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.

Avid Event gives some tantalizing clues

There is a great article over at EditBlog on some tweets from this weeks AVID Media Composer Committed to Professionals event held at Warner Bros.

There is some pretty amazing stuff here. LiveToEdit tweets:

3D, 7.1, new U.I., Kona, Decklink, Matrox, Bluefish support coming soon


and

3rd party I/O: no announcements,  other than ‘we’re working with them for the future’


and

80% of pro systems are Avid, 50% of #Avid employees used to be in production


And even cooler

future is 64bit, new interface, WILL NOT lose known features, keyboard short cuts, etc.


And @comebackshane has this interesting tidbit.

Third party hardware support (Matrox, AJA, BMD, MOTU)…Plugin support from more vendors (Red Giant)…external control surfaces… #avid


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And thanks to Pietari Creative for this awesome pic of the possible AVID Media Composer 64 Bit Interface.

•••••••••••

Pretty amazing news, though no timeline given. Still I love the look of the new interface, especially if is fully 64 bit, and does not lose all the features of previous AVID (see it can be done Apple).

And Black Magic and AJA support is huge, as is Red Giant Support, does that mean we may be getting Collorista 2 for AVID soon? Awesome.

It can’t come soon enough!

Helmut Kobler has an excellent article on being a Final Cuttter moving to Premiere Pro

Helmut’s article is mostly on the switch and what Premiere does and doesn’t offer, but also talks about the whole FCP X Fiasco.

Yes, well before all of Apple’s recent shenanigans, I started to sense that Final Cut, along with all of Apple’s professional apps and gear, was slowly being strangled to death. Here are a few of the harbingers of doom that caught my eye over recent years:


• Apple took nearly 2.5 years to upgrade Final Cut Studio from version 2 to 3 (and v.3 was only a moderate upgrade at that). Until then, updates had come at a much more aggressive pace.

  • Apple cancelled the popular Shake, promising to replace it with a new tool that never came.


• Apple got lazy with its Logic Pro app as well, letting development creep along with an upgrade about every two years.


• Apple stopped updating the Pro page on its web site long ago. There hasn’t been a new item posted in almost two years: http://www.apple.com/pro/


  • Apple took more than a year to fix a glaring Final Cut 7 bug that made its Close Gap command unreliable. To break a core Timeline feature like Close Gap and not fix it for 14 months was offensive and inexcusable.


• Apple cancelled its Xserve RAID then its Xserve hardware.


• Apple started taking longer and longer to release Mac Pro workstations, and absolutely phoned in the latest upgrade last July. 511 days in the making, the newest Mac Pro was one of the most un-inspired hardware upgrades I’ve ever seen from Apple.


• Apple pulled out of industry trade events like NAB.


• Multiple rumors (and confirmation of rumors) of significant layoffs in the Pro Apps division.


• Multiple rumors that Apple was trying to sell off its Pro Apps division.


Take just a few of these and maybe they don’t add up to anything. But take all of them together, and it’s a real sign of Apple’s low-to-non-existent priority for professional media. Yes, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while, and by 2010, I reluctantly began to read it. Late last year, I started to look at the two clear alternatives to Final Cut….

The rest of the article has some excellent reasons why he moved to Premiere, and documents the differences and similarities, and really gives a good idea of why to try out Premiere Pro, it really is a must read!

Techvessel has an interview with a former Avid Employee on FCP X

This is an interesting article at Techvessel on Final Cut Pro X. I still don’t think that Apple is really thinking they have the new professional paradigm. I tend to think they are using the cache of the Final Cut Pro name to try to sell to Prosumers, but the article dose have some interesting points.

It’s hard to say exactly what Apple’s strategy was with their release of FCPX. Its announcement at the NAB convention seems to suggest that they were trying to get professional editors excited about FCPX, yet the lack of support and backwards compatibility with FCP7 shows either a disconnect, or outright disregard for the realities of being a professional editor.  


This release feels similar to their previous iMovie reboot. In that case, I think Apple could afford to be more aggressive with abandoning the previous version of iMovie and starting from scratch.  Many iMovie users probably don’t use it on a daily basis, so throwing out their previous experience with an older version and starting over really wasn’t that big of a deal.


For *professional* editors, this is an entirely different scenario. Pro editors use their software of choice all day, every day. They become masters at shortcuts and UI tricks to make them effective. If you’ve never seen a *good* professional editor at work, I can tell you it’s amazing. The speed and precision in which they work is staggering. They can do this because they’ve spent countless hours training on and mastering their tools. That’s why it’s unreasonable to expect that Pros would jump on board with FCPX on day one.


and

What happens if you’re currently on a project using FCP7, and you need to bring some new people on board to help finish the project? You’d better hope they already have a copy of the software, since now you can’t buy FCP7 any longer. I’m not sure what you do in that scenario. I think it’s these kinds of issues that show a lack of respect for the Pro editor that has gotten the community so riled up.

and

The bigger concern I would have if I were at Avid would be that it appears Apple is again trying to leapfrog their competition with a new paradigm for video editing. Avid’s interface was already showing its age, and now it’s only going to appear more antiquated in the eyes of young editors growing up on FCPX. Maybe Avid doesn’t necessarily see that as a big deal – they have their loyal users who aren’t going to switch and they know it. Remember also that Avid doesn’t make their money from the editor software alone – they also have big enterprise server systems that manage large amounts of media and also do things like big newsroom automation systems. These are things that Apple are not likely to compete with. However, in all those kinds of systems, the lynchpin is the Editor, and if none of the younger editors know how to use, or don’t care to learn Avid, that’s a big long-term problem.

As I said I don’t fully agree, as I don’t see FCP X really taking off in the condition it is in, and I believe some of it’s basic paradigms are so flawed (the magnetic timeline being one) that I don’t see this being the choice for young editors if they actually expect to work in a professional environment.

Premiere Pro Needed Feature

So far I am enjoying learning Premiere Pro, in fact much more than I thought I would, but one feature I really miss is iChat theater.

The ability to cut remotely and show your cut and see the producer and let them see you was an amazing addition by Apple, and something that really needs to be added into Premiere to bring it on par with Final Cut Pro 7.