Apple unveils new 64-bit Final Cut Pro X - Page 2

Like super fast RAIDs that will be needed to handle the big multi-k formats.


Yes. We use Final Cut and Compressor mostly. Sometimes we use Color, but since we have a Lustre that doesn't happen much. Everything else is never used. I mean never.

Since this will be available through the Mac App Store, will Apple be following its own rules that they set for other developers, such as:

Single icon containing ALL of the files used by the application, including libraries and support files.

No installation of kernel extensions.

Any other rules for developers?

Having used FCP for 9 years, I still am a bit hesitant on the interface.

Excited to give it a go though...

This is really huge. People who are used to the old way are going to be resistant-- this is to be expected when you have a new product that has been demoed and we haven't even gotten to see the demo. We're all going on a few pictures and text snippets from live blogging.

The iMovie UI is fantastic, if you take an hour or two and play around with it and learn it. This UI is more professional and deeper-- that much is obvious from the screenshots. What I think people confuse for "simplicity" or "lack of depth" is really just good UI organization and usability.

I think Adobe's video editing just died. It isn't really used in the industry and the architecture is ancient and the usability is on the floor. I think Avid is just barely coming back from bankruptcy. I don't think Apple will kill them, but it isn't like they are in the dominant position in the industry. (I think Adobe fans and Avid fans talk like they are dominant, but the numbers really don't support it.. it is just wishful thinking.)

Nobody is making use of these core OS X capabilities-- such as grand central dispatch. They have been shipping for awhile, but why would Avid (or Adobe) rewrite their product that is a decade old? Too many people will complain about he features that are missing in the rewrite.

Only Apple has the guts to do a complete rewrite like this. And because of this, now Only Final Cut is a modern video editor.

All the competition just became obsolete and is going to get increasingly further an further behind FCP in terms of usability.

There's nothing special about broadcast editing. Editing is editing. IF it outputs in the format you need then you can use it... if it is a better editor then it is a better Broadcast TV editor.

And this is a redesigned editor, made to be really efficient for editing.

That's really fantastic news.

I'm sure there are some beloved features that will have to be reimplemented and will be missing for awhile.... but the end result is an immediate productivity boost.

That sentence doesn't make sense. GCD doesn't let you pick how many cores, and there's no reason that any code that works with GCD would be limited in the number of cores. That's the point of GCD, it scales up and down with cores and GPUs.

I believe they gave an example saying "it will use all 8 of your cores now"... which is assuming a MacPro with 8 cores, not a limitation.

It would be quite a hack to make GCD limit to 8 cores, and there's no benefit to doing so.


Seems like they are integrated into the product. There's a titling button in the UI so, livetype is integrated as well.


Probably because plugins are not yet supported, but they are going to make the announcements for this at WWDC when they can have sessions and training for plugin authors. No point in mentioning them until they are ready to release an SDK, and WWDC is a good time to do it. Apple just has to ship the App supporting the plugins, and the SDK and plugins can come later....



They mentioned that you can do everything with the keyboard.


I just googled adobe premiere mac, and it seems their last version was released in 2002. (Maybe google led me astray.) 64 bit on windows is nothing compared to a real modern Mac OS X application (64 bit or not.) I think Adobe was behind before and is now not even in the same ballpark.


What are the shows?

There may be features you've been wanting for year but this is a ground up rewrite. The "missing features" may well be no irrelevant, or made pointless by the new way things are done.


I think this is the replacement for Studio. I think all the features of studio are built in, though they may not be as complete as they were in Studio (though they will get there over time.) Except Soundtrack, though having not yet seen the demo, maybe essentially all of that is in there now as well.



I think Apple's answer is that they've built in Color and Compressor, they are now part of the apps workflow, and that if you want to use Lustre, eventually Lustre will be able to integrate with the FCPX workflow as a plugin.

