FCP X 10.1 Released!

Posted by Michael

Ok, exciting night here at the Garbershop homestead. The boards are lighting up like crazy. And I forgot my power supply for my laptop at the freakin’ office!

I’ll update this post with updates. But here’s what I know for now.

  • FCP 10.1 released (tons of updates and changes)
  • Compressor 4.1 released (new UI)
  • Logic update released
  • Motion 5.1 released

Event Manager X now free. Read this article about using it to move your old FCP file structure over to the new Library structure. It’s very easy and straightforward. I’ve already done it with a client project.

http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2013/12/upgrade-your-events-and-project-to-fcp-x-10-1-libraries-the-better-way/

Philip’s review of 10.1:

http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2013/12/final-cut-pro-x-10-1/

Premiere in the down time

Posted by Michael

As you all may know, I’ve chosen FCP X as my NLE for the foreseeable future. However, I can’t always guarantee that I’ll be able to use FCP on jobs that I don’t run through my shop.

Many people I speak to in post casually mention that they are planning on moving over to Premiere. Being keenly aware of this possibility, I’ve been keeping my eye on Premiere since CS6.

Every time the software has a big update, I give it a run-through to see what’s been fixed and added. But, I never end up really using it for anything. It always ends up like this weird science project that gets stuffed in the attic, only to be dusted off every 15 years so that your child can re-use it for their science project. Immoral? Yes. Time saving? Absolutely.

I finally got a chance to get my edit on this weekend with the Premiere CC December update. This will be the shortest review of Premiere on the blogosphere:

Premiere needs Find in Timeline. Without that, I ain’t a-usin’ it. I’ve been saying that since CS6. FIT is the key to smart editing and I’m having a “fit” without it.

And that was my review.

My pal Mike Nichols over at TheEditDoctor has written the most extensive list of requests for Premiere HERE.  What do you think his number one request is? Yup, Find in Timeline. It really seems like the most basic of features. Think of Microsoft Word without Find and Replace? You’d have to scan your document every time you want to edit something. Seems very old fashioned to me. Like pre-1990s old-fashioned.

Here is my list of missing features in order of importance:

1. Find in Timeline

2. Scrub audio at normal pitch

3. Audio that goes to 12db. Why only +6.02 in the timeline? So, like, weird.

4. Make the wireframes work just like FCP 7. Can’t currently move more than 1 object at a time. They need to be able to be turned on and off. Currently, it’s cray cray. Yeah, I said it. Cray cray.

5. Fix the 3-way color correction filter. Having to always change the spread of where the blacks, mids, and whites overlap is insane. Right now, it’s barely usable in my book. Too much twirling down of tools that I need every time. And, no, I don’t plan on moving over to SpeedGrade every time I want to do some quick CCing.

6. Why is there no way to set a Marker out-point other than 2x-clicking on the marker and setting a duration? And nope, I don’t want to always use Prelude to log my stuff. If I’m mid-edit and need to log something quickly there’s simply no need to go out of Premiere.

7. There’s no keyboard command to switch between tabs in the selected panel. I really really (did I mention really?) want this. The key command was CMD-SHIFT-] and [ in FCP 7. It worked just like Safari or Chrome. It’s a necessity to keyboard-only editing.

8. Update the render engine. FCP X renders downconverts and upconverts much better than Premiere.

9. Just pony up and make ProRes presets. Just do it. You’ll make me happy. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what you really want, Adobe?

10. The multicam engine is ok. But FCP X’s is way better. Unless it’s buried deep, there’s no way to set a camera angle and tell Premiere to automatically order the clips by angle.

Adobe, get on it!

 

To quote GLaDOS…

Posted by Michael

“It’s been a looong time.” Sorry but things have been a little nutty ’round the ol’ Garbershop lately. I’ve been traveling around Cali on business and also have a shoot coming up this week in Bakersfield for a high-end corporate client.

