bit OS? Just switching software is not enough? My Mac Pro is outfitted with an NVidia card.....

2-Do we think Avid is biasing their MC software to the windows platform? There was something key (that escapes me right now) about certain MC features being only available on a windows platform? Or maybe it's the package software for authoring DVD's that's only windows compatible.

Maybe the Adobe suite is an attractive alternative to Avid, (in which the NLE gets all the attention)? I need to produce SD and Blu-Ray DVD's. (Adobe Encore).

>My Mac Pro is outfitted with an NVidia card

That should work fine with Adobe, since one of the components for the Mercury engine uses CUDA acceleration (which is owned by Nvidia). They may have ported those parts over to OpenCL, or may be in the process of doing so, as none of the new Mac range uses Nvidia cards. BMD has already done it with Resolve 8 (which is a free upgrade if you own the Resolve 7).


> Do we think Avid is biasing their MC software to the windows platform?

Nothing I can see that is Windows only.

[shop.avid.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

Oops.... my card is an ATI Radeon HD 2600.

You sure about the AVID suite DVD authoring being Mac OS compatible? If so, can you do more than just "toast" a blu-ray?

According to the Avid site, it includes Windows emulation apps so you can run Sonic. An emulation environment usually isn't optimal, but if you are just using it as an authoring environment, there is no reason why it shouldn't work efficiently.


>my card is an ATI Radeon HD 2600.

Not sure if that is OpenCL compatible. Doesn't seem so. Adobe may still use OpenGL for some operations, not sure what Avid uses, but my guess is CUDA.



www.strypesinpost.com

I have an ati 5870 (5months old), And i am now on my 4th full premier edit. I have not seen anything that suggests i am missing out by not having a nVidia card.

I am sure that it is something since i have seen plenty of tutorials that mention Mercury and CUDA. However, i do not think that it is an absolute or incredibly necessary for PP to work well.

I will say that moving from FCP to Premier is probably one of the easiest things to do if you do not like FCPx. You can edit with mts and red files as a native, then choose your conformity, codec or format when your done.

Media Encoder is very unstable so i think compressor or toast is still relevant to have. OH and here is another nifty thing.... as far as i know fcp requires you to pull the media into the browser or define your in/outs within the clip to create a clip in FCP.

Premier allows you to go to the drive location of the media, preview it in the source monitor (viewer in fcp) mark in and outs and put its directly into the TL or Browser. Also at the end of the edit you can just pull the clips from the from the TL to the browser, if you haven't before and the project will have only the media used associated to the project. Thus no media management interface is needed. I think thats a very tidy feature.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

>Thus no media management interface is needed

Well, if that is your idea of media management, you would probably struggle in a collaborative environment. What if your client wants to send a spot over to a post facility for grading and vfx? They could have a really good colorist that they like working with.. What if you were working on a show with over a thousand hours of HD rushes and you need to go offline/online? What if you were working for a news outfit where you need to send the files to someone to cut and have them clean it up for broadcast?

I am curious about Premiere's media management tools as I haven't heard much about it. FCP has the ability to trim and recapture. And you can fallback on XML workarouds for many other workflows. Also, in FCP, you can batch import files off a batch list and recapture. Not sure if metadata handling is built into Premiere. If these features are in Premiere, it would be good for anyone switching to Premiere.

As far as the Nvidia card is concerned, I believe CUDA is currently responsible for playback of RED (and other RAW formats) and DSLR footage. Otherwise, Premiere may fall back on software processors, which is not optimized for such specific tasks as a graphics co-processor would be. Since I could not find any Adobe documents on OpenCL (only CUDA and openGL), I would assume it still relies on CUDA for these tasks.



www.strypesinpost.com

Not having full tested or pushed Premier's file management, what i have learned so far is that even if you decide to consolidate the parts or clips of the media files to only what you have used in the TL. As long as that drive is still connected to the system, you can always go back to the full clip on that drive. They have some very deep metadata features in Premier.

i haven't used it in the environments you have mentioned but i would guess that since you can only loose connection by renaming or removing the drive the pass offs would be fine. I always rename my source clips the same as the project.

I remember something about fcp project size effecting performance in a pass off situation or working from a shared array. If you can limit the data associated to a project by using this feature of premier i think its a 1-up.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

>As long as that drive is still connected to the system, you can always go back to the full clip
>on that drive.

That would be interesting.



www.strypesinpost.com

excuse the typo on the metadata.



""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

I would expect Premiere to know the pathname (how else to work with media), but I need to test out premiere properly.

Btw. That is not an EDL. Not in the cmx3600 sense of the word.



www.strypesinpost.com

yeah, you are right its just an action history.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

[tv.adobe.com]

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Ok,
I recant my statement about there being no issues with premier and ati. My card is old school x1900.

Instead of using Ae for a look, i decided to try something intensive with the same project. So i added vignettes, changing blends and stacked filters til ... BAM... render everything or skip happens. And it wasn't all that much i added. 2.5m project, about 40 cuts, on 4 v-trks, 2-4 filters on about 50% of the clips in the SEQ.

My nVidia gxt570 should be here at weeks end. 480cuda nice....

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"