A ‘pro’ app with missing features

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Chris Kenny

Well, the “It’s not a pro app!” freak-outs have started. The only real surprises for me, in terms of feature omissions, are support for video I/O cards and XML exporting. I expected those things to be there from day one, and they’re not.

But I don’t buy that this isn’t a pro app. To me, this looks a lot more like a pro app that was pushed out the door with features still missing than like a consumer app. It has DPX/OpenEXR exporting, 4K support, and credible video scopes… these are not ‘consumer’ features. Plus, there’s the extensive metadata/tagging stuff, which seems designed for large, complex projects.

OpenEXR is not, last time I checked, a consumer video format.

Why would Apple do this, instead of waiting and doing a more feature-complete release later? Well, the key to answering that question is to look at who this release is useful to: it’s seriously useful to anyone who does work in formats FCP 7 doesn’t support natively, and who doesn’t need offline/online editing. Among other folks, this includes most DSLR shooters, who are a pretty big market. Apple presumably figured it was worth getting something out there for these folks ASAP.

The real issue here is that Apple is sufficiently secretive about its decision making process that they’re probably not just going to come out and say this; they’re going to let people freak out for, probably, months, before missing features start quietly showing up in updates.

If this seems hard to swallow, consider that we’re talking about the same company that, in 2007, shipped a new smartphone platform that didn’t support third-party apps, copy and paste, and other features that people thought should be taken for granted, without so much as a word about future plans to fill in those gaps. People freaked out. But things turned out pretty well for the iPhone in the long run.

FCP X seems to provide a strong technical foundation, and some long overdue rethinking of the standard non-linear editing user interface conventions. Apple has a history of starting off with simplified products and building on them incrementally. Being annoyed by the fact that FCP X isn’t useful (to you) today is perfectly reasonable; personally I was hoping it would solve a couple of problems for us that it doesn’t solve yet. But writing off Apple in the pro video editing market is premature.

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“The Bleeding House” premieres at Tribeca

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Chris Kenny

The Bleeding House (formerly County Road K), on which we provided digital dailies, workflow support, and color grading, is currently showing at Tribeca, and being distributed by Tribeca Film. Produced by Will Battersby, Tory Tunnell and Per Melita, directed by comic book creator Philip Gelatt, and shot by Frederic Fasano, who has previously shot films for Italian horror master Dario Argento, it’s a seriously creepy indie horror film.

Nice Dissolve graded The Bleeding House from raw Red files in DaVinci Resolve, to preserve as much image data as possible through the pipeline. While this is our standard workflow, it was particularly important on this project, as principle photography predated the existence of the much more light sensitive Mysterium-X Red, and a significant portion of the film is comprised of night exteriors. Working from raw files allowed us to reach down into the shadows to recover image that other workflows would have lost.

The film, which employs a visual style carefully crafted to inflict a sense of tense unease, is a great example of how a cost-effective indie post process based around today’s high-powered commodity hardware and software tools can produce entirely uncompromising results.

A trailer is available from Apple’s trailer site, you can rent the film on iTunes or Amazon, and of course, if you hurry you can still catch screenings at Tribeca.

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The end of project files?

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Chris Kenny

Take a look at this little section of the Final Cut Pro X user interface:

I think this post over in the Creative Cow forums correctly identifies this as a mechanism for switching between multiple open sequences. That should allay some people’s fears that the new UI doesn’t seem to allow for easily working between multiple sequences.

But there’s something else here. Look at the icon. It’s a document icon. Next to a sequence.

Now, have a look at the Event Library:

You might notice a few things:

  • It’s rooted at the storage device.
  • There’s no reference to any specific project. (Based on the icon, “Audi” is clearly a collection of footage, not a project.)
  • There are no sequences mixed in with the clips.
  • It’s called, well, “Event Library”.

In the current version of Final Cut Pro, the documents you work with are project files that represent collections of media and sequences. Looking at these screenshots it seems clear that this is not how FCP X works. In FCP X, rather:

  • Sequences are stand-alone documents.
  • All of your media lives in a single library broken up into collections called “events”.
  • Projects are probably gone altogether.

Properly implemented, this could be an extremely flexible and robust approach to managing footage. And it’s a big shift, that reenforces how seriously Apple has questioned the usual set of assumptions about how a non-linear editing app should work.

