Gradually, that became less and less true. Over that decade I’d continued to use Final Cut extensively, and even taught a beginner’s course in it for several years. But as the industry changed in monumental ways, particularly with the move to HD production, and Final Cut lagged behind trends and technological advances and stuck with the same tired paradigms, I grew increasingly frustrated with the application. Eventually I stopped using Final Cut and stopped making videos. I often wonder if part of the reason for quitting was that the tools had become such a burden to me.

I haven’t made a video in a couple of years now, but when Final Cut Pro X was announced I was really excited to hear it. Excited in the way you are when you see an old friend from college and they’ve just gotten a makeover. Excited in that, “God, Final Cut, it’s been ages! You look great!” kind of way. It’s not that I have any genuine interest in rekindling the friendship, I’ve moved on with my life. But it’s heartening to see an old friend with a new spring in his step.

Unfortunately, the makeover seems to have included a lobotomy.

Sources of Information
An insane amount has already been written about this release, and I don’t want to rehash much. So I’ll start by just listing what I’ve read so far, because it informs where I’m coming from. I also think these are really good sources for folks who want to learn more.

Macworld First Look
Macworld Opinion
Ken Stone First Look
Phillip Hodgetts Unanswered Questions
John Gruber’s Take

David Pogue’s Takes 1 Through 3
Take 1
Take 2
Take 3

Jeffrey Harrell’s Takes
This one’s really good, but you know what, just read the whole fucking blog, it’s all FCPX stuff, and jeff Harrell is a terrifically entertaining writer.

Art Guglielmo’s Take
Creative Cow’s List of Missing Features
Ken Segall’s Take

Richard Harrington’s Response to David Pogue (Wow)

Trends
Right off the bat there is one very clear trend here: People who don’t edit video professionally seem to like Final Cut Pro X; professional video editors, on the other hand, tend to find this release largely unusable.

Another pretty obvious trend is the sheer amount of passion people feel about Final Cut Pro. I’m not alone in having such strong feelings; Final Cut Pro is — or at least was — an application that inspired fierce loyalty and admiration from its users, many of whom have relied on it for their livelihoods for over ten years. So there’s a crazy amount of writing being done about the new release.

The Good
Here’s just a quick list of some of the stuff they got right with FCPX.

• Performance is reportedly vastly improved with multi-core and GPU smarts.
• FCPX is 64bit and can now address a full compliment of RAM.
• Far less rendering is needed and most clips just play in realtime.
• Background rendering allows you to keep working while you render. Huzzah!
• Background import lets you edit while you ingest.
• Revamped interface makes certain common operation quicker and easier.

The Bad
And here’s some of the good stuff they omitted or just simply gutted.

• No XML, OMF or EDL exports.
• No way to open projects created in prior version.
• No way to buy the previous version.
• No way to organize media outside of keywords and Events.
• No video reference monitor support.
• No support for Photoshop layers.
• No tracks.
• Almost no tape support — only DV and HDV are supported.
• No RED Camera support (which I thought was half the point of this release).
• All available media (even that of competing clients, for instance) appears in the interface at all times.
• No multi-camera editing.

So you can see there’s a lot of good stuff there. Stuff that FCP users have wanted for a long, long time. Stuff to make you work faster, smarter, more efficiently. But it’s all completely mitigated by the huge list of drawbacks, many of which are non-starters for Pro editors. In fact it seems like every feature Apple threw out of FCPX was something Pros — and perhaps only Pros — really needed. But the thing is, they really needed it.

Some Thoughts
After reading everything I can about how FCPX works, there are three major points that come to my mind. The first is about the software itself: It seems to me that what Final Cut used to be — what made it such a good tool — was that it was flexible. You could do things many different ways, and you could set it up in a way that suited you. One of the biggest problems with version X seems to be that it is inflexible, that you must bend to its will, to its way of thinking. That’s a step backwards.

The second thought is about the development of the software: It almost seems as if Apple developed FCPX in a complete and utter vacuum. It’s as if they never once consulted a single professional editor. The implications of this are truly frightening.

And this inevitably leads me to my third major thought, the thought I can no longer avoid, the one about the very core of Apple as a company: Is Apple abandoning the Pro market?

