I will try to restore as much content as I can recover to this website over the next couple of weeks, unfortunately it’s very likely that some things will have been lost forever.

For more details on exactly what happened see my post here: TekTonic Deleted My VPS

You should take this as a timely reminder to ensure you have useful backups of things that are important to you, even if you believe them to be safe.

There’s no clear answer to this, so let’s work through the most obvious options.

Do I need to move?
As has been very widely echoed in discussion about the new version of Final Cut Pro, your current version has not stopped working. So do you need to move to something else at all?

Maybe not. It does still work, and it shouldn’t just stop working at any point in the near future, so you can obviously continue your current projects in FCP7. But the future is much less clear. What we do know is that FCP7 has been discontinued – there will be no FCP 7.5 or 8. What it is today is all it’s likely to be. If you’re having difficulty with workflows now they aren’t going to get better.

Also you effectively need to freeze your system where it is now. While Apple say that FCP7 will work in Lion, there’s no guarantees beyond that. OS updates in the past have often caused problems with Final Cut Pro, as the application is EOL it’s unlikely that updates will be released for OS compatibility. Also new Apple hardware tends to be unable to run any OS version earlier than they were shipped with, so it’s possible that future Macs will not be compatible with FCP7 at all.

Another concern is forward compatibility. Final Cut Pro X does not support old FCP project files. So any new FCP project you create now is effectively being created in the last application that will natively read or write that format. While there are methods to import those projects into other systems they are effectively EOL along with the application.

Can I Move to FCP X?
Very possibly. It will depend a lot on what you do and what you need from the application. It appears that Apple have designed FCP X to be suitable for what they believe are the most common requirements and workflows. Ultimately you are the only person who can determine if it will meet your needs.

Broadly speaking, if you’re work is heavily reliant on tape-based formats, interchange with other post-production tools or advanced features like Multicam and telecine tracking it’s unlikely that FCP X is going to be readily applicable. At this stage there is also no capacity for standard broadcast monitoring.

If FCP X will do what you need there are still a few considerations… It’s a whole new way of working – you need to factor in the learning curve and a fundamentally new way of thinking about some of the basic concepts. There is no backward compatibility with FCP7 project files – the work you’ve done before will not be able to be transitioned into the new application.

The Alternatives
Assuming you want to continue basically the same work with basically the same hardware there are effectively two options going forward – Adobe Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer.

Both applications are very capable video editing applications with a long history and both will probably run fine on your existing Mac hardware.

Best of all both have 30-day free trial versions available.

Avid Media Composer
Media Composer, often known simply as Avid, is the big boy of professional NLE applications. It is still the most widely used NLE in most broadcast TV and film (although FCP had been making a big impact on those markets).

As of today Media Composer is at version 5.5 (the version numbering was restarted in the early 2000′s) and is a very different application from that which many remember or have heard about. In recent years Avid has been very pro-active in adapting Media Composer to better suit modern file-based formats and workflows. Avid as a company has also evolved now, becoming much more attentive to user feedback and suggestions.

Another big change for Media Composer is the move away from proprietary hardware. At this stage Media Composer offers support (with various limitations) for the Matrox MXO2 Mini and AJA IOexpress hardware I/O devices. It is widely expected that the next version of Media Composer will feature hardware support for popular I/O hardware from AJA and Blackmagic.

Unfortunately there is no simple and native way to migrate FCP projects into Avid, but there are two effective tools available from third-party developers – Pro Export FCP from Automatic Duck and AAF Transfer from Boris.

Media Composer is still the most commonly used NLE in Hollywood and for network TV, if you’re aspiring to work in those fields then experience with Avid’s systems is invaluable.

• Media Composer product page at Avid
• Download the 30-day Media Composer trial from Avid.
• If you are a student or teacher you are able to purchase Media Composer for US$295 which also includes four years of upgrades.
• With a valid FCP serial number you can also take advantage of a US$995 crossgrade offer.

Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe’s NLE, Premiere, has been around for 20 years. It was among the first applications to bring video editing to the desktop of regular computers. In 2003 it was reinvented as Premiere Pro and updated to better meet the needs of professional editors, and to be more intuitive for editors who were familiar with FCP and Media Composer.

