Re: After a year has perception of FCPX changed?

[Bill Davis] "The only reason to demand that the artist do it in Photoshop is because you want the ability to open and mess around with the pieces. That can be a good thing. Or it can be a VERY bad thing depending on who's doing the opening and who's doing the messing... My concern is that the higher up the food chain you go in the realm of design and editing, the less you want to make the entire process accessible to the whole team. One way to do that is to build complex workflows with specialists in-house - and wall off people via access restrictions. The other method is to let the designers "reach in" and apply their expertise directly into the project creation stream."

And the best solution is proper production management.

Incompatibility is not a feature. When contributors use esoteric tools, it should be for their unique functionality, not to make it harder for non-experts to change their work.


[Bill Davis] "But increasingly, a tool like Pixelmator can open a layered Photoshop file and make the same changes, every bit as easily."

Because the PSD format is open and documented [link].


[Bill Davis] "To me, Apple got this pretty right in Motion 5. They've provided some control at the level of FCP-X over universals like re-typing title text easily - but essentially "walled off" some of the more complex aspects of the design process via the "publish parameter" functions."

Agreed that this is very cool, at least in theory. None of my clients are using FCPX at the moment, so I haven't had a real opportunity to rig graphics packages in Motion for them.


[Bill Davis] "That's the main trend I've been working within for the past 3 years or so. I haven't a clue which shop or state my next gig is going to come from. My wife and I have worked as part of virtual teams responsible for digital creative content delivery for clients in St.Louis, San Diego, Nashville, and Provo over the past six months. None of them have a clue what my shop looks like, nor what software I'm working with. They want the final work delivered."

You are a production company. You are expected to deliver a final product. If you're writing, shooting, and editing yourself, you've got the whole workflow totally self-contained.

As you add independent collaborators, though, the workflow increases in complexity. Production management is doing their job if they care about the how as well as the what.



[Bill Davis] "Not so long ago, the shop that owned the iron and the talent used to have all the control. Now, that's shifting. The control is whoever has the skills to do the best work. To the extent that a shop does care, they're looking for more control. Which is fine if they're paying the bills. But the big functional change is that it's not REQUIRED that there be a big shop to support big talent or big ideas. Big talent can work in their spare bedroom if they so choose. That's a big change, IMO."

That's been shifting for years, though. We could debate when exactly the desktop editorial revolution began, but I think I'd peg the beginning of the shift with the release of the UVW-1800.

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