Elizabeth Flock for The Washington Post BlogPost:

In the latest move of Japanese pop toward virtual or fictional stars, the newest addition to a Japanese girl group with millions of superfans turns out not to be real.

Fascinating development in terms of what people view as real and unreal. I think virtual characters are only going to accelerate as time goes on. Wondering whether or not a character is real or not will be a conversation for old people, much like the generation before mine never quite understood how meaningful conversations could happen over IRC/AIM/chat.

Also, check out the “making of” video:

Perhaps when I said the [release of Final Cut Pro X felt botched](http://www.candlerblog.com/2011/06/21/final-cut-pro-x-doesnt-do- what/), I was jumping to a specific conclusion because of the way I use FCP today. In my day to day work, I require high-end tape-based input and output from Final Cut. I’m an edge case and FCP X might not be for me, but who is it for?

I think the price tag says everything you need to know about who Apple sees as its core market. At $299, it’s no longer the high end niche product it was when Final Cut Studio cost $1000. When I postulated that [FCP would take most of its cues from Aperture](http://www.candlerblog.com/2010/11/17/final- aperture-pro-an-idea-for-whats-to-come/), I never considered price tag or target markets; I was only thinking in terms of interface and usability. The bigger picture, from Apple’s perspective, is how many units they can move, and there is a much bigger market for non-professional filmmakers than there ever will be for full time editors. Much in the same way that Aperture appeals to photographers of all levels, Final Cut Pro X is meant to be accessible to folks who are unfamiliar with the antiquated ways of tape-based workflows. It is for the casual editor.

Defining Casual

The term “casual gamer” has become relatively commonplace over the last few years, best exemplified by the runaway success that is the Nintendo Wii. Debuting in 2006, the Nintendo gave up on the processing arms race its two biggest competitors, Microsoft and Sony, had been engaged in. Instead, they released a lower-powered machine with an innovative interface. The Wii remote represented a paradigm shift in gaming). This was a videogame system that grandma could play. Nintendo discovered an untapped market and used it to bludgeon the competition. The casual gamer wasn’t just born, it became the market to go after.

I believe that Apple is looking to sell Final Cut Pro X to casual editors, people who now lug around video in their phones and their still cameras, unaware of what to do with it. Filmmakers who would rather just jump in and start cutting without taking the time to learn the historic language of film; who will never have to understand what a “bin” is. They just want something that will let them get creative with their footage to an extent that iMovie can no longer handle.

Apple isn’t coming out of left field with this move. Look at the way professional video cameras have progressed over the last 20 years. They have dropped in price and compromised classically professional features in order to get them in the hands of consumers. The result has been a revolution in independent cinema. Panasonic in particular has aggressively gone after the “prosumer” market and won over many filmmakers even though many of their products have been technologically inferior to the competition. Apple is trying to bring the accessibility and availability revolution of film production tools to post production. The casual editor is tomorrow’s filmmaker and Apple is looking to that future.

What About Hardcore?

In the gaming analogue, hardcore gamers are the ones who drove the market back when gaming was something of a niche. They desired better graphics, more power, more buttons, more intense gameplay. Sony and Microsoft engaged with them, but Nintendo sidestepped them completely. The accepted knowledge at the time was that you didn’t want to irk the core; they’re the audience who spends money on consoles.

As the Wii reached ubiquity, hardcore gamers felt like they had been abandoned by one of the progenitors of their obsession. But did Nintendo abandon them? For all its blemishes, the Wii was still able to run great titles that even the most cynical hardcore player could find enjoyment in. It became commonplace for gamers to have more than one console in their house, and that was okay too. They could get their fix on the XBox and then goof off with the Wii.

Following that thread, perhaps Final Cut Pro X is a new tool that can be used for some projects but not for all of them. You can ruin¹ run an install of FCP X alongside FCP 7, so it’s conceivable that one will be used for tape-based workflows while the other is relegated to low-end tapeless projects. Where Apple made it’s biggest misstep was in replacing FCP 7 with FCP X (you can no longer buy FCP 7) when really, it apparently is a different toolset.

A Final Word on Fear Mongering

Editors whose livelihood depends on Final Cut have plenty to think about at this juncture, but I think it takes it too far to say FCP X kills the product altogether. Editors are talking about moving to another NLE, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t seem fair to treat FCP X as unusable. It will find its footing and, hopefully, become the best available editor for most projects out there.

Final Cut Pro 7 still works today and it should work for a long time to come. Of course, one never knows when Apple will start phasing it out. Since it is based on legacy code, support could be dropped in a future version of OS X, but it will still work in 10.7 Lion and that should take you a few years into the future. By the time support is dropped, FCP X should be up to snuff.

Or not.

My point is that you shouldn’t whine about Apple selling editors up the river (the didn’t). Go find a tool that works for you and make great work. You can bet the casual editors of the world will.

