Apple announces Final Cut Pro X for $299

June 11th to be exact. Larry Jordan and I were keynote speakers at a Media Professionals Association bootcamp a couple of months ago. He is a master of self promotion. The version he saw at the 'sneak peek' was the same they showed at NAB. In both settings, no one was allowed to ask questions so Larry really is in the same boat of 'I don't know' as every one else. Sometimes we can be reluctant to change and I guess I fit that category being extremely happy that it is 64 bit and will access all your cores and ram....very reluctant about switching to a whole new GUI and workflow. Also, why would anyone want auto color correction upon import? Suppose you deliberately under or overexposed your shot and there X goes correcting it? Hopefully, you will be able to turn off some of the new features like CC and auto stabilization which works by scaling up thus losing contrast and resolution.

It has that other new feature telling you how many people are in a clip....I wonder if it will tell me how many bait fish in the school. ;-)

Love all the rumors....it won't work with tape or on Leopard, just Snow Leopard and eventually the new Lion OS. Who knows and my Apple contacts have not returned my emails yet.

Steve

Wonder who we can bribe, I mean speak with, who can give us some information.

 

Guess we just need to wait until June...

Bribery is going to have to be pretty high for those who signed the NDA as developers. If Apple takes away developer status, the loss in software, hardware discounts and the support structure is huge. So even if people have seen the betas, they either put out garbage talk or not talk about it at all.

Also, why would anyone want auto color correction upon import? Suppose you deliberately under or overexposed your shot and there X goes correcting it? Hopefully, you will be able to turn off some of the new features like CC and auto stabilization which works by scaling up thus losing contrast and resolution.

Like you said Steve no one really knows, but from my understanding FCPX wont automatically make changes on import, it will just analyse the clip so when you want to make the changes they are done instantly rather than having to wait for them to render and re-render every time you make changes as currently happens. It should speed up workflow quite a bit! Well hopefully that's how it works....

Cheers, Simon

Like you said Steve no one really knows, but from my understanding FCPX wont automatically make changes on import, it will just analyse the clip so when you want to make the changes they are done instantly rather than having to wait for them to render and re-render every time you make changes as currently happens. It should speed up workflow quite a bit! Well hopefully that's how it works....

 

Cheers, Simon

It's all a bit gimmickey though isn't it. I think they're aiming this squarely at the hobbyist/pro-sumer market.

I'm by no means loyal to any one product. But the current CS5 looks to have already covered a lot of what Apple is lauding in FCPX. I think I'll stick with Adobe until I see something groundbreaking coming from Apple.

I don't understand the speculation of some about stuff not shown during the "preview" or to be added in response to feedback. What kind of changes/additions can you expect to happen to such a complex product within a month and a half from the release date? From a software engineering point of view, adding new features at this stage would be shooting themselves in the foot. They must be fixing any remaining bugs at this point and MAYBE trying to improve performance, and most likely only took note of the "preview" feedbacks for future versions. The fact that they will sell it at a much lower price tag than FCS is likely only partly due to their using Apple Store for that. The main reason is clearly that this will not be as feature-rich as FCS. But as an amateur videographer using FCE and having held off upgrading to FCP and buying more powerful hardware because of there being no difference in terms of the "Rendering video. Time remaining: more than you can take anyhow", I am looking forward to this new version.

My 2 cts.

Study up on your iMovie workflow which I am now trying to do. It should help in the transition.

Steve

@ $299, it's obvious Apple is attempting to broaden the user base beyond pros/prosumers. It's not dubbed iMovie Pro because of App Store download.

Steve, what's new in iMovie 11 compared to 9 (the previous version, which I do not use anymore due to the lengthy and file size-exploding import feature) apart from useless (to me) gadgets? I couldn't find anything compelling in the new version's description that justified getting side-tracked from learning FCE... I just read that is supports AVCHD Lite (whatever that is, but according to wikipedia, camcorders using AVCHD Lite are not 1080i capable, so my Sony CX550V must have the "heavy" type:-), but is it on export or does it still need to import and convert to AIC?

If your advice is "in order to learn the interface", thanks, but I am coming from iMovie (HD, 8 and 9)!

