Jon Alper's probably insufficiently humble opinion

[See bottom for updates since first publication.]

Based on Apple’s presentation and press coverage so far, there are three words to sum up my first impressions of the new Final Cut Pro X.: Awesome, Unknown and Unfortunate.

The Awesome

I’m not an editor. There are a lot of people who think they’re editors. They’re not. I know real editors and, I can tell you, I’m not one of them. Final Cut Pro has always been a utility to me to solve technical problems with video and bash bits of it together. A real editor is an artist. A deep collaborator in the storytelling process and somebody whose brilliance spans the gamut from cutting diamonds to polishing turds. I’ve worked with these editors, these people with real talent, on and off for decades from the old days of A/B roll linear editing with U-matic videotape decks through the early days of Avid and the fun of AVR compressed video that would make your iPhone movies look like Blu-ray by comparison and into the modern age of Final Cut Pro. What Apple has done with the NLE in Final Cut Pro X is, truly, revolutionary. Arguably it has the potential to be as much a transformation of video editing as the invention of the NLE. The new UI and the flexibility it offers will surely be jarring to existing users but it truly does stand to change the game completely.  It’s no small thing that FCP got a ground up re-write that means it can finally use all the RAM you can feed it, bludgeon all the cores you can offer it and, based on Apple’s claims, background process audio and video so well as to make the dreaded render dialog a thing of the past. ColorSync support, resolution independence, and non-destructive pre-filtering of audio and video are truly marvelous but the revolution is in really in two places: Metadata and the timeline.

Metadata: Setting aside the mechanical tedium of ingestion, correction and export, editing is about choices. It’s about knowing the often ten, twenty or even fifty or more times the total duration of your source footage and being able to choose, re-order and sweeten it all in to the perfect distillation of what matters. To do this as a true editor/artist, you must deeply know your source materials and . if you are working with a Director and Producer, be able to present them with choices to make to allow them to delude themselves into thinking they still have control over the final product while you help them convey their vision sometimes in spite of themselves. Apple’s new approach to media management finally makes the idea of logging as you go a realistic and, arguably better approach than the methodical review, log, tag and bin before you start cutting that a good editor must do now. Now, moments in a clip can be keyworded and are, essentially accessible by almost magical means as smart clips. Now the bins can live and breath as your project evolves without making a nightmarish mess. Content Aware metadata will make better movies.

The same essential change, the ability to be fluid in the process of evolving your project also applies the timeline. Gone is the need to have a methodical plan for sub-sequences and byzantine markers. Over are the days of being afraid to rethink something late in the cut for fear of breaking sync or losing something perfect in your undo buffer. Magnetic tracks, the almost magical flexibility afforded to creating and refining L and J cuts will make better movies. In particular, they will make better documentaries.

These changes will revolutionize video editing. People used to old ways of working will suffer from the shock of change. Those punk kids will think they’re editors just because they can cut together a show.  True talent. adaptable, thoughtful, true talent will delight, evolve and shock us with what these new approaches mean for video storytelling.

A lot of the ‘buzz’ I won’t link to seems to be folks objecting to the more approachable look of the UI and, to me anyway, seems to be people saying essentially “It doesn’t look intimidating anymore, it’s not a Pro tool and I won’t feel cool because I know how to use it.”  You can imagine I think that might miss the point. While there are surely a few things too-pretty-by-half about the eye candy in the UI, the fact is, Apple has brilliantly rethought the Non-Linear Editor UI in ways that will change video. The changes, and not just the buzzword compliant ones, will turn out to be revolutionary.

To understand why the changes in the UI are so profound, you need to see it demonstrated. Lucky us,  YouTube User machineurs has posted two segments of  camcorder capture of Apple  previewing Final Cut Pro X at NAB: Part One and Part Two

Beyond the truly revolutionary UI and what it can mean for a fluid creative process, the price, $299 is, truly, awesome.

Unknown:  There are unknowns and some of them are a little unsettling. In truth, beyond one item below, most of what struck me as ‘unfortunate’ are things I am admittedly cynically speculating about from the list of unknowns.

The core  of those unknowns rests in what hasn’t yet been said about the Final Cut Studio and, more importantly, the functionality it offers.

(One article in Macworld suggests that there is hope for some or all of these apps so my angst about the unknowns may turn out to be much ado about nothing.)

Understanding the concern perhaps depends on a refresher of what’s available now. The current FInal Cut Pro product is Final Cut Studio 7 and it includes Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, SoundTrack Pro 3, Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 and DVD Studio Pro 4.

