Fcp 7!!!

Well for me I have a Macbook Pro and an older PowerMac G5. I have FCP6 on the G5 and FCP5 on the Macbook Pro. I noticed with FCP7 it ONLY runs on Mac's with the Intel chip. So I guess I will be upgrading my laptop to 7 but keeping my desktop at 6 for now anyway. I may get a newer tower sometime in the future though.
 
From the looks of it there are a bunch of great new things that I neither expected nor really needed....
but quite a few things I'm surprised not to see included (64bit, redesigned Color UI, native MXF & P2 metadata support, and AVCHD support).

I need to upgrade my computer sometime in the near future - and this has me thinking that I may consider jumping back to Avid for the first time in years.
 
DVX100Shooter said:
Well for me I have a Macbook Pro and an older PowerMac G5. I have FCP6 on the G5 and FCP5 on the Macbook Pro. I noticed with FCP7 it ONLY runs on Mac's with the Intel chip. So I guess I will be upgrading my laptop to 7 but keeping my desktop at 6 for now anyway. I may get a newer tower sometime in the future though.
Click to expand...

I'm unclear if a G5 can run the new FCP7. Will it?

I hope not! Because that will force my boss to get a decent machine to work on at the office. I work from home mostly, and will get the update, then my projects won't be able to be opened at the office until he gets a new machine! It's win win for me. I can't stand being at the office, but if I have to, at least I'll have a decent machine. Muaahahahahahaha...
 
Luis Caffesse said:
From the looks of it there are a bunch of great new things that I neither expected nor really needed....
but quite a few things I'm surprised not to see included (64bit, redesigned Color UI, native MXF & P2 metadata support, and AVCHD support).

I need to upgrade my computer sometime in the near future - and this has me thinking that I may consider jumping back to Avid for the first time in years.
Click to expand...

I have an AVID sitting in my corner.

That is the LAST way I'd be going right now, but to each their own.
 
Chadfish said:
I'm unclear if a G5 can run the new FCP7. Will it?

I hope not! Because that will force my boss to get a decent machine to work on at the office. I work from home mostly, and will get the update, then my projects won't be able to be opened at the office until he gets a new machine! It's win win for me. I can't stand being at the office, but if I have to, at least I'll have a decent machine. Muaahahahahahaha...
Click to expand...

FCS 3 is completely Intel-native. It will neither install nor run on PowerPC Macs.

Noah
 
Yeah, I was really expecting something 64-bit and Snow Leopard worthy. This seems like no real workflow upgrades, but lots of bells and whistles added. Can anyone comment on stability yet?
 
Been following this thread with interest, and I really can't understand what the big deal is over native AVCHD support. In practice, all that does is to shift the uncompress-edit-recompress effort to the real-time editing engine, rather than batch reformatting first. If you have a machine that's fast enough to be able to do the real-time thing in something that approaches real-time, then I guess it's fast enough that the pre-processing time isn't a great issue.

I can understand why consumers don't want the extra steps (and the understanding of what's under the hood that goes with it), but FCP isn't a consumer app.

I can also see why removing the transcoding step would be convenient, by simplifying workflow - but not critical.

Here's another thought - maybe, just maybe, Apple thinks of AVCHD as a consumer format with a limited life and doesn't see it as worthwhile to incorporate it. Maybe they see something like AVC-Intra as the longer term bet. They have a record of dumping or ignoring technology that they don't see having a future.

On which point, I wouldn't hold my breath for a major update to DVDSP. Steve J said explicitly back last autumn that he considered DVD to be on the way out - that was his explanation (excuse?) for not fitting BR players to new Macs.
 
NickG said:
Steve J said explicitly back last autumn that he considered DVD to be on the way out - that was his explanation (excuse?) for not fitting BR players to new Macs.
Click to expand...

I vote "excuse".

Due to a lack of a nearby brick-and-mortar video store I rent by mail exclusively (from both Netflix and Blockbuster). These days, when I look at my queue(s), about 2/3rds of the titles are available in BR.

Also, according to blu-ray.com, ten days ago:

"A recent report from the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) shows that sales of Blu-ray titles during the first six months of the year are up 91% - to $407M - compared to the first half of 2008. The increase in title sales has also affected sales of Blu-ray players, which are up 25% from the same period last year to 2M units."
 
Ted Spencer said:
I vote "excuse".

Due to a lack of a nearby brick-and-mortar video store I rent by mail exclusively (from both Netflix and Blockbuster). These days, when I look at my queue(s), about 2/3rds of the titles are available in BR.

Also, according to blu-ray.com, ten days ago:

"A recent report from the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) shows that sales of Blu-ray titles during the first six months of the year are up 91% - to $407M - compared to the first half of 2008. The increase in title sales has also affected sales of Blu-ray players, which are up 25% from the same period last year to 2M units."
Click to expand...

