Why are you very dissatisfied with Final Cut Pro X?

I have used Final Cut Pro 7 for years in a professional broadcast editing environment where I need to interact with other team members who take care of different parts of post-production, from assistant editors to people doing specialized parts like color grading and audio mix. Final Cut Pro X has, until very recently, made it almost impossible to insert into this existing workflow in a sane manner.

Aside from the “working well with others” consideration, I am often in the role of an online editor, and with the lack of functionality I have seen to be able to relink and replace footage in a sane way, I simply cannot perform my online editing duties.

Using FCPX what little I have outside of my daily pro editing work (I say this having seem the demo and REALLY wanting to like it), I have not found myself able to get into any sort of flow with FCPX that I still have with FCP7. It seems, in many cases, that it now takes more steps to perform the same editing functions than it used to.

What are the primary reasons you upgraded to Final Cut Pro X?

I saw the demo at NAB, and was very intrigued by the new editing paradigms that Apple was trying to introduce. I REALLY wanted to like FCPx, so I gave it a shot. I have, however, mostly reverted to continuing to use FCP7.

Please share any comments and suggestions for improving Final Cut Pro X.

Final Cut Pro 7 had evolved into a tool that I trusted to help me get my daily work done. FCPX has stripped away a lot of those seemingly minor features that made FCP7 so powerful, and at the moment, it has seemed as if Apple is uninterested in restoring them, throwing it all off to focus on the “prosumer” editing market and allowing 3rd parties to fill in all of the Pro gaps. Maybe. Someday.

I hope that this survey signifies a change in that outlook.

I would encourage you to look at the broadcast video market to see whose needs are not being addressed. I can imagine, as FCPX stands, how those who work in film and corporate video might find it useable, but with the strict time contraints our edited video must fill, FCPX currently makes it harder to get precise timecode-dependent work done.

I really want to like FCPX, but at the moment, it’s very hard for me to do so. Clients I work with on a regular basis (e.g. NGT) are considering abandoning FCP. Please give us back our tools.

Thank you again for your participation.

If you have any additional comments about Apple, please include them in the space provided below.

Whatever happened to Final Cut Server? It was the germ of a good idea, and seemed to be a promising step toward increased professional video support, but it never seems to have gone anywhere. Why did that die?

The Post Atomic Horror Unofficial Episode Guide is a fun and humorous guide to the all of the Star Trek™ adventures featuring the original crew. It helps you keep track of which episodes you’ve watched, and offers easy access to the comedy review podcast, the Post Atomic Horror.

You don’t have to be a Trekkie to love this app: Let my good friends, podcastronauts Ron “AAlgar” Watt and Matt Rowbotham, be your guides to the incredible world of Trek — and listen to them joke while they watch the bad episodes, so you don’t have to.

Buy it now on the App Store!

This app contains written content from the Post Atomic Horror’s first book, The Post Atomic Horror Unofficial Episode Guide, volume one. The book also has bonus content, and artwork by Ramon Villalobos. Check it out!

“It seems like there’s always more and better to learn, but I learned enough to actually ship an iOS app for sale in the App Store, so I’m calling this a win.”

How I did it:

I can see several keys to my eventual success:

• Stick with it. Even though I was learning in spare hours here and there, continuing to attempt progress certainly helped.
• Find a support group. The assistance and encouragement of my local NSCoderNight group was invaluable. People really do want to help those who are trying to help themselves.
• Read a lot. I read numerous books and web articles about the things I wanted to learn. It didn’t always sink in the first time, but reading other books and articles on the same subject, with different wording and a different perspective, really helped it sink in with repetition and context.
• Take time off. I found the real way to boost my learning was to take some time off from my job to concentrate on that and that alone for a week or two.
• Write an app that you’re passionate about. Even when I didn’t feel I knew enough to write an app yet, the act of writing an app forced me to learn what I needed to do to get the app done, and really sped things along. The three weeks I took off work to code all day and put my first app out into the world was the best boost to my programming knowledge so far.

Lessons & tips:

I think I covered most of those above. Still, my biggest piece of advice is to figure out what app you’re passionate about building, and build that. You’re not going to be nearly as engaged in learning if you’re just building some boring tutorial app.

Resources:

• NSCoderNight — Find a group near you, and go to the meetings. Usually these are informal gatherings of people actually coding, and asking the occasional question. My local is NSCoderNightDC.
• If you want a more formal meeting with presentations and such, CocoaHeads may be your thing.
• The book that was the most help in learning Objective-C is Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan. That book was the first (and only, at the time) to teach you Objective-C from scratch, instead of assuming that you are learning it as an add-on to your existing C knowledge. Since then, I’ve also heard good things about Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, but I haven’t read it yet myself.
• The book I found most helpful for learning Cocoa was Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, from Aaron Hillegass of the Big Nerd Ranch, but if you’re going to concentrate on apps for iPhone and iPad, you might want to swap that out for iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide.
• If you’re curious, you can check out my first publicly released app, the Post Atomic Horror Unofficial Episode Guide for Star Trek.

