* Posts by Stephen Macken

10 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2008

Apple's new Final Cut Pro X 'not actually for pros'

Stephen Macken
Facepalm

You seem to miss the point...

Why produce an 'update/upgrade' to a product that requires the established professional user base to not buy it until it supports the functionality of the 'older' product, if it ever will; it makes no logical sense. FCPX is not an update/upgrade, it is a new product that has merged iMovie and Final Cut Express, call it iMovie Pro, if you will. It is most certainly NOT Final Cut Pro, not an update and most definitely not an upgrade.

As a facility that uses Final Cut Pro in our workflow (along with Avid MC) we are annoyed with Apple calling their new product FCPX as it completely undermines the credibility of any post facility exclusively using FCP. FCPX has been positioned to appeal to the individual user who is using consumer/prosumer equipment, it is not aimed at post production facilities. Once upon a time, we sang the praises of FCP to our clients and fought an uphill battle to gain respect for Apple's emerging product in our broadcast market. Apple has completely destroyed that investment of time and energy. We will not be investing any time in the FCP argument going forward. Unlike some, we are in the fortunate position to have Avid MC in house too, as some clients could just not see FCP as a serious tool, no matter how hard we sold FCP to them.

As a professional editor, I'm disappointed, as I had a preference for FCP, in spite of the fact that I have been instructing others how to use Avid professionally for some years now.

I suppose it was inevitable. Apple is a consumer products company now, that's it. I wonder how many more revisions of the MacPro there will be before it disappears too.

Stephen Macken
FAIL

Constructive corrections corrections...

Dual Screens -

"No raw display on a second monitor."

Monitor -

"No true video output. According to an AJA Video Systems PDF on using their Kona cards with FCPX what you see on your external display is a "preview" version of your video. Not a true video signal that you can use for color correction or confidence viewing in front of a client. Simply cannnot have a professional video editing application without true video output."

Capture -

"No support for Capture from Tape (outside of Firewire) or Edit to Tape. DV/HDV is is not now, never has been, and will never be, a broadcast format."

Other formats will be supported -

"Sorry, that is not a correction, that is an opinion and not much use to professional users now."

Project/Media

"There is no way to customize the organization of the project media. "Events" are nice for home movies, home photos and such, but organzation is clunky at best for a professional video editing environment, whether that's working in your home or in a facility.

Media keeps wanting to copy itself to the local drive. We have over 60TB of media in our facility, we could not possibly copy that much to a local computer.

No directory structure when media is offline. When media is offline you simply get a red screen with an exclamation point. There is no "Reconnect Media" function or any other function that will tell you where the media is supposed to be. With previous versions you were presented the original media path. Since this is based on iMovie, it expects that everything lives internally."

Software -

"No integration with DVDSP, SP, Motion, Color and even Photoshop, layered files are flattened by FCPX."

Hardware -

"See above"

If it can't replace FCP7 yet then why release it... it is nothing more than iMovie Pro.

Thanks, Apple for screwing a very loyal user base of professionals in favour of the more lucrative pro-sumer market. Avid and Adobe are only too happy and willing to provide solutions for the broadcast market. Professionals have never had a problem paying large amounts of money for products that support our industry, we understand that the market is small. We would rather pay well for a product that serves us well than be offered cheap tricks that don't serve our needs.

Stephen Macken
FAIL

FCPX - Because 'Pro' users never...

... use more than one screen

... output to a monitor

... care where media is stored

... output to tape

... use SDI

... capture from tape

... open old projects

... use other software

... shoot multi-camera

... use xml import/export

... use external hardware

... use omf export

... use EDLs

... batch recapture from tape

Stephen Macken
FAIL

Dear Apple...

Thank you very much for FCPX.

Love,

Avid.

Facebook enables apps to peek at mail

Stephen Macken

As the bootnote says...

... I'm a Reg reader and not from Facebook marketing...

Google fits web with meta comments engine

Stephen Macken
Thumb Up

Libel hell...

Bring it on I say, lawyers need more libel cases...

Google's email service goes down

Stephen Macken
Unhappy

GFail

GFail is still out for me... so much for update 2!

Is filming someone in the street a breach of privacy?

Stephen Macken
Unhappy

The end of news...

If this case is won, it will make newsgathering and documentary film making all but impossible. While I sympathise with the context with which her image was used, I cannot take her side on this issue. Images acquired in a public space must be protected from such spurious claims unless they are libelous and in this case, it is hardly libelous and more likely just a factual statement.

Ripfactory Ripserver CD-ripping NAS box

Stephen Macken
Happy

Nice lamp.

Lovely shot of the lamp behind the desk... doh!

The war on photographers - you're all al Qaeda suspects now

Stephen Macken
Unhappy

It can only end..

... in tears. Unfortunately, I cannot see this issue going away or it becoming any easier for photographers. In reality, the level of offical paranoia has gone beyond anything that the general public actually need to feel safe. We are being controlled through fear and the more fear there is the more the state will take away our liberties and make us even more fearful. We have a lot to be fearful of and it's not al Qaeda, it's the erosion of our civil liberties. Who needs al Qaeda to destroy our society when the state can do that fine by themselves.

We vote these paranoics into power so the only way to ensure the preservation of our democratic rights and freedoms is to vote them out. Lobby your MP and find out where they stand on civil liberties and vote accordingly.