Maybe it won't be appropriate for you to upgrade right away, but I don't think it will be too long. (I hope I'm not wrong about the plugin architecture, if they drop the ball there, that's the biggest risk to me.)

Dunno - with Aperture going for under $100 on the App Store, it's possible FCX will stick around at a similar price point.

I suspect the other posts suggesting it's only Pro (not Studio) being offered at this price. Can you imagine the download for Studio? To say nothing of the upgrades if the process for XCode is any indication (the latest 4.0.1 patch required a full 4+GB download).

Its called Premiere Pro now. It has been completely rewritten to take advantage of 64 bit on a Mac. But it does not use Core API's, Open CL, or GCD.

They said it in the Keynote:

There is no Express. FCPX is it. You either pay the $299 for Final Cut Pro X or you use iMovie.

I know this isn't a big deal, but this is definitely an unusual way for apple to announce a big product. As I write this, there isn't a peep on the Apple site about Final Cut Pro X.

We can all come up with a bunch of reasons why this is so, but you have to admit, this is different.

I know; I get it:
- FCP X is just for pros and pros are hardcore
- FCP X is not released yet and not really ready yet
- The venue was exactly the Moscone Center
- They don't want to discourage sales of existing version or FC Express

BUT STILL, I think everyone on this thread knows that when Apple normally announce an upcoming operating system set to be released months or years away, they always have a web page dedicated to the new upcoming release in addition to their many pages dedicated to the existing version that they are still selling.

The apple site usually goes live with the new materials almost instantly after the keynote.

Is this sloppiness or calculated? Is this a symptom of Apple working without Steve Jobs?

It's weird.

It's probably because it's night time and the Web Team are at home with their families.

The place was in Las Vegas, this was an event that goes along with NAB that is the worlds largest broadcast show.
http://www.supermeet.com/
Then maybe you didn't noticed that for at least the last year Apple is trying to go away from stablished dates to release products or introduce them. Some we had to wait longer and others sooner. They axed completely macworld since everyone was waiting for the traditional event and the new stuff unveiled there.
Presenting FCP X at the Supermeet it doesn't only makes sense.. in my opinion pays tribute to those that used the software and supported the platform for all these years. It is a good thing, this FCPX is for them.

I'm with you. I'd expect something to be online immediately or soon to coincide with the release for all of us who can't be there. I hope they put up a video soon, I want to see the presentation. The liveblogging, summaries and photos are just making it worse!

I so hope this is true. Final Cut has always sucked for adding even the simplest type. At the very least, we should FINALLY have access to all of our fonts and styles, I would hope.



I was thinking this as well, although The Loop claims to have a different word from Apple on this: http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/04/1...t-studio-apps/

Speaking of which, if there is a full Final Cut Studio X being released, I hope Apple offers the ability to upgrade the full studio for $299 and not have to pay a fresh price for every piece of the package, which would end up making the full studio a costlier upgrade than the current version.

See Jim Dalrymple's post on The Loop.

Edit: xanthohappy beat me to it!

A little different than their consumer focused product launches, but it isn't all that different than some NAB announcements.

The very first version of Final Cut Pro was announced at NAB in 1999. And actually, before FCP was announced, it was showcased in private demos at NAB in 1998.

If anything, announcing it at Supermeet was sort of sentimental. It was born at NAB and now reborn. On top of that, they get to introduce a whole new version to a highly concentrated group of professionals and they'll all spread the word.

Macromedia created Final Cut and presented it at NAB before Apple bought it from them.

Looks good! Are they going to upgrade the Mac Pro to Sandy Bridge to allow it to shine?

A few nice features. Overall I was underwhelmed.

Great for prosumers and some pros, perhaps. I already have FCP and will surely upgrade at a nice price point. But for elite work? I'll use AE and Premiere. Then again, I'm more a short format guy.

I'm actually relieved. I know now I will continue to trounce the competition with my current workflow.

Yup. I was merely pointing out that FCP has history at NAB, so Apple announcing it there isn't that much of a surprise.