Hey, I am just now trying to learn iMovie to prepare for the new GUI and am no expert in it at all. Never heard of the term AVCHD lite but you or they may be confusing AVCHD INTRA and INTER. The CX550 is inter and is not nearly of the same quality or expense of the AVCHD Intra camcorders.

Notably, Apple's pro applications have been embarrassingly late to transition away from Carbon APIs—transitional APIs designed to support porting applications from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. Apple began deprecating Carbon in 2007 when it dropped its planned 64-bit Carbon APIs from Leopard (10.5). Since then, the company has pushed third-party developers to get on the Cocoa train or else get left behind at the station. All the architectural changes Apple made in the foundation of Mac OS X for Snow Leopard (and extended to Lion) required the use of Cocoa APIs.

That left Final Cut Pro, and the rest of Final Cut Studio, languishing in 32-bit land, unable to take advantage of performance improvements of OpenCL, GCD, or even architectural improvements in Intel's latest 64-bit processors. With the rewrite of Final Cut Pro X, Apple is close to vanquishing the last vestiges of Carbon from its software.

Steve

PS. Here is Ken's article that I am now reading carefully..http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/imovie_09_stone.html

Bribery is going to have to be pretty high for those who signed the NDA as developers. If Apple takes away developer status, the loss in software, hardware discounts and the support structure is huge. So even if people have seen the betas, they either put out garbage talk or not talk about it at all.

Okay, so much for my bribery plan. Guess I will just wait until June then

I know a beta tester or two (not Larry Jordan who is not a beta tester at all) and he is being incredibly tight lipped about it. Didn't even bother to impose and ask him.

Steve

Here is Ken's article that I am now reading carefully..http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/imovie_09_stone.html

I can't download >500MB from home, so I'll wait until tomorrow to purchase the $15 iMovie 11 (version 9.0.2 on Apple Store). I am quite familiar with all previous version prior to this one, and my impression from visiting Apple's website and reading some forums is that the interface hasn't changed much since iMovie 9 (the link you kindly provided and that I had read a while back already, when I was considering transitioning to FCP).

My question (to myself) was: are they going to work directly on the AVCHD footage or are they going to keep transcoding it before working on it (that's also the question I read about the new FCPX BTW)?

Well, I would recommend reading the user comments on Apple Store: "very slow for complex projects" (does this mean they indeed do not transcode but that rapidly overwhelms a basic machine's capabilities?), "takes hours to render" (not what the FCPX "preview" claimed about FCPX but again, what hardware was used? Will we need a GPU farm in the background to be able to not see the dreaded rendering progress bar? One of the user is using a i7 quadcore with 8 GB RAM, which is what I was planning to buy), "audio out of sync", etc...

I dropped iMovie 9 because it was screwing up my footage's color during some transitions during export (and because of the explosion in size during import). It looks like it still easy to find some flaws to the software when trying to go a little beyond the kid's soccer game week-end video... But for $15, what can you ask for?

Of course that does not say anything about FCPX!

Concerning AVCHD Lite, here is what I found on wikipedia (not a guaranty of any sort, obviously):

iMovie 11:

iMovie '11 (Version 9.0) was released on October 20, 2010 as part of the iLife '11 package. It has the ability to make trailers for home movies, more control over audio, instant replays, flash and hold, facial recognition, news themes, and the ability to watch the video on a Mac, iPad, iPhone/iPod touch, Apple TV, Facebook and YouTube. It now supports the AVCHD Lite format.

AVCHD Lite:

Branding

Panasonic and Sony developed several brand names for their professional as well as simplified versions of AVCHD.

AVCHD Lite

AVCHD Lite identifies a subset of AVCHD format, in which HD-recording is limited to 720p/30.[23] The 720p/30 video is recorded in the AVCHD 720p/60 format by storing every other frame, and using a bitstream flag to tell the playback device to play each frame twice. Announced in January 2009, the Panasonic DMC-ZS3/DMC-FT1/DMC-TZ7 digital cameras were the first digital cameras to offer AVCHD-lite movie mode. Since then, Panasonic has added AVCHD-lite to more of its digital cameras, such as the Lumix GF1 Micro Four Thirds, Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2, Lumix DMC-FZ35/38, Lumix DMC-TZ10/ZS7, Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX75, Panasonic LX5, LEICA D-LUX 5, LEICA V-LUX 2.

Then follows a couple other formats...