Communication
Apple may be a secretive company, but I believe they communicate in subtle ways the direction their products are headed by the focus they give those products. I continue to believe, for instance, that the design of the iPad communicates that it is a product more for the consuming of media than for the creation of media, and thus far the app ecosystem we’ve seen grow up around this platform has largely shown that to be the case. Sure, you can make stuff on an iPad, but that’s not really its intended primary function. That’s not its specialty, at least not in its current incarnation.

So let’s look at Final Cut Pro X and see if we can’t glean some similar conclusions from its interface. And to do that, let’s look at the fundamental organizing principle around which FCPX is based: The Event.

The Meaning of The Event
The concept around which clip organization is meant to occur in FCPX is that of The Event. Each time you import footage it creates Events out of the import, placing each import into some kind of chronological order (just like in iPhoto, for instance). This is great, and really smart if you’re shooting home videos; you tend to organize them chronologically in your mind anyway, so it’s a logical way to order your videos in a project.

But if you come from professional video and film, you’ll immediately see the flaw in the thinking here. The notion that a production is organized this way is completely and utterly wrong, and based entirely in the world of home movies, the world of the consumer. Feature films are shot in order of convenience — almost always out of sequence, not chronologically — so organizing by Events is anathema to the world of professional film and video.

If you view the things that Apple makes as a sort of body language of the company, it starts to look very much like Final Cut Pro X is telling us something very loudly and very clearly: This is not software for professionals.

Couple the release of FCPX with other recent recent Apple trends — the discontinuation of XSAN and Xserve, the price drop and likely lack of development of Mac OS X Server and the lackluster recent Mac Pro builds — and if you’re any kind of Apple Professional, you’ll start to get worried. Apple is beginning to look very much like a company that’s moving away from what was once its base, creative professionals, and exclusively towards the consumer masses.

Conclusion
Final Cut Pro X seems like a step backwards for the venerable editing suite we’ve all come to love over the past decade, feature-wise to be sure, but also philosophically. Maybe it will quickly become more capable and flexible, maybe the real deal-breakers will get addressed, and maybe it will all turn out groovy in the end. Maybe Apple will ultimately listen to its professional customers, though they don’t seem to have even consulted them in the first place. It’s hard to tell sometimes with such a complete overhaul what the future holds.

But you may not want to hold your breath. Final Cut Pro X really seems to me like another, rather loud signal from Apple to the professional world that they’re done providing us with the best software and hardware around, and that their only real focus going forward will be the average computer user, the consumer. iPhones and iPads for everyone!

Apple used to care deeply about the Pro market, because it was the Pros that gave them so much good press, so much visibility. It was the Pros that really supported Apple, particularly behind the scenes, via word of mouth. Apple made the cool Pro kit, and the Pros went around and told all their friends about Apple, showed it off. The Pros contributed a great deal towards Apple’s mindshare. But now that Apple has managed to tap into the consumer psyche in a large and extremely profitable way, they seem to care less and less about their bread and butter for the last 20 years, creative professionals. Final Cut Pro X is the most definitive statement of that attitude I’ve seen to date. As someone who’s based his career to a great degree on Apple hardware and software, it makes me sad.

Which is to say that FCP will finally be able to do all those things like threading and taking advantage of multiple cores, using as much memory as you’ve got, background rendering and exporting, and simultaneous ingestion and editing.

Image Via The Loop

Essentially, Final Cut Pro X is a complete, ground-up rewrite of the app, as well as rethinking of what a non-linear digital video editing application can and should be. Much like they did with iMovie — and likely drawing from many of its lessons — Apple has sought once again to redefine how we approach video editing. In fact, FCPX even looks like a mashup of the elder FCP and iMovie. It also looks to me like they’ve got a winner.

In addition to finally leveraging core OS components, the new FCP both removes the annoyances of yesteryear — things like the inability to use the application when you’re performing an export (God, that was frustrating!) — and adds forward-thinking improvements like the addition of metadata for faces, places and tags, as well as a far better ability to deal with today’s complex CODECs and cameras. It’s very cool and makes me wish I still did video. Frankly, despite the fact that these days I am not making nor teaching video, I may buy Final Cut Pro X anyway, just to play with it. Yeah, it looks that cool.

It’s also fairly reasonably priced at $299 (no more Final Cut Express, apparently), and available from, of all places, the Mac App Store. While I’m not quite yet a fan of the MAS, I am kind of excited at the prospect of being able to get FCPX on a whim with nothing more than a credit card and an Internet connection.