Color, perhaps, has been made a moot concern by the incredible in-the-timeline color correction features in FCP X. Color is, by all accounts, a remarkably good color grading tool but it did demand a somewhat kludgy workflow. Most people almost certainly did their grading even in the now ‘old’ FCP. It’s just unknown how much of Color is now in Final Cut Pro itself or whether it will continue as a separate application. The way FCP was announced, it would seem it has no future on its own.

Soundtrack Pro also seems to have much of its ease of use for level control and time correction elegantly  stuffed into the timeline UI but, pending more information of about FCP X, it seems likely much of the other value in Soundtrack Pro, coring, will be lost and, if so, that will be a shame. STP’s loop-based scoring is something I have a tough time imagining being made part of the Final Cut  Pro X UI. It just wouldn’t seem to fit in well. Again, the “it’s $299, no upgrades, no confusion” message at the presentation implies SoundTrack Pro is ex software and just nailed to the perch.

Motion is another unknown. How much of what Motion did is now folded into Final Cut X? Will there still be a Motion application? Is Apple giving Adobe the pro-sumer Motion Graphics business in After Effects as an “I’m sorry” for finally telling everyone Flash is just too broken? So far, we just don’t know. AfterEffects is, even with Motion as a product often a necessary and valuable tool anyway. AfterEffects is just a more complete tool. Is Motion going away tragic? Perhaps not.

The real scary unknowns are Compressor and DVD Studio Pro.

Compressor in FCP Studio 7 just sucks.I really do wish I could be kinder. I have encoded thousands of clips and and hundreds of hours using all major versions of Cleaner, several of Squeeze Episode in addition to the using the encoding features of countless other tools. Compressor just sucks. It’s less approachable than Xcode, has lingering bugs and UI ambiguities and it is simply unable to reliably exploit the hardware it runs on. In many ways it remains, to this day inferior, to what Cleaner was about ten years ago before it languished for lack of love at AutoDesk, (Note that I link to neither.).

The problem is, Compressor  sucks a lot less than nothing. For Compressor to simply go away will leave a gaping hole in the tools Apple provides.  Is there a a batch processing functionality now added to FCP?  A means of managing encode queues across multiple machines now part of the Final Cut Pro UI?  Will it become necessary for more users to buy and learn Squeeze or Episode if they plan to do anything more serious than upload to YouTube and not care? It’s unkown at this point what has or will become of Compressor. I don’t have a warm fuzzy about it. I hear the words “third party opportunity” said in a NoCal accent in my head. I hear a pregnant pause after the word “So…” as I imagine myself asking about it. It worries me.

DVD Studio Pro. [Disclosure: I have made a substantial portion of my living authoring commercial DVDs some of which you have likely heard of and may have seen in stores or on Amazon if not actually watched.  I have helped teach DVD Studio Pro at Macworld Expo and I was even quoted in Apple glossy marketing materials. So I do feely disclose that I have a vested interest in DVD.]  Apple acts like it wants DVD dead. It feels like Apple has hired Boris and Natasha to go after DVD and drag it off to the secret gulag out back behind Whatsamatta U. The problem is, unlike Bullwinkle, DVD will continue to successfully pull rabbits out of its hat and remain useful and therefore, for film makers, necessary for at least a few more years. If DVD Studio Pro is dead, it’s virtually certain the functionality it offered hasn’t been folded in Final Cut Pro X. Adobe Encore may be the only practical/affordable option. Not a bad one, surely, but another UI and cost.

So far the Unknowns all look like they land, at least in part,  in the unfortunate camp.

What does appear to be squarely  in the land of the unfortunate is that it appears FCP X will only be available in the Mac App Store. That’s just bad. The Final Cut Studio 7 package actually includes some useful paper documentation and the earlier versions, full (and damned good ) paper manuals. The packaged product also includes good tutorials and the media to support them, a DVD full of Sound track Loops  and a full set of .pdf manuals. Sold via the Mac App Store there wont be seven DVD’s worth of application(s) and content to download.

Beyond that though is that no competently managed NLE in a professional production environment is even allowed on the public internet. I’m sure I will get feedback telling me I’m off base on this but I stand by it. If you run a post production operation and you are letting your editors surf the web, download applications and updates to their NLEs you are mis-managing your assets. Period. Buy them an iMac or a laptop for that. Selling Final Cut Pro X only via the app store is Apple not recognizing what ‘Pro’ really means. Will FCP X remain available via other channels? Only if the Pros demand it. Start demanding. Now.

