From JackJames at Apple Discussion Forums:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15478781#15478781
"The London Final Cut Pro Usergroup was held earlier today. As someone who
was, shall we say, "somewhat disappointed" by the latest release, I was
eager to hear what others thought, and whether or not there would be any
word from Apple as to the future of Final Cut Pro.
During the second half, Larry Jordan took the stage. One of the first things
he asked was how many people were pleased about the direction Final Cut Pro
had taken with the new release (I'm paraphrasing here). Out of about 300
people, maybe a dozen raised their hand. He then went on to give a bit of a
tour of the new version, in an effort to dispel some of the misinformation
circulating about the release. He also explained that while he isn't
directly affiliated with Apple, he had been in contact with the development
team (if I have some time tomorrow I will try to post a transcript of the
email he read out from them).
I will try to summarise the main points below:
* Audio cross-fades can be done, but the process is ugly. Probably will be
fixed soon.
* Media does not have to be copied to the local drive.
* Plugins will work, but the developers need to recode them.
* Keyboard shortcuts are same as FCP7
* It will be down to blackmagic et al. to get SDI out monitoring
* Apple Color is dead
* Audio mixing is not very good at the moment
* The magnetic timeline will grow on people, as will the skimmer
* You can do versioning by duplicating projects, otherwise everything is
saved as you go along (my own guess is that this will tie in to OS 10.7's
autosave and versioning functionality in the future anyway)
* Markers are still supported, with a new type of marker (a "to-do" marker)
* There's no way to have a separate viewer and sequence window like in FCP 7
* Dual screens can be used, in a limited sense
* There should be a major update within 4 months
* There's no way to work collaboratively right now
* It's mad that it doesn't import FCP7 projects
* It will be down to third-parties to create support for EDLs, XML, and
decks (Apple is not interested in any of these).
For me personally, it's the last point that kills it for me. Everything I do
in post revolves around interchange. EDLs are 30 years old, but they work
because they are incredibly simple. It should be so trivial to code EDL
export for Final Cut Pro that I'm actually looking into doing it myself. But
to "outsource" FCPXML -a specification created by Apple, no less - to
third-parties, will just not work in the long term. Who will decide how the
format grows (and unlike EDLs, it must grow)? Autodesk, Adobe, and others
actively support the FCPXML format. That Apple are effectively abandoning it
is bad news for the post industry.
Anyway, I hope that's food for thought for some of you. I'll update this
post tomorrow if I think of anything else I've missed."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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