Jessi,

You're probably correct in that they haven't limited concurrency to max 8 cores.

However GCD does in fact offer mechanisms to limit queues when it is important to do so. And let me assure you, it is important to do so for resource management especially when contending for disk I/O and memory. Whether or not that becomes an issue at 8 or 16 cores is a very complex question and depends on the app and host system configuration.

Now I've watched compressor go-to-town on disk I/O and with only a handful of jobs it can create such a frenzy of seeks so as to make (eg.) 4 jobs concurrently take much longer than 2 jobs, stop, 2 jobs stop.

This is why GCD makes it fairly straightforward (and hardly a hack) to do things like limit the number of items in a dispatch queue.

FXPlug should still be supported. DigiEffects brought out some new plugins using GPU acceleration:

http://fcp.co/final-cut-pro/news/300...-final-cut-pro

I'd expect a lot will be rewritten/recompiled for 64-bit and compatibility so there may be upgrade fees but I'd expect support.


I think the old UI looked very old-fashioned. It's perhaps because it now resembles the UI of a consumer app that makes it seem worse but to me that setup is much better. Having the panels together in a single window makes better use of the space.

Concerning content packs, I think it would be best for Apple to offer these as separate downloads whenever you need them and they can maintain an online library. So you'd just download FCP from the App Store and there could be an online asset browser and you can preview audio samples etc and just click to download which you want.

They can do that with every part of the current suite like DVD templates.

I personally hope they have integrated a lot of the apps into one. Soundtrack Pro doesn't really do enough on its own to be separate and people can get Logic for more advanced sound editing. Having non-destructive color-correction built-in seems like a better idea than running Color separate.

Motion will probably still be separate as well as Compressor, although Compressor is just a background app that will be bundled with FCP and hopefully integrated better.

I'd expect DVDSP to be separate too but tbh, it would actually be ok to have this in FCP for things like titling and menu setups. It could mean you don't have to re-export the whole edit if you change a small part for authoring. It will be interesting to see the authoring capability they have in store and if full Blu-Ray image authoring is coming. I still don't think they should go for Blu-Ray hardware support internally in their machines but the movie industry is backing Blu-Ray so people need to author the discs.

Can't believe there's no video presentation and demo of this thing in action. I want to see how this thing moves. Did they just cancel all the sponsors in order to look good on the show? I thought they did it to use it for long demo sessions.
Also, no official word on h.264 support as an editing format or did I miss something? I expect no transcoding is needed, but it would be nice to know for sure.

All the changes that were made were fairly predictable in my opinion. It looks like Apple just combined FCP, Color, and Soundtrack Pro into 1 App. There seemed to be some motion graphics capabilities in the demo, but the live feed I watched was black at that point. Can anyone elaborate on the Motion like part of the demo?

I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple release Motion separately, combine it with the nodal interface of Shake to compete with Nuke and possibly eliminate Color, Soundtrack Pro, and DVD Studio Pro all together. Apple doesn't seem too keen on supporting optical based media in favor of their file based distribution system on the iTunes store. That just leaves Compressor, I wonder what will happen with that? Output wasn't really covered in the demo, was it?

I can't believe all the new features + new UI, its awesome. Pluraleyes built in, color correction w/ grading, nesting clips. Excellent.

I wonder what the minimum supported configuration will be? Snow Leopard no doubt, Core2Duo w/ 256MB VRAM probably is my best guess. To process all the rendering in the background seems too good to be true on lower end machines. I don't think many amateurs will be able to purchase the app simply because it won't be supported on a Macbook, low end iMac, or Mac Mini with integrated GPUs, but maybe I'll be eating my words.

All in all, Final Cut Pro X probably just cut my editing time in half. Don't tell my boss

According to the reports I've read they made no mention of Final Cut Express. Did they actually say it or are you making that assumption? I suspect you may be right but I would like to hear it from Apple.