———–UPDATE 4.15.11 ———–

This is a great piece on FCP X introduction and more support for some of my unknowns perhaps moving from unfortunate to awesome. I didn’t even touch the QuickTime question Larry asks but the fact that the blue Q wasn’t even mentioned by Apple is, to me telling: http://www.larryjordan.biz/app_bin/wordpress/archives/1452

As a side note, I read the comments on Larry’s post and continue to be amused by the techno-machismo evident in the fear of the comment writers that the tool might make things too easy.

It is a completely valid concern that a tool would be ‘dumbed down’ to make integration into pro workflows a problem or professional level functionality either removed or so deeply hidden as to be useless.  It’s utterly laughable to be worried that a tool you learned with difficulty will now be easier for others to master.

As broadcast TV continues it’s slow death, and really, it’s basically over, content creators have allowed and even propped up more intermediaries. Intermediaries that mean consumers will pay for more and more services to get access to ‘big budget media’.

The content producers are allowing themselves to get squeezed into a constrained income by their intermediaries and consumers are allowing themselves to be roped into spending money for things they have already paid for once. (Paid for with spectrum allocation, advertising views or, in the case of public television, tax money and donations and corporate underwriting [it’s called underwriting not advertising].).

The changes in the media economy have hurt content producers and consumers and propped up cable companies and ‘internet cable companies’ like Apple iTunes and Netflix (and Hulu <smirk>).

The ‘video rental store model’ and, perhaps sooner than we’d like the physical media model (DVD/BluRay) are eaten by Netflix too.  For now, Netflix is a benefit to consumer cost, convenience and variety but as Netflix gets more control, that will change unless the Cable Companies fight back more effectively.

What’s ironic and interesting is that now, many people would actually be better off with no cable and with Netflix andrabbit ear antenna for ‘loca’l tv.  For now, bundling  internet access with cable services props up the cable companies. Cable company efforts to undermine net neutrality are their cowardice about the ‘the new world order’ threatening their business model. They’ll use a stick (traffic shaping) rather than risk inventing a carrot (viable alternatives to Netflix/TiVo etc).

The take-away, to me, continues to be:

– Content creators need to work hard to disintermediate the Cable Co.’s, Netflix and Apple or they’re doomed, especially independent content creators.

– Consumers need to be vigilant about how much they pay for services that take away their control (DRM, availability windows, bad law, (ACTA) etc.) in exchange for convenience. Consumer’s risks will include an ever-shrinking variety of editorial voices and an ever-growing portion of their disposable income spent on media as intermediaries take control. Control that is propped up by law and inertia.

Fear on the part of big media has allowed intermediaries to make things ‘safe’ for them in the short term and fatal in the long term for most (not all). Netflix and Apple brilliantly allowed content creators to think they were preserving old business models and surviving in the ‘new world order’. In fact, what was happening was intermediaries were taking new control over producers’ fate and access to their audiences.

What producers who actually care about quality (to the extent they still do) should be doing is resisting the obvious ‘business think’. Old busines-think has producers ‘adapting’ to the new realities in MBA-safe ways instead of radically mutating in anticipation of the new environment.

Sports and news are two spaces where the power balance is, to a point, still weighted toward the content owners. The news business is under obvious threat from the audience’s inability to know journalism from propaganda, commentary, guesswork or gossip or what was fashionably once gathered under the moniker ‘citizen journalism’. The sports business is trickier. I can’t really comment intelligently on how that’s shaking out because I’m not a consumer or even interested observer of sports content beyond Formula 1 racing. (And even that interest is waning as the sport is diluted by rule changes.)

Food for thought: “Is the current broadcast tv busines-model such that it will become necessary for broadcast tv to come down *against* network neutrality in order to survive since they’d get no traction legislatively imposing ‘must carry’ on Apple and Netflix?”

I’ve had a number of jobs over the years where R&D was in my portfolio as support staff, a participant and a manager and I’ve worked, as an I.T. tech, in pure research facilities. I’ve learned something. Ship your research.