I'm 100% with Ted on this one. I'm a huge Mac fan, heck I have two MacBook Pros, a Mac Book, an old G5, a new 8-core Mac Pro, bought two iPhones (have one, gave the other to the sister), a video iPod, some iPod nano I think I got for free with a bigger purchase, you name it, I've got it. And I think Steve Jobs is a genius. That being said, that's a stupid comment, and from a guy who is supposed to be a visionary it shows a total lack of vision or real-world understanding.

It's one of my real "button" issues that when I hear that on a forum I want to slap some sense into whoever says it. I heard a guy say this the other day and I just ignored him, which is tough for me to do, but to say that Blu-ray is an "intermediary format" and that somehow it's really not going to "catch on" or last, frankly that's crazy talk as it's already caught on. I buy everything on Blu-ray, so do lots of people, and standard DVDs are all on sale now. You can pick up basically any SD DVD for about $10, sometimes less. It's rare that they come out priced more than $15 anymore, seriously. Also anyone who has seen Blu-ray knows how much better it is than standard DVD. All that being the case, it's also totally stupid to say that somehow "watching movies online is the wave of the future!" Really Einstein? Did you read that in a magazine somewhere? Yeah that's what I thought. If it was the wave of the future, and the future is very soon, as these tools will have you believe, you tell me when is my building going to be wired for fiber optics? When am I going to have access to a hard drive with, oh, say, 50 terabytes of space? Oh you don't think either of those is going to happen in the next 5-10 years? Yeah, of course not, because they won't. Hard drives 10 years ago were still not much smaller than they are today. I have a 120 gig hard drive that is officially almost 10 years old now. Yay now you can get a 1 TB drive fairly easily (or a 2 TB drive is really just two 1 TBs, so that's cheating), so basically 10x increase in 10 years? So great, that puts us at a 10 TB drive 10 years from now? That's not good enough. Not even close. A Blu-ray disc can hold 100-200 gigs with 4-8 layers, still 50 with only dual layer technology. I have already more than 150 Blu-ray discs, and I have almost 3,000 standard DVDs. How in the hell am I going to fit all of that onto a hard drive, or even ten hard drives? It's impossible unless technology takes some serious leaps forward.

And also, why would I want to risk all of my media being on hard drives, which frankly are INCREDIBLY unreliable?! I've had 3 hard drives fail in my life, of about maybe 35 to 40 total, so that's not far off from a 10% failure rate. That would mean if I'm going to have all of that media, you're darn right it has to be double back-up just like my iTunes library. So you do the math and you tell me if owning movies in digital format is going to happen any time soon for the die-hard movie fan.

Furthermore, to argue that the mainstream consumer is going to go that way is nonsense. Most people prefer physical media. Even if you take the people who buy like 10 movies a year, who cares about them? I buy 100 DVD products per year, I'm the value of 10 customers like that. If I don't care about downloading movies, there's a problem, because I spend hundreds a month with Amazon.com. You have to get the customers like me to care, otherwise you're screwed. It's just like the tax system -- the top 10% pay all of the taxes basically. The top 10% of movie fans buy 90% of the movies, guaranteed. I know other people like me who buy even more and have even bigger libraries.

As I said, no fiber, no go. I'm not sitting around waiting forever so that a MASSIVE HD file can download to my computer. And also I don't want to watch anything on my computer, so how is it going to be easy for me to download media and play it on my TV? Something like Apple TV? Yeah... the hard drive blows on that.

But sure, in 2025, I too look forward to having a RAID system that has about 100 TB that I can attach to my computer and to my TV setup and then have fiber optics downloading movies super fast, blah blah etc. So for the next 15 years I, like anyone else, will be sticking with Blu-ray!

I just ordered Final Cut Studio's upgrade... we'll see how it is. I can't be behind on the only editing system I primarily use, though. I held off on the CS4 upgrade because I had just bought CS3, but even then I'll have to cave and buy that eventually no doubt.

Also, switch to Avid? I know I didn't read that blasphemy... I know I didn't. Screw Avid. I hear they are actually trying to release some upgrades for their terrible software with awful user interface and overpriced hardware (OMG don't install anything else on your Avid "machine" or we won't offer support! How can a company this completely terrible be allowed to survive? I don't know). Wow, good for them, finally trying to compete in a market they once dominated! Now only dinosaurs use that crap, unfortunately our industry is absolutely dominated by dinosaurs. Yay let's shoot 35mm and cut it with Avid. You know what, forget about it, why don't we shoot with 8mm and cut on a Moviola?! God... we need a lot more Michael Mann's and Steven Soderbergh's and David Fincher's and a lot less Steven Spielberg's who are afraid of anything that came around since they started filmmaking forever ago. Screw Avid, and screw 35mm. I'm tired of people using anything for romantic or nostalgic reasons, use logic and reason and you'll also learn to use 21st century technology not ancient 19th century technology coupled with bad editing software made for people who were born in the World War II era.
 
