The ProVideo Coalition has 2 open letters to Apple.
Why do Mac’s deal with external monitors haphazardly.
and
Why does FCP X deal with i/o haphazardly.
Unfortunately I am not sure how much Apple listens anymore (though they seem to have on the MacPro), but we can hope.
Neptune Salad has a good look at FCP X 2 years after the demise of FCP 7 and the alternatives out there (he too preferes Premiere Pro as his editing choice for a FCP 7 replacement).
Appleinsider has a report that a French retailer, who has been forced to stop selling MacPro’s in March due to a new EU law, has said that they have word on Apple that new MacPro’s will arrive this spring.
Now that is all second hand, but with the current MacPro being banned in the EU, maybe Apple would try and re-assure it’s retailers, though why not just make an announcement. I guess they need to clear their current stock.
Still, lets hope this is true, and it gets releases at the WWDC. The current MacPro is quite old in the tooth and we need a thunderbolt equipped MacPro with PCI slots and power to spare including graphics power!
Ars Technica has this note, and it isn’t an apple choice, it is a new ruling about safety on fans, but I still find it ominous.
Apple should be pushing out a new update as fast as they can, as they want the line to still exist if they are planning on having it in the future, but maybe their pans have changed. And who knows what Tim Cooke was actually talking about.
Apple has added a 128GB iPad 4 to it’s lineup (at least within a week), but it is $799 for WIFI and $929 for 4G, so they are charging a premium for more memory instead of staying the same price as they get bigger.
Starting to get to be the right size, especially for video and audio, though I could still use bigger. I keep most of my music in Apple Uncompressed AAC, and it is huge, and I am constantly fighting it being full.
Now I did try and use FCP X right from the start with lessons, and I don’t think it is a professional program at all. Yes it might be faster to teach to someone with no previous editing knowledge as Larry says, but that is because it forces you to edit in a very specific way, and for me not a way that I find faster or better at all. And yes I am biased by all the horridness of Apple’s launch of FCP X and killing of the Final Cut Pro 7 suite, and that may bias me, but I also think that Larry making his living doing Final Cut Pro lessons may bias him.
And I hate how no one ever talks about the things that Final Cut Pro 7 is not setup to do, like working in a multi-user environment on an X-Serve or Edit Share. He does mention it is not that good at going to Pro Tools, which is a deal breaker, but also the inability to organize tracks makes for a mess of a timeline when I often use 15-20 tracks on a commercial, all for different elements or graphics to keep it organized, and to have that all haphazardly put randomly into the timeline is insane and a mess, and not at all professional!
Now I do love the ability to mark clips by keywords and make it all easily searchable, but that could have easily been ported into a Final Cut Pro 8 and made it a really powerful 64 bit editing system instead of a mixture of 64 bit tech with iMovie conventions.
Even with all the additions I still see Final Cut Pro X as a mess and not-professional. It has too much wrong with it, and has so many weird bugs (see previous posts on Red Giant software and FCP X), and I just don’t see the magnetic timeline as being professional in a commercial environment or any graphics heavy environment where timeline organization is more important that clip organization, which I am perfectly capable of organizing myself.
StudioDaily has an article on editors picking Dell Computers over MacPro’s for editing, which may in fact be true (though the article is written by someone working for Dell), as the MacPro has basically stagnated for years now, but I also hate how they never bother upgrading a MacPro with more modern technology for speed tests. Like putting in a PC NVIDIA Geforce 675 GTX with 4GB of RAM. That will make a huge difference in speed, especially with CUDA compliant software like Premiere Pro or Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve! It may not be a TESLA, but it also doesn’t come with the price, which could set you back well over $6000 for a QUADRO and a TESLA, vs under $500 for a GTX 675 which works with the Mac’s current power supply and can really upgrade your existing MacPro.
Now of course their is still the question of what Apple’s next MacPro will be like and if it will be a worthy and powerful successor to the current MacPro, but we won’t know till it comes out, hopefully at this years WWDC.
FCP.Co has 2 articles from 3D designer Peter Zigich on possible, though pretty out there designs for a new MacPro which Tim Cook has promised we will get this year (hopefully at WWDC).
The first is on a modular tower, and the second a smaller design using low powered AMD chips (wouldn’t that require a new OS and apps?).
Interesting ideas, though I doubt either will happen. I am hoping for something really powerful, and better would be the ability to use PC videos cards without Mac supplies firmware as long as you have drivers, and releasing the 2 GB of video ram limit, NVIDIA TESLA support would be great too, as well as many hard drives as you can stuff in there!
So Red Giant knows it has issues with Looks and Mojo in FCP X, and it seems they can’t fix it. It is an Apple thing that must be fixed, and there is no word if or when they will.
Macstories has the story on this excellent app, that I have been a fan of for sometime, which has been rechristened Documents, and made even more powerful, with the ability to play audio and video.
I have used this app for sometime, and pretty much use it and iBooks for my document needs.