Reality TV heavyweight drops Final Cut Pro for rival Avid - Page 4

LOL. That's a cut and paste from the FCP wiki page. You don't know anything about these movies. Look into every one of those movies and find out which were done top to bottom in FCP only, or if FCP was one of the many workstations used. Was it pieced together in FCP but not anything else? Was all of the compositing done in FCP or did they send it to get done elsewhere?


The point you missed from my other post is that: FCP has been used a lot; FCP has NOT been used much in major films as "the" major tool through the life of the production; FCP's name gets attached to a lot of films where it was indeed used and used happily no doubt, but hardly at all enough to say it was "Made in FCP".

Don't use ad copy and wiki pages of the product to prove a point. Even if this list was a great example of films made entirely in FCP (which it isn't), I hardly think a list of 25 (or whatever) spanning TEN YEARS adds up to anything except a list I've seen all over the net which is notable mostly for the fact that it, um, numbers around 25 over a ten year span : )

I, however, DO know about some of those films (especially since I cut two of them) and state unequivocally that most were cut entirely in FCP, as are hundreds of other features and episodics.

Your compositing question is specious, since no major film would ever be comped in editorial software, btw.

Your post is a major fail, but thanks for playing.

This is not how professional post facilities operated. This is how PC tweakers and people who cannot afford new computers operate.



You really don't seem to know what you are talking about.



The foolishness is your claim that businesses are running home built computers. That makes no sense.

They buy computers from major manufacturers (HP, Dell, Apple) With a proper warranty and quality support.



You claimed they simply add new components - now you are saying they never open the case.

This confirms, you have no idea what you are talking about.

Aiwaz418, thanks for posting. Facts are good. I was merely rebuffing that anything can be proven by reposting from a product's wiki page by someone who posts theory and ad copy as an argument. Plus, it was only a sidebar to the original issue. Thank you for stepping in.

As far as the compositing, it was more just choosing a random part of the post process that requires something that it doesn't excel at. There are better examples.


My point was: FCPX, great software. Not so great for being part of a larger whole in the workflow in it's current incarnation, and frankly the ratios I see it used in NYC in major projects is what influenced my comments. And as an editor you know that it's not even a FCPX vs Avid world there, by far.

This is really beyond commenting on, aside from how you put words in my mouth. You need a course in remedial reading. FCPX doesn't run on anything other than Mac, hence any big non-Mac rigs will not be running FCPX, got it?

Tech staffs at post houses know how to upgrade a rig without breaking it, and when you say that upgrading a computer is not done there, only by people who can't afford a new computer it shows an unfortunate lack of knowledge about the subject which you expound so loosely on.

You argue in strange circles.

I've heard this comment that FCP X is not good for anything over, say, 15 minutes... you seem to support this.

How, then, do you explain this:

Using FCPX on long format broadcast productions


From The Article:

From The Comments:


With due respect, I guess my questions would be:

Are you both wrong?

Are you both right?

It seems that there are pros and then there are pros... and editing jobs and editing jobs...

Not every editing job needs a ball-peen hammer... nor every editor knows how to use one. But, in the hands of a creative, where its use is warranted, it can be used to make a thing of beauty.

I have never used FCP X. I was referring to FCP Studio which is laboriously slow to render since it doesn't effectively use multi-core cpus in my Mac Pro. It kind of depends how much fancy stuff you have in the timeline but to produce 30 minute training videos we still ended up rendering out flattened movies of most scenes, which sucks because you can't work on the subtitles until the very end and if you need to go back and fix something you have to redo the xml again because the markers may have moved. If you have all flattened movies for every scene then you can use FCP to assemble a long format video but having everything flattened is the drawback. I have not done any 30 minute videos on Avid though, so I don't have any experience there. We used to use Avid before we switched to FCP but it was just the Express version not the full fledged Pro version.

Im sorry but you where right about it in 2010 but in 2011 it again became a very nice piece of hardware compared to its price!

Of course they could hire staff to upgrade the machine and stabilize it. Why go through all the effort when you can buy a new machine.

I know what I'm talking about because I work with the very companies we are talking about.

Have a look at this:

Try Final Cut Pro X Free For 30 Days

I think if you try it with an open mind, some experimentation and a few tutorials you may catch a glimpse of the future.

