Apple finally, at long last, let FCS3 out of the bag
Well it damn well took them long enough! At long last Apple got their
act together and have FCS3/FCP7 ready to roll. It's no secret i have
been highly critical of Apple over the past few years for not making
FCS as good as it should or could be. Releases 5 and 6 were profoundly
disappointing simply because they brought nothing new to the editing
table that didn't already exist in competing
applications.
I wrote about about this some time ago
in a long post entitled 'FCP6,
Where did al the newness go?'
More
recently, speculating on what we might hope for in FCP7, I offered up a
list of hoped-for additions. How many of them were
fulfilled...?
- A real-time engine that can actually scale
decoding resolution.
Result - Umm... seemingly
not. Whilst RT performance should be improved and ProRes performance is
very good, it doesn't appear that Apple have addressed this issue in
the way that most other NLE's have.
- Actual 4k 4096px
support
It seems so. A major failing of the QT
engine overcome and FCP now reports to suppourt 4k 4096 res.
- Project files able to be fully exchanged with
Motion/Colour/DVDSP
Nope. Apple still havnt
engaged integration in a more comprehensive way. XML is the right idea,
Send-To commands such as that from FCP to STP are good but none of
these is as a well rounded system as that which Adobe have shown is
possible whereby projects files from After Effects, Premiere,
Soundbooth can all be freely moved around. Despite the rhetoric Applee
are still very much behind in regard to the fully integrated suite.
- GPU acceleration (used for much more than page-twirl
transitions)
Nope. It seems the GPU remains an
untapped resource.
- Greatly improved audio tools in FCP (this is a VERY long
list that starts with the ability to playback a bloody MP3 files
without RENDERING!!!!)
Nope. It seems Apple have
failed to see the forest on this one. I don't have FCP7 to test yet but
there seems no mention at all of improving the horrendously bad audio
tools in FCP. Of course they would contend that this is SoundTrack
Pro's job but by forcing the user to move to a different application
for any kind of sound work they force the user to work in a specific,
traditional manner. And I dont like begin told 'how' i should work by
the software. What if i want to mix and edit sound as I edit rather
than AFTER i edit? A new age of production demands that I as the user
choose my workflow rather than have the software dictate it. Premiere,
Vegas, Edius all have very comprehensive audio tools right on the NLE
timeline including surround sound, bus to bus routing and wet-dry
monitor/record. This more forward thinking approach that Apple seem not
interested in, simply makes for a much more open and non-dictatorial
tool that allows the user to work they want to.... And if FCP still
cant play an Mp3 files without rendering than the guys at Apple truly
have their head screwed on backwards!
- Metadata
management
Ummm, nope. It seems that Apple really
havnt put any work into advancing the idea of managing, creating,
annotation media assets with metadata. This is the frontier of new
thinking about digital production - on one hand its simply
good media management (an area FCP has been notoriously poor in
comparison to say, Avid) but on the other Metadata management evokes
all sorts of new worklow concepts and processes. Witness the way Adobe
have started to implement Metadata into tools like the auto-transcrbing
of audio files from Soundbooth or the direct to disk shooting metadata
annotation of On-Location. Apple appear to have left this unexplored.
They have the system in place in the form of their XML structure but to
date this is very under exploited.
-'Real' native format
suppourt rather than compulsory re-wrapping to
MOV.
NOPE. Once again Apple claim the 'no
transcoding' 'native' workflow tag lines when in truth Apple is almost
completely restricted to QuickTime MOV files. Almost every non-MOV file
has to be re-wrapped to MOV in order to be used. This isnt transcoding,
there isnt quality loss but it is a manipulation that shouldn't be
necessary. it means files like R3D's and XDCAMEX have to be duplicated.
And worse that such files are often not usable or give poor
performance) when opened in non-Apple/FCS applications. Either this is
a deliberate protectionist policy by Apple to protect its own Quicktime
product from competition or else FCP's underlying engine is so flawed
that it simply cant cope effectively with non QT
wrappers.
That said, what we did get
outside of this wish list was a form of background rendering such as
Adobe CS4 have with Media Encoder working in the background while you
work. This is nothing new but it is good and I hope it works as well
and efficiently as it will need to.
