Get your Library unhidden in Lion

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For those of you who are annoyed by the Library folder being hidden in your user folder in lion. Here is the terminal command to make it unhidden. You will have to change to you superuser to do it though.

chflags nohidden /Users//Library


Now if only I can change back the permissions on my Utilities folder so I can read and write…

A Quick Note: It looks like then 10.7.1 update reset this, so I guess you will have to keep making this change if you want to be able to see your library at all times.

Editing Software on Lion

So I am checking Editing Software Compatibility of Mac OS X Lion.

As Apple Said Final Cut Pro 7.0.3 does open fine in Lion, though it does ask me to register, though the button to register is grayed out.

The Demo of AVID Media Composer 5.5.2 boots and runs just fine.

Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5 I am having issues with. and it won’t start. Adobe claims it should run fine, so I am going to try and re-install and see what happens. It is weird as After Effects and Photoshop work fine, but just Premiere won’t boot.

What I don’t like about OS X Lion So far

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Well it just came out today, so I have obviously not dealt enough with Lion to really know, but i have a few annoyances already.
I hate the new scroll bars and how they disappear, and even though you can make them always show up, I hate the removal of the arrows at the ends. I was always a fan of double arrows at both ends, but to not have them at all is stupid.
I don’t like the new Address book, as it is harder to add an entry and then add it to a group as it is on 2 different pages and takes extra steps to do so.
The death of Power PC apps completely is annoying, though only affects one app I have, which was an app that published my now playing song in iTunes to my FTP server. I will have to find a reasonable alternative.
The death of the spaces control panel. I for one use spaces all the time, and I love it. I have different screens for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop, and could easily use the spaces control panel to pick which app showed up where, and have some apps show up everywhere, like Safari and iTunes. Now this has been taken away. At least it still remembers my old settings (though I had to turn off the auto rearranging of spaces which just confused things). I get mission control, but I would love to be able to name my spaces, and once again have real control over what apps show up where. Hopefully someone will release a 3rd party app to return this functionality. I mean I am glad it remembered my old Spaces settings, but not being able to easily change them is a real pain.
Not sure I like the new Mail. I was fine with how it was, and think it actually shows less info now than it did before, but at least the classic view is still available, so i can switch back if it really annoys me.
Launchpad is useless to me, and I have way too many apps for it, but might be nice for a novice user.
I am sure I will have more as I use it.
For a thorough review check out Ars-Technica’s Extensive Review, which you can also get in ebook or pdf format, though you will have to pay for it to get it in those formats.

EDIT:
I have some additions. I don’t like that in Finder windows the custom icons for hard drives no longer show up. I use custom hard drive icons for a reason for easy visual identification of drives, and not having this just slows things down.
I hate that the user library is now a hidden file, as I want to be able to go there if I need to easily. And the Utilities folder now requires administrator privileges to make changes, and strangely it won’t let me add myself in the info panel. Hopefully this is just a bug, because I trust myself with my own Utilities folder!
Another thing I hate. The ability to turn off the backwards scrolling requires either a Trackpad or a magic mouse! Well what if you only have a 3rd party mouse? That needs to be settable no matter what!
I find the Address book to be a major step backward, as it takes extra steps to do what it could do before. To add a new entry you must be within a group, but to add an entry to different groups, you have to click to see groups. I would rather have a 3 way window pane than a 2 way pane as it is now.

ADDITIONAL:

I don’t know if it is because I use a third party mouse driver (SteerMouse from Japan which I have used to enable a third mouse button on my EOL Microsoft Trackball Explorer, the best trackball ever made, which I used when using Shake and Color, both of which I probably won’t be using anymore) or if it is a feature of Lion, but moving the mouse no longer wakes my computer up. I have to hit the keyboard, which is just annoying! Is this a feature?

The Edit Blog at PVC has 100 Questions answered about FCPX

The Article has some good answers and also says some interesting things that I believe to be true.

In its current state I would not use FCPX in a professional, client heavy environment. At this time I don’t consider it an FCP7 replacement as it lacks so many features that I’ve come to rely on. It’s a brand new piece of software so it will take years to mature into the full featured application that FCP7 is … that is if Apple chooses to add back a lot of the features missing from FCP7. At this point in time I don’t know when / if it could replace FCP7 (or Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro).


and

23) Do you think Apple is moving away from the Pro Video market towards the wider prosumer market with FCPX.


Most definitely.


and

51) Does your knowledge of FC7 help or get in the way of learning FC10?


That’s a great question. I’d almost say it gets in the way as FCP7 uses long established editing paradigms that work very well. In some aspects FCPX is trying to reinvent the wheel. Where there are some great things in FCPX there’s other instances where, IMHO, the wheel doesn’t really need to be reinvented because it works so well.


and

63) how does the magnetic timeline handle a music video where the main audio should be locked permanently?


My music video testing has found that I would create a synchronized clip with the master audio to place in the primary storyline and then connect all my angles to it via Connect to Primary Storyline. In theory that should keep them all in sync. Truth be told the inability to really lock a clip in place and lack of multiclips / group clips would make me look elsewhere for music video editing.


and

77) Worthwhile building new edit suite around FCPX or still shrink-wrapped FCPStudio 7… etc?


Personally I would never build an edit suite around a single NLE so I certainly don’t feel the current release of FCPX is enough to build an entire edit suite around. As one tool in that suite yes but the only tool? Not in its current form and probably not for a long while. Plus, if Apple is going to rely on 3rd parties to supply many of the pro-workflow tools that we need for FCPX then the final cost is going to end up well above $299 to run FCPX in a professional / broadcast environment.


and

83) What’s your favorite new feature, and new disappointment?