At any rate, even though I’m no longer a video guy, I’m so very happy to see one of my all-time favorite applications, Final Cut Pro, finally, after years of neglect, get the upgrade it so richly deserves. The actual video guys must be so psyched! Lucky bastards!

Winscape

I’ve actually had this idea for some time. Get a large, bright screen and show video of the outdoors on it. Hang it on the wall and frame it with some trim so it looks like a window, and voila! Instant techno-window. But this rig adds one cool wrinkle: parallax. Parallax is the changing of said view out said window as your position relative to said window changes. Simply playing video of the beach on a screen will yield less realistic results as it will lack the parallax effect.

Parallax in the Winscape rig is achieved with a transmitter on the viewer that sends location to a sensor on or near the virtual window display. As the viewer moves relative to the screen, a computer tracks the movement and updates the display accordingly.

As someone who deals with a lot of art and museum installation, I can tell you that there is at least one big potential problem with this kind of setup. How do you deal with more than one viewer?

The Winscape system, while cool in concept, is clearly only suitable for the basement-living single crowd. Pity.

Some History
In the very cross-platform lab where I used to work we were continually on the hunt for the best filesystem solution for users of multiple platforms when they were using external firewire or USB drives. That is, some folks wanted their drives to be accessible from both the Mac OS and Windows. On the surface this can seem like an easy problem to solve — Fat32 (or “MS-DOS” as it’s called in Disk Utility) is readable and writable on both platforms. But it’s not so cut and dry.

The biggest problem for me was video. See, I taught — and continue to teach — a video class in that very same department. We use Final Cut Pro as our editing software, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I prefer to work on the Mac. I require my students to have a firewire drive appropriate to showing in-progress video work in class. But Fat32 has a 4GB file size limit, and video captures can often exceed that limit. What happens when this limit is exceeded is interesting from a systems standpoint, but devastating from a user standpoint.

Video and Fat32
When capturing video in Final Cut Pro to a Fat32 volume, what happens is that the video file gets segmented. That is, the capture file gets written in 4GB chunks. Initially, Final Cut will see these chunks and understand what they are. But after saving the project and quitting the app Final Cut will no longer be able to locate the captured media because it’s in multiple files with different names. The path to the media that FCP relies on is now, essentially, broken. This actually happened to a student of mine some time ago, and we were able to use the cat command to reconstruct the single movie file onto an HFS+ volume and then point FCP at the reconstructed file. Boy was that fun.

NTFS
We’ve often looked to the ever-popular NTFS file system as a possible future solution. It does not have such small file size limits, and it’s readable on Mac and Windows. But the Mac has never been able to write to NTFS. So, in the past, our solution in the lab — our recommendation for users who really needed a dual-format drive with read/write capabilities on Mac and Windows — was to use the HFS+ filesystem on the drive and use MacDrive on Windows to read and write to that drive. Inelegant? Yes. But it mostly worked.

Mac and Windows Partitions
Another potentially attractive alternative to a single, dual-platform volume was the idea of splitting the drive into two partitions and dedicating each partition to a platform/filesystem. This way, even if all your Mac and Windows data wasn’t all mushed together in one volume, you could at least keep it all on one device. This solution would likely work for the vast majority of users. Unfortunately, there was never a particularly straightforward way of doing this. Sure, it was doable. But it wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t something you could tell new students to do. In fact, it was likely to require admin access and command-line heroics, and so just wasn’t a viable solution to anyone but the most die-hard user. Until now.

Without too much mucking around, it’s now possible to create a dual-format external drive that contains a mac-formatted partition and a Windows-formatted one.

MacFUSE and NTFS for Mac OS X
The first step is the only really tricky part, and it’s not even that tricky. If you have need for a dual-format drive, this should be pretty easy for you. You’re going to need to install the MacFUSE and NTFS packages. In a nutshell, MacFUSE is an experimental set of tools for doing unsupported things with filesystems like SSH, FTP and, of course, NTFS on your Mac. And, experimental though it may be, I’ve been using it for quite a while and have not had any problems to speak of. Installing MacFUSE and the NTFS drivers will allow you to mount NTFS volumes with read-write access.