It's Apple. They can give you a "Install Final Cut Pro" app in your Applications folder, like how Xcode is delivered now. So the installer will basically get around any limitations.

Yeah having to re-download 4GBs and more each time is going to be a pain... Now for pro apps too, I imagine. The developed countries will continue to gain steam with better broadband compared to the emerging world still lagging behind in so many aspects of Internet delivery. Where I am I can't even connect properly to Steam for games without having to use a VPN that goes through somewhere on the other side of the world or what not.

There's so much wrong with this...

Avid's not dominant?

Pull your head out of your a**.

Well, both of you made claims, anyone have any published facts?

Maybe this is of interest: http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/w..._campaign=feed
It's a blog post by Larry Jordan, the same filmmaker, who revealed some information a month ago.

There are no hard facts on this, because many edit stations have both AVID and FCP installed these days. But, as someone as who works in the TV industry I can offer you some average numbers that are "believed" to be true:

It's estimated that AVID is used for about 60% of television programming (we're talking everything from no-budget cable all the way up to big network TV) and about 90% of all films released in cinemas.

Out of that 60% TV market, about 90% of the top tier broadcasters (ie. network television) use AVID. News networks tend to be almost exclusively AVID also.

Hence the perception that AVID is hugely dominant in the "high end market."

Some broadcasters, such as the BBC, use a combination -- last year they even bought 2,000 Premiere Pro CS5 licenses.

So... where does FCP have it's strength? It's used on low budget/indie (ie. non theatrical release films) quite a lot. I am sure it also has a majority usage in corporate and various consumer (weddings, etc) uses. It is also used extensively in the childrens TV market. There are a number of high profile shows that also use FCP, such as GLEE, and (I think?) True Blood, but these are mostly exception: it's taken for granted that unless otherwise stated a television series is working on AVID.

Just to put it out there, but Wikipedia has this to say about FCP marketshare for editors:

With a few references for those numbers at the bottom. So bottom line; it depends.

Your time line may be off. First, when Apple released Final Cut there was no Adobe Premiere Pro. There was only Adobe Premiere, which was based on an over ten year old code base. That is a long time in computer years. Further, Adobe Premiere was designed for amateur video enthusiasts, and Adobe was focusing more on Windows. Final Cut was designed many years later from the ground up by the same people who designed Premiere. It was commissioned by Macromedia and the audience was professional video producers not amateurs. The product was going to be called Key Grip, but later the name was changed.

Final Cut's intended competitor was Avid Media Composer, not Adobe Premiere. With Avid you needed to buy both expensive hardware and software (not the case anymore). If memory recalls, a relatively cheap Avid Solution was around $10, 000. So, yes, cost was a big benefit with Final Cut. However, the other big advantage was it wasn't based on aging code and it had professional people in mind from the get go.

Final Cut was designed around Quicktime, which was light years ahead of the competition at the time. Premier supported Quicktime, but that wasn't the underlying technology. The other major advantage of Final Cut was Apple's Firewire, which many of the new cameras supported.

Final Cut came to market in 1999. Adobe Premiere Pro was released in 2003 in response to Apple making significant inroads into the professional video market. Adobe Premiere Pro was a complete rewrite of the code base. Not the same product as Premiere at all.

Final Cut was getting a little old as well. To Apple's credit though, it had to rewrite the Code from the ground up to go from Carbon to Cocoa.

Apple limited the live demos. The presenter mentioned the software is still considered beta.

For $300 it's a steal, and I will have no reservations buying it. I'm glad Apple is leading the way here. Selling professional suite like that for affordable price is going to be a real hit. Watch out Adobe.

Thank you for posting the link.

Have a colleague there and his note, "around a couple of thousand were there to see the keynote, but the buzz outside after was equally amazing."

