Thankfully there are a lot of smart people out there poking Final Cut X with a stick to see what it'll do. Sometimes that's even useful. On Ken Stone's web site Steve Martin posts a method of making and using disk images to keep your work separated from other editors on a station. It's easy and clever and has the added advantage of allowing us to also edit across a network as we did previously with Final Cut 7. So that takes care of my two big complaints against the new kid.
It would have been nice if Apple has just mentioned this right from the beginning, but maybe they didn't know about it either. I can't tell if I think that's good or bad. Hmm.
I surprised myself yesterday, editing in Final Cut X, with the ease of copying a "look", or rather matching a color pallet from one shot to several others. That was useful. It gave a more unified look to a quick montage sequence I cut using good and not so good shots.
I had the RGB parade view up (to give me insight into what's off with the color) and I was also using a second monitor for the Events window which made it much easier to see the clips I was working with. So, all in all a pretty good experience with our new friend (or is it the devil in disguise, just tempting us).
I haven't had as much time working in Final Cut X as I would like because we're, as usual most summers, remodeling the labs in the media basement. This year I cut down the depth of the desktops by about a foot. I built them quite a while ago to fit all of the video equipment we used to have at a station: decks (DV and VHS), video monitor, two 17" or 19" CRT monitors, a tower computer, hard drives, (Zip and Jaz drives, remember), a mixer, headphones, speakers, Final Cut colored keyboard and I'm sure something else, too. Well those days are over. We have much less stuff at a station now and that empty space ends up just collecting dust bunnies and tumbleweed.
Now, we're down to an iMac, an external Raid drive. speakers and headphone, a regular Mac keyboard, an Epson flatbed scanner and a couple of desk lamps. A little sleeker and, I hope, a little sexier. I still have to stop off at Target and get some more of those chrome desk lamps that everyone likes.
We used to have a couple of stations facing each other, but now they all look in the same direction at the large projection screen so it'll be easier to do training sessions in the lab. We're also taking over the old tech shop space and converting it to a classroom. That will relieve the use of the studio as a classroom space and get it back to being a real shooting space again, something we all need desperately.
So lots of real work to do yet, but the results are already paying off in the cleaner look and feel of the lab, which always makes it easier to maintain, and the open-ended potential of an adjacent, high-end, media classroom. We were surprised to notice that we'll end up with three adjacent spaces all with large projection capabilities and good traffic flow from one to the next.
Oh, and we have the new InfoBar concept to work with up on the main floor of the library – we'll have a public presence for a change (that's a whole other post to talk about). Looks like it could be a fun year.
gunther
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