Re: New blog post from Philip Hodgetts. Worth the read.

[Jeremy Garchow] "Here, I'll give you one. Being able to work natively with h264/AVCHD footage is way more than four times as fast, it's probably 20-30 times faster, but that shouldn't count. Naming and organizing clips before/during/after import is another. It's the efficiencies of skimming, not moving tracks around, no clip collisions, basically everything that some people hate about the magnetic timeline that serves efficiency, is really hard to time and therefore prove, but it does make things go faster. As the blog post said 80% of the edit, 80% of the time."

I get that it's hard to time any individual step, especially since there is not a 1:1 correspondence between tasks in FCP7 and FCPX.

However, it's very doable to time a project from start to finish, which is presumably what's behind this line: "As near as I can tell these people are doing the same sort of work on Final Cut Pro X as they were on Final Cut Pro 7 and finding that they get to a result from twice as fast to four times as fast. Twice as fast to four times as fast!"

If a new tool make you four times as productive, presumably you'd have some insight into the nature of the gains. Again, I am not making this up, "four times as fast" is a quote; PH assumes "twice as fast" later in the post for the sake of argument, but he did make four references to 4x or 400% in the article.

It's not that I believe this is utterly impossible -- it's that I want to understand it better, because that kind of productivity gain is simply stunning.

If you can only get the same results 2x to 4x as fast in certain situations, let's talk about what those situations are. If you can get the same results 2x to 4x as fast in virtually any situation, let's talk about that too, and then even the most hateful of haters would switch.

Walter Soyka
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