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The predictability of the Final Cut Pro X response

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Chris Kenny

I’ve been going through old posts on my Indie4K blog (now merged into this blog) to see which of them might be worth migrating to this blog’s archives, and I turned up this, originally posted nearly a year ago (and now living in its new home on this blog). Important bit:

In general, [Apple is] willing to do things that they know people will complain about loudly — but this gives them the flexibility to sometimes make exceptional products.

I suspect this is precisely where they’re headed with FCP. We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.

In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.

Hmmm….

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The magnetic timeline’s off switch?

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Chris Kenny

There has been some concern expressed on Twitter and various blogs that Final Cut Pro X’s new “magnetic timeline”, with all of its automatic rippling, could interfere with the process of making adjustments to material that has to meet precise length requirements, like commercials or TV programming.

I noted a couple of days ago that for all anyone knew it could just be switched off, like snapping in the current FCP timeline. Aindreas Gallagher over on the Creative Cow forums may have identified the toggle.

(Clipped from the screenshot attached to this post.)

It could also possibly be the switch on the left here:

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What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie?

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Chris Kenny

Another emerging source of concern about whether FCP X is a professional app is its relationship to iMovie. In particular, a narrative seems to have emerged in which FCP X was derived from iMovie, after Apple realized there was no way to modernize the existing Final Cut Pro codebase.

There’s clearly a lot of shared DNA between FCP X and iMovie, as marcus.sg noted in commenting on the previous post. But the most accurate way to look at this is to view iMovie and FCP X as having a common ancestor, with a bit of horizontal gene transfer since the apps split off. I suspect an accurate depiction of the relationship runs something like this:

Evolutionary Relationship Between iMovie and FCP X

(Horizontal transfer probably occurred more than once and it’s hard to say exactly when, but that’s not really the point.)

The idea that Apple only recently realized it wasn’t possible to modernize the old FCP codebase, and belatedly decided to start over from the iMovie codebase, isn’t very plausible. The old FCP was obviously not the way forward. Its interface felt like something from a different age, it was the only Carbon pro app left, and it was clear at the very least that the entire rendering engine was going to need to be rewritten to use GPU acceleration and multiple cores.

It seems far more likely Apple started serious work on FCP X immediately after wrapping up FCP 6 in 2007 (FCP 7 was more of a maintenance release) — this would have actually been somewhat before the product’s release date, which was April of that year. Now, shipping a pro video editing product based on an entirely new technical foundation is a serious, high-risk undertaking. But Apple happened to have another video editing product where the new engine and even some of the new UI could be tested without much risk: iMovie.

So along comes iMovie ’08, in August of 2007. Rewritten from the ground up, it’s clearly a much more modern app… but it has so many features missing it seems almost more like a proof of concept than a finished app. My theory is, that’s because it pretty much was. It was Apple’s early-stage work on its next-generation video editing platform, quickly packaged up as a consumer app.

When you get right down to it, most of what sets a pro video application apart is not related to the core task of arranging video clips in time, but to ancillary functions like format support, video I/O, workflow integration and metadata management. So, if FCP X is an offshoot of the same codebase as iMovie, but adds support for these things… well, that makes perfect sense. Why would Apple not allow iMovie and FCP X to share DNA this way? Why is this a bad thing?

What’s funny is that nobody would object to this if the release order had been reversed, and the shared new features and UI had shipped first in FCP X and not shipped in iMovie until, say, iMovie ’12. But the truth is, pro users are all much better off for the fact that Apple isn’t dumping four years of code on them with no real-world testing. FCP X will be less buggy because Apple has been using consumers as guinea pigs for nearly four years.

Posted in Industry Commentary | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

Is Final Cut Pro X a professional app?

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Chris Kenny

Almost certainly. There is essentially no reason to believe otherwise.

I’ve seen speculation that FCP X won’t support EDL/XML/OMF export, won’t support professional video I/O interfaces, won’t support third-party plug-ins, won’t work well with large projects, no longer supports three-point editing, and even that new automation features won’t be possible to disable.

Why are so few people willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here? After all, it would be unusual for a new and ostensibly improved version of an application to drop all sorts of critical features that previous versions had.

The skepticism toward FCP X makes little sense based on the actual content of Apple’s announcement. It only makes sense if you went into the announcement with a preexisting conception that Apple was pulling back from the pro market. A lot of people clearly did precisely that. But where did such a preconception come from?