I worked as the hands-on I.T. guy for a now defunct medical devices company. The job was great. I was there while they grew from about thirty people to close to two hundred over the course of about two years. Until late in my tenure there, all the R&D was done in specific support of their flagship product. Whether it was on the accounting ledger as R&D I couldn’t tell you but thousands of staff hours were spent on researching everything from materials science, manufacturing practices and, of course the formal clinical trials of their products. Virtually every dollar spent on this R&D was driven by a product goal. Everything tested and experimented with during my first year there was being tested for use in the product line they actually intended to ship. Nobody was on the clock saying “I wonder if.”. If somebody had an idea, If it wasn’t vetted as having a potential commercial future, it didn’t get done. There was no ‘pure R&D’. That didn’t mean some ideas didn’t get very far along before they died. I remember every man and woman in the company being brought into a room to feel plastic breasts. We went in, we were asked “does this feel real”. A few weeks later we were asked “Can you find a lump?”. The goal was a training simulator for breast examination. As I recall, and I could be wrong, the conclusion they came to was that the stimulants of breast tissue, skin and lumps couldn’t be made meaningfully enough realistic to make it safe to teach to ignore what to feel as case to for concern and what to feel as normal variation. The project was summarily killed and the staff back on in process projects without any kind of merciful pause or mourning period. It was a dead end quickly.

I worked for another company that was ultimately sold to a very large company you’ve surely heard of. I got supremely lucky in my brief tenure there. I arrived at the worst possible time to actually achieve any of what I hoped to when first took the job but the President and CEO were extremely honorable and generous with me despite the chaos that began a week after I arrived. Frankly, I seriously lucked out. It was immediately scary within mere days of my hire but that panic ultimately evolved into the sale to ‘unnamed huge company’ and most of the engineering team went on to jobs there and do major work, on the other side of the country. That company, the one sold, began life as a firm doing very academic R&D funded in large part by SBIR grants doing work for NASA. Things even now not yet, as far as I know, deployed by NASA. The things they built, the prototypes done as R&D were shockingly cool things. Things I still, more than a decade later, haven’t seen make it into mainstream products. The brilliance in what they built is impossible to articulate. These people, from the founder on down were shockingly smart. They built controllers for telepresence and simulations that included touch feedback. Now, we’ve all felt a gun in a console game that jumps in your hand when fired. A steering wheel that rumbles when the virtual car runs over a bumpy patch on the pixel track. Imagine touch feedback so nuanced, so elegantly implemented that you could feel the shape of a virtual space you couldn’t see while walking through it with a joystick. Imagine feedback so nuanced you could draw the shape of a virtual maze based only on what you felt from the joystick. Imagine touch feedback so good that if you used it on a steering wheel in a game, it made you able to drive the car closer to its limits and complete laps faster. The steering of my real car is ‘drive by wire’ more than fifteen years later and it gives me less useful feedback than those prototypes. The R&D that built the prototypes was R&D with a purpose but it wasn’t R&D that was ever intended to end up in anything like the test form in a final product. They weren’t rough drafts, they were proofs of concept to learn from. None of that work was ultimately visible as more than a faint glimmer in the final shipping products. No fault on anyone there, the costs involved and target market of the final products not only precluded it but actually might have made the product inferior.

Before both and after both of these jobs, I’ve been employed as and a consultant to pure academic research facilities mostly in biotech. Academic research is, and should be, a completely different ball game. It’s not technology R&D, it’s science. There are critical differences there. The purpose of science is discovery. Pure, simple, discovery. Sure, maybe it will lead to a new medication, a new procedure or a business opportunity but that isn’t, and can’t be, the purpose. The purpose is “Let’s build a test to see how this works”. You don’t, for example, send the Voyager space probes to invent a product. You do it because we, as a species, need to learn. Of course, there will usually be technology innovations created in support of the research that could lead to business opportunity but the purpose of the work is pure learning. Cancer research may lead to cancer cures. Pure academic metabolic research might also. You have to invest in basic research on cellular metabolism whether or not you’re studying cancer. The current climate of public derision in the press for research that seems to have no probable useful purpose is bad for society. Research, pure research done with scientific rigor is vital for its own sake. Science is enormously important. Our society is investing less and less in true science and that’s deeply disturbing. It is important to remember though that R&D is not science even if we seek to apply scientific rigor.

Finally, I’ve worked on  a lot of new media jobs. All these experiences above taught me this. When you’re doing R&D in a commercial tech company? Ship your research. I don’t mean literally take an idea all the way to a product you sell. I mean treat it like everything will be or will be used for shipping products.

