Re: Email Exchange with Randy Ubillos, FCP X Designer

[Walter Soyka] "FCPX is introducing some new editorial and organizational concepts, and it's using a modern framework for media creation and playback, but I don't see why they are as inextricably linked as you suggest. AV Foundation contains the tools used to build FCPX, but AV Foundation doesn't strictly define the FCPX feature set."

Yes, but we need to understand the influences based on the underlying technology. AV Foundation is one of them. There are certainly others. It doesn't define/limit the entire app. It's one key element though.

[Walter Soyka] "For example, I've seen you suggest that gaps must be added because AV Foundation can't have a hole in a composition. Even if that were the case, FCPX could hide that unnecessary detail from the user. Don't you think it's more likely that gaps are there to make connected clips behave consistently in the UI?"

That's the kind of critique we need to see more of. It's an example of why the "wonderful GUI" still has some issues. Why can't the end user pull apart things and have the Gap inserted invisibly for example? I believe AV Foundation uses the "sequence" (Storyline" as a kind of file a little bit differently then the old style sequence which was just a series of pointers. The new thing (looks like a sequence but called a Storyline) can't have holes in it but why does this "working" have to be visible to the user?

My own gut is that Apple changed a lot of the nomenclature because they wanted to make intuitively clear (without explaining why) that things "things" that look like things you saw in FCP7 were only superficially similar and are, in reality, quite different. That this may not clearly come across may be another critique. Do the new names for things clarify or confuse? Maybe sticking to conventional would have actually helped people's understanding.

It's almost as if a "first tutorial" now needs to be a glossary of "this is called this because of that" It might be a more colloquial way of explaining AV Foundation without getting too technical.

Maybe, "A Storyline looks and works like a sequence but it's really a container. It can't have holes in the container so we have to have slugs to file holes. A "Gap" is a slug but that name was used because we want to make clear it's necessity to fill the hole," or whatever.

That a "Project" has one sequence is another good example of some of the confusion and frustration going on. In this case a "project" in FCPX is confusing because the word is what would use in FCP7 but it's really not the same thing at all.

Basically there's some serious confusion in the naming and that plays in to confusion about certain functions being there or not. All this frustrates people.