Friday, November 29, 2013 at 7:58PM On episode FCG006 of FCPX Grill we were discussing how to share Motion templates between machines and I thought it would be a good idea to make a quick tutorial. What this allows you to do is to share graphic templates between your edit suites so everything will look consistent.
Thursday, November 28, 2013 at 5:39PM The other day I noticed a lot of traffic coming from Creative Cow. I went to investigate it and found that we had created quite a ruckus in one of the forums. I decided I needed to chime in. Here is what I said.
Hi… I haven’t posted here on the Cow in quite some time, maybe a few years, as a matter of fact, getting my password working again was a bit of an ordeal. As you may have heard me say on the show, if you’ve listened to it, I’m not to good at “internetting”. 
The purpose of FCPX Grill is not to start fights or tell the world that they are dopes if they choose to use another NLE, although, some listeners have expressed that THAT sentiment is implied on the shows, I sincerely don’t mean it to be.
I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. 30 years ago was the first time I (tried) to make money producing a video, I ended up having to drop out of school (the first time) in order to go learn more about what I REALLY wanted to do. The common theme throughout my career has been this… “You always have to take time to learn.”
Learning can be a drag… there is so much pressure and desire to move forward in this business that the time it takes to sit back, read a book, go to a lecture, crack open a manual or just plain bang your head on the screen is daunting, and it feels counter productive… COUNTER productive. At times I feel like i’m going backwards.
A great analogy is creating a Photoshop action. I’m pretty good in Photoshop, well, I’m good enough to do what I HAVE to do, I can do the things I need to do very fast. Sometimes, when you have to process a big load of images I look over at that damn Actions menu and I think, “Well… I COULD slow down for a bit, write an action that’ll do all these images FOR me and then be done with it. But then I think… “Hey… I’m a pro. I know my keyboard shortcuts, I’ll be done with this in NO TIME.” Stopping and writing the action doesn’t FEEL as productive. It doesn’t FEEL like i’m moving forward… the images aren’t changing in front of me and I don’t get the satisfaction of being a bad-a$ while I hit all these keys so fast. But I’m being fooled.
If I were to slow down and make the action… I’d be done in LESS time EVEN THOUGH it feels like I’m not moving forward for a time there.
I remember the pain of learning Powerpoint when I was REALLY good with a Chyron, a production switcher and an ADDA stillstore. (Dating myself?). I remember the painful hours of wrestling with Premiere 3.0 and logging onto the AOL message boards to ask Randy Ubilos first hand questions about why I couldn’t capture video if the capture window wasn’t on my PRIMARY screen. I remember the time struggling with my first Avid in 1997 and my Media100 in 1998 (cuz I hated the Avid) and my reluctance to learn Final Cut Pro 1.0 because, “hey… I’m a pro!! I have a $30,000 edit system, I don’t need a $1,000 TOY application from Apple, it can’t even do a real time dissolve like my Media100 can.
But I learned it. I got on Ken Stone dot Net and I went thru the HASSLE of learning all new preference panes and all new keyboard layouts and a WHOLE NEW metaphor… (why the hell isn’t there an A and a B track… Media100 had them).
Everything changes.
if you dig thru my blog at chrisfenwick.com you’ll find plenty of posts with me truly angry at Apple for dropping the ball with FCPX. I was REALLY mad. I played with Premiere for a few months about a year before FCPX was released, I made a bunch of tutorials and then it REALLY bagged me a on a few jobs… (and YES, I DO understand that CC is better. And I’m SO glad that all those people now have my credit card number, but thats another problem.)
When I sat down with FCPX with a clear head I realized that in much the same way that I made a change between editing tape and editing on a computer, or moving from the A/B metaphor of Media100 and moving to the single track of Final Cut Pro. It wasn’t that the tool couldn’t do what I needed, it did it, it was just a little different.
I know what you’re thinking and what you want to say, I KNOW that you are sitting there trying not to YELL at your computer screen because I went thru ALL those feelings to. Its ok… take a deep breath, everything will be alright.
I believe we are due for this change. But what I “believe” really doesn’t matter.
I fully realize that there are people, and companies, and organizations and networks that have needs that are WILDLY different then MY needs. Our company is very small compared to many. But then its a lot bigger then others. What I DO know, is that this tool allows us to work faster.
My purpose for making FCPX Grill is to talk to people that are using this tool and to find out what they hated about it, what they love about it and what changed their mind. I get no money for doing it, although if someone wants to sponsor the show lemme know. I just want to talk to people and I figured if I wanted to HAVE these conversations that others might want to LISTEN IN.
