It's time to call for Ubilllos' head...
He 's the wrong guy at the wrong time that turned Final Cut into Premiere v.4 with a shiny veneer. Obviously a lot of Pro customers are looking towards Avid MC and Premiere CS5.5 I do think however users need to get very specific about what their problem is and in this case it's Randy Ubillos and his philosophy on building cinema/video editing applications. Most Pro users aren't buying it, third party developers for the most part aren't buying it the thing left is to name a name to place blame in this debacle. I guarantee Final Cut will never improve to the level that's necessary with Randy Ubillos running things. Remember...the guy invented the original totally amateur version of Adobe Premiere.
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And this couldn't go in one of the three existing threads about people complaining about Final Cut Studio why?
Because it doesn't have anything to do with nit-picking about missing a boatload of necessary features or about Final Cut specifically. This thread is about throwing a spotlight/microscope on Randy Ubillos specifically and recognizing that a failed core philosophy that's been tried already was engineered by the same person 15 years ago. Final Cut can get better, but not with him running the show. Once people start digging into Ubillos' past I think it will be crystal clear that slamming Final Cut, to a large extent, makes no sense because it's what everyone should have expected from the Media and Entertainment group with Ubilos at the head.
Because it doesn't have anything to do with nit-picking about missing a boatload of necessary features or about Final Cut specifically. This thread is about throwing a spotlight/microscope on Randy Ubillos specifically and recognizing that a failed core philosophy that's been tried already was engineered by the same person 15 years ago. Final Cut can get better, but not with him running the show. Once people start digging into Ubillos' past I think it will be crystal clear that slamming Final Cut, to a large extent, makes no sense because it's what everyone should have expected from the Media and Entertainment group with Ubilos at the head.
You people slammed iMovie 8 and rightfully so as it didn't have many features that were in iMovie HD but it did offer a nice peak into the future with the realtime playback of effects and transitions on even basic systems and the skimming functionality.
iMovie 9 has improved by leaps and bounds and once you grasp it ..it's easy to create something that looks presentable with little effort.
Truth time
Final Cut Express was an abomination. It was usable only if you slogged through a book or had prior experience with Final Cut Pro (which you slogged through a book to learn). I cheer the demise of FCE because it was not suitable for consumers taking the next step beyond iMovie.
Final Cut Pro X is the pro version that won't cause people to panic when they launch it the first time. It's just an easier UI to grasp even from the screenshots. I think it's going to usher in a lot more slick prosumer productions and it presents much less roadblocks like transcoding and logging and capturing.
I suspect that FCPX 2.0 will be a great leap forward in polish to an app that already has the chutzpah needed for the 21st century at its core.
Ubillos is still the man.
Remember...the guy invented the original totally amateur version of Adobe Premiere.
And Final Cut Pro - even the versions you like.
They totally expected most users to just rollover and say "Great job guys, we don't need all of those critical features anyway. We'll wait and see what you come up with."
Visionaries are often called crazy before everyone understands what they could see the whole time.
Remember...the guy invented the original totally amateur version of Adobe Premiere.
Amateur? The first version of Adobe Premiere was released in 1991.
Perhaps you just don't understand Randy Ubillo's full vision of what he believes an NLE should be. I don't know if the market will get on board with him.
Visionaries are often called crazy before everyone understands what they could see the whole time.
The entire television production industry is not going to change how it works to satisfy either Mr. Ubillo's or Mr. Jobs' vision.
Just out of curiosity, what's the "failed core philosophy" that was "engineered by the same person 15 years ago"?
Premiere 1-4 was a "Timeline Only" based editor, which is fine for educational purposes. I learned editing with it the beginning of filmschool. Essentially, you have the whole dragging and dropping of clips to a timeline where macro layout of a project is great, but editing shot to shot transitions are made exponentially more difficult. In a "Timeline Only" editor you're forced to work with postage stamp sized windows to make a precision edit and that's just not acceptable. Getting into long form editing that needs precision cutting, with multiple revisions just amplifies the problem. That's not even touching the surface of half of the things that that a pro editing app needs, but as soon as people look at the interface the first thing they see is basically..."Sorry guys, No precision editing for YOU. Postage stamp style editing all the way baby!"
The one thing Premiere had going for it was project portability, because everything including a project file could be saved to one folder and you could save that folder, move it to a completely different workstation and keep things moving without missing a beat, FCPX doesn't have an option for that even though it has the amateur editing structure Premiere 1-4 had. People didn't start taking Premiere seriously until Adobe added real, usable 3-point editing.
