Apple unveils new 64-bit Final Cut Pro X - Page 4

Yup, just watched it myself. He specifically said they were "doing away with all of that" and "greatly simplifying the pricing structure." It's at 25:30 in this video: http://www.vimeo.com/22341718

That video, by the way, is a great quality video (compared to everything else I've found) of almost the entire demo. Check it out, it looks amazing. Yes, there are still some unanswered questions, but the stuff in that video looks like it is going to be at least somewhat game-changing.

I agree. I understand that some people worry about change but its a little premature to dismiss the thing. Even if FCPX borrows a thing or two from iMovie (not saying it does, OK) it doesn't make it iMovie.

Interesting. Are other App Store developers allowed to do the same thing with their programs, i.e. give you an "Install" app which then installs stuff all over the hard drive?

It is final cut pro for $299 not Studio. If there are separate apps you are looking at more like $500-600 for all of FCS.

As for the whole logic thing. They will likely do the same breakout including buying the jam packs in groups like you can now. But all of it via MAS. And hopefully much cheaper (those packs should be $30 each, $50 tops)

I think the presenter made mention the software is considered Beta by Apple. The live demo part was kept short for that reason. I think Apple will be fine tuning the application quite a bit over the next two months.

Apple probably doesn't want to go into a terrible amount of detail incase it has to add or get rid of things.

It is the full price. And not surprising when you consider
Apple makes the software
Apple is selling via a channel that they control and apparently only that channel
It will be download only as will be the documentation. So no costs to stamp disks, no printing anything, no shipping costs
And the biggie
It only runs on Macs making it something of a loss leader to computer sales.

FCP probably costs them only like $50 a copy to make, so they will have plenty of profit



Those that talk that talk due so because of the apparent focus on the iPad etc. They forget that Apple needs the 'easy money' from such things to pay for everything else. They also forget that Apple doesn't give updates of works in progress every week/month so they have no proof of what Apple is or is not working on. Plus many of them have never tried to completely rewrite a major piece of software so they have an unrealistic view on how little time it would take

Whoever said FCP X was limited to 8-Core needs their hearing checked.

With GCD it leverages all available cores, and with OpenCL all the GPGPU streams/cores available to throw at it.

Would it be able to use multiple graphics cards in parallel on a Mac Pro, like SLI or Crossfire?

Outrageous, mind-boggling demo! Wow.

"Apple boasted that there are 2 million Final Cut Pro users with a 94 percent satisfaction rate."

I'm excited about this release and don't want to be a nattering nabob, but this statement is kind of like "94% of those who didn't abandon it due to their dissatisfaction are satisfied"

What happens if you include those who don't use it because they're dissatisfied with it?

SLI/Crossfire is only for display, and primarily gaming. No advantage for Grand Central or GPU computation (so don't look for it any time soon)

I asked an acquaintance, who is a network executive, if they were going to attend NAB or had heard anything about the new FCP to be shown there. The acquaintance is non-technical, but here was the first response before the FCPX showing (emphasis mine):


The acquaintance did not attend NAB but had some people there. I got this note a couple of hours ago:

I just finished watching the second video -- the Randy demo of FCPX editing.

Towards the end, he clicks a control that turns off the thumnails -- the thumbnail of each clip is just text and looks similar to a clip on the timeline in FCP 7.

So, those who are put off by the iMovie look -- can just turn it off.

Personally, I think it's a spectacular upgrade and at $300 who wouldn't want to get it?

After watching the video, those who are equating Final Cut Pro X to the "iMovie look" need to look again - or get steamrolled. What a quantum leap forward in interface design - I'm not a hot and heavy user of Final Cut, but I could relate with what he was demoing far easier than anything I have played with with Avid, Primer, Vegas, or previous versions of Final Cut.

I really do feel somewhat sorry for many of the folks who are tied to Avid or other (now) archaic interfaces - I can understand how a shift this dramatic can be threatening. But I think Apple has the potential to really set the industry on it's ear. While it's a little early, and the other shoes on the other pieces of the former Final Cut Suite haven't dropped yet - but anyone who watches that video and still is insisting that Apple doesn't understand or is abandoning their Pro apps is simply delusional.

I'll say one thing-- the FCP presentation has really driven home how clueless the average Apple basher actually is. People who clearly have no idea what FCP's position in the professional film industry actually is are gobbling on about the "toy interface" and "dumbed down" processes and how $300 is typical Apple gouging. Oh, and that Premier has been 64 bit for a while, so suck it fanbois.

It's kind of awesome. The same people who think saying "open" and "multitasking" and "Flash" a lot makes them part of a tech elite are completely and comically out of their depth, and seem befuddled that they're getting schooled by pro film folk.

Like.

Read the first line.

People are already calling this iMovie Pro.

That's just ignorance and fear of change.