It will be unfamiliar, and is not all goodness and roses, but it does address many of the things that are downers in FCP Studio.

-- fast multi-core (including CPU and GPU cores) rendering (on demand or in background)
-- immediately begin editing - even before ingest is completed
-- 64-Bit - support for large amount of RAM
-- native support for many codecs
-- eliminate transcoding (or perform in background with automatic substitution of transcodes for originals as they complete)

That's just for starters... I suspect you can completely eliminate the flatten/fatten process. Some "pros":

-- turn off background rendering, altogether
-- edit and play the changed, non-rendered video in real time (instead of a blanking/beeping canvas)
-- render when desired (for final output or less CPU/GPU intensive playback)


Happiness is never having to [wait for] render.


Seriously, once you stop fighting the UI (trying to make it work like FCP 7), you just begin importing your clips and start editing right away...

It is amazing how fast you can go and when you can immediately see the results of any effects, titles, corrections, changes...

...Every now, and again you might decide to do a render -- just so you can go to the bathroom or take a coffee break. Even then, you can still edit while it is rendering...

I am not opposed to trying it as soon as it works with our subtitle plug in and has multi-cam which we use for lectures on stage. It is a bummer that we won't be able to reuse any scenes from our older projects which we tend to do quite a bit.

My original comment was regarding the article that they switched from FCP to Avid not FCP X to Avid. I then offered my opinion that I found FCP difficult to work with for long-ish format videos, inferring that among other reasons, the slowness of FCP in longer projects could possibly be a contributing factor to Avid being far more popular in Hollywood feature length films.

1) Which subtitle plugin? If it is a home-grown plugin you can build plugins with Motion 5 ($50 - no free trial).

Also, you could use FCP X to prepare the video, then add the subtitles in FCP 7 until a subtitle solution exists in FCP X. You'd gain all the performance benefits of FCP X and only pay the piper (FCP 7 render time) for subtitles.

2) You can do multi-cam, ala PluralEyes -- sync the clips by the sound track of each camera. If this is acceptable, it is dropdead easy as the capability is native to FCP X -- no plugin or external prep necessary. Just select the Clips in FCPX and Menu--->Clip--->Synchronize clips.

3) You may be able to use scenes from FCP 7 in FCP X. I have imported render files from FCP 7 into FCP X to utilize a title or other effect that was not yet available in FCP X.

One of the things I found helpful, is to bring the output movie from FCP 7 into FCP X. you can include it as a separate story line (AKA track) and split it into clips as desired. You can disable any/all of this as needed, while you build up the FCP X equivalent.

So, you have original (unedited) clips, FCP 7-rendered clips, and the rendered FCP 7 movie available for import/use in FCP X. It's not as elegant as opening an FCP 7 project in FCP X would be -- but it's not particularly burdensome either.


Do you have any examples of the types of videos you edit that I could see -- PM me if necessary? I'd like to get an idea of what you are discussing.

Well said. I was going to say the same thing.

Thank you for making the case that FCPX is a pro app. You brought up interesting and good points.

That sounds like one guy putting the show together on his own from his own storage. The link in the comment at the bottom shows a multi-user studio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMxoP7-EMEc

I'd say the biggest complaint about Final Cut Pro X is that it seems to be designed to work for one editor. The workflow for sharing media and edits was easier in previous versions. Imagine for example that someone prepared source footage incorrectly with interlace artifacts but it wasn't noticed until the edit was done. In FCP, you just replace the entire source footage in seconds. How can you relink an entire set of source footage in FCPX?

I find the separation between the media and edits an odd design. You're rarely if ever going to use the same footage for two projects and you could easily accidentally do something to footage used in another project without realising. Having media tied to a project gives it a better level of protection, especially in a shared environment.

On a side note, it seems that Avid hasn't been doing so well lately. Stock price is tanking (lowest in 15 years), dropped by half in the last 6 months, they've gotten rid of another 10% of their staff. I guess the film industry would have to do a buyout/bailout of the company if it came to it because who else could they turn to? They're not going to do their film editing using Premiere or Vegas. I wonder what would actually happen if Avid went under.

