An interesting little side benefit that I hadn’t noticed about Roles, is that Final Cut Pro X will give a read-out of the duration of the media tagged with a specific role, throughout the whole Project.
Select a role and, as well as all clips tagged with that role being highlighted, a summary of duration appears in the header of the Timeline Index.
At LAFCPUG’s special meeting at DV Expo we showed, for the first time a brand new app from Assisted Editing (my day job): Project Xâ‚‚7 (10 to 7), which takes the brand new FCP X Project XML export and converts it through a simple drag and drop applet to FCP 7. FCP 7 sequence XML is generated and loaded directly into FCP 7.
When I wrote on Saturday about how tracks have evolved from their compositing role, to one where they became defacto metadata I had no idea Apple were about to release the first Final Cut Pro X update (I only found out on Monday). I also wrote in Conquering the metadata foundations of Final Cut Pro X:
Apple teases us with Audio Role metadata that seems to have no current use within Final Cut Pro X.
If you open the Info Pane and select the Info tab, you will see the pop-up menu in Figure 20.1. showing the Roles
One magic way for this to be useful would be as a solution to the missing audio output options. In the near-magic, near-future I expect that a future version of Final Cut Pro X will use this Audio Role metadata to route audio outputs. At version 1 Final Cut Pro X’s audio output options are very basic, and there’s improvement coming, for sure.
So you can imagine how excited I was to open Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1 and see that those fairly limited audio roles (no doubt implemented specifically to enable export to OMF/AAF) had evolved into not only customizable Audio Roles, but to have the same option available for Video clips as well. And a Title Role comes rolled in!
In the mid 1990’s my Australian company made the decision to purchase a Media 100 system. That remains the best business decision I ever made (and selling it to jump to Final Cut Pro 1 was the second best business decision). It also meant we were migrating from Amiga computers to Macs. Given that I already had a graphic designer on staff for titles, illustrations and animations, I decided to delight clients by having our designer create a full color slick for the (then) VHS deliverables. (Masters simply got descriptive labels.)
Until that point we’d only done black and white printing, and it’s easy to proof what you’re going to get on a B&W laser printer. Not so with color. Color output wasn’t as common then as it is now and we didn’t get the first Kinkos until very late in the 1990’s, so we really only had one choice for our runs of 2-3 covers for each job.
This became a serious problem when – while developing a food product for my parent’s company during the period I managed it (in addition to my own two companies) – we needed a very specific purple on mockup packaging we were presenting to food buyers at the national department store chains in Australia. Cadbury – Australia’s biggest chocolate company – have always used a specific purple in their packaging, and had just spent several million dollars on a campaign that heavily featured this purple. Since the new product was a chocolate variation on a traditional English Christmas Pudding, having the purple match was beyond important. And we got blue-purple, and red-purple: seemingly every color except the one we wanted.
I was working in Final Cut Pro X today and discovered a little trick with Smart Collections.
Smart Collections can be dragged from Event to Event. Â You probably already knew that, but it was new to me.
The responses to Final Cut Pro X a month Later. http://tinyurl.com/3wa8ahl
In this episode Terence and Philip discuss how the postproduction landscape has changed a month after Final Cut Pro X was revealed. How has the competition responded and how has the Final Cut Pro community has reacted. Lots of discussion on the launch and subsequent response to Final Cut Pro X, touching on every aspect of the release.
Why is there an emotional connection with creatives and their tools. Where do Final Cut Pro 7 users go? Who is really focused on NLEs in professional postproduction? Oh, and yes, Philip has new software for Final Cut Pro X (inspired by Terry in part).
Over the last couple of weeks, some of the discussion around Final Cut Pro X is focused on who Apple wrote it for – a discussion I’ve contributed to in more than one place. And I see today in Oliver Peter’s excellent review of Final Cut Pro X he tackles the same question and punts on “full-time” editor as the distinguishing factor. (And yes, yet another Final Cut Pro X post, but one where the main point isn’t really about that piece of software specifically, but relevant to the discussion.)
It strikes me that we might really be asking the wrong question, or questions. It’s not so much what type of work you do, or what proportion of your time is spent doing it, or even the attitude one takes to one’s work – “professionalism”. In the context of talking about the relative suitability of tools, surely the question is on workflows and toolset?
http://tinyurl.com/3ls73kv A great perspective imho
I rather like this take on the reaction:
Beyond that, the new FCP is supposed to be easier for people who have never done serious video editing before. Pros don’t care about this, of course. In fact, many don’t like the idea of making video editing easier and expanding the pool of people who can do quality video editing. Making a task or software easier to use both makes current users’ jobs easier but also lowers the barriers to entry.
The thing about many Pros is that they like complexity on some levels. They like the idea of being elite and doing something that very few people can do. Or, more precisely, doing something that very few people would put up with. Just look at how complex and ugly Bloomberg Terminals are to see how people and industries like using something that looks complex and hard to comprehend by outsiders. Wall Street veterans have resisted a easier-to-user, easier-to-learn, more attractive Bloomberg Terminal for years.
TalkAbout Tech 013: Like Ripping Off a Band-Aid http://tinyurl.com/43uxe8m More from me on FCP X.
I recently wrote about Airplay as a possible solution to external video monitoring for Final Cut Pro X, and that would indeed be a cool monitoring solution but not for critical work as it’s H264 compressed and 8 bit.
With Matrox’s announcement today of their monitoring solution, which confirms uncategorically that there is no “broadcast quality video” out of Final Cut Pro X, I had to rethink what I thought they were thinking!