The iChat
theatre system in FCS3 is the one glimmer of Apple the Innovator of
old. This is a very interesting idea that goes a step further than
Adobe's clip-notes system for review and collaboration by going into a
real-time landscape. It sounds very good and I look forward to kicking
it around.
Velocity controls for clip speed. This
is the classic Apple/FCP that I have previously complained about.
Premiere and Avid have had comprehensive speed controls, ramping and
enveloping of speed for, literally, YEARS. Thank you for catching up
FCP.
Improved marker system. The previous marker
tools in FCP were a cruel and pointless joke and so it appears Apple
have finally joined to 21st century with a (seemingly) much improved
set of marker tools. Sony's Vegas has nothing less than 5
different types of markers that are completely customizable, namable,
individual or paired regions and can trigger events and captions - will
FCP's be up to this standard? Probably not but any improvement is
good.
The interface of FCP it seems missed out
completely. Whilst cosmetic this is one area no one seems happy with.
The overly bright, bitsy, cluttered GUI filled with microscopically
small icons really needs a re-think.
ProRes got the
big bump that everyone was expecting. A 444 with Alpha mode was just
what everyone was looking for to make effects heavy and higher-end post
a bit more viable than just working with the clumsiness of Uncompressed
10bit. ProRes is a great codec and it just got better. But again
there's nothing new about this. Cineform have had a lossless
intermediate 10 and 12 bit 444 and 422 format available for a long time
and even go further with RAW capabilities and a real-time,
non-destructive, metadata colour correction system. So ProRes 4444 is
nothing new, nothing innovative, nothing we havnt seen before expect
for the fact that it comes as part of FCS3 and FCS3 is very cheap!
Apple as bargain basement bundle!
I wont go into
much detail on the other FCS applications in this post. Motion has been
boosted and thats good but it is still a very far cry from After
Effects. Some users will love it for its price point in the FCS bundle
and for some of the great and easy to execute tricks up its sleeve. But
its not even close yet to competing with After Effects.
Color is an enormously powerful colour correction
system but it seems Apple still havnt had the time to "Appleise" it, it
still doesn't look or feel like a true FCS app and is arguably still
more complex to use than it should or needs to be. Anyone who has used
Magic Bullet Looks knows how fluid and elegant a colour system can be
and if MBL only had secondary CC an Motion Tracking masks then Apple
Color would look very clumsy indeed.
SoundTrack
Pro, from the beginning, has been the great DAW that ISN'T. STP could
have been great but so far it has very much not been great. Modeled off
Sony's superb Acid Pro but lacking both the power and flexibility of
Acid, STP has been plagued with stability issues and a host of strange
quirks - not the least being that it can import but Not export an OMF.
The Apple press release speaks of a number of improvements to STP but
largely they seem simplistic (voice level match) or long over due
remedies to previous failings (channel re-ordering) I was, in many
ways, hoping that STP would be the shining light in FCS3 but it seems
disappointment is coming my way.
The FCS3 package
may be great value and cover almost all the bases of production, but
there's really no arguing that STP and Motion are anything but
second-rate to where the market is at. Acid Pro, Audition, ProTools,
Cubase, Reaper, Sonar are all superior DAW's. Some of these are
expensive (PT, Sonar) other are inexpensive (Reaper, Acid) but for
SoundTrack pro cheap can be a big price to pay for second
rate.
And as for DVD Studio Pro.... My god, has it
been left out of the upgrade cycle altogether? The great authoring
system that once was had fallen so far behind the curve that
it was getting a bit ridiculous. And now it seems Apple are just
ashamed of it.
Now, dont get me wrong. Im very happy
to have the improvements that are there, as will my students who are
daily frustrated with FCP. But for all its niceties this release is
much like FCP5 and FCP6, it keeps Apple in the game with a strong
toolset but it does not put them ahead of it. There is no real
innovation here, nothing that we havnt seen before. They may have 50%
of the market now but without going one-better than the competition
they are likely to see their market share substantially whittle away
over the next few years.
Heres the FCS3 press
release
Heres the Apple Whats New
list
Posted at 09:11AM Jul 24, 2009
by Mike Jones in general |