NickG said:
Been following this thread with interest, and I really can't understand what the big deal is over native AVCHD support. In practice, all that does is to shift the uncompress-edit-recompress effort to the real-time editing engine, rather than batch reformatting first.
Click to expand...

Apple has no excuse not to support AVCHD. After upgrading to CS4.1 and seeing that my 2006 Mac Pro can handle real time AVCHD (that's without Grand Central), I'm using Premiere 80% of the time now for editing to avoid transcoding. And maybe some people can wait 1/2 hour to an hour, and maybe its psychological, but I find that I'm shooting/editing a lot more now that I can work sans transcoding.

Or here's another real life example. For a feature I'm working on, we're shooting with 2 HMC150's + Letus adapters. We sometimes shoot 2-3+ hours of footage a day and can sometimes wrap pretty late. When I get home, I like to do a rough cut of some of the scenes as dailies to make sure we had enough coverage. Waiting for footage to transcode completely kills that workflow. I don't need to render my dailies in Prores.

Sure, for larger projects/important projects I'll Log and Transfer to ProRes, but there are several situations a amateur/professional can face where that is unnecessary. And I expect a pro application to be able to accommodate.

I'm with a lot of other people that hoping there will be a FCS3.5/FCS4 0 upgrade once SL is released. Hopefully THAT version will have native AVCHD.
 
I don't know whether Steve J's right or wrong. His record is that he's right most of the time, but he's not infallible. So we'll have to see.

I'm sure BR sales are way up - but don't forget (a0 it's still a new technology and it's coming from a low base and (b) take-up last year was throttled by the format war between BR and the rival format (whose name I've already forgotten). So while 91% makes it look like a juggerenaut, it's still close to take-off, and $407M isn't a big number (well, it is to you and me, but it isn't in the context of retail electronics sales).
 
i can live without native AVCHD support (event though most of what i shoot comes off my HMC150)

but i would like to see the whole suite go 64bit with Snow Leopard. but more importantly

Please please someone tell me that "show audio waveforms" won't bring the computer to its knees like it has in the past. i mean seriously, Premiere Pro 1 had no problem displaying audio waveforms on my 2002 era pentium 4. but i tell my intel quad core mac pro to display audio waveforms and i have to go make a sandwich and wait for the audio to display.

doesn't it seam weird that 17MB/sec prorez files with light effects play fine but final cut chokes on the audio display?

weird

john

and also Bluray rocks, my clients what something they can hold. plus the infrastructure for downloadable content favors big-time producers and locks out the little guys. well maybe "locks out" is too strong but if i shoot a wedding I'm not going to be able to upload the final edit and have someone download it to there tivo or whatever. Not to say that it can't be done just not by the vast majority of my clients. There is the apple Tv and the WD box of course but then i have to get the video over to their place somehow.... so we are back to needing some physical media.
 
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From a personal point of view. I watched Slumdog last night on my apple TV in HD. Rented it, within a minute of purchasing the rental we were able to start watching it. Looked and sounded fantastic. Can somebody explain why Bluray would be better than this experience, I don't think so. And iTunes/the internet will continue to get better, Bluray wont.

Having said that I am considering buying a BR burner and player now that FCS supports it (sort of). This is for my wedding clients. These are young, generally reasonably wealthy people and it's probably the most expensive video purchase they ever make. Very few however seem interested in BluRay at the moment which is a shame I think.

I do think that BR could take off (probably not as much as DVD though), but it hasn't happened yet. The problem is that DVDis still actually pretty good in most peoples eyes. The difference between VHS and DVD was much larger and people could easily see the benefit. Of course, internet downloading of movies isn't really mainstream either.
 
NickG said:
st autumn that he considered DVD to be on the way out - that was his explanation (excuse?) for not fitting BR players to new Macs.
Click to expand...

I think Apple and Sony just don't get along too well. Sony makes the EX1 of course, and Apple has to accommodate that format due to it's popularity, but also Sony owns Vegas, a competing video app, and DVD Architect 5, ACID, Soundforge, and more. All PC only apps. I notice little things, like how footage captured in FCP from my Sony VX2100 doesn't automatically separate footage by shot (like it does on Canon footage) but it does do this in Vegas. I think things like that are a conscious little "FU" to Sony from Steve. Why would Steve rush to help Sony Sell the blue Ray? He backed HD-DVD and lost. He's probably trying to come up with something new to beat out Sony, and in the mean time we, the loyal minions of Mac must suffer.

