Larry Jordan reveals Apple's FCPX Roadmap

[www.larryjordan.biz]

Very interesting that they are bringing back the dual viewer. Huge move by Apple.

Aside from the features that Larry mentioned, I'm hoping they make it useable on the Wacom Tablet.



www.strypesinpost.com

> Very interesting that they are bringing back the dual viewer. Huge move by Apple.

That's what happens when you fix something that wasn't broken to begin with. Let's see how long passes before they finally admit getting rid of multitrack was a bad idea.


www.derekmok.com

strypes Wrote:
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> Very interesting that they are bringing back the
> dual viewer. Huge move by Apple.

After seeing multicam I suspected somethings were going to come back. Ganging is an example. I suspect the Dual Viewer will be contextual though. I don't think it'll be always on. Of course one hopes it's easy to turn on in those contexts.

Of course it's good that Apple is FINALLY talking about road map.

derekmok Wrote:
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> > Very interesting that they are bringing back the
> dual viewer. Huge move by Apple.
>
> That's what happens when you fix something that
> wasn't broken to begin with. Let's see how long
> passes before they finally admit getting rid of
> multitrack was a bad idea.

I don't think this is a sudden change of heart. I don't think they could have slapped on a dual viewer. I think some features are building on other features that needed to precede it. Building multicam gave them dual viewer and ganging. Now that they have that those are easy to implement. Basically their developmental direction is creating an odd order of feature implementation. I think the underlying data base concept is why individual copy paste of effects isn't there yet.

The Dual Viewer won't be like the source record of the past and they did seem to indicate that. I have my guesses but I need to think more about that.

Tracks are gone as we knew it. I think Roles will develop into a visual display mode in which the Roles will display the tagged components in track like fashion. In other words you'll be able to call up a visual track like reference.

Roles vs tracks.. I guess the important part is that the editor doesn't have to tag the lower thirds and supers on import. Being conscious of media organization while you are editing is not a good thing, and this was why many Avid editors didn't make the switch to FCP. Also, in the SD days, sometimes I cut with a letterbox matte to match 4:3 footage to 4:3 letterboxes footage. I usually lock the matte layer. Being able to do that in FCP X would be useful.

Btw, Craig, how does FCP X fare on huge projects, especially with DSLR footage? My hunch was that it would get very laggy due to the sheer amount of RT processes- filmstrip view, background rendering, real time playback, generating waveforms, etc... The design of FCP X really isn't processor friendly. And i'm not sure if the 64 bit world will allow all of that.



www.strypesinpost.com

10.0.3 was a bit sluggish (frequent inexplicable beach balls). 10.0.2 was better. I haven't done any big H.264 based projects in 10.0.4 yet but reports from others is that it's working much faster. Of course one of the nifty features in X is that you can transcode to ProRes or ProRes Proxy in the background and it will "invisibly" replace the H.264 files with ProRes.

Whether with Tracks or Roles you still have to do something whether patch to a track or tag a Role. Of course that gives Roles no specific advantage. Roles does "intelligently" tag things but it's very limited without intervention.

For example, you may have clips that are Video, Dialog. If you really want Character A, B, C you'd have to tag them as such with the appropriate Role. Neither better nor worse than patching a track What's missing though is that when you displays the Roles, while they are tagged, it's still "pattern scatter" if you need to observe whether you're falling into a stylistic pattern while you're editing. This is why I think Roles will have to have some kind of track like display at some point. Of course there was no specific indication of that in Larry's description beyond that they were going to add mixing and other features as well not mentioned. While I work, I really like the "trackless" nature of it but there are times when I want to look at rows (tracks) of each Role. It would help if you need to apply an audio processing filter to all instances of Character A and a different one to Character B.

Despite that fact that I like the FCPX paradigm in general, audio in FCPX is a real kludge. It really doesn't handle sources with dual or more mono tracks where you need that all available individually. You can break them apart but that fundamentally "breaks" the paradigm since you lose the precision editor and you can lose sync without any indication.

>Of course one of the nifty features in X is that you can transcode to ProRes or ProRes Proxy in the
>background and it will "invisibly" replace the H.264 files with ProRes.

My guess is that if you have lots of rushes, generating film strip view alone will require you to have really fast storage, on top of fast processors and lots of RAM.

On a recent project in classic FCP, one of the editors was working on a recap episode, so he needed some 10 episodes of multicam edits with dual system sound in one project. Couldn't do it without hitting a threshold, so we had to split the project. Not very elegant in today's age.



www.strypesinpost.com

Guys -- (and gals) here's the reality - the Editor's Lounge pre-NAB this year -- pro editors TV and Film -- "how many in the room cutting on FCP X?"

One hand goes up.

One.

It belonged to Philip Hodgetts - Bless him for working his tail off to create FCPX plug in and translation goodness - actually he may have put up both hands

Listen to the Mark Raudonis, Bunim/Murray senior vice president Post Production in this video - and you realize Apple just didn't listen to editors and they are indeed scrambling to catch up a year later - while Premier Pro and Smoke - smoke's them in going to where the puck will be. Mark knew FCPX was the end of the line for him when he got his beta copy and it simply didn't work for what he did - at all.

This is all the more sad because everyone one of us on this forum were FCP's biggest fans and evangelists.

Talking about roles and second monitors and missing drop shadow etc....is absurd when it was all there in the first place.

It wasn't broken....and now most of the editors in broadcast (well all of them at this meeting other than Phil) have said thanks for the memories - we need a company that thinks like us -- not the other way around


go here

Editors lounge Part 2 - The FCP X Aftermath a year later

After reading Larry Jordan's article, I started running through a couple of FCP X tutorials to see where FCP X is at. Multicam looks good. There are times when you need to be able to step into the multigroup and see the angles easily in a timeline. You couldn't do that in FCP 7, but you can do this in FCP X. But the tutorial I saw was using the skimmer to locate the sync point. That doesn't seem very precise.