As far as I can see, the primary evidence for the notion that Apple was pulling back from the pro video market is that there had been no really major new release of Final Cut Pro since 2007. But there were always two ways to explain that:

  1. Apple was de-emphasizing the pro video market or
  2. Apple was quietly working on a major, ground up overhaul of Final Cut Pro.

We now know definitively that the latter was the case.

It makes no sense to evaluate what we know about FCP X within the context of a mental model of Apple retreating from pro video, when the mere existence of FCP X removes the primary evidence for the validity of that model.

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First thoughts on Final Cut Pro X

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Chris Kenny

Well, the long-awaited major rewrite of Final Cut finally dropped yesterday… sort of. Apple’s Supermeet presentation showed off lots of flashy new features that will be extremely convenient for creative editorial, including a dramatically improved timeline. But an on-stage presentation isn’t really the best place to discuss crucially important workflow details, so we still know little on that front.

What we do know is good. The new Final Cut is resolution independent, extensively uses OpenCL and Grand Central dispatch (for leveraging graphics processors and multiple CPU cores), it’s 64-bit (no 4 GB memory limit), and it’s Cocoa. It also uses floating point video processing like, say, DaVinci Resolve, which depending on other details conceivably makes it a valid high-end finishing tool, not just an NLE. And it supports ColorSync. In theory that means you should be able to get something pretty close to accurate color with just a desktop display and a $200 calibration probe. I’m curious to try that next to one of our calibrated video monitors and see how well it works.

On the other hand, this is a new app. A ground-up rewrite. As a consequence, one can’t necessarily assume it has a strict superset of the features of Final Cut Pro 7. There may be some things missing. We just don’t know yet. And many questions about anticipated new features were left unanswered, and may not have clear answers for a while.

Native support for Red files, for instance, wasn’t mentioned yesterday. Maybe once info on FCP X goes live on Apple’s web site, this will be there. But if it’s not, we won’t immediately know the implications of that. If there’s a flexible new plug-in architecture that would allow for it, for instance, it might be better if R3D support was handled entirely by Red, so users wouldn’t have to wait for updates from Apple when Red upgraded its color science, etc. But we probably won’t know this until Red has had some time to kick the tires on the new release. The same applies to formats like DPX — if they’re not there out of the box, the answer to the question of how smoothly they can be added will have extremely significant implications for where FCP X fits into the market.

And then there are all the little entirely un-flashy things that people in the post business deal with every day. Can the new Final Cut finally relink a timeline entirely based on timecode + reel number? Can it batch-sync dual-system audio based on timecode? Can the new PluralEyes-like auto syncing feature be used to sync up dual system audio, or just multiple video tracks? How much has Final Cut’s XML file format changed, and what implications will that have for its integration into complex workflows? Has Apple fixed the bugs FCP 7 has with EDL exports? Some of these questions quite likely won’t be answerable from whatever promotional info Apple posts on its web site, and some of this stuff is sufficiently esoteric that early reviews probably won’t touch on it either. We’ll have to wait until FCP X goes live in the App Store.

Also, before I wrap up here, a few words on pricing. FCP X is going to be $299, available through the App Store in June. Initially this seems like a huge price cut, but there are two things to keep in mind.

First, the App Store lacks upgrade pricing. So yes, FCP X is $299, But FCP 11 (or whatever they call the next major release) will probably be $299 as well, even if you bought FCP X. $299 has long been the upgrade price for Final Cut, so really this is just a discount for first-time customers (which makes sense; Apple seems to be aiming for aggressive growth here).

Secondly, this is just Final Cut Pro. Apple has announced nothing about the rest of Final Cut Studio. My guess is some other FCS apps are slated to be axed, while others will live, see significant upgrades, and be sold separately from Final Cut Pro in the App Store.

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New web site launched

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Chris Kenny

Our new web site is live.

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Welcome Indie4K readers!

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Chris Kenny

We’re merging Indie4K with our company blog. Selected archive posts from Indie4K will be migrated over here, and this blog will now include the sort of technical and industry discussions previously featured at Indie4K (the first such is here), as well as announcements about our creative projects. Links to old Indie4K.com posts will remain active for the foreseeable future.

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