Note that iMovie 9 was already importing AVCHD footage (but converting it into AIC), so I suppose it simply means iMovie 11 now supports some exotic manufacturers' variants but doesn't tell anything about transcoding or not. That would be best asked on an iMovie 11 forum, I suppose.

Too many damn variations of codecs. At least Apple says that X will not require transcoding at all. Wonder what codec they intend to use? Probably Pro Res, but which one if not all?

Steve

Too many damn variations of codecs. At least Apple says that X will not require transcoding at all. Wonder what codec they intend to use? Probably Pro Res, but which one if not all?

Steve

If there is no transcoding then it won't need another codec. It means they're intending to support the native format of the footage. And if the native footage is long-GOP then it should support that too. e.g. AVCHD MPEG-4 transport stream (.mts), HDV MPEG-2 transport stream (.m2t) etc.. Other NLEs such as Vegas can already do this. I nearly always edit native footage on my timeline. It requires a change of mindset for FCP users who are used to transcoding everything to intra-frame codecs when they ingest footage.

FCP can already edit HDV natively without transcoding, also when editing XDCAM I usually edit that natively too rather than transcoding to ProRes. However it can't currently edit H264 or AVCHD natively. From my understanding not only will it now edit everything natively, but even when it is desirable to transcode (lots of colour grading, FX etc) it now will not be necessary. Then again that could all just be wishful thinking.... !!

Just downloaded iMovie '11 a week ago and as expected, there is no major change from iMovie '09, and therefore probably not much to fuel further guesswork about FCPX.

However I noticed one thing which would absolutely drive me insane if I had had any intention of using it: when importing movie clips into an event (I tried only with files on my hard drive, but I don't see why this wouldn't be identical with files from a camera), and even when deselecting "optimize video", iMovie '11 "optimizes" the clips, which literally takes hours during which the only thing that can be done is "Force Quit" iMovie (there is no "Cancel" button to be found).

The same files (1080i60 .mts converted to .mov files by ClipWrap) are imported fine and quickly by iMovie '09 with the "optimize video" option deselected.

An Apple thread confirming this can be found here.

In other words, iMovie '11 transcodes everything...

Why really few people here mention EDIUS?

Is it considered so bad?

I'm using EDIUS NEO 2.5 Booster and it edits everythings without transcoding. It was the first sw to natively support AVCHD If i remember well since 2008.

It works like a breeze also on obsolete machines:

I edit 1080p GH1 mts files on my old Thinkpad T60 with a centrino duo 1.66GHZ and 2 GB of Ram! 99% of the time I don't need rendering at all!

Of couse when I export the final project it could last some hours but... there is the night for this

Bye

Why really few people here mention EDIUS?

Is it considered so bad?

 

I'm using EDIUS NEO 2.5 Booster and it edits everythings without transcoding. It was the first sw to natively support AVCHD If i remember well since 2008.

It works like a breeze also on obsolete machines:

 

I edit 1080p GH1 mts files on my old Thinkpad T60 with a centrino duo 1.66GHZ and 2 GB of Ram! 99% of the time I don't need rendering at all!

Of couse when I export the final project it could last some hours but... there is the night for this

 

Bye

Come on Wagsy, no need to start making fake Wetpixel ID's just so that you can promote Edius!!

Why really few people here mention EDIUS?

Is it considered so bad?

 

I'm using EDIUS NEO 2.5 Booster and it edits everythings without transcoding. It was the first sw to natively support AVCHD If i remember well since 2008.

It works like a breeze also on obsolete machines:

 

I edit 1080p GH1 mts files on my old Thinkpad T60 with a centrino duo 1.66GHZ and 2 GB of Ram! 99% of the time I don't need rendering at all!

Of couse when I export the final project it could last some hours but... there is the night for this

 

Bye

Err, maybe this is because this thread is about Apple Final Cut Pro?

It's not just about native editing. It's about the ability to have a efficient GUI to do things like color correction and other post things, all in one package... that's why Edius isn't popular. Adobe and Final Cut have a stronghold on PC and Apple platforms respectively. Even Avid is now losing ground but they are trying to stay relevant in the pro market.

Err, maybe this is because this thread is about Apple Final Cut Pro?

Err, maybe I wrote this because in this thread all rivals were cited?

Jocking apart is there some official data on market shares, pro and consumer?

Bye