Roles, on the other hand, is very simple. Too simple for practical use, and I can see many areas where not having a good role naming convention can lead to problems months down the pipeline. And to add to that, you can't get delete roles easily.

How does roles compare to tracks? In the traditional editing process, you'll slap a graphic, drop it onto V2. Subtitles, maybe on V5. When you realize that you want your subtitles on V6, you just select the entire track and shift it up a track. I guess you can call roles by tracks, eg. "audio track 01-SOT", "audio track 02-Music", "subtitle track 01- english" and so on, so when you need to change tracks, you will rename the role. This means you still don't have tracks in the timeline/project, but you have tracks in the role names. This also means that you need to have the assets properly roled before you start editing. This part doesn't sound very intuitive.


>we need a company that thinks like us

I like Avid's editing features and media management, and I'm also interested in Smoke, now that it is starting to look affordable, and hopefully it develops into an all-in-one editing and finishing station. The one thing I always hated about the FCP/Color workflow was the conform process. Sure it is something we always have been doing, but heck, if we don't have to spend hours conforming an edit, that will in itself add a great deal of speed and flexibility to the workflow.



www.strypesinpost.com

I'm more or less with Gerard.

Multicam can be pretty powerful in FCPX, but the audio handling (once you got external audio) is totally useless. It can even "kill" all audio which comes with an AV clip in a project quite often.

Roles can be pretty nice, but as Gerard said you have to handle and organize those very carefully, best right at the beginning. In so far tracks weren't that bad.

Andreas

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

Andy Field Wrote:
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> Listen to the Mark Raudonis, Bunim/Murray senior
> vice president Post Production in this video - and
> you realize Apple just didn't listen to editors
> and they are indeed scrambling to catch up a year
> later - while Premier Pro and Smoke - smoke's them
> in going to where the puck will be. Mark knew
> FCPX was the end of the line for him when he got
> his beta copy and it simply didn't work for what
> he did - at all.

I actually ran into Mark yesterday on the show floor and he's a super great guy to talk to. Also a fellow Orangeman Alum so that makes him a doubly good guy in my book.

Mark was far from alone from many folks I talked to in the original beta program and folks Apple are trying to reach out to again. As I reported in my blog last night, I am getting overwhelming feedback on the NAB show floor that folks are just tired of Apple and X. From what I heard on the show floor and at the Motion Ball / Adobe party last night, folks who have had the private meetings with Apple are for the most part underwhelmed with what they saw. One group is willing to give Apple a second chance, but most others who sought me out said they were simply underwhelmed. Only the multicam operation has garnered any positive comments.

Several folks on here are saying there have been multiple "major releases" in the last year. A "major release" is not putting elements back into the software that makes it useful for a professional editor. You can call it whatever you want, "dual viewers" is not "Major." It's a fix and an attempt at appeasement.

If you want to see what I consider a "major release" look no further than Adobe CS6 or Autodesk Smoke 2013. Those are major releases chock full of new features and complete re-writes to the some or all of the underpinnings of their software. They are not putting features back that were taken away or a workflow completely re-written simply because they could.

I hear the X classes in the Post Production classes were full, so that's a good sign for Apple, but other than the AJA booth, I have not located X on the show floor yet. I'm sure it has to be in other booths, but I haven't heard of it or found it yet. Smoke, Premiere Pro and Avid seem to be all over.

From where I'm seeing it after Day One of NAB 2012, Apple has not really undone the damage of 2011. Folks are moving on and not waiting for Apple, particularly since they are completely silent on the future of the Mac Pro. Folks who want / need a tower to cut with are seriously considering PC so that removes X from the equation by default.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Walter - you are an Orangeman!?!? Class of 79 here! I knew you were smarter than the average bear!

Another note on roles versus tracks.

I made a little freeware set last year to handle subtitles for multiple languages via XML.
As there are no tracks any more you cannot select a track for a language, but a role -- which might be not that bad.
But with roles you have to be extremely careful when working with multiple languages since applying a wrong role to a language(clip) can or will create timecode collisions.
So you might spend a (real) lot of time to sort things out -- tracks are (had been) easy since no TC collision would ever happen.

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

I think drop shadow has was put back in 10.3 maybe 10.2 it is in the inspector. You can now turn thumbnail and waveform off just like in FCP7 for all track heights. I've found huge performance improvement with 10.4 but audio still a PITA.

From everything I can figure, there is a ram leak that hasn't been fixed in 10.04. While it seems to run and accept my DSLR footage just fine and now to be able to see it on an external monitor via my MXO2 is wonderful but often playback stutters and I am fairly certain this is due to the ram leakage others have mentioned.
Steve

steve-sharksdelight

There is usually some RAM leaks. FCP had it, so you had to purge the RAM every now and then especially on larger projects. Why would RAM leaks affect FCP X if it is able to use so much RAM, unless it has a RAM leak the size of the Titanic?



www.strypesinpost.com

Good question and I do not have an idea for an answer. Since this intermident stuttering has been confirmed by others, what would your answer be if not a ram issue?
steve

steve-sharksdelight

I just read around a bit. It does seem like it has a big RAM leak problem. Upgrading RAM will let you hold the fort a little longer. Not surprising, as firstly, it's pretty much beta, and secondly, the design is an incredible resource hog. One would only hope that 64 bit computing is enough to withstand the resource usage.



www.strypesinpost.com

Glad you could confirm and surprised that Apple really hasn't said a word about it and that they were 'on it'. I would have expected the latest update to bring the fix. I have 20 gigs of Ram and I still notice it.
Steve

steve-sharksdelight