The application has made further leaps and bounds in the last few versions and now features some of the best real-time performance available thanks to it’s ability to leverage the power of NVidias graphics processors through the CUDA architecture. The most recent versions also include native support for Final Cut Pro XML allowing for easy project import.

Many editors have sung the praises of the new Premiere Pro, but overall the application still hasn’t gained a reputation as a truly professional tool, at least in the television and film world. It has support for things like EDL, AAF import and export, R3D, tape-based workflows and more. It’s a successful hybrid tool, with one foot in the ‘old school’ world of tapes and EDLs and SDI, and the other foot in the future world of files and metadata.

Premiere Pro also forms one part of the very well integrated Creative Suite group of products. It supports powerful and direct interchange with other Creative Suite productions such as After Effects (visual effects and motion graphics), Photoshop (photo editing), Illustrator (vector graphics and design), Encore (DVD and Blu-Ray authoring), Audition (sound mixing) and Flash (keyframe based animation and app development).

Adobe is in a strong position to take advantage of the change that’s been motivated by FCP X – many users already own the Adobe Creative Suite (for After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator) and it can also take advantage of most of the same popular I/O hardware in use commonly with FCP.

• Premiere Pro product page from Adobe
• 30-day trials of Premiere Pro and the whole Creative Suite Production Premium are available from Adobe.
• A competitive upgrade offer makes the Production Premium suite available from US$849 for any FCP or Media Composer owner or Premiere Pro alone from US$399.
• The Academic edition of Production Premium is available for US$449.
• Adobe also offers a unique subscription model, making it possible to pay as little as US$39 a month for Premiere Pro – which includes all upgrades.

The Way Forward
There is probably not any rush. Ideally you should evaluate all the options. Unfortunately no trial version is available for FCP X, so to demo that you really need to shell out the purchase price. For Premiere Pro and Media Composer you can download the trial versions and evaluate them for your needs. There is plenty of training available for both products and large communities of existing users to provide more information.

Any change is going to require some retraining and some workflow adaptation, but both Adobe and Avid have publicly affirmed their commitment to the professionals who rely on their products, and both companies have been very proactive in their development over the last few years and show no sign of slowing down.

The current specials are great, and are currently available until the end of September 2011. If it’s practical it could be worth taking the opportunity to purchase both Avid Media Composer and Adobe’s Creative Suite Production Premium – VideoGuys are offering the Avid and Adobe offers together for US$1744.

Purchase links in this article are to VideoGuys.com – this is because they are experts in this field, offer a wide range of product, and sell internationally with no fuss. I have no financial relationship with them and am not receiving any affiliate income from my referrals.

Before I go any further I need to define what I mean by Pros in the headline (and from here on) – I am referring, mainly, to editors who work predominantly in broadcast television and feature films. Obviously there are many more people earning money editing video, but it’s these editors who are the most demanding, and for whom the uncertainty of FCP X is such a problem.

Has Apple abandoned this market? I think to all intents and purposes they have. They will continue to claim that their product is a professional product and a continuation of the Final Cut Pro legacy, but in reality it really appears they are absolutely willing to lose that market if they need to.

And why wouldn’t they? Apple’s estimate of FCP install numbers was “two million” a while ago – it wasn’t clear how that was measured, but many speculated that it was all sales since 1.0 or some similar aggregate number. Regardless, it was clear that within the larger world of FCP users it was a minority that were utilising it in the demanding broadcast television and film market. The vast majority are probably doing all their work within the one suite – capturing a tape or importing a file, editing, basic audio mix in FCP or Soundtrack Pro, export a file for DVD or web upload. And then another large segment are likely to be “aspirational” editors – people who don’t get paid to make videos, but have installed FCP because they would like to one day and it’s the accessible “pro” tool.

So as small as the “professional” (see second paragraph) market is within that user-base, it so destined to be much smaller in an application that costs a mere $300 from the App Store and has so many simple time-saving features to make it as easy as possible to get something in and edited. Catering to the “professional” market would add complexity to the application, and reduce it’s appeal to people outside that market.

Apple doesn’t seem to do niche any more. They have been systematically killing any and all non-mainstream products they offered, and the re-imagining of Final Cut Pro seems clearly in line with that. If a product doesn’t have a sales potential of millions of units it doesn’t seem to fit into the Apple business plan.

