Re: Final Cut Server - Initial Thoughts and disappoinments

I've been installing and configuring FCServer all week. It's full of surprises, definitely.

I absolutely agree that it's a nuisance how far you have to go just to scrub or play an asset. The filmstrip icon is OK but it opens in QT Player instead of in place. All of my clients just sort of expect a play button whenever they have a clip selected.

It's also to clicky-windowy in other areas. For example, if you search on annotations, there doesn't appear to be a way to quickly see the annotation in the results. you have to get info on the asset, then open the annots window (by aiming at that tiny icon), then find the search result by eyeballing it in the list of annots (no filter). Then when you double-click the annot, it doesn't automatically seek to the in point of the annot; you then have to click on another tiny icon at the bottom left. Sheesh.

I'm also surprised that the rough cut editor they showed last year is gone, at least for now. Everything from CatDV to Microsoft's IMM had one, and exported to FCP. And the Final Cut Studio project didn't buy me as much as I thought either. Pretty much the only difference between working with Final Cut and Premiere is that it knows which media assets you need to copy from the server for the FCPS project.

I can't seem to check out a multiple selection of assets. I have to check them out one at a time.

All of my clients think that the mark in and out buttons in the annotator are supposed to head/tail the clip. They never figure out by themselves that it marks the in and out of the annotation itself. This is probably because they only open the annots window to play the clip, they aren't thinking about the annots.

Several operations encourage you to export, copy locally etc, spawning a dangerous number of asset copies. I'd prefer to avoid that; I'm hoping edit in place will work, but I haven't gotten it working. I'm not using my SAN yet, but all the clients have access to the server by gigabit ethernet. Not sure how to troubleshoot that -- I might call support.

I was REALLY disappointed that it doesn't handle native, unwrapped MXF files from a Panasonic camera. My intended workflow was to set up a watcher and have it suck in from the P2 cards more or less unattended but that's kind of broken. I'll need additional software and steps in between.

If I try to drag a clip to an app or the desktop, nothing appears to happen. Going back into the client app we find a dialog saying it must be cached first. I'd prefer it if it just cached it for me.

I'd like to see a list of clips in the cache and be able to sort and filter them for deletion. If you don't remember they're there it's hard to figure out where your disk space went.

Also, and I'm sure this must be user error, when I drag a clip into the NLE it always brings the high-res version, not the proxy. That can be annoying, I want to control it. I'm hoping for a low-res edit, high-res finish workflow here.

From a UI perspective I feel that it is exceptionally inefficient with screen space. Even with a 30" monitor I have tons of overlapping windows. there are lots of places that look like they should be clickable (notably the Jobs In Progress indicator and the resources list for the Assets) and that I could do interesting things with them (open the job monitor or the alert it's showing me, or select/rebuild/delete the selected resource, respectively).

I'm always surprised that the clip playback window is small even for HD material. I guess what I want is a player window that is used by whatever the frontmost window is, with the selected clip. Put the player window on a 24" monitor and then preview clips from the asset browser, Asset info panel and annotator, at full size. Good for critical evaluation.

I don't even know if it's possible with a Java app but I'd love some kind of URL that immediately fires up the client app and shows the asset or set of assets, to quickly go from an email to the asset. There are ways around it by assigning it to a person for review, but maybe you don't want to do that. Or maybe you want multiple people to take a look -- optionally.

Tip for those of you setting up a server: Don't change the IP address of the server. The client app often won't launch afterward, and you have to hunt it down, delete it, and re-download the client app.

Another tip: You may want to start with Leopard Server so that you can easily use Open Directory or Active Directory to manage user authentication.