It will be interesting to hear how the other 90,000 attendees at The NAB Show will react. Certainly it was the place and the audience to be in.

http://news.google.com/news/more?q=n...ed=0CCsQqgIwAA

Before people start making assumptions based on such small amounts of info...a guy recorded the whole thing (mostly audio...some video)

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13961499

Some of the stuff people are getting all worried about all over the web are mentioned.


Also..remember, this is a preview. Relax guys.

Lots of jobs available. NBC, Disney, ABC, CBS, PIXAR, even Apple. http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobs/li...c/l-california

If anything AVID is becoming a legacy system. The kids coming out of such highly deemed 'graphic' schools around the world such as the Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts is more evidence of where the future is headed.

And as Apple cites, the list of high profilejust keeps growing. http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/in-action/

Are you kidding? That list is disingenuous at best. Several of those projects can be traced back to Electric Entertainment (where I've worked before), who made a huge investment in bringing everything in-house via FCP Studio.

Even prior to yesterday's preview, they were seriously considering moving to something else due to Apple's disinterest in the pro market.

I'll give you a few examples and apologize in advance for the long post:

1) Being able to view various different timebases/timecodes regardless of what I'm editing in:
We shoot and edit our content at 23.98fps, but we have to deliver to the broadcaster at 59.94i drop-frame format. Since 23.98 is a non-drop format, the timecode doesn't match what would be on a 59.94i drop-frame master. Even though I'm editing in a non-drop format, I want to see the drop-frame equivalent, because that's what is going to matter to the broadcaster. Sure -- there are all kinds of workarounds ... but it shouldn't be a work-around. AVID has been doing this since... seriously I cannot even remember when they didn't do it.

2) Being able to display and burn-in the filename or clipname, or any metadata (all of them on the timeline). Simple example: Producers, directors, and broadcasters often want to see the filename displayed of every single shot, as it is playing in real-time for them. When they watch a quicktime and see the filename tagging along at the bottom of every clip they can easily comunicate back "hey, this file is a good or bad take" and if they're tech-savvy they can even find the file on the video server. This allows us to keep version-control of shots (crucial for animated series', for example). FCP doesn't do it. In fact, there are forum posts in the Apple forums of programmers claiming it can't do it due to the nature of their plugin architecture. Plugins have no way of extracting the filename of a clip. Once again - there are workarounds, but it shouldn't be a work-around. This has been a dinosaur feature on AVID that's just taken for granted.

3) Switching from offline (low resolution) to online (hd resolution) shouldn't be break the motion properties of a clip. Try it: Make an edit in SD 720x486. Create some kind of a basic motion/zoom effect on a clip. Now make your sequence 1920x1080 - effectively preparing your sequence to ingest HD material ... first of all you'll notice that FCP doesn't scale up any clips, the only way to automatically make it scale is if you use the media manager, create a new sequence. But let's pretend you manually select all your clips and choose "conform" or "scale" from the drop-down menus ... that's only going to assume that all your clips want to be perfectly scaled to fit the screen (any adjustments you made...are gone). But guess what? Now all that basic motion/zoom stuff is broken -- you have to redo all of your movements. Why? Because FCP doesn't accurately scale up its motion effects with resolution. I know I know..you'll tell me "prores proxy is here we don't need low res workflows!" well ...baloney -- that stuff is indeed here to stay, especially as editors begin to work from home and don't just want "DV size" clips, but infinitely smaller clips that can sync from a home internet connection. Bah... I'm getting frustrated just typing this out...forgive me.

...I could go on, but you get the point. I totally understand that these are not features that many the vast majority of video editors need if you include the whopping numbers of indie, corporate, wedding, etc, group of editors. But this stuff really does matter on the broadcast level. It makes a difference on working a 10 or 12 hour day, and ultimately affects how creative we get to be when we're not tricking the software into doing these tasks with work-arounds.

No editor I've ever worked with in 15 years as a producer has come from an art school.

Graphics and editing have nothing to do with one another. Anyone who's serious about becoming a pro editor eventually learns AVID.