MacFUSE

So, if NTFS can be mounted read-write on the Mac with MacFUSE, and it’s obviously read-write on Windows, and it doesn’t suffer from the file size limitations of Fat32, why not just use NTFS as your über-filesystem and format the whole drive with it? That’s a great question, and I’m glad I asked it!

The thing about getting NTFS read-write access on a Mac with MaFUSE is that it’s very much a hack. Yes, it works, but it has its problems. First and foremost among them is the fact that Final Cut Pro is really not a fan. In fact, FCP might just be the best barometer of a good cross-platform solution as it seems to be so picky about filesystems. So far, the only filesystem I’ve seen work consistently well with Final Cut is HFS+. No surprise there. And on NTFS it gets downright crazy. Files sometimes won’t open. Sometimes they won’t save. It’s a scary mess, and I wouldn’t trust my FCP data on NTFS for any amount of money.

But, what the MacFUSE NTFS package does get you is a relatively easy way to format your drive with separate Mac and Windows partitions, and this, at least in my tests seems to work just fine.

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X

The easiest way to get everything you need is to go to the NTFS-3G for Mac OS X website and download the latest package. This package will install the most recent non-beta version of MacFUSE as well as the latest NTFS libraries, and contains everything you need. Once you’ve installed this bundle, you’ll need to reboot your system.

Creating the Dual-Partition Drive
After the reboot you’ll see a new filesystem option when you go to format drives in Disk Utility.

A New Option

Moreover, that option will be available to individual partitions of drives that are otherwise formatted. And that’s what’s new (to me) and what allows the magic to happen. Here’s how you do it.

1. First, if you have any data on the drive that you need to preserve, back it up. This process WILL ERASE YOUR HARD DRIVE.
2. Next, select the drive you want to dual-format and choose the Partition tab.
3. Select a Volume Scheme. I’m just doing the simplest, two-partition scheme, with one Mac and one Windows partition, but you can certainly get more Byzantine with it if you’d like.
   

   Volume Scheme

4. Set the Format for the partition you want to use on the Mac to “Mac OS Extended (Journaled),” give it a name and a size.
   

   Mac Partition

5. Set the Format for the partition you want to use on Windows to “Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G),” give it a name and size.
   

   Windows Partition

6. Under the Options… set the partition scheme to “Master Boot Record.” This is needed for Windows to see your drive.
   

   Partition Scheme

7. Finally, hit the Apply button. You’ll be warned that everything is about to be deleted. Click through, and after a few seconds you will have completed the formatting process and your dual-format drive will be ready for use on Mac and Windows.

Caveats
As I said, so far this has been working really well for my class. You may still want to file it under “experimental” for the time being, at least until you’re sure it’s working safely. But I’m confident enough in this method to recommend it to my video students who also need some external Windows drive love.

It’s also important to keep in mind here that I am not endorsing using the NTFS partition for Mac data of any kind. Doing so is surely unsupported by Apple, and by all reports is fraught with problems.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, unlike with a GUID partition table, you will not be able to resize or split partitions without completely erasing the drive.

Erases Everything

Conclusion
Lastly, I realize that this process is hardly new, nor am I the first to discover it. It was pointed out to me by one of my video students, and I have a feeling the new admins at my old job have been using it for some time. But it’s new to me. This is the first I’ve heard of this and it’s exciting to me from an academic standpoint, in the context of my old job, in the context of my class, as a new option I can offer to whomever might need it, and as a symbol of progress — however small or kludgy — towards cross-platform filesystem solutions. This is just another of the very cool advances made possible by the existence of the MacFUSE (and the original Linux FUSE) effort. It’s very cool to see this sort of thing coming to fruition at last!

Another intriguing extension of the MacFUSE project — and one that I’ve used a bit myself — is MacFusion, which allows for mounting of data over network protocols such as FTP and SSH. I’m sure there are tons of others. I highly recommend folks — particularly SysAdmins — check out and familiarize themselves with MacFUSE in general, as well. As much as has been done since the last time I looked at it, there is still a ton of future potential in the project, and I see it increasingly becoming a part of the admin’s toolbox.

In this latest version, LiveType has disappeared and appears to now be completely integrated into Motion. Compressor now has image sequence support, blessedly, and Blu-Ray disc burning support, including basic menu creation. DVD Studio Pro sees no changes; it’s version number remains the same, prompting me to wonder about its fate.