I'm actually regretting having paid for Adobe Production Premium CS3 and CS4. If I want the next version I need to basically throw away my existing hardware and buy highend nVidia cards because the Mercury Playback engine demands it. I'm actually sitting out CS5/5.5 because I want to see if there will be a MacPro in the future and weather to move to the Mac platform to have some hardware stability. Oddly enough Avid makes the same requirements of Windows, but not the Mac. Meanwhile switching to FCP requires a mac even though there's nothing really tying it to the mac other than it being owned by Apple.

Using the existing CS4 version, doesn't make very good use of multicore (I honestly think it doesn't use multicore at all since all the projects I've dealt with get pegged to one core, but that may simply be the underlying windows codecs.)

But hey, maybe some open source NLE system will come and steal FCPX's lunch and the rug from under Avid and Adobe. I won't hold my breath.

My 3 year plan is this
If no 2012 Mac Pro, build new Windows 7 system for 2012 keep adobe software, else get new mac pro and change to Mac licences.
2013 Upgrade RAM
2014 Upgrade Hard drives

2015 Reevaluate Mac Hardware.

Point of interest, all my clients use Mac's and other Apple kit. I've held off being an early adopter of the iPod/iPhone/iPad until LTE models are available. Likewise I've held off buying a Mac Pro until the Socket 2011 processors are available. I did not want to buy a MacPro utilizing the Xeon 5000 series because I forsaw this chip line ending soon and not being able to upgrade or replace the RAM if needed. Especially considering how much hardware died on me during 2011. If I could have one Mac Pro last 5 years instead of replacing a desktop PC every 18 months I'll be much happier and save more money in the end.

Avid is in the interesting situation here though of having their audio business, Digidesign, as the de facto standard for mid to high to the highest end audio studios. So it doesn't fall on the shoulders of the video community to keep Avid afloat. I would go so far as to say that the video community has something to lose in a tanking of the company, but the pro audio community would be completely turned upside down. A bailout by the audio industry would be more likely. Selling off of parts would be their first act, should it come to that, after all they bought Digidesign, and Avid's product assets are not unattractive for an investor who believes there is synergy with their current business. There wouldn't be any shortage of interested buyers for either the parts or the whole.

Too bad that stock prices have to dictate so much, more than the products themselves, but such is our economy and the trials of a public company.

That video shows that they shoot 30-40 hours/day of tape, 7 days per week while in production...

I suspect that the lack of native FCP X Tape Import has something to do with the decision...

Apple backed away from trying to support every media type and every camera in the base product-- rather, they are supporting 3rd-party implementations for those who need this capability. Some of these 3rd-party solutions are beginning to appear.


The September update to FCP X added SAN/XSAN support where:
-- all the source media on the Share is available to everyone, concurrently
-- any FCP X Project and its Events on the Share are available to one user at a time
-- it is trivial for a user to duplicate FCP X Projects/Events for his own use
-- the source media need never be copied, just referenced
-- edits can be recombined with the master Project and Events an any time, one editor at a time

It is different, and likely, somewhat more difficult than FCP 7.

The main reason for this is the way FCP X uses a database to manage, metadata, keywords, smart collections, etc. At present, this limits access to an FCP X Project/Event to a single user at a time. I suspect that this will support multiple concurrent users in a future release -- as that is a major advantage of using a database over a flat file structure as in FCP 7.


First, you can do this by reimporting the media, essentially what you do in FCP 7 -- you just do it differently. The edits are preserved. In addition, the database of metadata, is preserved.


You can encapsulate a Project and its Events if you desire. For example, it is trivial to duplicate a project (along with its events) and move that to another computer, say a laptop -- so you can continue working off site.

Also, you can move or copy clips among events.

So, where sharing media (source, events and edits) makes sense -- you can do it!

Where tying media (source, events and edits) to a project makes sense -- you can do it,

Maybe:

http://www.lightworksbeta.com/

Sigh... No Mac version yet...

I just downloaded the latest trial of Parallels, so I can try this on Lion... The bad thing, though, is the latest Windows I have is XPMCE...

So it will likely perform poorly.

I really don't want to buy another version of Windows, as we have no apps that require it!

Well, I installed LightWorks on WinXP...

First impressions:

Kinda' retro...

Reminds me of PhotoShop -- where everything's a Windoid -- you have crap windows all over the place.

The Conbination of Windoids is fully configurable (there seems to be no main window)

Real bummer -- when you create a project you must specify fps -- then you cannot import any video into that project with a different fps.