So there you have it. My 2 cents. I gotta say, you guys like to write a lot. Talking is easier. You may want to start your own podcast, its easier then all this typing… but if you do, let me give you a pointer, turn on the “Category Podcasting” feature in Wordpress, it’ll save you tons of troubles down the road…
Later…
Thursday, November 28, 2013 at 11:58AM In the past 2 weeks since launching FCPX Grill over on digitalCINEMAcafe.com I’ve been notiing more traffic here on my blog. Oddly enough, the pages that is getting the most traffic is a post I made back in 2011 after the release of Final Cut Pro X (By the way people, it’s pronounced “ten” not “ex”). That post was a list of resources that are of use to someone interested in the new application. However, one thing that is NOT apparent when looking at that page is that, I was NOT a fan of the new version of Final Cut in any way, shape, or form.
There are of course many good links there, I haven’t had the energy to check, some may be dead, but so much has gone on in the FCPX community since then I thought it would be a good idea to post a few more links.
Apple FAQ about FCPX
Blogs & Tutorials
Plug ins
Alex 4D These are all FREE!
Final Cat Pro - The Missing Plug Ins
next
Friday, November 22, 2013 at 9:01PM 
digitalCINEMAcafeHello podcast listeners… As you may know, last June Alex MacLean and I launched a podcast called digitalCINEMAcafe. DCC is about an hour each week and it is a discussion with people from all manners of discipline in filmmaking. The conversations are great fun and Alex and I have had a chance to talk with some great guests. Personally… I’m looking forward to many more shows with Alex.
But a few weeks ago I got the idea that it would be fun to dispell some myths and rumors about my favorite edit system and meet some other people, like myself, that prefer cutting in Final Cut Pro X so we spun a new show off of DCC called FCPX Grill. Personally, I love talking about FCPX in detail, and although some topics will no doubt not be intersting to EVERYONE, I’m ok with putting them out there and letting the audience decide what they want to download and listen to.
Well… that leads us to THIS post. Internetting is HARD. If you don’t know the whole “cha-cha-cha” between starting up a libsyn account, a Bluehost account, a WordPress blog, and a BluBrry Powerpress plugin, then count your blessings, go to iTunes and just hit Subscribe and enjoy the show. However… if you have been down that path, especially after thinking you were a Laporte-esque Media Mogul and could actually run TWO shows on your own with NO TECH support… then you’ll know… lets just say, its confussing, (can you say 301 Redirect).
I have inherent problems when I read a sentence and a percentage of it has no link to REAL WORDS… I had the same problem years ago when someone tried to teach me how to play “Hearts”… nevermind, that’s bad memories all around.
FCPX GrillSo.. this week, the two feeds for the two podcasts whet thru the fire. First, the digitalCINEMAcafe feed had some episodes of FCPX Grill in it, and FCPX Grill feed BARELY had its own show in it and it took me about 48 hours to get it ‘fixed’, and I use THAT term loosely.
As of this writing which is 9PM Friday the 22nd I THINK I got it all ironed out BUT, only if you use an Apple product, like iTunes or the iPhone or an iPod or an iPad. If you use one of those other mystery devices you’re gonna be kinda screwed, maybe for a while… maybe forever… maybe till I figure out the 301 redirect thing.
So… thank you for your patience, and please forgive me for the mess I’ve caused on the interwebs and enjoy the shows.
Alex and I have a great show coming up next week that we’ll record on Monday night and there are a bunch of great FCPX Grill shows in the can.
Later…
Monday, November 18, 2013 at 9:18PM If you’ve been following my blog for a few years you may remember back in the summer of 2010 I created a project that I called “Switch to Premiere Pro” or “#X2PPro”. If you check your twitter feed you will see that that hashtag was used in 2010 and 2011. At the time I was very unhappy with what Apple was doing with Final Cut Pro and its progress. I set out on my own to find a replacement for a tool that I had used for a long time.
The “campaign”, if you will, proved to be quite successful. Many of my professional peers were shocked that I was considering leaving Final Cut Pro, a tool that I had used for over a decade. Even Adobe Systems noticed my blog entries and asked me to be a part of a few events designed to promote Premier Pro.
Not wanting to be a “spilled milk” kind of guy I left one part of the story out of my blog. After six months of following the “Adobe Way” I tired of the application and moved on. The biggest stumbling block that I had was the lack of what is commonly called Smart Renders. Smart Renders allow you to begin rendering a timeline and then abort that render midway while keeping what has been rendered thus far. Since Adobe’s biggest selling point was a lack of rendering due to the power of the Mercury Playback Engine, I guess it took a while for the good people at Adobe to decide that this was an important feature. What this resulted in was often times getting to the end of a project but requiring one long massive render in order to deliver. This made it very difficult to calculate how long it would take to send a file to a client.
For me, in my workflow, that was a dealbreaker.
