Nothing wrong with democratizing moving pictures, after all these years, like what has been going on with other kinds of publishing. One can only welcome the rivers of creative "content" that will begin flowing, whereas up to now it has been highly centralized. It's inevitable, and Apple will be at the front of yet another revolution. But --
They are showing disrespect for their ancestry and for tradition by killing off the original Final Cut metaphor. The timeline and the complete control of sync is basic to what film is, or was: strips of still pictures linked to sound.
Video can lend itself to a new, debased metaphor, a stream of data that can be opened and closed like a tap, ignoring the basic syntax of the single frame and the single waveform of sound. One of the posters in the comments linked by addabox says it very well:
"As a day-1 buyer of FCPX (and a user of FCP since version 3), I've been horribly disappointed by the app. As others have said, why wasn't it released and marketed as a new, separate app? One that could potentially grow into a proper replacement for FCP over years of development (while FCP7 is supported in the interim with patches)?
"I've tried to use it on two projects, and on both I've had to give up. The magnetic timeline is the real killer for me. I edit a lot of stuff to music, and the linked tracks (along with the inability to lock tracks) drives me nuts. When putting up captions on an upper video layer, it's handy to just add a dissolve transition to the end to fade it off. As far as I can tell, you can't do that in FCPX as it expects transitions to have 2 pieces of footage.*
"It's a real sh*t sandwich. There's some nice technology in there for sure, and some interesting ideas. But they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater by completely ditching track-based editing. The iMovie-like auto-timeline is probably a good working paradigm for some jobs, but not all (or in my case, any). The fact that FCPX can't import in FCP7 projects might even be taken as a sign that the new editing paradigm isn't as flexible as as traditional track-based editor - it can't support all the old functionality!
"On the plus side, the auto-colour matching is nice, though."
Keeping multiple tracks linked precisely, the film metaphor, is the most basic function in my kind of editing, don't know if you can do it with X.
For my part, Marvin, I grew to like the tricky Final Cut interface very much. But I'm easily impressed by linear approaches. I agree it was frustrating at first, and seemed un-Apple like.
You listen to yourself? What does "deconstructing Apple's motivations here is reading too far between the fuzzy lines" even mean?
I thought someone would take issue with that. Basically it means that when Apple launched the software, it's natural for people to look at what changes were made and then figure out from those changes what their intention was.
Their marketing is all about professional workflows but a number of key elements of the software design are the opposite and don't cater to collaborative workflows at all.
There's a clear conflict there and so various theories are being made to fit to resolve that conflict. The one that fits best ATM seems to be what Addabox and others have suggested, which is that Apple redefines what a 'pro' user actually is. This way it ties in with both the marketing and the design of FCP X.
While I agree that's what fits now, I think it's too soon (lines are too fuzzy) to make that the final call. Apple made their move, the community reacted, now it's Apple's turn again. I think their next move will be a much clearer indication of their roadmap.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bulk001
And no, software cannot be designed to cater for everyone - what made you think that it could or even should?
That operating system and web browser you're using now. If it's built properly, anyone can use it. The reason I think software should be built this way is because it cuts down development resources. Having to maintain iMovie + FCE + FCP + STP + Motion + Color + Compressor + Livetype + DVDSP all takes resources. If you cut it down to iMovie + FCP + Motion + Compressor and give the latter 3 a shared render engine and common elements with iMovie, the development resources can be used better.
They could even merge Motion and FCP at some point in future if they wanted to, which would justify them rendering everything automatically.
There are still loads of things wrong with the state FCPX is in like the text transitions mentioned above. You can keyframe opacity but there's no keyframe graph so you can't move keyframes you've set. It also makes more sense IMO to apply behaviours to text rather than picking a text animation for what you want i.e you just create a basic text block and then drop effects on it and can enable/disable each one.
Comments
They are showing disrespect for their ancestry and for tradition by killing off the original Final Cut metaphor. The timeline and the complete control of sync is basic to what film is, or was: strips of still pictures linked to sound.
Video can lend itself to a new, debased metaphor, a stream of data that can be opened and closed like a tap, ignoring the basic syntax of the single frame and the single waveform of sound. One of the posters in the comments linked by addabox says it very well:
"As a day-1 buyer of FCPX (and a user of FCP since version 3), I've been horribly disappointed by the app. As others have said, why wasn't it released and marketed as a new, separate app? One that could potentially grow into a proper replacement for FCP over years of development (while FCP7 is supported in the interim with patches)?
"I've tried to use it on two projects, and on both I've had to give up. The magnetic timeline is the real killer for me. I edit a lot of stuff to music, and the linked tracks (along with the inability to lock tracks) drives me nuts. When putting up captions on an upper video layer, it's handy to just add a dissolve transition to the end to fade it off. As far as I can tell, you can't do that in FCPX as it expects transitions to have 2 pieces of footage.*
"It's a real sh*t sandwich. There's some nice technology in there for sure, and some interesting ideas. But they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater by completely ditching track-based editing. The iMovie-like auto-timeline is probably a good working paradigm for some jobs, but not all (or in my case, any). The fact that FCPX can't import in FCP7 projects might even be taken as a sign that the new editing paradigm isn't as flexible as as traditional track-based editor - it can't support all the old functionality!
"On the plus side, the auto-colour matching is nice, though."
Keeping multiple tracks linked precisely, the film metaphor, is the most basic function in my kind of editing, don't know if you can do it with X.
For my part, Marvin, I grew to like the tricky Final Cut interface very much. But I'm easily impressed by linear approaches. I agree it was frustrating at first, and seemed un-Apple like.
You listen to yourself? What does "deconstructing Apple's motivations here is reading too far between the fuzzy lines" even mean?
I thought someone would take issue with that.
Their marketing is all about professional workflows but a number of key elements of the software design are the opposite and don't cater to collaborative workflows at all.
There's a clear conflict there and so various theories are being made to fit to resolve that conflict. The one that fits best ATM seems to be what Addabox and others have suggested, which is that Apple redefines what a 'pro' user actually is. This way it ties in with both the marketing and the design of FCP X.
While I agree that's what fits now, I think it's too soon (lines are too fuzzy) to make that the final call. Apple made their move, the community reacted, now it's Apple's turn again. I think their next move will be a much clearer indication of their roadmap.
And no, software cannot be designed to cater for everyone - what made you think that it could or even should?
That operating system and web browser you're using now. If it's built properly, anyone can use it. The reason I think software should be built this way is because it cuts down development resources. Having to maintain iMovie + FCE + FCP + STP + Motion + Color + Compressor + Livetype + DVDSP all takes resources. If you cut it down to iMovie + FCP + Motion + Compressor and give the latter 3 a shared render engine and common elements with iMovie, the development resources can be used better.
They could even merge Motion and FCP at some point in future if they wanted to, which would justify them rendering everything automatically.
There are still loads of things wrong with the state FCPX is in like the text transitions mentioned above. You can keyframe opacity but there's no keyframe graph so you can't move keyframes you've set. It also makes more sense IMO to apply behaviours to text rather than picking a text animation for what you want i.e you just create a basic text block and then drop effects on it and can enable/disable each one.