Is FCP X a bad product? No, not really – and had it been called anything other than FCP X there would have been widespread acceptance of this. However FCP X is not a new version of the Final Cut Pro that had won respect in the film and television industry – it simply doesn’t have what it takes to work in that environment.

Businesses in the film and TV industry, that have to deliver a product to a strict standard within a strict deadline, can’t pin their hopes on a future upgrades or the next version while relying on an increasingly ageing product that has been EOL’ed. They need certainty and at the moment the only certainty that exists with FCP is that the current version has no future hopes and the current version isn’t suitable for their work. They have no choice but to look elsewhere.

It simply makes no financial sense for Apple – selling a $300 product that appeals, as is, to millions of people – to pursue a small market with very specific and complicated demands.

In the end Final Cut Pro X will be a success, it is a powerful and innovative application. But it will no longer be a big part of the film and TV post-production industry.

Let’s imagine a car racing league that uses production-style cars (basically ‘touring cars’ in many places). In this field there were a couple of established players, they made very good cars, but they were incredibly expensive as they really only made them for this very small number of potential clients.

Then a new upstart car maker comes along – they’ve designed a car that looks like one of these racing cars – we’ll call this car Fast Car Pro – it can drive the circuits well, but It’s not quite ready to win races, but it’s giving the big guys a run for their money. Also, this new car is available to the mass market and costs a just a tiny fraction of the cost of the established cars.

In time this Fast Car Pro starts to attract more professional teams and even wins a few races. Even more importantly there are now a large number of third parties making accessories and modifications for the car that make it more powerful and more suitable for the serious drivers. While at the same time the car is still fine for driving the kids to soccer or taking on a vacation.

After a decade in production the FCP is still going strong. Many racing drivers have adopted it and are doing great, but it’s a bit overdue for a new model and the manufacturer, Apple Automotive, has promised something great. At this point the car is still seen as a racing car that many people also like to drive on the highway.

After a lot of secret development Apple Automotive reveals their new Fast Car Pro X – which some people have suggested will be a Minivan Pro. It certainly is revolutionary, it has a joystick instead of steering wheel and all the seats (there’s now 7 of them, a lot like Apple’s minivan) automatically move around inside the car to where they are needed. It has auto-driving features and a host of other time-savers. For a ‘Soccer Mom’ this car certainly is revolutionary and will probably make life easier.

But for the racing drivers there are some problems. It can’t go above highway speeds for a start. None of their old aftermarket accessories can be used on the new car, and it can’t use the high-octane fuels they rely on for extra performance. Also the tyres can’t be changed to suit conditions, and it’s not possible to turn off the auto-driving features. It is still technically able to drive around the circuit, but it can’t do it with all the established racing cars.

Of course the original Fast Car Pro they’d become so used to still works fine, but it wasn’t going to be updated anymore. Also, surprisingly, Apple Automotive had decided that the same day they launched the new car they would entirely discontinue the old one. They stopped selling the original Fast Car Pro and even told dealers to send back all their inventory. If a team crashed one of their cars, or wanted to add a new car, there wasn’t any option to buy more – they would have to go to the second-hand market.

For the racing drivers this seems like the end of the world, they had built reputations and teams around the Fast Car Pro and now the new version simply couldn’t perform the way they needed it to. Apple’s decision seems insane to the drivers because Apple had effectively held half of the market for these racing cars. However the potential market for the racing cars was pretty small.

From Apple Automotive’s perspective and, perhaps more importantly, the perspective of their shareholders the new direction was a great decision. Now instead of a potential market of racing drivers and a reasonably small number of car enthusiasts they were looking at a potential market of just about everyone who needs to drive anywhere. Even if the professional racing drivers were entirely alienated they stand to gain a lot more than they lose with a new, more accessible, performance car.

Now, there is some hope that Apple Automotive might reinstate some of the missing features for the racing drivers, but there’s no suggestion of when that might be or what features might come back.

The main issue is that for editors in the Film and TV world FCP is basically one of two options. For Apple however the Film and TV post market represents only a small fraction of the current FCP market, and a absolutely tiny fraction of the potential market for a new application.

For the editors FCP is a big thing, for Apple the TV/Film world is a small fry.