Favorite new features are the many different background processes from rendering to transcoding to media management. Auditions is another strong new feature. Disappointment is the Magnetic Timeline and single Viewer that changes between source clips and the timeline.


The rest has some interesting points, and tells how to do may good things, but these are things that really stand out to me about what is wrong with the software.

Dylan Reeve says Apple has Abanonded Pros

And I have to agree. He has an excellent blog post on the subject, which talks about defining Pros, as people working working in Broadcast Television and Film and not just people making money editing.

This is how he ends the article:

Businesses in the film and TV industry, that have to deliver a product to a strict standard within a strict deadline, can’t pin their hopes on a future upgrades or the next version while relying on an increasingly ageing product that has been EOL’ed. They need certainty and at the moment the only certainty that exists with FCP is that the current version has no future hopes and the current version isn’t suitable for their work. They have no choice but to look elsewhere.


It simply makes no financial sense for Apple – selling a $300 product that appeals, as is, to millions of people – to pursue a small market with very specific and complicated demands.


In the end Final Cut Pro X will be a success, it is a powerful and innovative application. But it will no longer be a big part of the film and TV post-production industry.


FCP X will work for a lot of the smaller people, and will eventually, with a slew of plugs in (driving it’s price right back up to what it used to be) will do even more, but it will never be the the pro app that it once was. Apple has nixed that market, and it is just too bad they don’t have the decency to rename FCP X into iMovie Pro to show that they really are going a completely new direction and instantly saying to all pros that they need to find another home, instead of doing it in such a backhanded way.

Dylan Reeve and the FCP X Disconnect

Dylan Reeve has an excellent post on the FCP X Disconnect, which is about how FCP was used by professional users and how Apple sees FCP.

He has some excellent graphs that show what he thinks is the potential market for FCP and how Apple just doesn’t see it as an important segment of it’s market, because it is so incredibly small, and I completely agree.

Apple is going lowest common denominator, and it can even be seen in Lion. Making everything more iOS like, instead of making iOS more mac like, because iOS is great for portable devices, but too simple, but they want to make the mac more like iOS and that personally scares me.

Mathew Levie comments on the Magnetic Timeline

Matthew Levie in his fifth and final article on using FCP X to cut has some things to say on the Magnetic Timeline that mirror my thoughts, and are the main reason I am in the process of moving to Premiere to edit.

Which brings me back to where I was on day two: the “magnetic timeline” is cute, but it keeps me from making the sequence I want and therefore it really has to go.


It reminds me a little bit of when Apple was introducing FCP 1.0 and Steve Jobs showed us how we could take a clip from the Viewer and drop it on this beautiful transparent overlay in the Canvas to choose insert/overwrite/replace/etc. and the crowd went, “oooooooh.” But who edits that way?


Maybe you’ll say I didn’t give it enough of a chance. That might be fair. I just played around with it for a few days. But the truth is that we have an editing paradigm that works for us in FCP 7. It’s not enough to show us that if we completely rethink our workflow then we can do the same things in FCP X as we can in FCP 7 with a couple of extra steps. What can we do that’s more efficient, faster, better? Yes, the infrastructure is improved; yes, the 64-bit implementation and background rendering mean things will be much faster… if we can still figure out a way to tell the stories we want to tell.


In conclusion, I think if Apple’s FCP X team really is serious about wanting professionals to use this program — and maybe they’re not, and that’s okay — we will need to see it go back to a track-based editing metaphor, at least as an option. If that happens, I can’t see why I wouldn’t use it eventually. I don’t really care about the feature set: they can always add multicam and OMF export and whatever else, and I’m sure they will. But if they add those features while retaining the current editing paradigm, it will still be very difficult to use professionally.


My biggest complaint about FXP X is that I think the basic editing paradigm is broken and much too simplistic for a professional editing program. The magnetic timeline is what the program is built around and for me it makes things harder and not easier, as Matthew points out, it actually makes many things take more steps than they did in Final Cut Pro 7.

Sure there are some cool new features, but we would have been better off having those added to a 64 bit upgrade to Final Cut Pro 7 and not this monstrosity that is Final Cut Pro X.

Apple has obviously given up on the professional editing market and done it in the most insulting way possible, and I don’t think they realized the bad press and loss of sales they will get for not taking their professional market seriously.

Larry Jordan is sticking with FCP

Today Larry Jordan has a new article, where he talks about why he is sticking with FCP for now, and waiting for new features.

I personally disagree. Apple had a mature and powerful editing program that could have been updated and have had some of the great new features added to it, but instead they decided to make a new less powerful program geared at making editing ‘easier’. The thing is they are engineers and have no idea what editing is really about, and have instead made a program that I don’t think will ever be right for a professional editor. The magnetic timeline alone proves this to me, because they no longer think that organization is important, and it is one of the most important things!

Larry Jordan has a nice post on Accountability

Larry Jordan has a good blog post on how Apple is not accountable to anyone for the disaster of it’s Final Cut Pro X release.

And it really is true. No is accountable, and Apple would hold everyone accountable if things were revered. Nvidia made one mistake and look they have not been in a mac since, and we the users are punished by Apple for it (having to put our ATI cards back in for major upgrades and then re-install the NVIDIA drivers).

I am knee deep into learning Premier Pro (after trying, but giving up on FCP X) and am pretty impressed by many features (especially the XML export being able to do the whole project with all sequences), but can’t see why this was even necessary! I can see that Apple might have wanted to cement their lead in the future, but not at the expense of their entire installed user base who are going to bad mouth the hell out of their new product until they make something useful.

And why buy Color, just to kill it a few years later? Or why kill Shake? Why did they not spin off their entire pro-division like they did with FileMaker Pro? Make a business unit that is answerable to it’s base. and needs to make a product that it’s customers want!

I am left shaking my head.