Yesterday someone gave me a film to fix. It was ancient 16mm with bad colour and the sync out of sync. I got it in two formats – MPEG2 and Canopus codec. All I had to do was re-sync and re-colour. Half and hour’s work, with any luck.
I’ve been using FCP since it was in beta, and up to last year was a vocal advocate. It was a pain to me to have to buy a Mac as well as a PC, but it was worth it.
Actually, I didn’t have to buy anything at first, as I was a senior producer at BBC TV. Two days a month I was a consultant to a BBC place called the DigiLab, where my part was to try out various technical gear with a view to producers using it themselves – self shoot, self edit, saves lots of money. That was the theory anyway. We had been running an Eidos offline system called Optima, and though it did the job well in the early nineties it was well past its sell by date.
When the The Man From Apple came in with an FCP beta we were amazed, and I went around telling everyone that we’d finally found a replacement. I added it to my Royal Television Society lectures and everyone else was amazed too. RTE in Dublin bought a pile of systems and later brought me in to train producers there. Recently, a couple of years ago, the BBC decided that their new Salford base would be all FCP, a good decision (to my mind) at the time. Not so good in hindsight.
I left the BBC to be freelance/retired in 2001. I needed an editing system, and after a few months with a really rubbish PC editor, I bought a G4 with my own money. Freelance work paid for it in reasonably short order, and I rolled on, updating FCP as the new versions came out. I’m not in any way an Apple fan, the Mac is just a tool, and when the G4 got a bit old I looked for new gear. I was horrified at the price Apple charge for a PC in fancy clothes, and they weren’t even the latest spec. I built myself a Hackintosh which was a bit more up to date, and carried on. I, like everyone else, looked forward to each new FCP release adding functionality and sorting out odd problems. FCP had the accelerator pedal on the right, and the steering wheel in front of me, just like Avid and Premiere, except that it was more ergonomic than either, a pleasure to edit with.
So then it all went wrong. Steve Jobs never got everything right, contrary to some people’s deeply held religious beliefs, and FCPX was a big mistake. Most people want the accelerator pedal on the right. The era of “the graphics/editing guys will only use Macs” was over. Now Apple relies on bringing out new glitzy toys with short term appeal to twenty-somethings with money and is the world’s richest company. It’s made a huge success, based on Foxconn cheap Chinese labour, but it has to keep coming out with new toys. An iPhone 6 or iPad 4 just won’t cut it in 2014, and now they’ve dumped the old faithfuls. And Chinese labour isn’t going to stay cheap. I do wonder if what we’re seeing is their own private Apple dotcom bubble. In about 2015 there’ll be endless articles by people who “saw it coming”.
Personally, I tried FCPX, as I’ve tried lots of other systems. Walter Murch said, I think, something along the lines of “Apple are looking further into the future than me”. Apple are looking at a future that doesn’t include lots of professionals, probably not Walter Murch, maybe not the BBC, and certainly not me.
Back in my tiny editing world in Surrey, my film wouldn’t stay sync. I’ve never seen this before, but every time I’d got it right – and it wasn’t difficult – it would go out again. Restarts and Pref Trashing didn’t make a difference. I still don’t know what the problem was, but it doesn’t matter now.
What I needed was a different editor, just to eliminate some of the possible reasons, and I needed it now, before I went mad listening to the same words over and over. Someone had suggested recently that I gave Edius a try. Long ago it had been one that we tried and dropped, but you can download a full function 30 day trial, and I just needed to try an alternative to FCP 7.
An hour or so later I was a very happy person.
From the time I started the software to the time the job was done was less than an hour. The accelerator pedal and the steering wheel were where they were meant to be, and the 3-way colour panel was only slightly hidden. I didn’t have to re-learn anything, it just worked. And it just worked on the PC which I use far more than the MacHack. It may not be suitable for BBC Salford or Disney – I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.
To get to FCP7 I’d had to fiddle around with format changers of various types, in Edius I just loaded the MPEG2 file off the incoming DVD. I exported to H264 as requested and the job was done. After I’d posted off the material to my client I sat down and fiddled some more with the software. I loaded some AVCHD rushes and started editing. Just trying out the usual stuff – overwrite, insert, add a music track, change some levels etc. Completely painless, and a pleasure to discover, just like FCP beta all those years ago.
I’ve bought a proper copy – currently at half price from a UK dealer – and even at full price cheaper than Premiere, though not cheaper than FCPX. I’d like to get rid of the extra box on the floor next to me, but I actually value and use Soundtrack Pro, Color and Motion, so it’s going to stay. And it might turn out that my impulse buy was a mistake and I’ll go back to FCP7.
But probably not.
Bernard Newnham 25th Feb 2012.
A PS – long ago at the BBC our department bought the first PAL Grass Valley 300 Mixer (switcher) . It was the best there was. Now I’m back to using Grass Valley gear again for the first time in 20 years.