Plus editing is editing regardless of the tool you are using. You are a good editor on iMovie or FCP, you are a crappy editor on iMovie or FCP.

Wow that article was actually WORSE than I thought it would be and my expectations were really low.

FCPX delivers pretty much everything that most users I speak to wanted.

What don't you like about FCP X?

I know that only a limited amount of info is available right now but what are you concerned or unhappy about?

Fear of the unknown is a factor (as in, I fear this new UI is a total POS). However, I am reserving my final conclusion on this until after I've used and had enough time to learn FCPX.

I think the linked article expresses a lot of the fears that Pro users have about FCPX. Whether they turn out to be unfounded or not remains to be seen.


It's hard to resist the comparison (and I hate iMovie).

From http://www.easternews.net/1372/final...-june-for-299/



That is true to a certain extent but there is a point where the tools do make a difference.

Nvidia would disagree that SLI is only good for gaming.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_sli.html

Another argument I see is that "Macs don't need SLI because the Quadro is a professional card." Well, if 1 Quadro card is so "professional", wouldn't 2 or more working in parallel be even more "professional"?

I apologize for not answering your question directly, but read the concerns raised in this thread.

If you look closely at the end of this incredible timelapse video shot from a plane flying from San Francisco to Paris, you will see the person who made it used Final Cut Pro X. Its actually an amazing timelapse, I suggest you watch and when you get to the last frames of the video, for a split second it flashes his camera setup on a tripod and then the shot of Final Cut Pro X on a Macbook Pro alongside an iPad with the Korg App on screen somewhere in Paris. Uploaded on Apr 1, 2011.

The concerns seem to include:

- 3-point edit system
- plugins
- tape I/O
- log & capture
- 'child-like' UI
- being able to run FCP and FCX concurrently
- Color correction tools
- rewriting tutorial material
- support for capture hardware
- no track lines

The least important points I'd say are the UI style and relearning. The UI is not that much different from FCP in terms of function or layout. It just behaves more intuitively. Final Cut Pro does things wrong and learning the wrong way doesn't make it the right way.

Having to remake tutorials is a plus for book writers because they can make new ones and as far as teachers are concerned, less of having to answer what the hell messages like "File Error: unknown file" mean.

The UI style being child-like and unprofessional is plain silly. These people still use aqua Mac OS X and don't seem to have any problem with it. FCP uses an archaic UI just like Shake did and most of the legacy apps and it causes problems/glitches. Good UI design makes a difference to productivity. No disappearing panels or messed up layouts or closing a panel by accident or clicking in a gap between them. Putting on a drab suit doesn't give you credibility, let people judge you based on what you do.

Given that the stage demo showed a project transitioned from FCP to FCX, it's probably safe to assume it's capable of creating the same edits so 3-point edits, track lines etc shouldn't be concerns but obviously all will be clear in the release. Same with the current CC tools.

I highly doubt that Apple will drop plugin or hardware support, although legacy capture/export could be dropped. Their decisions will be based on what the industry tells them and not people with old HDV cams. If the industry has moved primarily to digital capture, there's no need for tape input/output. Backing up to tape (e.g LTO) is a different thing entirely and doesn't need to be handled by Final Cut.

Being able to run FCP and FCX together would be for people who just want to test it first or use it alongside the current workflow. It would probably be wise of Apple to do this so people can transition projects.

The important point I think that was clear is that they've listened to feedback from the professional users and delivered a huge number of big improvements. If there's anything missing that's needed, they'll get to know pretty quickly. At the end of the day, we're talking about NLE, it's not exactly the most complicated set of software tools in the world. You have input clips, chop them up and correct them and output clips. It's pretty difficult for a UI change to bugger that workflow up.

I actually don't get where the discontent is coming from. For once, Apple aren't pushing a new phone or tablet in people's faces, they are putting quad core i7s in laptops, bring in standardised external PCIe and giving some much needed attention to professional apps and not iApps. To me, these developments show there's still a desire at the company to provide powerful tools to high-end users. I'd say there's definitely a bridging between consumer and professional lines at Apple but remember when smartphones used to be owned exclusively by suit-wearing corporate types?

It's not always a bad thing. Pros are shooting TV shows on DSLRs, does that make them a bunch of know-nothing kids? Of course not, people use the tools they feel are right for the job and it's up to the software makers to play along.

"Someone used Final Cut X to make this awesome timelaspe"

The software interface CLEARLY says "iMovie". Also, one wouldn't need anything more powerful than iMovie to do this simple time lapse video.

"The concerns seem to include..."

Thank you so much for this! There have been way too many people judging this product based on a brief demo; people who seem to miss the fact that if they don't want to keep up with our changing technologies they have entered the wrong field of work. Many of these people, with little or no posted data to back up their convictions, hate Apple to begin with, so it doesn't even matter what's included in Final Cut Pro X, they will not be open to it. Ironically, these same people accuse Apple of not being "open". Funny. And sad.