If you want to explore a technical idea, an innovation, invest in it when you think can actually use it. Don’t expend your core resources just fiddling around. Find a business goal you think your idea can support and find a way to make the project fund the research or the research fund another business goal. So, for example, let’s say you want to experiment with a new CMS, find a project that needs the functionality you want to explore. Do structured tests to see if what you want to be true stands a decent chance of being true. Set break points to check your thinking and set about actually doing work with the experimental notion with the idea you plan to ship it. Don’t fund the research out of R&D, fund it out of an actual project. Do the research with the same level of rigor you’d bring to production methods you already know and use. You will, I hope, fail miserably regularly. Failure is the cornerstone of innovation. You have to be prepared to throw an idea away that’s clearly not going to work.

The thing is though, if you don’t treat your R&D with the same level of rigor you would if it was sure to actually ship, you’ll learn nothing. You’ll never stress test the idea. If it’s a new software tool, you’ll never test the vendors support services. If it’s a new version of a tool you already use, you’ll never put it through the mundane day to day processes you’ll have to when you’re actually doing production work.

The worst mistakes, the most disastrous  dead ends, the most massive cost over-runs and delays were almost always something you could trace back to a decision that went like this: “We’ve spent a few weeks looking at this tool and reading up and we want to invest in this tool.” Investment in a tool is sometimes just training and time. Sometimes it’s millions on expensive hardware. All of these messes arose from somebody thinking the technology itself could do magic. People do magic, technology doesn’t. Only applying the same level of self criticism and doubt to your ‘experiments’ as your customers will to your products can you make efficient use of your research.

A concrete example should make this clear:  If you make television shows and you want to try a new editing system (NLE), deploy one and use it. Now, testing a new new NLE may not seem like R&D but it is. It’s what needs to be done to stay at the cutting edge in the video production business. First, use it to produce an internal project. A real project with stakeholders and somebody other than you setting expectations for turnaround time and quality; an internal presentation reel for example. Remember though, don’t cut something that nobody cares about. Cut something that somebody outside the testing group cares about. Something underfunded but low stakes. Use the R&D budget to make a skilled editor available to this project. Use the R&D budget to rent this much desired new system for the important internal project that couldn’t otherwise afford it. Pick something gnarly. Something with footage from disparate sources. Something that relies on your motion graphics group to make assets for. Pick something with a picky stakeholder who will make you make a pile of annoying last minute changes. In the middle of the project? Break the NLE. No, I don’t mean spill coffee into it, but I do mean break it. Install something you shouldn’t. Disconnect the media drive in the middle of a render. Delete some obscure application file and call for support. See how it will be when there’s an air date on the line. If your internal project survives all this. If your experienced editor comfortably adapts to the tool. If they like the tool. You’ve given your senior staff a chance to play with a new tool. They get professional and personal development. Your ‘no paying client’ internal project that was important enough to fund got done with the money set aside for R&D. Your test of the new tool stress tested it.

Next step. Use the new NLE on an actual project. Not one for a client but one that’s complete. One you’ve already shipped that you’re proud of. Assign a junior editor and producer to re-make something that’s already been done from the carefully archived materials for a finished project. Then you’ll test your NLE with a real volume of footage. The previous finished product is the benchmark for the re-make. Everything from lower thirds, to effects to closed captioning gets put through the workflow with the new NLE.

If the new NLE lives through this test, you’ve really stress tested it. You’ve reduced your business risk in deciding to deploy it on paying projects and you’ve done these tests with enough different people involved you can make your choices based on feedback from the people, your people, that will need to rely on the tool. You didn’t just read an article and say “it’s the latest thing we have to use it”.

You’ll have tested your archiving compliance. You’ll have given your senior staff a chance to participate in a strategic choice. You’ll have given your junior staff to learn new things and get their hands on playing with a flagship project.. They’ll learn from how their more experienced colleagues work. You’ll have a low risk letting these junior staff try things and see how they perform.

You’ll get to see how the NLE that survived the stresses of making a five minute internal demo reel. If the new NLE survives that test? Then you deploy in a relatively low stakes project in production. It’s R&D research and development. You researched the viability of the tool and you developed the internal resources to deploy it. Even if it turns out to be badly supported overpriced junk you’d never buy in any volume, you’ve spent your R&D money well.

R&D in I.T. and New Media Production is about testing new tools, new workflows, new ways of capturing, organizing and presenting information. Your time and money should be spent moving to scenarios where you’re actually testing the ideas in real-world scenarios while managing risk. Maybe it’s a new visual metaphor. Prototype it and get it in front of real users not your staff and do it in a structured and objective way. Go in hoping it will crash and burn as much as you’re hoping it will be a breakthrough. If you’re not, very quickly, imposing discipline on your process you’re wasting money and putting your business at risk.