After months of speculation, Apple finally released an 8-core Mac Pro today. It employs two quad-core Xeon’s clocked at 3 Gigahertz. The price is high — $1500 more than the standard system with two dual-core chips — about $4K.
The big question is how much real-world speed increase you get with this baby.
Technorati Tags: avid, final cut pro
What does the recent Avid Insider seminar mean to editors? That depends on how you think it fits into Avid’s plans for NAB next month. The seminar itself was well done, and the company certainly has been busy, but what we saw was mostly focused on workgroups.
It’s possible that will be some surprises in April, but if this was an NAB preview then there just isn’t that much in the way of bread and butter features for editors to get excited about. Specifically:
Avid Interplay is an interesting product but it wasn’t designed for typical feature and TV cutting rooms. For reality TV and large installations it’s another story. If you are trying to coordinate the work of dozens of editors, producers and writers, or have to handle lots of new visual effects every day, then you need something to help you, and Interplay might be that thing. Unfortunately for editors, it requires the learning of yet another user interface and frankly, one that looks awfully crude and Windows-centric.
DNx36 is probably going to be adopted in a lot of cutting rooms and for Avid folks it’s going to represent a small revolution. But editors have been cutting compressed HD for some time with Final Cut, using DVCPRO. Avid’s codec is arguably superior, but the process is nothing new. It requires Adrenaline, so adopting this format will nudge editors and facilities to trade in their old Meridien machines.
Automatic script mimic is a very slick idea and I certainly plan to try it out. But, so far, the large majority of editors haven’t been attracted to Avid’s script tools and I’m not sure whether this will sway them.
A realtime burn-in effect for timecode and footage would save cutting rooms a lot of time, but it’s not here yet and we’ve been waiting for a long time.
Avid running on Intel-Mac should be released any day now. That’s probably the biggest news for editors and it should help make our machines, particularly our portable machines, run a lot faster. But like all Avid products, it’s probably going to be buggy at first, and for that reason, the adoption rate is going to be slow.
That leaves Avid Satellite, which seems like a good solution for Pro Tools video until you realize that it costs roughly $6,000 per seat. I expect that many sound and music editors, when told what the ante is, are going to decide that Quicktime is plenty good enough.
What was missing in all this were new usability features for editors. A new title tool, new mixing tools, a live timeline, background saves, automatic backups — the list is long, and I’m sure you all have your favorite items for it.
Instead, the changes we’re seeing mirror the kinds of things that came in with Meridien, namely improved speed and image quality — along with a lot of new bugs and quirks. Editors never got excited about Meridien, and we’ve largely been staying away from Adrenaline for the same reasons. That can’t be good for Avid’s bottom line.
There’s plenty on this list to think about and some of it will certainly be used widely. But at the same time. I’m struck by the fact that while Avid continues to avoid changing the core application, Apple pushes the envelope, bringing out major new features, or whole new applications, almost every year. To some extent they have to do this, because they’ve been coming from behind. But that time is ending. Though I still prefer Media Composer, both applications are now roughly similar. And with Final Cut you get DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Compressor and Soundtrack.
The question now is what each company will offer at NAB. Rumor has it that Apple will show a beefed up Final Cut, able to play, cut and conform 4K materials, perhaps running on an 8-core Mac Pro. That’ll be a show-stopper for sure.
Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video
A report today says that Apple is planning to hold a media event at NAB on Sunday April 15th, the day before the show floor opens. There are several things that could be announced, including details about what Apple is up to with Shake, or Logic, or with the color correction software FinalTouch. The company could also announce upgrades to the Mac Pro desktop machines, which are overdue. There’s speculation that we’ll see an 8-core system based on a pair of Intel’s new quad-core CPUs.
But the big question is what’s in store for Final Cut Pro. Final Cut 6 didn’t make it out of the labs last year and it seems almost certain that we’re going to see it in April. But what it will include, nobody knows. We’ve also been hearing rumors for a year now that Apple is working on something called “Final Cut Extreme,” which will be able to handle 4K materials and thus become an inexpensive and very capable finishing system. That might dovetail nicely with an 8-core MacPro.
The question is, what is Avid up to? Next Tuesday (3/6) the company will hold a seminar at the Skirball center in LA to showcase some of its new stuff. The agenda includes info on Avid Interplay, high def offline with DNxHD 36 media and improvements to script based editing with automatic dialog recognition. It should be very interesting.
Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video
I just finished reading an article in the Editors Guild Magazine about the making of “Zodiac.” It’s pretty hard to figure out exactly what they did, but the general outlines are there and they reinforce a lot of what I’ve been saying in recent posts, namely that file-based workflows are coming at us very quickly.
The show was shot with the Viper FilmStream camera and used Final Cut Pro in the editing room. The editors were responsible for archiving and cataloging the original camera source files, for down-converting those files to DVCPRO HD for editing, and, apparently, for conforming the show back to 2K for the DI. They also did some color correction using FinalTouch. In other words, the cutting room took on a lot more responsibility than is traditional. That’s good news for assistants because there was certainly plenty of work for them, but if this workflow takes hold it also means that assistants and editors have a lot of learning to do.
If everything’s going to end up as files, then much of the work on a show will turn on how we handle, store and move these things, and, most important, how they translate from one program to another. And here, I worry about Avid. The company has stuck with closed standards for a long time now. That made sense in the old days when people wanted something that was totally supported and really worked. We still want that today, of course, but more and more, we want to be able to pick the best software for the job and move materials back and forth transparently.
In that environment, Avid’s closed approach looks more and more anachronistic. Avid bins can’t be opened by other programs, Avid visual effects don’t translate into anything except Avid products, Quicktime export and import is slow and confusing, and even Avid sound files can be hard to share with all data intact.
On the other hand, the Media Composer still has many advantages, and Avid tends to understand our work very well. This stuff is still new, and there are plenty of hiccups on both sides of the aisle. But it’s easy to see that the company that gets this right is going to have a big advantage.
Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video
Several people have responded negatively to my suggestion that Final Cut Pro hews closer to a desktop publishing metaphor than Media Composer does. Admittedly, the differences are pretty subtle, but this issue was hotly debated in the early days and I, for one, advocated the idea that editors were more interested in moving pictures and how they look on a screen than on little rectangles and how you can move them around in a timeline. As much as possible, I wanted you to be able to make all editing decisions based on moving video. Avid’s engineers also did without an explicit toolbar and tried to make the cursor smart enough to do what you wanted when you wanted to do it.
In one sense the difference is just one of visual semantics. The MC has a ‘toolbar lite’ at the bottom of the timeline, where you choose effects, trim, segment or source/record mode. So you’re switching modes in both programs. But there are fewer modes in MC than there are tools in FCP, and to me, that makes it more intuitive. People who started working with one of the Adobe applications before learning to edit often find FCP more intuitive.
One question is whether this difference of approach leads to a different kind of editing, or is more appropriate for a different style, or with different kinds of material. One commentator suggested that FCP seems to be used more for documentaries and music videos and the MC more for features and television.
So how’s this for a hypothesis: FCP does a better job in segment mode than MC. It’s easier to drag things around, easier to rearrange clips, easier to create new and unexpected juxtapositions. MC is better in trim mode, better at tying material together, better at making disparate material look like continuous action. FCP is better for montages; MC is better for dialog. FCP is better at making cuts that jar you; MC is better at making cuts that are smooth as silk.
In addition, FCP is better in a standalone, home-brew environment, where you might be working with full-resolution media and doing your own visual effects, sound work or tech support. MC fits better in a world where teams of specialists have to collaborate and work with various kinds of media.
What I find most frustrating about both the Media Composer and Final Cut these days is the static quality of the interface. We’re so used to this now that we don’t notice it, but if you play around with Apple’s Motion you might start to think differently. Even iTunes feels more live than our beloved picture editing programs.
What makes Motion different is that it’s designed to modify your animations while they continue to play. This may not sound like much but using it on a fast machine can feel liberating. You get instant feedback on whatever you are doing. There’s less waiting, less mousing around; you get a much clearer sense of connection to the material.
The Media Composer was born at a time when playing a sequence took all the horsepower the thing had. So it was designed around the idea that you’d press play, look at your work, press stop, change something, and then press play again. The Media Composer was so rigid in this regard that once you pressed play you couldn’t click the mouse anywhere without stopping video. That was how it was in 1991 and that’s how it is today, a decade and a half later.
Though it was designed more recently, Final Cut isn’t much better. But it does offer one huge advantage over the MC, namely the ability to scroll and zoom the timeline while video plays. Once you try that, you never want to go back.
That kind of dynamism, where nothing stops you, where you’re always making decisions based on moving images and sound and where you get live feedback on your changes, is the basis of the user interface of the future.
Here are some initial thoughts about what that might consist of. Some aren’t completely fleshed out — they’ll take some experimentation. But I hope they’ll be food for thought. Please contribute your suggestions.
The old paradigm was “make a change, press play.” The new paradigm is “press play, make a change.” A system that can do this is going to make our current machines seem quaint.
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