My take on the Apple FCPX Briefing in London 6/7/11

All,

Yes I was there and I thought I'd reply to a few people as I've been asked what went on.
I had to disappear fairly sharpish after the event as I was on air in less than two hours. I might have missed some private Q&A at the end, however...

Main item was FCPX demo which for the first time looked pretty good with somebody working it (apart from Randy) who knew what they were doing. Very slick compared to some of the recent 'stumblethroughs I've seen. I hope Apple put a version of that demo online.

Apple are investigating the possibility of allowing existing volume licence holders to buy more seats. The problem is a legal one with licences. Glad to hear they are listening to our feedback. FCS3 box set will not be coming back.

Color and all the other apps have been killed off.

Multicam will be a free upgrade (I think this came out accidentally)

Compressor works in 64 bit but throttles down to 32 bit when using 32bit only codecs

The deployment of compressor on other machines to render FCPX/Motion seems fairly easy as they all share the same render engine.

Cannot comment when FXPlug2 will be available in FCPX

A few DAM companies have been working closely with Apple and FCPX - Expect a range of asset management solutions from very cheap to expensive soon.

Didn't hear about EDL import/output or capturing into bins.

Didn't hear about capture PLUGINS - There are third party standalone solutions though as we know.

My take on 3rd party codec support for FCPX is slightly different seeing as Lion changes everything again

Didn't hear about different timecode exports

Thunderbolt demo with Pegasus RAIDS was very impressive. Thunderbolt to ethernet adapter means cheap shared storage/Xsan possible and not denied. - Xsan is in Lion.

Thunderbolt to fibre channel adaptor means laptop working on shared storage possible.

Peter

FCS3 dead = I'm going elsewhere.

Thx Apple, I think I'll see myself to the door.

Apple, I'm not an amateur, I am a professional respect, has a brain and I know where I put my money, and will not be in their hands but no more.

Bye Steve!

Reading back this morning, I think I need to underline that I was impressed with FCPX. A lot of lights went on for me. Yes there are things missing, yes there problems but maybe we will look back and think that Apple put down some firm foundations with FCPX 1.0

We are standing in level one of a tall building that will be constructed over time.

Don't forget I'm a huge fan of FCP7

Peter

So raid tb out > gige adaptor to switch with XSAN = SAN ?

interesting!

s

I find it hard to believe that any sane person thought that Apple wouldn't sort these things out...:whistle:

Well we only know a few pieces of the jigsaw, but there has to be some kind of 'cheap' shared storage solution happening in the future.

I hope

Some of the rumor from the London briefing suggest EDL import/export is coming.

If so, couldn't one export out an EDL for a FCP 7 sequence and import it into FCPX? Not the same as the whole project but imagine being able to pull in all your final sequences from past projects?

Am I out of my mind to think this should be possible?

Fantastic!!!

imageshack.us/photo/my-images/16/wheelfcpx.png/

She wants to convince us to push the carriage with the wheel??

Hello Peter,

Could you expand on what the legal issues are surrounding the re release of serials?

At Lincoln University we along with many other institutions are in a fix, we purchased a new batch of Mac Pros and put in an order for 8 more FCS3, only to find out that our suppliers can no longer give us serials. This is a nationawide issue at the moment.

I wish I could but that was all that was said on the matter.
At least they are thinking of allowing extensions to FCP7 volume licences.

I have no further information but if it was me I'd be on the phone to the reseller

Thanks a lot Peter for your interesting feedback and the time you needed to comment and share.

I'm a professional using FCP7 since 2 years (was on Premiere and Avid before), i will never, never go back in FCP7

---

> thank you Mr Jobs
Viva FCP big X

Did Apple give any hint as to where we should go for future replacements to SoundTrack Pro (sigh, actually beginning to like it), DVD Studio Pro (still works, still get asked for it now and again) and Color (never opened it thanks to Colorista)?

Soundtrack Pro is now bundled with Logic

:boggle: - so, SoundTrack Pro isn't 'dead', just moved?

Apple is doing a very bad job of managing this transition. If I were cynical, I'd think they were sowing the seeds of discontent in the FCS apps so people like me would, with a heavy heart, switch from SoundTrack Pro to Logic.

I'd have hoped Apple would be encouraging FCS owners that at least STP is still useful, supported and 'one of the family'. Sigh.

Those who rely on Apple to purchase any of their products? You never know what they will do in the future. I do not trust.

Thanks for the info on all of this. I have a mixed feelings about FCPX. In it's current state, I find it unusable. But I'm open to it when they fix the bugs and add back in features.

That said, I was wondering if you saw them do anything with the magnetic timeline that might be different from what we've seen in the past. In my albeit limited experience, I find the magnetic timeline to be be extremely difficult and limiting (slip edits on the storyline with a connected clip on top... grrrr). So hoping you saw something that might "make it all better"