But I’m most curious to see what the new version of Final Cut Pro has to offer. They appear to really be focusing on leveraging the new family of ProRes CODECs, which is great. Also great, Final Cut 7 can export in the background (finally!), which means you won’t have to offload your exports to Quicktime anymore if you want to continue editing. And if the app’s gotten any faster or more stable, that would be fantastic.

But what else? The other features I’ve read about seem entirely ho-hum. I mean, colored tabs? Nice, I guess. But it hardly seems like the sort of radical rethinking a la iMovie I was really hoping for after a two year wait.

After Two Years: Colored Tabs, Ladies and Gents!

If FCS’s prominence — or lack thereof — on Apple’s front page is any indication, rethinking this package is not a priority. Rather, maintaining the status quo would appear to be. Final Cut seems to have somehow moved from flagship to mainstay.

Actual Size

I’ll wait to pass final judgment. But I’m prepared to be underwhelmed.

Since this is something I do a lot — wrap command-line tools in Automator wrappers, that is — I thought I’d whip up a GUI method for doing this. So here it is.

The OGG Theora converter

It’s a Finder workflow, so download it, unstuff it and put it in:
~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Finder

Placing the workflow there will add the item to the Finder’s right-click contextual menu. To use the workflow, simply right-click a video you want to convert, navigate to More->Automator and choose “Convert To OGG” from the menu.

Ogg Converter Workflow

While this crunches you’ll see a badge in your menubar:

Progress

Wait a few minutes and you’ll see the OGG version appear right alongside your original movie.

Completed OGG File

And remember, you must first install the OGG Theora converter tool, ffmpeg2theora, for all this to work.

I’ve made a droplet-style version of this as well. Place this version anywhere — your Desktop, the Applications folder, your Dock — and when you want to convert a video, simply drag the video onto the droplet.

Enjoy!

UPDATE:
Folks, for those of you having trouble installing the workflow version, here’s a tip, as mentioned in the comments: Double-clicking the unstuffed workflow will open it in Automator. From here you can choose File->Save As Plug-in…

Installing Workflows the Easy Way

Make sure it’s a Plug-in for: Finder, and hit the Save button. It should now show up as an option in the Finder’s contextual menu.

And remember, there is a Droplet Version as well whose installation is drag-and-drop. To anywhere!

Hope that helps!

iMovie 8: Icon

No Save
John Gruber recently wrote about what he calls “Untitled Document Syndrome,” the phenomenon wherein a user opens an application and begins working in a new, untitled document before ever saving it. He specifically cites the iLife suite as being one in which the saving of documents is handled automatically, rather than foisting the burden on the user:

“Everything on your computer is ultimately saved somewhere in the file system. But that doesn’t mean that you want to handle the actual filing by hand for everything. You don’t really want to know a lot of things about the specific technical details of how your data is saved, or if you did, you’d write your own app.”

Gruber talks in particular about iPhoto and iTunes being applications that remove the need for the user to really think much about where their files are. But iPhoto and iTunes are cataloging applications. You don’t ever really create documents in either of these apps. In fact, it could be argued that the entire point of iPhoto and iTunes is to remove the filesystem from the equation. They are aggregators, of a sort. The approach becomes much more novel in an application that is document based, an application like, say, iMovie. Certainly one of the things that heralds just how radical iMovie 8 is is the fact that there is no “Save.” It simply doesn’t exist.

iMovie 8's File Menu: No Save

This is the direct antithesis of Final Cut, in which you can work for hours having never saved your project. This can be a real problem in FCP, as capture scratch folders get named for the project the media was captured from. So the first thing I always tell my students is that they must name and save their project when they create it. This is something I often overlook myself, creating projects with media folders called “untitled project” all over the place. It’s getting a bit annoying. iMovie 8 is further evidence that Apple is far more willing — or perhaps more interested in — innovating at the consumer level than they are at the pro level. When was the last time we’ve seen such thought given to a pro application? When was the last time someone tried to actually make pro editing easier and more intuitive, rather than just adding features. (The answer is with the introduction of Motion, several years ago. But that’s another story.)

