Being young during this transition

It's an odd topic, but I thought I would bring it up and ask. In a time where the editing world is undergoing so much change, I already jumped on the FCPX bandwagon long ago. Unfortunately my lead editor still cringes at it and has made no move to try it. My creative editor wants to switch to Premiere and I can't stand the thought of working in that environment after cutting with X. It's saddening to encounter every pitfall of 7 and realize how much faster everything could be if you were operating in X.

Plus it's very odd that I have an emotional connection to a piece of software now. I feel better working in it. I enjoy editing more so than ever. It's brilliant really. I commend every legacy user who has made the move or tried out X. I just don't know how to swindle my team of people into making the switch too. It's hard having power when you're the younger one of the bunch in a group, especially when some on top might have more experience than you and here you are with knowledge of the next best thing in editing.

I'm just looking for advice. Should I mention how much it hurts me to cut on 7 all day? Should I explain the drag of track based editing? The lack of speed and efficiency in a workflow? I guess the best thing to do may be to have them try it. How long before everyone catches on and we all use X?

What a great topic/question!

I am in similar environments. I work in a small post-house and also for Turner Broadcasting and its hard to explain whats going on honestly.

The small post-house, they still havent made the decision...but 6/8 want premiere and 2/8 want X. This is probably what your experiencing and I dont really have an answer myself. but the way i am approaching it is to be hands off of the decisions and let them find out themselves. Premiere Pro has some cool stuff to it...but when you look at the backbone of the program it still has a lot of problems, and FCPX is pretty consistent with speed in the forefront. It's also got the pricing to make it attractive. Time is what is going to prove the winner of this battle and I think FCPX is going to win it. And each year the post-production studios are understanding this. FCP.co should release the numbers of users it has gotten over the past 2 years and show a line graph or something.

Turner on the other hand doesn't play games. any scent of loss in professionalism and they change course because they want to invest in support in programs. and sense adobe supports PP more than apple supports FCPX, as far as phone calls and tech support than they jumped from the apple ship. It sucks they jumped because I have seen a lot of third party structures getting built for FCPX that Turner would use and it just seems to work and be amazing. FCP.co posted one topic where you can have 8 video feeds coming into FCPX that are ever-growing files, and it looked to work like a charm! So much better than what they use now. Oh well.

I would love to hear others on this as well.

I was dragging files to a FTP program whilst thinking about your question?

My feeling is that people often develop an emotional attachment to their first program and that is hard to break. The first FTP program I had was a thing called Captain FTP. What I liked about it was that there were 2 columns. On the left you had your local computer and on the right you had your FTP Server. It was a simple drag and drop operation from one column to the other. Left to right or right to left. It made sense to me I was hooked.

Cyber Duck drove me mad because you did not have this 2 column layout. You draged from the finder to a single column in Cyber Duck. FileZilla made me puke. Yes there were 2 columns and 3 and 4 etc... I just do not need all those boxes with code flying through them as if I were trying to hack into the pentagon

Back to today and there I am dragging a file into my FTP program and I am doing it from the finder and not availing of my 2 column layout in the Captain FTP that I love so dearly. So what is going on?

OK so I should clarify. I am not using the finder as such. I am using a thing called Path Finder which surprise surprise has a 2 column layout. So I am still hooked. Just the other way around now! I have 2 columns on the finder level and drag the file from one of the two columns to the right hand column of my FTP program.

Whilst I am personally convinced that FCPX makes at least as much if not more sense than a 2 Column layout, I think that your cause is difficult at best. :whistle:

On the one side : try and find what your friends colleagues love about their NLEs of choice. What is that function that they just love and can not live without. There are probably several of them. Then see if you can do it in FCPX better and more effectively. Then show them. Expect rebuttals. Go back to the drawing board and repeat...

On the other side : expect people to make false assertions like you can not do this or that with FCPX. Find out how to do the things people say can not be done and demonstrate. Expect rebuttals. Go back to the drawing board and repeat...

Almost sounds like a 2 column FTP set up what I am describing here. Left to right and right to left :-o

Major decisions on these matters usually boil down to time & money. If you guys begin to collect as many links to testimonies of top tier pro houses that are using FCPX (like the Emmy winner featured here recently), & gently prompt your top decision makers to view it from the time & money perspective, you might have a shot.

Those links should stress the advantages from the desired marketing perspective (time & money), not emotional attachment(that'll come later).

The majority of high level pros that are on board with FCPX continually tout its superiority in the two marketing categories mentioned. From a purely logical standpoint, when it comes to time & money saved, no other editing software even comes close.

As Apple always says, be an evangelist, but be smart & evangelize in a language they understand ~ time & money.

My experience is more in the field in Berlin Germany than in the board room.

When I started as a FCP Trainer I was told the story of a major TV station that came to a boutique software house. The software boss got some FCP/AVID experts in. The TV station boss and his crew grilled the Avid and FCP experts respectively. The “experts” got asked about functions ABC - XYZ. From what I was told it was neck in neck and the breaking point was a slippery question related to “slip and slide.”

The software house boss told me that the TV station chose AVID because you could not do this or that with Slip and Slide in FCP. If I remember correctly it was sliding with a -/+ numeric input!!! I looked at him bewildered and said you can.

It was a match point situation and the ball was out but there was no one to shout out! The FCP expert F**ked up. So the game went to AVID.

And lets us not forget the domino effect...

Years later I was in a similar hot seat. I had the boss of a TV station and 4 of his favourite editors. They actually took a class with me for several days all of them with an AVID background. Basically all they wanted to know about was the stuff between the cracks. Like how could they interact with their graphics department etc. So I threw every little trick that I had at them and they made the switch to FCP7, 6 months before it went EOL... :huh: