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
The law of unintended consequences has been the one constant in the whole digital revolution. We thought digital tools would give us our lives back and make the job easier. They made it harder. We thought it would take away the drudgery. It made assistant’s lives much more tedious. We thought it would make post production cheaper. It made it better, but more expensive. We thought new tools wouldn’t change the artistic qualities of our work. They did.
We weren’t so bad at predicting the technical future — it isn’t that hard to see what the effects of faster processors and bigger hard drives will be. But we really haven’t had much luck at predicting the social effects of this transition.
Today, the $64,000 question is how the democratization of our tools is going to affect us.
The argument goes like this: Now that you can edit on a laptop, it’s easier to gain access to the tools, easier to learn the job, and more people are going to do it. Editing is now widely understood to be critical to the filmmaking process, and partly because of Apple’s fantastic marketing, editing has become cool. That too is bringing people into the field. All of this means more competition.
The counter-argument is that quality always wins. Yes, anybody can learn to be a button pusher, but that doesn’t make him or her an editor. If you’ve looked at even a few student films you know this very well. And even if the size of the workforce is growing, the number of jobs is expanding, too — there’s more content out there everyday, and all of it needs to be edited.
Another concern is that editing work will move to foreign countries where wages are lower. You ship or or ftp the dailies overseas, you get cut material back. The counter-argument is that editing is a private, collaborative task and can only be done when director, producer and editor are near each other. Furthermore, piracy is a big issue. No serious filmmaker is going to trust a long distance editing arrangement.
So are our jobs safe these days? And if they’re not, what can we do about it? Most important, how do we improve the accuracy of our predictions? If we can’t see the future, we can’t prepare for it.
Well, it’s finally happened. Avid released Media Composer 2.7 and Xpress 5.7 today, complete with Mac/Intel compatibility. Other features include phonetic script integration, which Avid is calling “ScriptSync,” and compatibility with the DNxHD 36 codec. New features in these releases were shown at Avid’s Insider Seminar, which I described in several recent posts.
The press release quotes Matt Feury with the following: “We’ve run these systems through a more rigorous testing process than ever before, and we’re confident that our customers will be pleased with the stability and performance they’ll receive after installing the new software.” Let’s hope so. I’ve heard that Avid on Mac/Intel is the fastest Avid you’ve ever seen. I’m eager to get my hands on one of these things.
The complete press release, including upgrade pricing, is here.
I don’t know about you, but I’m always wishing that I could see clip comments in frame view bins. I make a lot of sequences (and sub-sequences of different versions and alternates) and even though you can create clip names of any length, sometimes it’s helpful to make longer notes. Yes, I know I can see comments in text view, but I arrange sequences in a visual grid where position means something and I don’t want to switch views to see comments. I’d like to see a second line of text under a clip, or have the comment pop open if I pause my cursor over a clip.
By the same token, I’d love to have a comment column for bins. It’s galling enough that I can’t make a bin name that’s longer than 27 characters, even though the OS no longer has a problem with this, but I’d like more. A description of what the bin contains and why I might want to open it, visible in the project window, would be very helpful. A typical project for me lasts six to twelve months and produces hundreds of bins. In the Avid I can’t search across bins, so getting some help figuring out what a bin contains would be welcome.
These two features seem pretty simple to me and I venture that they’d appeal to a lot of people. For my money, they’d be a lot more desirable than some other features that would take a lot more effort to create.
I’ve generally felt bad for folks who have to carry Blackberries. These people inevitably spend more and more of their time looking down at that little screen. No matter what they’re doing it can interrupt them. They lose a certain part of the lives.
But as an editor, I’ve come to enjoy working with producers and directors who are thumb typists. Why? Because when they work with me, they can communicate quietly.
Nobody can sit next to an editor and stay focused all day long. There’s just too much down time for the person who isn’t doing the work. In the old days that often meant the phone. Whoever was in the room with me was often talking, and a big part of my job was filtering out that talk so I could concentrate on the job. But with the Blackberry the talk goes away and is replaced by the subtle sound of little keys clicking. And that, folks, is a beautiful thing.
Every year the American Cinema Editors compiles the results of a member “equipment survey.” It offers a pretty reasonable estimate of the number of feature film and television editors currently working with various kinds of equipment. The 2006 survey results were released yesterday.
Key results:
Full results of the survey are here. Special thanks go to Harry Miller for his hard work on this project.
Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video
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