Future of FCP X and my hopes for Premiere CS5.5
So back in Novemeber when I wrote up the long post predicting what has pretty much happened with the release of FCP X and discontinuation of Final Cut Server, I actually wasn't that confident everything would pan out the way it is. Yup, I was wow'd a little by the FCP X demo video at the LA User Group meetup. But then I shook my head, looked a little closer at the screenshots, and asked myself, "Ok, besides looking pretty, what is FCP X?" I had a lot of questions re: the limitations of background rendering, asset management, and the usability of the entire system. It looked nice, but so did Motion when it was first demoed. Touching Motion for 5-minutes gives you deep insight into the Apple philosophy regarding pro apps, and imho, a lot of critical things they do not understand about professional users. Well, now that I have played with FCP X, all that I feared about background rendering, asset management and usability have come true. Now what? To be honest, Apple isn't dumb. In a few months, they'll release patches for free to include Multicam, some limited import of old FCP projects, EDL support, etc. By does that mean all is well? No. Here are my reasons why:
Apple actually has a very poor track record for pro app updates. To get a 0.1 update takes a while. First, compare Apple's pro-photo tool, Aperture to Lightroom. I don't want to get into a feature war between the two, but people will have to admit that Adobe is much faster with updates and do so more frequently. When a new camera comes out, count on Adobe to get support out the door ASAP across all its product lines. So, yes, maybe Apple will have the multicam, etc support in like 2 months (they better!). But what about after? An update every 6 months? Is that enough? To be honest, in a pro-level environment, I expect significant updates every 2-3 months. How can you not if you're working daily with your customers and you're iterating based on feedback from them? <grin>
Even if FCP reaches feature parity to FCP7, we still have the issue of media management. I fundamentally believe moving to the Project/Event folder model was a wrong move. I'm a user experience expert, and I would agree with Apple that people think in terms of events. But do they organize in terms of events? Here is where I think they interpreted the UX data wrong because professionals do not. They'll organize by project, or organize by keywords, but not by event. Whether I shot it Thursday or Friday doesn't matter 5 months down the line. And so I drag in a bunch of clips, and FCP X separateds it out by day (and I have like one video per day). So I have this laundry list of video items to scroll through. Yuck!
I think fundamental to their project/event folder is the inability to transfer or copy what you're working on to someone else. If you really think deeply about it, your footage is spread across a bunch of events. Your projects and all the behind-the-scene render files are stored somewhere else. How can you give that to someone? Perhaps you can consolidate it and give it to someone else. Then what do they do? They import it and it gets dispersed again on their system's project/event folders. Case in point: how does an iPhoto user transfer 50 albums to you, while preserving meta data and slideshow projects, etc? Not easily, if not impossible. As iPhoto users know, they're locked into your own computer. I'm afraid FCP X adoption of the iPhoto/iMovie media management philosophy does just that, lock you in. (Btw, I know there's the "Move" project/reference events to another drive dialog thing. Try to use it.) To be honest, I'm not sure how Apple can fix this easily. They're essentially built a baby Digital Asset Management system into FCP X. But unless your DAM is feature rich and awesome (which they couldn't do right even in Final Cut Server), it's useless and at best, frustrating and wreaks havoc on collaboration. DAMs have to be done right or they create more headache then they're worth.
I'm gonna go out a limb regarding background rendering because I've only played with it here and there. It's interesting to see how Adobe Premiere CS5.5 and FCP X handle your typical H.264 file. For Adobe, they place all their eggs in the Mercury Playback engine. It's a playback engine. It never touches or transcodes your H.264 until you're ready to output. They've done their due diligence to make sure as many filters and streams can happen while playing back in real-time. FCP X borrows some of that playback love, and renders ProRes behind-the-scenes. That sounds good in theory. But what happens when you just dragged in 500GB of H.264 files into your project? Background copying, analysis, rendering sequentially kick in. And it takes forever. And the horrible part is constantly that popup you get, "Sorry you can't do that while there's background jobs running, bleh!" I find myself constantly going in there and pausing/canceling background jobs. Copying btw is dirt slow. Rendering is even slower. Most editors already did the ingest process, yet FCP X insists on doing it again. Sigh. I prefer Adobe's approach ... get the footage in there, give me the tech to work with the footage without rendering, and I'm okay with a little stutter on 5-stream heavy effects shots. Then you finish your project, hit render, and celebrate, grab a coffee, and come back in 5 minutes (CUDA rendering is blazing!)
The effects management in FCP X is something I will never get used to. It's the UI, the feel of it, to be honest. It feels like Motion. Feels clunky. I want it to feel like After Effects or Shake (I hoped the new Motion would have been a re-skinned Shake ...sigh).
Outputting on FCP X is like iMovie but worse. You can't even export a down-res'd, low data rate Quicktime without resorting to Compressor (and I'm not going to pay $50 for that!)
Now I have a few things I wish Adobe would do (hopefully Todd Kopriva is listening).
Adobe Dynamic Link should be just available. Don't force people to buy the whole suite to get it. There are cases where they only want After Effects and Premiere together, and they have them as separate licenses, but they don't have the interconnectivity between unless they're from the same suite.
The monthly subscription price is a little hefty. The math just doesn't make sense to me. I know for many Adobe users like myself, I skip upgrades. I never went to CS4 because the benefits were not that great to warrant the expense. CS5 however, deserved it. I think the subscription model should be priced assuming that kinda of behavior is the norm. Basically, slash the subscription price in half.
I really wish Adobe would offer competitive cross-over pricing. I think there's a ripe opportunity for Adobe to welcome a whole bunch of unhappy FCP users. This one facility manager posted on Creative Cow how he can't expand his facility because Apple discontinued FCP7. To be honest, the $299 price for FCP X was irresistible for pro-users. With compressor, it was more like $350. I think if Adobe offered Premiere Pro CS5.5 for that price to existing FCP users, it would do much to gain entry in the video editing pro-level market that was once dominated by Apple. Come on, where's the "Switch to Premiere CS 5.5" campaign?
I wish Premiere CS5.5 could refresh some of it's layout UI. The myriad of in/out type buttons below the viewer/canvas is just too much. FCP X does look slick because of it's minimal design, and I think Premiere could use a little layout clean up to make it a more space efficient.