What concerns you?

You've been here a while so you've obviously not just registered to troll. I'm curious to know what is actually concerning pros who actually use this stuff. I don't use the stuff so I don't know.

I do think that a 'good' update to FCP would show a commitment to pro apps and a weak update would be a cause for concern. How Apple ultimately treat the pro apps will say something of the direction of Apple.

I'm also interested in how GCD and OCL perform. FCP could be a sort of demo of these technologies and should show off their potential.

Judging from what I've seen around the web, I'd say the discontent is coming largely from people who have never used FCP, have little to no knowledge of professional editing, and are simply eager to shit on news from Apple.

The whole "iMovie Pro" thing is a case in point. It appears to based on nothing more than a few blurry phonecam shots from the presentation which show the changed layout of the clipbin. Really, that's it.

Watching the video makes it abundantly clear that this is a heavy duty pro app, that the changes Apple has made have in been in direct response to the shortcomings of the older software, and that they've thought long and hard about how to streamline workflows for pro editors. Sure, there's some automation of common tasks on ingest, but they can be toggled off and they're hardly designed to make FCP more of a consumer friendly app.

There may be real issues, but that we'll have to wait and see about that. As it stands, the borderline nonsensical bitching is just a carryover from the new Android heavy Apple bashing environment of the internet.

None of which has anything to do with FCP. I realize your entire reason for posting here is to figure out some angle that you imagine puts Apple in a bad light, but you're just openly trolling.

There were 1,700 PROFESSIONAL Final Cut Pro users at the NAB conference on Tuesday. Each and every demoed feature of the new Final Cut Pro X received (from what I could tell from the videos) universal applause. Had these features not been received well there would have been groaning from the audience. Many professional editors are understandably nervous, perhaps hesitant, because we just don't know the full feature set quite yet, and because every major update requires a bit of relearning. But this community has gone from film to video to digital video to HD video (film to tape to memory card) in less than twenty years. These are generally not people who are afraid of change, or of new challenges. And they certainly don't shy away from tools that make their jobs easier, especially those things that allow them more time to make creative decisions.

I think that any decent video editor (or color-corrector, or motion graphic artist, etc.) that was considering using Apple's products at all is going to wait for the actual product release first, and then make a truly informed decision on whether or not to go with Final Cut Pro X. They're going to use whatever tools work best for them. Those who prefer Avid will likely stick with Avid. There is nothing wrong with this. Those who have been using Final Cut Studio may well make the move to FCP X, but they don't have to hate Avid users, or Premiere users, because of their own personal preferences. And most of them don't. I don't know of any digital artists who hate filmmakers who still shoot with film. There will always be the "film snobs" who think the latest digital tools make the process too easy, just as there will always be musicians who think that music made using a computer (as an instrument) is "cheating". There was once a time when people scoffed at the idea of adding sound to motion pictures. I'll push this further: there was once a time when people scoffed at the idea of women being allowed to vote, or "blacks" being given equal rights. But that attitude didn't stop the world from changing into a better place.

Final Cut Pro X is not going to change the world. But it IS another set of tools available (soon) that someone is going to use to change the world in their own way. This person may not have the resources to work with an Avid system. Perhaps they scrapped up enough cash to get an Apple computer, because they knew they finally had access to tools that they could use to tell their story, something they could have never afforded to do before.

But in the end, it's just a piece of software. And we don't know much about it yet. So I don't know... quit your bitching and use something else if you don't like it. If you do like it, then use it and make something significant.

I would go a little further than just "applause", from what I could see they were more or less losing their shit. In particular background rendering, magnetic timelines, auto waveform syncing, sample accurate audio editing, pitch corrected audio scrubbing, one click clip to clip color matching, and the various timeline enabled clip management and bundling caused something like champagne corks being popped.

The crowd was more guarded about the automated ingest processes and metadata tagging, I think those kinds of things are a real "have to use it in the work flow to evaluate" sort of thing. But anyone can see something like the magnetic timeline is a huge time saver.

"Losing their shit" is probably more like it. But I didn't want to push it too much... needless to say, I am very excited to see the final product. I lost some shit when I watched the video. Had to clean my office chair afterwards.

Go back and read what I was originally replying to. If someone says "With GCD it leverages all available cores, and with OpenCL all the GPGPU streams/cores available to throw at it", then it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether that includes multiple graphics cards installed in the same system.

Same impression. Last time I remember hearing an audience that enthusiastic was back in 1977 when I saw Star Wars for the very first time.

One can only hope that the new Final Cut Pro X delivers as well as that first "Star Wars" did. And perhaps Steve Jobs will acquire all of the licensing rights, as George Lucas did, so then I can have FCP X sheets on my bed and FCP X breakfast cereal too!