Edited: By request of FCP editor Doug Dillaman, my representation of the FCP X potential market.

By providing an empty XDCAM folder structure (download link at the bottom of the page) on a bare drive you can convince Avid that it’s looking at an XDCAM disc, and it will then author a standards-compliant XDCAM video file.

That’s easy enough, but I wanted to test it and didn’t have an empty harddrive available (the drive should probably only have the XDCAM files and folders to work properly) but I remembered an old DOS trick – first I copied the XDCAM folder structure to a folder on my D: drive called “XDCAM” then I opened a command prompt and typed:

subst x: d:\xdcam

subst is an old DOS command (still available all the way up to Windows 7) which maps a drive letter to a folder on your harddrive. In this case Windows will create a new drive as X: which will point at D:\XDCAM – when I use Avid’s Export to XDCAM function I will find a file called C0001.MXFin D:\XDCAM\Clip folder – this is the MXP OP1A file that Avid has created from the sequence.

This same principle can be used to create virtual drives to organise project-based media. For example if you have a series of folders on a drive named for each project, each containing an Avid MediaFiles directory then you could use subst to “mount” each of those folder as it’s own drive letter.

Avid will see each folder as if it were a real drive, but media will be kept within the project-based files. The biggest drawback to this approach seems to be that all virtual drives have the same volume name as the source folder drive.

Virtual Project Folders

Subst Usage

XDCAM folder structure:
Download

Since the pricing on Sony’s new PMW-F3 came out  – €20,700, or around US$28,000, with three lenses – the cry heard around the internet has been “but that’s almost as much as a RED One!”

But is it?

When RED came to the market a few years ago their pricing was completely crazy, and still is much lower than many competitors. If you ask some interested person how much a RED One costs they will probably say “about $20,000″ – which is just about right. The original RED One was $17,500 and the improved RED One MX currently costs $25,000. But that’s the bare body – we’re not comparing apples to apples, so how much does RED One cost?

If we take the basic spec of the PMW-F3K – camera, three lenses, viewfinder and LCD – how much will it cost to get the same basic features from RED?

• RED One MX Body – $25,000
• RED Prime 35mm – $4,250
• RED Prime 50mm – $4,250
• RED Prime 85mm – $4,250
• RED LCD (5.6″) – $1,700
• RED Bomb Viewfinder – $3,200
• RED Quickplate (battery mount) – $500
• RED Power Pack (2x battery and charger) – $1,450
• RED CF Module – $500
• RED Bottom Plate – $600
• RED Steel Rail (18″ x2) – $110

That’s a very basic kit. And it costs $45,810 – nearly twice what the PMW-F3K is expected to cost. However we can be a little generous here and remove the RED Bomb, as the F3′s viewfinder isn’t very impressive and people will probably rely on the LCD, so that’s only $42,610

For what you get in the box and what you have to spend to get going – the Sony F3 is nowhere near the price of a RED. It’s a lot more expensive than Panasonic’s AF100, but a lot less than any other camera of it’s type (large-sensor HD or greater-than-HD video camera).

Then Apple’s Final Cut Pro started to make a big impact – at first it was a DV-only system (capitalising on Apple’s new widespread use of Firewire on their computers) but with third party hardware it was soon quickly extended to support more I/O options and a greater number of formats. FCP’s low cost, high flexibility and agile adoption of new formats won it a lot of fans and it quickly surpassed other systems to make a big dent on Avid’s pro market. But has it done enough lately?

It’s impossible to deny that FCP is a solid product and has made massive leaps and bounds since it first entered the market – but is it keeping up? While FCP once had great support for file-based media (compared to clunky imports with Avid’s products) it is now nowhere near as versatile with the new file formats, requiring either long ‘Log and Transfer’ imports at the start, or forcing users to sit though heavy renders to play the timeline.

The most recent version of FCP added very little in the way of features or improvements, and with no sign of a new version on the horizon many FCP users are starting to look at other systems. Avid’s new version Media Composer offers a lot of features designed to appeal to Final Cut users but there’s another, possibly stronger, competitor too…

Adobe Premiere has been around for ages, it was the first computer-based editing software in the mid 90′s, but it’s never really been accepted for professional broadcast use, and wasn’t initially designed for that purpose. But a lot has changed – in 2003 the entire application was rewritten and rebranded as Premiere Pro. The new version was designed to be a more direct competitor for FCP and deal with some of the professional demands that it had previously lacked.