Collaborative editing and better full pipeline data asset management, like Avid has, was something people were expecting in the next FCP, because of the introduction of Final Cut Server and XSan. However, with Apple nixing all server services except iPhone and iPad networked application development that's pretty much out the window which is another huge reason to dislike FCP at this point.
... I don't know if the market will get on board with him...
It's already crystal clear that NO PROFESSIONAL is down with Ubillos' "Vision" for the NLE. Even the pro editors that are trying to remain optimistic are telling others to stick with FCP7 and reserve judgment until the miracle updates roll out.
It's already crystal clear that NO PROFESSIONAL is down with Ubillos' "Vision" for the NLE. Even the pro editors that are trying to remain optimistic are telling others to stick with FCP7 and reserve judgment until the miracle updates roll out.
I mentioned earlier in another thread I'm surprised Randy U. hasn't been singled out more specifically. It seems strange that we also haven't heard anything from him directly AFAIK... Just a variety of "product managers" who are smaller fish compared to Randy who probably reports directly to Steve Jobs.
Edit, MacNN reported Randy's response, which surprisingly has not been mentioned by AppleInsider AFAIK:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/06/...rs.after.fcpx/
Apparently Randy has been keeping a low profile and the only contact from him is an email posted in a forum:
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/4302
This is what Randy said:
"FCP7 projects do not have enough information in them to properly translate to FCPX (in FCP7 all of the clip connections live in the editor's head, not in the timeline). We never expected anyone to switch editing software in the middle of a project, so project migration was not a priority.
Final Cut Pro X 1.0 is the beginning of a road, not the end."
Overall it is disquieting that the person whose vision and responsibility is most related to FCPX has been essentially MIA these past few weeks.
Not surprising. Ubillos was thinking about the methodology for editing video over two decades ago. He didn't have the luxury of getting a finished product and manual to learn.
Let's face it ....editing video isn't Rocket Science and it takes considerably more effort to start with a blank sheet and create a new way of looking at completing task knowing that you are going to anger the users who have learned a way of doing tasks and dogmatically cling to these methods.
Randy is so far ahead of every editor out there. He knows what is coming and what isn't because he's creating it. Trying to placate the angry mob is futile. As he said FCPX is the beginning and not the end.
Let's face it ....editing video isn't Rocket Science and it takes considerably more effort to start with a blank sheet and create a new way of looking at completing task knowing that you are going to anger the users who have learned a way of doing tasks and dogmatically cling to these methods.
Randy is so far ahead of every editor out there. He knows what is coming and what isn't because he's creating it. Trying to placate the angry mob is futile. As he said FCPX is the beginning and not the end.
This isn't the issue at all - it's not about visionary vs dogmatic. It's about collaborative vs single-user.
The way Final Cut Pro X is designed so far is all about the single-user - evident from the lack of volume licensing for a start. That design is not far ahead of anyone else's thinking because no single-user is making a big budget production in their bedroom using just the internal storage in their iMac. This design is wrong and it needs to be fixed.
Right now, you cannot import a file into FCPX without it being transcoded to ProRes and the render files being placed in the same place as the projects (which is silly); you cannot take the files you have placed into the timeline into a visual effects package like Shake, Nuke, AE, Color or even Motion, edit them and reconnect the media (FCP 7 did this live without even having to ask you).
From the outset, FCPX should have been designed as a collaborative product because this design works for everyone. Once the XML API arrives, it will help fix some import/export issues but the file connection design is wrong.
As for the rest of the software, there's not really a huge departure from standard editing to the point you could call it groundbreaking. Being able to index clips with metadata is great but it's not a new idea. The magnetic timeline is great but is just a little thing to make life easier. The editing workflow is unchanged.
The entire television production industry is not going to change how it works to satisfy either Mr. Ubillo's or Mr. Jobs' vision.
It's already crystal clear that NO PROFESSIONAL is down with Ubillos' "Vision" for the NLE. Even the pro editors that are trying to remain optimistic are telling others to stick with FCP7 and reserve judgment until the miracle updates roll out.
The way Final Cut Pro X is designed so far is all about the single-user - evident from the lack of volume licensing for a start. That design is not far ahead of anyone else's thinking because no single-user is making a big budget production in their bedroom using just the internal storage in their iMac. This design is wrong and it needs to be fixed.
collaborative environments.
I'm keen on finding out more seeing as how Lion Server has XSAN Admin built in
and Lion has XSAN Client.
Back to Ubillos.
Lion should enable some nice features but FCPX has to straddle Snow Leopard/Lion so we're likely not seeing the full spectrum of functionality until Lion gains many more users. I suspect in 18 months people will look back and marvel at how far FCPX has come along with Apple updates and great 3rd party tools.