What did UPS just deliver? The first copies of my new book.

What did UPS just deliver? The very 1st copies of my new FCP X metadata book, Conquering the metadata foundations of Final Cut Pro X. Amazon shortly. PDF is $4.95 under the Books menu above!

Apple provided me with early access preview to Final Cut Pro X in a private meeting on June 13 – in the morning.  That afternoon and next morning I read the manual cover to cover (while this shiny new loaner Four Core i7 laptop that Apple had loaned me laughed at me).  Then I explored it as much as I could that day and next morning.

Thursday I outlined the chapters and worked out how to integrate what I already had from the Mastering Metadata webinar I taught for Larry Jordan a few months back. Revised it became the second half of the book – the deeper background foil to the first half’s very practical approach.

Friday morning I started writing; continued Saturday, Sunday and Monday and finished late afternoon Monday. A cover still needed to be designed, and some graphic work done, and of course it needed to be proof read, a task ably performed by my partner in most things, Greg Clarke.

What’s interesting is the parallels what seems like a design philosophy behind Final Cut Pro X. From what I’ve done in Final Cut Pro X, it seems to me to encourage a much more polished project along the way. It’s as easy to add an animated, high production value title as it would be to add a placeholder to remind you to do it later, as I’ve always done.

With the way clips (and titles) stick to other clips, I feel we’re encouraged to add polish as we go, by making ti no extra pain to add the polish: a little color touch up; maybe a reposition; animate some clips. These are all so easy in Final Cut Pro X that I have to think this is part of the design philosophy.

What’s that got to do with the book? Every other book I’ve written or attempted to write, the draft was written in a Word processor and careful track had to be kept, with strict formatting guidelines, of what images were being added later in layout. It’s not until much later in the process, after the text is finalized, that it goes to layout.

That process wasn’t going to work in this case, so as I wrote on my computer, I would have Apple’s loaner beside me, snap a screen shot with the built in tools that are not perfect but functional. Rename it, drag it to iChat and dropped it via Bonjour to my own laptop. Then dragged the imaged directly from iChat to Pages and into the layout. It turned out to be a very efficient workflow.

When I needed to take a break from that writing, Greg would review what I’d written, and it’s much more precise and readable because of it. Those would be the times I wrote last week’s blog posts, among other things.

Greg also, in parallel set up the book page, and all the consequent eCommerce stuff.

After I finished on Monday, I started on the cover design, which took a couple of hours while Greg gave the new material a revision before we both had one final read through and check for layout issues.

I left the final version as a PDF with cover for Greg when I fell asleep around 1:30 Tuesday morning, and it was on sale by 9:30 am.

Then the cover design got a slight revision and it was off to upload to Amazon Createspace and prep it for printing. And today, five working days after I finished writing, printed copies are on my doorstep.

It’s a wonderful time to be alive, don’t you think?