Even with a new name and improved functionality it hasn’t really gotten a foothold in the professional and broadcast market that Apple and Avid have been battling over – until now perhaps? For a long time Premiere has been sitting in the corner of the world’s edit suites, untested and uninstalled – as part of the Creative Suite package it comes along with Adobe’s industry-standard After Effects.

The release of Creative Suite 5 earlier this year marked a turning point for Premiere Pro. The new Mercury Engine, harnessing the power of the GPU, has delivered amazing playback performance for difficult video formats. It is very possible that Premiere Pro has the best performance and workflow when it comes to working with popular file-based formats like H.264 (from DSLRs) and RED’s R3D raw format. Now editors who’d previously left the Premiere discs in the box are starting to take a second look.

Could this be the beginning of another shift in professional post production? Avid lost much of it’s market to Apple over the last decade, but the momentum seems to be stalling, Avid is winning people back but it seems that Adobe might be most likely to be the big winner out of Apple’s slowdown.

The BBC is perhaps leading the charge, committing to 2,000 seats of Premiere Pro for the next generation of it’s “Creative Desktop” programme. And Adobe is starting to put the pressure on by directly targeting the professional market for Premiere Pro, trying to woo users from FCP and Avid.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to evaluate Premiere Pro for the type of work we do, but I know that plenty of people are giving it serious thought and that already some are making the switch outright.

I’d love to hear from those that have really given Premiere Pro a good look – is it ready for professional work? Where are the weaknesses? How does it compare?

Yesterday I posted a very brief summary of the workflow for Canon DSLR clips in Avid Media Composer 5.0, today I am following it up with the same demonstation for R3D media from the RED One camera.

Direct access to the RAW R3D media is as simple as selecting Link to AMA Volume from the File menu then navigating the folder where you’ve copied the clips from the CF card, RED RAM or RED Drive (you could potentially access the media directly from the card or drive) – seconds later you will have a bin full of clips.

In my test above Media Composer scans and indexes 93 clips in less than 12 seconds. All the clips are then immediately available, with full access to all RAW processing settings and file metadata right in the Avid bin.

Again, on my laptop playback can be a little difficult, but with only Media Composer running I can actually get realtime single-steam playback of 2K 2:1 RED media in Avid’s Yellow/Yellow mode.

Check back soon for more posts about new features in Media Composer 5.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called Avid Media Composer in a DSLR World which detailed the various workflow options for working with DSLR media (mainly from Canon’s insanely popular 5D and it’s siblings). In that post I mentioned that the upcoming Media Composer 5 would change it all, and it really has, so here’s the update…

With Media Composer 5′s support for Quicktime as an AMA media format working with DSLR material (shot in QT-native formats .MOV or .MP4) is as simple as the Avid workflows for XDCAM or P2.

Accessing the media is a simple as selecting Link to AMA Volume from the File menu then navigating the folder where you’ve copied the clips from the card (you could potentially access the media directly from the camera card) – seconds later you will have a bin full of clips.

When linking to the Canon DSLR media Avid will create new timecode from the file metadata, a Time-of-Day timecode based on the record time in the file.

On my laptop, which isn’t very powerful with a Dual-Celeron 1.6GHz processor, I can play one stream of H.264 in realtime (assuming I’m not running other processor or memory intensive applications). For improved performance it is possible to transcode selected clips to an Avid resolution.

In my test video above, it take 13 seconds to link and index 46 minutes of footage from an external USB drive.

To put this in perspective, it took me only a couple of minutes to link to 5 cards containing a total of 129 minutes of footage. Also it’s significantly faster to transcode from the AMA material than it is to directly import the files – I transcoded a 1:03 clip to DNxHD 120 in 2 minutes 27 seconds, importing the same clip directly to DNxHD 120 on the same system took 5 minutes 06 seconds, a little over twice as long – again on my underpowered laptop with a few other memory-hungry apps running.

So in summary, the workflow issues with DSLR media in Avid Media Composer largely cease to exist in version 5.

More posts about Media Composer 5, including a lengthy review/introduction will be posted in the near future.