I’ve personally been following Apple’s keynotes and releases for about twelve years, and in that time I’ve never seen a release get as botched as today’s rollout of Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 and Compressor 4. Cupertino has done a terrible job of managing expectations. Editors should be jumping onto a new release, not jumping ship, but it seems like that’s what’s about to happen.

I should mention that I haven’t touched FCP X; I haven’t bought it yet and haven’t seen anything more than the press materials and demos. However, I feel pretty confident that tinker time would do nothing to change the sheer lack of basic features in the newest release of FCP. From [Philip Hodgetts](http://www.philiphodgetts.com/2011/06/what-are-the-answers-to-the- unanswered-questions-about-final-cut-pro-x/) here’s a brief smattering of what Final Cut Pro X version 1 can’t do:

• Ingest Red R3D Media * Import FCP 6 or 7 projects * Capture footage from pro tape formats * Do a non-crash-capture from Firewire tapes * Output tapes * Support third party plugins * Multi-cam editing * Import/Export XML or EDL files
  I’d like to join others and give Apple the benefit of the doubt that these things will be slowly rolling out in time. To be fair, they’ve done a complete rewrite of the app in Cocoa 64-bit, which means all third-party support, including video in/out cards, goes out the window until developers get their code in line with the new FCP X. Still, this is a lot of missing stuff for day one. No tape workflows?

Apple is clearly looking to the future. So many productions have gone tapeless, but most workflows don’t revolve around DSLR H.264 files which appears to be all Final Cut Pro X is built for today. No support for Red, Arri Alexa or XDCAM (sans transcodes outside of FCP X)? That’s a big pill to swallow.

Apple has to roll out updates soon, like by the end of the summer soon, or else people will head to Avid in droves. We were all ready for the next wave in video editing, but there’s just too much missing from this release to make it a production tool today.

All that being said, it still does look like a sick interface that will be great for a lot of people. If you do shoot on DSLRs there is no better option available. I can’t wait to get my hands on it and shove some D90 footage into it and write a more well-rounded reaction.

Where are Color and DVD Studio Pro? I’m annoyed that Compressor’s design appears to be unchanged. Apple’s marketing claims there’s a “Streamlined settings library” but it looks like the same insane interface I’ve been staring at for years.

Oh well, as long as it’s more powerful…we’ll see.

As a result of the national spotlight directed at the development of the project, she noted, “You get bored of a show before it even opens because there’s been too much talk about it.”

She added, “Twitter, Facebook, blogging just trumps you.”

-Julie Taymor on
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

Some very interesting tidbits in Variety on the media event that was Spider- Man: Turn Off the Dark. Taymor took a lot of potshots for the spectacle but refuses to wear the production as some sort of albatross.

You have to respect an artist who won’t apologize for following her creative impulses, no matter what the critics said.

In the early days of the iPad, one of the first apps I bought was Penultimate by Cocoa Box Design. Penultimate was designed to be your digital Moleskine notebook, a simple and elegant blank page on which to doodle, sketch, or write. Whether it was the elegance of the app or the fluidity of the pseudo-pressure-sensitive drawing, Penultimate earned a permanent place on the front screen of my iPad.

I approached the developer, Ben Zotto, about my desire to use Penultimate for storyboarding. The app then offered a selection of three paper styles; plain, lined, and graph. Rather than myopically suggesting he add storyboarding templates, a rather niche use case, I suggested that it might be of general interest to his users to allow custom papers. I must not have been the only one thinking this, because just this May, Ben released Penultimate 3.0 with exactly that feature. He even used a film storyboard as his example.

This link is a whopping two days old, but it’s worth the read if you haven’t seen it yet. Stu’s attention to detail and his custom Penulimate storyboard sheets are simply phenomenal. If you have an iPad it’s a must read. If you’re a filmmaker wavering on getting one, be careful; you’ll want one.

David Lieberman for Deadline:

Wall Street analysts warned cable operators on Tuesday that they’d better fix their clunky user interfaces and lousy consumer service if they want to avoid a showdown with Internet and technology powers such as Google and Apple.

Wall Street analysts tend to make shit up, especially when it comes to [Apple](http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/04/20/apples-blow-out-quarter-the- bloggers-called-it-the-street-blew-it/). Still, cable companies have had their head in the sand for too long, so if it takes being scared silly by analysts, so be it.Times have changed but my Time Warner Cable menus haven’t. I mean since I clicked the exit button ten minutes ago… Here’s my other favorite excerpt:

[Citigroup Investment Research’s Jason Bazinet] raised one possibility that has grabbed many people’s imaginations recently – that Apple might design a TV set that would work with programming from a pay TV rival such as DirecTV. “That plays to Apple’s strength, which is not your strength, which is the operating system,” Bazinet said, calling cable’s user experience “a Rube Goldberg contraption.”

Amazing someone has to warn them about what seems so obvious.

