Re: macbook air and fcpx- the new portable edit suite

What about the idea of portable editorial has anything to do with FCPX? We've been editing on laptops for a decade (first with Firewire connectivity, then with ExpressCard, soon with ThunderBolt). What compelling advantage will FCPX on an iPad have over FCPX on a laptop?

I've been trying to pass off the statement "Expectations rise at the same rate as capabilities" as Walter Soyka's First Law of Computer Graphics [link], but this is really basic economics and I think it applies here, too.

Many here are pointing to increased portability as a big new production capability. I'll counter that increased responsiveness and shorter deadlines will be the accompanying client expectations.

There's another side to this coin, too, though. While tomorrow's tablet may compete with yesterday's workstation, tomorrow's workstation will add more processing power, I/O, and storage options. Maybe it'll be overkill for straight HD editorial, but any editorial that requires effects, motion graphics, 3D rendering, compositing, or coloring will see corresponding increases in capabilities and expectations that tablets and laptops won't easily match.

In other words, I don't see the "portable edit bay" (your laptop is surely not a suite) obliterating their desk-bound brethren; I see them complementing them.

One other loosely related thought: improvements in computing are evolutionary, but improvements in video are revolutionary. We have more or less consistently eased from the lowly 8088 to today's Xeons, but we jumped from SD to HD.

Computers' performance relative to video will improve gradually as long as HD is king, but the next quantum leap in video will set relative performance back again, just as we saw going from SD to HD.

YouTube is ready for 4K -- is your iPad?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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