[EDIT: To be fair, Adobe has made great stride in the area of Smart Renders in subsequent versions of Premier but it was a little to little, to late for me. I had already moved on.]
In the spring of 2011 Apple announced their new “Final Cut Pro X” at the NAB show in Las Vegas. By the time the software was released that summer the entire production community had decided that Apple had collectively lost their way. Many people were still using Final Cut 7, or as I liked to call it, Final Cut Classic, at that time.
Over the next six months Apple’s credibility to the professional market began to crumble. The lack of what many called “professional features” in this allegedly new version of an old favorite was a travesty. At that time in the professional editorial community the big question was not whether or not to use FCPX but whether they would be moving to Avid or to Adobe as their next edit platform. It would seem that Apple’s dominance in the editorial world had come to a complete and utter end.
However, there was a problem with that story.
Although thousands upon thousands of professionals thought that Final Cut Pro was dead, millions of consumers saw this as an opportunity to buy a tool that, as it turned out, was extremely powerful. Although previously Apple would take multiple years between updates of their old Final Cut Pro, within a couple of months the first update to FCPX arrived. And the updates did not stop there.
Over the next two years the updates came fast and furious. About half of those updates represented major feature additions while a few of the updates were actually just bug fixes. But nonetheless, the application got stronger and stronger with each passing month.
And then a very curious thing happened. Many editors started to look at FCPX with new eyes. The newly imagined Multicam feature was perhaps the first reason that made everybody look again at the “little edit system that could”. Many people have written blog posts about all of the additional features that slowly got added back into FCPX, so I won’t begin to do that here. But suffice it to say, that eventually they had my attention.
In the spring of 2012 I chose two consecutive projects, back to back, and decided to dive in headfirst. The first piece was easy, I was able to work by myself, and I didn’t have anybody shoulder surfing, being critical of what I was doing. I worked a little bit slower at first, but very quickly I found that I was working much faster than I had before. The second piece that I cut in FCPX was an on-site, same day turnaround edit where many people would be watching me work. Granted, it’s difficult sometimes to work with people over your shoulder, but add in the fact that I was working with essentially a new tool, and many people would say I was absolutely crazy for taking on the project. Not to mention a few of the people I was working with had enough experience in the business to look at me and wonder what I was thinking.
But the application performed flawlessly, and the project was a success.
In the subsequent months I recommended to my office that we move all of our projects to Final Cut Pro X. I would be lying if I told you that the move was simple. However, the difficulties were not in what the application could and could not do, but instead the major difficulties were caused by individuals who did not want to let go of the past.
I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time, over 30 years, and if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the decades it’s this, things will always change. ALWAYS.
In the 80s I edited on U-MATIC tape, 1 inch, and Beta SP, those are TAPE formats by the way. In the 90’s I cut on 8mm Video, Mini-DV, DVCam and multiple computer formats and applications. It has only been for the past 12 years that any one application, and or platform, has taken on a relative dominance. If you are under 35 years old you may not remember a day when Final Cut Pro did not exist. But I can assure you from experience, that the industry was way different back then.
It’s good to learn.
It’s good to stretch yourself.
It is only when we truly stretch ourselves that we excel.
The bottom line is this, the tool doesn’t matter nearly as much as the craftsman. However, I can tell you that Final Cut Pro X is an extremely powerful tool. Today, on November 18th, 2013, we are on the cusp of the next major release of this application. I believe in the next couple of weeks we will see Final Cut Pro X 10.1. If the rumor mill is even remotely correct, we are going to see some wonderful new features, features that, I believe, are going to make all of the doubters take a second look at this application.
And this is where you come in. I am launching a brand-new podcast. I am calling it FCPX Grill. In this show, I am going to speak with people who are successfully using Final Cut Pro X now. I am going to ask them about their businesses and how they use this tool. I’m going to ask them what they’re stumbling block was when they first started using the application. I’m also going to ask them what their “ah ha moment” was, where they decided that this was an application that was worth putting their time into.
I have found over the past 18 months that every time I get to have an intelligent conversation with someone else who enjoys using Final Cut Pro X that I am energized by that discussion. I believe that if I enjoy having the conversation, you, the listener, will enjoy listening to it. And that is why I am creating this podcast.
I don’t know how long this show will last. But in less than a week I was able to record two months worth of shows. I also believe that once these episodes start to air that other people will come forward and want to join the conversation.
I think you’re going to like these discussions. The shows will appear in iTunes in the next couple of days, and for now they will also be folded into the feed for digitalCINEMAcafe. Please feel free to comment in iTunes or if you’d would rather, you can find the shows on the digitalCINEMAcafe website.
Later…
Chris Fenwick
TLDR: I have a new podcast, you should listen.