I get the feeling they have sacrificed usability for flexibility -- you can make it turn cart-wheels... if only you could get it to walk.

Maybe more later... I don't know if I want to know anymore about this.

They could have used a 3rd party tool or FCP 7 to load the tapes onto the XSan though - an editor won't pick up a tape and import directly into the bin. It might have been the initial lack of XSan support, edit to tape and still lack of multi-cam (due sometime this year):

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/1150105
http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/335/11786 (Raudonis added a 'like' to this message)


This is what I don't like about the Events setup. It acts like an intermediary between the edit and the footage and it hampers portability. The 10.0.1 update is an example of this - it seems as though it is necessary to update all your events and projects such that they are no longer usable on 10.0.0. They might do that going from 10.0 to 10.1 where the update isn't free. It's likely that the updates will be inexpensive but I don't like that in principle. Of course, you could say the same about any project update not being backwards compatible but reverting one project file is easier than all the footage events in your entire collection. The Bunim Murray company has an XSan with over 300TB of storage space for their footage. It doesn't seem practical to manage that amount of data using Apple's Events setup.

I also don't think FCP should put the render files in beside the projects. I think it should be:

Final Cut Events -> Event -> Original + transcode
Final Cut Projects -> Project -> FCP project database
Final Cut Renders -> Project -> temporary render files

This way you can easily have a dedicated drive for render files and hose it if you run out of space. Although you can delete render footage from the project view, it would make sharing projects much easier as you can just find the project file/folder, zip it up and email it.

Sharing edits via email is something that seems to be very difficult in FCPX. in FCP 7, you just do save as... zip up the file and ship it to someone else who might have an entirely different drive setup and even format of source footage - they could be on proxy footage where you have originals. All they do is open the file from any save location and relink a single file and FCP 7 just automagically ( that word is in Apple's dictionary) relinks everything. I'm using some sugar coating here as the relink doesn't always go smoothly but that process just seems incredibly difficult, if not impossible now.

The process of moving events and projects to other drives is not something that makes me feel safe either. Having a Move Event button that copies source footage over to another drive behind the scenes and then deletes it without you really seeing what's happening, is a bit worrying. You don't know what would happen if FCPX crashed during the process.


Is this new in the update? What are the steps you do to reimport media?


It's not quite the same encapsulation you had before on one computer though where the footage from one project is not even visible or accessible from another project. I think that's how it should be by default. Not in the way that FCP 7 does it but by using extra metadata - so assign events project tags and then allow you to only see events from a given set of project tags.


Yeah, those kind of software packages tend to have really clumsy UIs. That's one element of what made Apple's professional software line so great - they managed to combine powerful software with usable interfaces. It takes more effort but it's worth it. An industry heavyweight 3D app called Houdini looks like this:



You almost feel like if you look at it the wrong way you're going to break something. Change a panel layout by accident and take weeks to figure out how to get it back the way it was. I don't think software should be like that and I really hate when Apple alienates groups of people like they did with Shake because it forces adoption of ugly software packages (the following at least had some legacy so it's not too bad):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSop7_Ljc9c

But now we're dealing with FCPX, which excels in episodics but doesn't handle features as well. I would be very happy if you were to point out features currently being completely handled in FCPX (as I say I want Apple to succeed in with their pro apps and in fact have been unhappy with my last few years of Avid (Digidesign) audio products and support and have no love for Avid) but most editors I deal with who are FCPX users (and many have Avid as well) do not do long form films, love FCPX as a tool yet feel it bogs down on even their longer projects. All of the editors I know who use FCPX for short form and work fairly independently are very happy with it, the ones who do long form and work as part of larger intertwined groups are not using it for that.


How are you getting around this currently in feature length work, or are you not experiencing this? Do you feel you could have done those two features that you did in FCP in FCPX in its current state?

Respectfully,

J

Absolutely not - FCPX is a disaster, not only in lack of professional features, but in bugginess as well. Also, several friend who have attempted short form work have the same issues with FCPX that feature cutters do. In spite of the amazing ability of the software to deal with certain forms of media efficiently on the fly, it lacks the most basic functionality inherent in FCP7 and several other packages.

It's an amateur software at best, and even then it would hobble most proficient editors.

Read that chart again. Visual effects are a separate line from post productionso yes, editing represents a major cost of 'post production' on this chart.