This 'n that with Steve Bayes @BMD NYC Road Show

I got a few moments to bend Steve Bayes, FCPX Product Manager, at the Blackmagic Road Show in NY August 8 so I'd thought I'd share my own interpretations so it doesn't get anyone in trouble.

Steve Bayes did a short 30 minute FCPX presentation. Interesting that he'd be the one doing such a minor presentation. On the other hand, great that Apple had him do it. He also sat at the FCPX table answering people's questions.

During Marco Solorio BMCC presentation he played an NAB clip of Grant Petty in which he mentioned the possibility of wrapping CinemaDNG in .mov.
I asked Bayes about that and he said he didn't think it would be necessary since you can transcode to ProRes4444 and no one would see the difference.

My reaction:
Transcoding takes time and would be inconvenient outside of FCPX (which only transcodes to Proxy and 422 on the fly on import at best). FCPX can import RedRaw with their plugin so why not do the same with CDNG.

When I asked a BMD rep or two about this, they seemed somewhat dismissive about making such a plugin.

I don't know where this is going but my interpretation is that neither BMD or Apple plan on supporting CDNG in FCPX. Nor would a transcode to ProRes4444 on import.

We won't know until we know but this does disappoint me.

Also brought up Compressor to Bayes.
My own gripe is the lace of H.264 High Profile CABAC encoding which nearly every encoder (including most of the free ones) support and is even support on the most recent iPhones and iPads. He seemed unsure of the necessity to include this. My response is the lack results in having to push the data rate higher to match quality.

BTW I also interpret some of his comments to mean there'd be an update to Compressor for better GPU assisted encoding to take advantage of the Dual GPU MacPro coming.

The above are just my own interpretations so don't take them as fact but I just wanted to post my own interpretation of my questions to Steve Bayes.

I will say I was happy to see that he was "out in the field" on the front lines for this show though.