I’m very excited about the shoot. It will be the first time I’ll be using my entire kit of gear. Here’s a tease of one of the carts.

Camera

We were also able to hire on an AC/DP who will basically be a “second me” on set. He’s knowledgable about DSLRs, REDs, DIT work, etc… I look forward to working with him.

Unfortunately I’m not sure how much of the video I’ll be able to show. Hopefully I can post a segment or two once it’s complete.

If I have a chance to post from set or during Thanksgiving week, I’ll send some updates on how the shoot went.

If I was a betting man…

Posted by Michael

…then I would have made a lot of money today. No new FCP X announcement. And you know, I’m ok with that. I’ll be spending a couple days just getting my systems updated to Mavericks.

I’m very glad we got the scoop on the new Mac Pro. I’m also ok with it being available in December.

It’s curious that Apple didn’t announce a new display to go along with it. Maybe that will get announced closer to the December release?

As with “everything Apple” these days, time will tell.

*UPDATE*

From the the Mac Pro Performance page:

Final Cut Pro X. Now optimized for Mac Pro.

The new version of Final Cut Pro X (coming in December) has been engineered to take advantage of the 4K capabilities of the Mac Pro. The dual workstation-class GPUs in Mac Pro accelerate effects, optical flow analysis, video export — and virtually everything else you do in Final Cut Pro. Ultrafast PCIe-based flash storage means fast project loading and multi-stream 4K playback. And Final Cut Pro X has been so perfectly tuned to take advantage of the new Mac Pro, you can work in 4K — in real time — without rendering. (Take a minute to let that slowly sink in.)

…aaaand let the rumor mills begin.

Posted by Michael

The Twittersphere and the CreativeCow-asphere are all abuzz and agog today with rumors of tomorrow’s impending FCP X-dot-who-knows release. Over the past few weeks, I’ve remained somewhat detached from all of this.

My feelings on the next release are that it’s best to temper my own expectations. Maybe there will be one or two major features. Maybe one of those will actually work on the day of launch. And maybe there will be a bunch of bug fixes. And maybe, just maybe, those bug fixes won’t need to be corrected next month.

It’s ALL hearsay and conjecture by anyone making comments about this stuff on the Internet. Just sit back, try to relax, and enjoy the show. Countdown to 10/22/13 begins… now.

And now we wait…

Posted by Michael

I hate waiting. Admittedly, in many instances, I’m the one telling someone else to wait (to render, to upload, to let me find that shot). Because of my own impatience, I work my tail off to provide results faster than others. It’s not always humanly possible and it’s a very high bar to set, but I strive for it. And I usually come through.

So when I am in a position of waiting on others for things I really want, I get very fidgety (to put it mildly). In this case, I am waiting on three things, all Apple-related.

First item of business is my new iMac. I sold the old one in order to upgrade. I did this almost immediately within the launch of the new iMacs. I upgraded to it because of the 4GB graphics card. I ordered it eight business days ago. It still hasn’t shipped. There’s no way it’ll get to me by the latest expected date of Wednesday unless it overnights tomorrow. Here’s hopin’.

Screen shot 2013-10-07 at 3.45.22 PM

I feel a little silly to have made the upgrade now that the benchmarks came out and they are not as exciting as I had expected. The good news is my upgrade cost was only a few hundred dollars and the resale value will be higher than my last one if I had waited another year.

This leads me to the second item of business: the new Mac Pro. I am desperately awaiting its release into the wild. I have very high hopes for this beast. I hope it’s going to energize a lot of people to start up projects which will have a trickle-down effect to me. As has happened in the past, my hope is that a new Mac Pro on the market equals new work for me.

The final item of business is FCP X. I have no idea when it’s coming out. I have no idea what the new features will be. And I am dying to know. I’ve maxed out what I can do with FCP 10.0.x. Here’s hoping the next version is as great as the hype out there. I truly hope it is because… (please return to the first line of this post).