Just so you know, I was at the SuperMeet, seated beside a Certified Apple Trainer of some regard.
We spent a certain amount of time wondering if the presenters had spent any time with their own manual for previous versions of the Final Cut Pro application. It appeared that they had no idea that many of the things they were extolling that you could "never do before", actually, you could, if you knew what you were doing. But then we started wondering if they were taking away things that we could do before, but they had no idea were part of anybody's workflow, since they did not actually seem to be completely familiar with the original app, or had taken the time to fully explore its more subtle capabilities. Its just what it looked like, is all I'm sayin'. But very, very few people have ever spent any time with the FCP manual, anyway. Look up what "Command-C" does, I dare you.
It was almost as if this program were being introduced into a world where no one had ever edited before.
Having had a few days to think about it and reading a lot of hysterical speculation, some of it my own... True, "X" is very much like the iMovie interface, and like it or not, this is the way things are headed. Its what all the schoolchildren are learning, I've had to haul the thing (iMovie) out on many occasions to help my daughter finish her little videos that she was doing with her school chums. In fact, it does things that FCP prior to X can't do, at least with the consumer codecs that the smart phones make. Mostly because FCP has (at least up until now) an enormous Achilles' heel with its core processing all taking place in Quicktime. That had to change, and it apparently has. "X" will be great, maybe even invincible, for projects that have arrived, unheralded, in edit, with no planning, no script, no continuity, no notes, no slates, in a few words, student films and news. Those few who have actually blocked their work might not find it particularly advantageous to have all their source material categorized like iPhoto, but, as it is, all the digital origination file names are ridiculously anonymous, anyway. A007_XYZ_89049.R3D anyone? Take a guess whether that's a Wide or a **?
I very much welcome the notion that the foundation has been utterly revised -- although at this point, I still have no idea whether it will handle field dominance or 2:3 24/30 cadence properly. All I know is that right up until the last version of FCP, it has not. Whether this justifies completely changing the process-of-editing remains to be seen.
Concern from this viewpoint is that "On-Line" is a very big part of my operation -- I do have to worry about all those broadcast deliverables, which if it is not part of your business is irrelevant -- but I'm not 100% sure that the major networks are going to start accepting H264 files because, oh, sure, we'll overlook all that closed captioning, Dolby E, described video, 59.94i, surround sound stuff because Apple says nah, you don't really need all that. And besides, we (APPLE) never said that FCP was an end-to-end application -- we really think it should be a creative off-line solution and you should take your project to a "big house" --> an attitude/opinion which actually IS in their manual. I'll give you a page number if you don't believe me. What is a mystery at this point, is whether a "big" house is going to be able to make sense of whatever it is that X is able to export.
Don't pay any attention to the price. If you think that's a big number, it baffles me. And OTOH, if you think the number is too small, I'm sure Apple has their reasons -- remember on an offered number of 2 million licenses, and climbing, in current circulation, even if less than half of those (legitimate) installations buy the new application, they are laughing, I can hear the high-pitched evil mwah-ha-ha cackling already. Volume, volume, volume.
All that we know for sure is that Apple has snapped the development cycle and core processing for FCP as we know it, and what we have seen of "X", just the UI, is square one of a different approach -- the first day of the rest of our lives. At face value, it looks like a so-called "four walls" application, and maybe that's who its for, and that would cover a lot of people. The wailing and gnashing of teeth w.r.t. going outside the app for a utility like COLOR just seems to have overwhelmed the need for sophistication, especially when the vast majority of users are satisfied with an auto-match and maybe a user shape secondary. Actual color correction is beyond the skill set of the majority of humanity, who certainly won't invest in the correct asset mix to make it work, anyway, and that's not an opinion -- that's experiential observation. If you can do it, you're already in an exclusive club, and you're going to be able to overcome whatever perceived limitations that X might bring.
I know I will be downloading it to my laptop for sure. If it makes for a quick offline and can be uploaded to an online for grade and finishing for broadcast delivery, great. If not, that's what competition is for.
jPo