Websites with articles and tutorials I found invaluable:

• Mike Ash: Friday Q&A series
• Ray Wenderlich: Tutorials for iPhone/iOS Developers and Gamers
• Cocoa with Love.
• Cocoa is My Girlfriend

Some other books that I read over the course of my learning:

• Learn Cocoa on the Mac (Learn Series)
• Beginning Mac Programming: Develop with Objective-C and Cocoa (Pragmatic Programmers)
• iPhone SDK Development (The Pragmatic Programmers)
• iOS Recipes: Tips and Tricks for Awesome iPhone and iPad Apps (Pragmatic Programmers)
• Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone: Creating Compelling Dynamic User Interfaces (Pragmatic Programmers)
• Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development
• Core Data: Apple’s API for Persisting Data on Mac OS X
• iPad Programming
• Learning iPad Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building iPad Apps with iOS 5
• The iOS 5 Developer’s Cookbook: Core Concepts and Essential Recipes for iOS Programmers (3rd Edition) (Developer’s Library)
• Tap, Move, Shake: Turning Your Game Ideas into iPhone & iPad Apps
• Advanced Mac OS X Programming (2nd Edition of Core Mac OS X & Unix Programming)
• The Complete Friday Q&A: Volume I, by Mike Ash

I was maybe 8 or 10 at the time. Somewhere in there.

And I had one, and it was delicious. Probably should have had half, but no, I ate the whole damn thing.

And then I kinda felt woozy later, but my mom dismissed it as too much sweets. And so I went to bed on the little travel mattress in the floor of the drawing room, just off the main living room, where I was staying the night (gorgeous, big old house — I once dreamed I’d buy it back into the family someday, but I doubt that will ever happen).

And then, about a half hour after I went to bed, with almost no warning, I threw up, all over my pillow and bed and pajamas and hair.

I remember it vividly.

So, even now, 25-30 years later, I become slightly nauseous even looking at an eclair.

[And now, to wait for my mother to read this, and tell me how I’m remembering it all wrong.]

I love, love, love Kindle books and the iPad. Two great tastes that taste great together. However, the does seem to be a trend I've noticed with screenshot images in technical books. To be fair, this seems to be an issue from the publisher side of things, and not an endemic Kindle issue, as the Steve Jobs biography had wonderfully high-resolution images in the appendix to the book. Some publishers even do well with tech books.

But some publishers, perhaps under the assumption that the pics are just there to look pretty, crunch them all to hell so you can't tell what's going on. For instance, on this page in Real World Modo about the Shader Tree, the image, even in its zoomed, full-screen version, is simply too low-resolution to comprehend. I may have to actually pick up the dead tree version of this book, just so I can tell what the heck is going on.

Publishers, please get your heads out of your asses when it comes to digital books. I really want to go all-digital, I really do. I'd love to have my library in the palm of my hand. But crap like this, and prices for a few megabytes of bits that cost more than for Amazon to ship me a dead tree, are not helping your case. An ebook is still a book. Don't expect that just because I prefer information in digital form that I also prefer a sub-standard experience.

An experimental analysis of the song “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar, digitized from a 45 RPM vinyl single.

This experiment was entered into to find if sampling the vinyl disc at a higher rate (by slowing down the input to a digitizer at the same sample rate) and then resampling would result in a “cleaner” auditory experience, in much the same way that oversampling an image on a scanner and then down-sampling to the required size often results in a cleaner image.

The green line represents the song as recorded at 44.1KHz playing at 45 RPM from my Technics SL-BD20 turntable with a brand new cartridge and needle.

The magenta line represents the same setup, but with the turntable playing at 33 1/3 RPM. The resulting 44,100 Hz sample recording was then sped up to 59,535Hz to match the original 45 RPM speed and then resampled back to 44.1KHz.

To my ear, I was hard pressed to hear any difference between the two, except possibly a slight difference in the tone of the “pops” picked up by the stylus due to damaged or dirty vinyl. The difference in the roll-off on the high end could potentially be due to the RIAA EQ curve built into the turntable not operating at the correct frequencies. The other general slight shift in frequencies, I would attribute to either a mistake in my resampling calculations, or a discrepancy in my turntable’s stability at different speeds (quite likely).

I’m well aware that I’m likely coming to bad conclusions due to poor experiment design, lack of understanding of all factors involved, and poorly-functioning equipment, but still it had to be done. For SCIENCE!

Regardless of the experiment’s inadequacies, the results do not seem to support the original hypothesis. The upshot being, I couldn’t tell enough of a difference between the two digitizing methods to go through all of this rigamarole when digitizing my collection of 45s.