I also think he's waiting to release the real "Final Cut Studio 3" (notice they just call it "Final Cut Studio") until after they come out with some new platform that will put our Mac Pros out to pasture. They have to keep changing everything so we have to drop another 5 grand on a machine every 3-5 years.

Don't get me wrong, I'm happy the changes are made, and for 300 bucks I can get a lot of new functionality. But I also notice that the G5 is out, which doesn't affect me, but what about when my Mac Pro is out? What will I be pushed into by Steve then?

I'm starting to feel manipulated...


Chadfish
 
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NickG said:
Been following this thread with interest, and I really can't understand what the big deal is over native AVCHD support. In practice, all that does is to shift the uncompress-edit-recompress effort to the real-time editing engine, rather than batch reformatting first. If you have a machine that's fast enough to be able to do the real-time thing in something that approaches real-time, then I guess it's fast enough that the pre-processing time isn't a great issue.

I can understand why consumers don't want the extra steps (and the understanding of what's under the hood that goes with it), but FCP isn't a consumer app.

I can also see why removing the transcoding step would be convenient, by simplifying workflow - but not critical.

Here's another thought - maybe, just maybe, Apple thinks of AVCHD as a consumer format with a limited life and doesn't see it as worthwhile to incorporate it. Maybe they see something like AVC-Intra as the longer term bet. They have a record of dumping or ignoring technology that they don't see having a future.

On which point, I wouldn't hold my breath for a major update to DVDSP. Steve J said explicitly back last autumn that he considered DVD to be on the way out - that was his explanation (excuse?) for not fitting BR players to new Macs.
Click to expand...

I wonder if their reasoning is just that transcoding is a better solution for AVCHD than native editing (with the current generation of computers at least). With Pro Res LT there doesn't seem to be so much of a disadvantage from the disk space point of view, and the ingest time is pretty fast on a Mac Pro, much quicker than real time. Plus the log and transfer process means you only transcode the bits you need.

I think that Apple will properly support BluRay if it takes off, but have no intention of helping it to take off by supporting it properly at this stage. hat's the way I would play it if I was them.
 
studio1972 said:
I wonder if their reasoning is just that transcoding is a better solution for AVCHD than native editing (with the current generation of computers at least).
Click to expand...

Their reasoning, as has been explained to me, is that they want to enforce Quicktime as a worldwide standard. They envision Quicktime being the file format used to record and view videos in all ways and in all places. Forget Flash, forget AVI and WMV and h.264 files, they think it's going to all migrate to Quicktime.

Which means, simply put, this: if your camera doesn't record quicktime files, and you want to use FCP, you will have to transcode (or rewrap). And that's all there is to it. Now, and forever, until they change this (misguided) policy, you will never again be able to edit native in any new format as long as you use FCP.

So get used to unwrapping, rewrapping, and transcoding.

The best you can ever hope for, from Apple, is a "rewrap" support of H.264. But you won't ever be able to just plug in the card and edit (like you can on just about every other editor) because Apple's priority is in enforcing the spread of Quicktime as the world's one and only file format, and they are attempting to leverage FCP's popularity to do that. So it becomes less and less flexible for you, the editor, as it becomes more of a political tool for Apple.

Your other alternative is to simply turn to third parties to solve the dilemma. For P2-based MXF file formats, Raylight and Calibrated and MXF4QT all address the issue. For AVCHD, I don't know of any alternative yet. Clip Rewrapper will allow editing of the native footage but only after performing a rewrap step, which is probably akin to what we could expect to see in the NEXT version of FCP. Native editing of the .m2ts files is already possible in Premiere, Vegas, and EDIUS, among others. Perhaps we'll see a "Raylight" for AVCHD before too long...
 
Of course Blu Ray is an intermediate format.

But EVERYTHING in technology is an intermediate format!!

It's ridiculous to say that we are not going to support it because the future is elsewhere. Google talks about the future of Apps being all web-based, i.e., all the apps on the app store on intermediate.... well, YES, but we also live in TODAY.

Blu-Ray will have a long shelf life as the industry and tech continues to evolve. And the point is, especially as a pro-app, it needs to be able to author and deliver DVDs/Blu-Rays well because that is what clients are asking for. What, am I suppose to tell my client I only deliver on memory cards and iTunes because that is where things are going in 5-10 years? Come on.

Everything in tech is temporary. Blu Ray is the physical format of the day. To not support it is an excuse.
 
Does anyone know - if you upgrade to FCS 3.0, do you have to reinstall all of the content discs? Or can I just install the updated Apps and it will still link to the content that was installed with FCS2.0?
 
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