By now you have been at least exposed to the vortex that is the release of Apple's new Final Cut Pro X software. It is indeed an exciting time in the world of editorial workflow.
We here at Meta Media are excited to take this software, place it officially into our lab environment, and begin to test its stability, ingest options, export options, and ultimately, its suitability for professional use.
Our advice to the curious: we invite you to go to Apple's Mac App Store on a machine not involved in your day to day production and download a copy for $299. We welcome feedback from your discoveries as we apply our rigorous standards to its functionality. The same goes for Motion and Compressor. They're $49 extra, each.
However, we all know that a 1.0 release will be rife with issues that FCP's vast user base will discover and report, and Apple will ultimately fix. We'd just rather they have to deal with these issues than you.
We're also available to form a plan to make sure your infrastructure is eventually ready this very powerful product. There are specific hardware and OS requirements that will sometimes require an upgrade to either category. Although storage infrastructure paradigms will basically remain the same, there are (in our opinion) significant changes coming to the edit workstation for which our current and potential customers should be planning.
Further, what will eventually surface is that Apple is clearly closing doors on certain workflows, and specifically codecs, that may inhibit your facility to work as it has with FCP 7.
Just peek into the main preferences of FCP X to see that Apple is subtly enforcing "ProRes or the highway" as far as what used to be called the "Sequence Setting". Now, if what you place into the sequence is any codec that you can throw at it, and now FCP X renders all of that footage eventually, in the background to ProRes, does that really matter?
Well, in terms of storage requirements and post-deliverable management and archiving tasks, it will.
What we want to make clear is that we at Meta Media have already thought these scenarios through. If these concerns are on your mind today, please make an appointment with us so we can meet with you, as a team, and walk you through these scenarios. We specialize in empowering our customers to leverage new breakthroughs in technology, like FCP X, so that their content is fresh and relevant, their workflows are effortless, and their creative process is the focus of their facility.
Thanks for reading, and happy FCP X release day!
Cheers,
The Meta Media Team
Comments