Interface Layout
But the lack of Save is only the beginning. Along with opening and saving documents, iMovie 8 eschews the traditional multi-track timeline editor found in most non-linear suites. The timeline has been the mainstay of NLEs for ten or so years now, and removing it is jarring to someone who’s been using one for those ten years. In fact, my first question was, “Just how am I supposed to edit without a timeline?”

iMovie 8: Blank Slate (click image for larger view)

Actually, iMovie 8 is not as radically different from Final Cut Pro as it first appears. By default, the application is divided into four main quadrants. The upper left quadrant contains your Project, which could best be described as, yes, a timeline. The lower left quadrant is labeled the “Event Library,” but it’s really just an iMovie-centric representation of your files on disk (it can even be toggled into a mode that shows a more traditional view of the filesystem, should you desire it).

iMovie 8: Event Library Expanded

The lower right quadrant is where you keep all the source material for a given project, just like in FCP’s Browser. And finally, the upper right quadrant is a viewer window for watching either individual media or edited clips, as well as for cropping clips (like a combination of Final Cut’s Viewer and Canvas windows). If you hit the magic toggle button you can even swap the locations of the Events and Projects sections.

iMovie 8: Toggle Windows (click image for larger view)

Doing so arranges the application in a way that very closely resembles the default layout of Final Cut Pro, except without all the ugliness (Final Cut looks like iMovie’s ugly sister). That simple act, actually put me much more at ease in the program.

Final Cut Pro: Window Layout (click image for larger view)

Basic Usage
To get started in iMovie you’ll want to make a New Project. New Project creation is the only time you’ll ever be asked to — or have need to — save anything, so don’t get used to it. And iMovie keeps the location of your projects close to the vest. Suffice to say, they’ll be saved somewhere sensible. (Oh, alright! They’re stored in your Movie folder in your home account. Happy now?)

iMovie 8: New Project

To populate the app, iMovie 8 will find any media you’ve stored in your iPhoto (not iTunes) library and present it to you for import from the Event Library, which is a nice touch that we’re starting to really see a lot of throughout Apple’s applications. If you’re in the habit of keeping video clips in iPhoto or one of the other locations automatically searched by iMovie, you’ll be ready to roll right out of the box. More traditional means are available from the File menu as well, where you can simply import video and audio files. And, as always, drag-and-drop is available for getting media to into the project. You can, of course, digitize material from supported cameras as well. And here again, unlike in Final Cut Pro, the media goes someplace sensible, and the user is never bothered with the question of where.

iMovie 8: The Populated Interface (click image for larger view)

Once you have some media, it’s time to begin editing. Rolling over clips with your mouse will scrub through the clip. (I must admit I prefer this to having to click, hold and drag like you do in Final Cut. It’s another example of someone really rethinking things in this app in ways that no one has in some time at the pro level. Since when does adding clicks — making things harder — make an application “professional grade?”) To put media in your “Project” (timeline) simply drag and drop it from the Event Library. Dragging a clip onto another clip presents you with some sensible insert and/or overwrite options, but otherwise the clips will go in the chronological order you place them in. To grab portions of clips, click and drag on the clip. Handlebars appear that represent the in and out points. Dragging a clip so highlighted will insert only that portion of said clip. Portions of clips that are already in use are underscored with an orange line. Much of this is entirely alien to a Final Cut editor, but it’s so intuitive, and in many cases preferable, that I truly wish some of these behaviors would make it into FCP.

iMovie 8: Trimming (click image for larger view)

Clicking the little blue widget in the lower left corner a clip also brings up a contextual menu that will allow you to make further clip-specific edits.

iMovie 8: Contextual Menu

And here you can find the now famed Precision Editor, which I suppose I’d better mention on fear of public flogging. Yes, the precision editor gives you precise control over edits, allowing you to trim down to the frame if need be. I never used the previous version of iMovie, so I can’t speak to life before the precision editor, but I can imagine it would be immensely frustrating.

iMovie 8: Precision Editor (click image for larger view)

Output options for iMovie are good and, like so much about the app, somewhat innovative. The Share menu yields: standard Quicktime export options (good!); Final Cut XML options (awesome!); and a simple “Export Movie” option that allows for easy export to a number of popular formats in a variety of sizes and quality levels (coolio!). There are also options for sharing your movie with other members of the iLife suite, like iDVD for instance.

