It's Not Easy Being Green

Played hookie from DaVinci this morning and instead got lucky and was able to spend a couple of hours talking with Isidore Mankofsky.   What a legend.  And, he's still working at age 80.  It's nice when someone at his level is actually willing to take the time to have a nice, intelligent conversation with regular people like me.  It definitely charges your batteries after going to events with people who are full of themselves.

Last night I was at the LAFCPUG meeting dedicated to FCPX.  Larry Jordan, the inimitable Michael Wohl and Phillip Hodgetts were all presenting on what actually CAN be done on FCPX (or as Michael Wohl calls it "Z," as in "forget about Final Cut, this is something completely different.")  It was a sold out house full of post production professionals.  About three hands went up in the whole theatre when asked who was planning on purchasing it.  And with good reason.  It offers a lot of innovation as far as GUI/database interaction for a video editor, unfortunately, it lacks a lot of standard features that a working professional would expect.   Say, telling you when your audio is out of sync.....apparently in the future audio will never be out of sync because X isn't going to tell you if it is.

I have a good idea what Apple was thinking, and in the longterm it was probably the right corporate strategic decision.  In the not too distant future most video is going to be shot in H.264 either on DSLR's or phones and end up being viewed on devices like the iPad or iPhone. But as far as alienating cultural tastemakers in such a huge way, what were they thinking?  I'm guessing we won't see the Coen brothers or Walter Murch on their marketing materials moving ahead, apparently they're at a place where that kind of approval is no longer needed for their products.  And we all scratch our heads, and try to figure out where to go next with all of this.