iMovie 8: Export Movie

A Lack of Time
The big difference between iMovie 8 and its Pro brethren, in my mind anyway, is less the lack of timeline as the fact that there seems to be no sense of numeric time anywhere in the editor. There is no visual indicator of time as there is in a Final Cut timeline. This is a decided problem if you need the sort of absolute precision you see on network television, where a 30 second spot must be exactly 30 seconds. For many folks this might not be a big deal. But if you’re used to seeing it, it’s scary to suddenly have no timecode in your timeline. In fact, the sense of time is almost completely absent in the Project view.

iMovie 8: 2 and 4 Second Clips

Unless you adjust the number of frames per thumbnail in the project browser, a 2 second clip will be the same sized blob as a 4 second clip. This makes it hard to get a sense of the timing of the piece by simply looking at it, and it’s probably my biggest problem with the application. Editing is all about time and timing, and iMovie fails to understand this in a big way.

That said, there is something kind of fun about letting go of all that control. You know? In iMovie 8 you’re forced to get a sense of the timing of the piece by watching your piece. This, at least for me, allowed for a true shift in focus. Suddenly I found myself much more engaged in the sound and imagery than the timing. And in my own sense of time, rather than that of actual, precise, numeric time. This was somewhat magical. Even though I found myself unable to edit the way I normally do, I gradually found myself editing in new ways, ways I’d never considered before. It’s hard to describe, but some sort of mindshift had occurred.

From my vantage point, which is that of a longtime Final Cut Pro user who finds that application getting old and stale, there is much to like about iMovie 8. Most importantly is what it represents, and that is a very fresh approach to video editing. While iMovie 8 may not be the perfect editor, it’s so beautiful and so extermely clever and fun to use that I see myself using it for its own sake, and conforming certain projects to its limitations. I can almost see it becoming part of my creative process, at least to some extent. That’s no small feat.

For an application to allow an artist to approach his medium with fresh eyes is, in my opinion, quite possibly the highest compliment imaginable. iMovie 8 may just be such an application. If nothing else, it’s an extremely fresh, yet entirely discoverable approach to digital video editing. In some ways it’s the iPhone of NLEs. I only hope Apple brings some of the same fresh thinking and innovation to the next version of Final Cut Pro and the suite of Pro Apps as well.

iPhone Video Recorder: Jailbreak-Only

When Apple announced the iPhone app store, video capture was one of the first apps I expected to see. Instead, here we are, a half-a-year later, and no such luck. Too bad, too. This is the one application I’d actually pay for.

Well, this and Bowling, of course.

“Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2.”

The Ars writer chimes in, chastising people who want firewire by, essentially, telling them there’s no demand. But see, what we’re trying to tell you is that there is demand. We still want firewire at the consumer level. Making the argument that no one wants it won’t really work on folks who do want it.

Ars and others are also equating this to Apple’s ahead-of-the-pack decision to lose the floppy drive on the original iMac, when clearly this is different: Apple is now following the pack, not leading it, by Ars’ own assessment:

“The truth is, FireWire—and in particular the FW400 variety—has been slowing [sic] disappearing for the last few years. Apple eliminated FireWire from iPods several years ago, since it allowed slimming down of iPods and made the nano and shuffle possible. Even external hard drives rarely have a FW400 port; FW800 and/or eSATA are the ports that are usually offered if there is anything other than USB 2. And, as Jobs says, most if not all of the consumer HD cams on the market now use USB 2.”

Oddly, firewire’s lack of ubiquity didn’t stop Apple from supporting in the first place.

And finally, Ars backs up “Steve Jobs’” idiotic and patently false claim, stating:

“And, as Jobs says, most if not all of the consumer HD cams on the market now use USB 2.”

Well, first off, that’s not what Jobs said. He said “all,” not “most, if not all.” He said “HD camcorders” not “consumer HD camcorders.” And he said “HD camcorders of the past few years,” which is just wrong. In fact, the dominant consumer-level HD format for the past several years has been HDV, which is transferred over firewire. HDV cameras are still plentiful in the market, and will probably remain popular for at least another year or two. It’s only been in the last year or two that AVCHD — an MPEG-4 variant with much lower bitrate requirements capable of transferring over USB — has gotten good enough to be taken seriously by anyone who knows anything about video.

Ars even makes the argument that editing video on a MacBook is no fun:

“I can also say from personal experience that trying to edit HD video on a MacBook is pretty much the worst experience ever, and I would never wish it on my worst enemy.”

Fine, and I tend to agree. But the fact is, I know plenty of people who do want to continue editing video on a MacBook. They’ve been doing it for years, and are quite happy with it. This article seems to be addressed to people with no MacBook video experience. But those are the people who are complaining, the people who are currently doing video on their MacBooks. Telling them that they don’t really want to be doing that, and if they do, to go buy a MacBook is condescending and insulting.

I’m generally a fan of the reporting that goes on at Ars. But this article has me incensed. It bothers me when big sites like Ars Technica try to tell people that their desires are unresonable, but it’s a hundred times worse when their logic is faulty and their facts are just plain wrong.

The New MacBook: Mmm! Purdy!

But, though they’re still hawking Final Cut Express as a bundle option with the machine, the MacBook’s lack of firewire makes it pretty much useless for video.

The MacBook Purchase Page: Is FCE Even Compatible?

Not only can you not use it to digitize DV material, but you can’t even use an external firewire drive to edit from. This means that the MacBook’s a non-starter for anyone interested in so much as experimenting with the medium. Strange for a machine that used to come bundled with iLife. Also strange considering the machine is now more powerful than ever, and even has a 24″ LED display made just for it. And annoying that the price remains the same for a far less full-featured computer.

Does the term “value-subtracted” exist yet. I think I’ll coin it. Dibs!

And while I’m not personally interested in editing video on a laptop much at all, I certainly know lots of people who are. I guess they’ll all be shelling out the extra $700 clams for a MacBook Pro.

Too bad.

UPDATE (I’m all about the updates lately):
Apparently, iLife still comes bundled with the MacBooks:

iLife Included? Really?

Sure, nothing about iMovie specifically requires firewire, but many video workflows — especially at the consumer level that the MacBook is aimed at — still use firewire for video capture. iLife apparently does support capturing newer formats (I didn’t think it did):

iLife Video Format Support

I suppose Apple expects new MacBook owners to use these new formats — in particular, those formats that have a low enough bitrate to work over USB — so it follows that USB capture support is there (I didn’t think it was). But there’s no mention (that I can see) that you won’t be able to use DV equipment with your new MacBook, which I find misleading. But more to the point, it just seems premature to kill DV off as a viable format — and firewire as a viable protocol — especially on consumer-level Macs of all places. There is still a lot of DV out there, and its users really just can’t get a new sans-Pro-MacBook at this point.

Not to mention all the other cool stuff firewire has all over USB. I mean, not only would it be slow as shit, but “USB 2.0 Target Disk Mode” just sounds lame.

UPDATE 2:
I’m glad I’m not alone in decrying the lack of firewire on the new MacBooks. Sounds like a lot of folks are up in arms. One meme I’ve seen a few times, though, is the idea that you can get a USB to firewire adaptor. While this may be possible, it doesn’t fix the DV problem. Adapting USB to firewire will still only allow USB data transfer speeds. And USB 2.0 is just too slow for capturing DV video. It’s also too slow to use as an external drive for editing said video. So, if you’re wondering, this is not a fix.

UPDATE 3:
A co-worker informs me that the Leopard’s USB drivers are much improved over older versions. He speculates that this might give USB enough throughput to at least be capable of editing DV from a USB drive. He also thinks you can do Target Disk Mode over USB, but I think he’s wrong on that one, at least for now.

UPDATE 4:
More on MacRumors about the lack of firewire, with lots of valid complaints in the comments. The rumor quotes someone claiming to be Steve Jobs saying:

“Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2.”

While this is plainly false, what I’m more curious about at this point is not what camera Steve Jobs thinks I should go buy if I want to use a MacBook, but rather what the thinking was behind the removal of firewire from the machine. Did it enable them to keep the cost down? The weight? ‘Cause frankly, the only reason I can see is to gouge folks who need or want firewire into paying for a MacBook Pro when it might otherwise be far more machine than they need.

UPDATE 5:
Still more from TUAW, including an excellent dissection of the purported Steve Jobs quote. Looks like this issue has legs. Glad to hear it’s not just me.

Go firewire!

UPDATE 6:
I’ve posted a response to Ars Technica’s article on the matter. Another, rather thoughtful piece with some additional info appears at Apple Insider.