One of the trends we’re seeing in the iOSification of computing on Apple products is the dominance of the application over the document…

Fascinating piece from Dr. Drang about where Apple is taking the file system. In short, iCloud represents a move to keep documents within specific applications instead of floating somewhere in the Finder.

I know I’d love to have a single Final Cut Pro Document contain every last piece of footage within a project. Imagine never having to media manage again. Extraordinary times.

I think in order to talk about J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, one must first talk about “The Case,” the super 8mm movie directed by the titular young protagonists that plays over the end credits of the film. It is a low-budget zombie flick made by the rubenesque Charles Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths) and starring all of his boyfriends plus one femme fatale. A detective must figure out why people are turning into zombies before they kill his wife.¹ In short it’s a bunch of dudes making movies² because they can and they want to: best summer ever. This creative process seems to be what motivated Abrams when he set out to make a monster movie that could both stake a spot in the genre’s canon and pay homage to it’s wondrous and oftentimes idiotic past. He wants to give kids an old fashioned thrill, and he does so effectively in this derivative yet enjoyable film.

Even if he weren’t a producer, Steven Spielberg’s hand can be readily felt in almost every frame of Super 8, and not only only from his early forays into monster mayhem like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Abrams’ use (perhaps overuse) of lens flare feels quite a bit like War of the Worlds and there is even a shot that feels lifted straight out of Munich. This is not just a film for the plugged in fanboy (there’s an insider Star Wars quip that got a healthy laugh in my theater) but an out and out attempt to match directorial wits with Spielberg. Abrams is trying to replicate the spirit of a young Spielberg film with the benefit of knowing the director’s latter creative forks. It’s nostalgia of nostalgia.

But what of the story? The fun of Abrams’ concept and subsequent marketing is that audience members are left mostly in the dark about what the film is actually about. I can tell you there’s a monster and that it is rightly obscured for the first two thirds of the film. M. Night Shyamalan, the one- time “next Spielberg,” misfired in Signs by showing his (utterly lame) monster too early. Restraint is only half the battle; the creature design here is top notch. It’s a mostly original [redacted] geared to inspire wonder in young minds. It’s all about the monster in Super 8.

That being said, much of the rest of the film feels too corny for a modern audience³. Most of the plot revolves around “vintage Spielberg” conventions. Broken family in peril, misunderstood nerd, daddy issues, fear of government, etc. Abrams put together a well-oiled and nicely sapped machine here, but it’s important to remember that he is paying homage to bad movies. The monster movies that boys watch at sleepovers have plots that are full of holes and superfluous characters, faux emotional progressions and misplaced messages. At one point a boy even yells “Drugs are so bad!” as a stoned adult sleeps his way through a veritable war zone. It helps to have a PSA in your monster movie so moms will feel okay making popcorn for the whole block.

Super 8 seems like a film from another era, which is especially fascinating given Spielberg’s history of hands-on producing. In the 1980s he earned a reputation as a backseat director for his protegé’s projects. He famously wrested most of Poltergeist away from Tobe Hooper. He also took some if not all of the reins from Richard Donner on The Goonies, a film that seems to share a heartbeat with Super 8. In both of those cases, however, Spielberg took a “Story by” but not this time around. When we fade to black, the first credit that comes up is “Written and Directed by J.J. Abrams.” If the elder director did in fact keep his hands out of the honey pot this outing, then what does it say of Abrams who seems to have made a film that feels as closely watched over as those earlier works?

You may have noticed I’ve spun an entire review without mentioning the plot or most of the characters. Not only would it be tough to skirt around spoilers, the truth is I think you’ll find a bevy of options online to whet your palette, but in all honesty I say just go to the theater and experience it for yourself. Super 8 makes for a fun summer ride that’s worth the price of popcorn. If you need more than that, look elsewhere.

Back in 1994, after we published a series of articles on no-budget movies like El Mariachi and Clerks, we felt morally compelled to publish a more sober follow-up, [The Myth of the Seven Thousand Dollar Movie](http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=lt9xkwbab&et;=1105864868977&s;=41244&e ;=001dKNh7PL3EcZUFpM2dK6d-ukWTnhRgFDzmBKW3JgoT0JKQvYoEhnLZmdi9HIxvC79W3QS9G6Wm pJG7ielCmiWy1OOuov4eOpRYRA_okjo3I7ttcfTbxssWgPi7lTQbsvxVWSpTEXEWO7rso4rn2mWtQD 850NeClUu5g5Ps3s8jBM=). It was written by producers Mary Jane Skalski (Win Win) and Anthony Bregman (Our Idiot Brother), who back then were members of the New York production company Good Machine. They wrote: “If you’re like most low-budget filmmakers, the word deliverables probably ranks somewhere at the very bottom of your List of Major Concerns, below ‘Outline my next film’ and above ‘Pay back Uncle Mort’s $1,000 loan.’ > … > So, it’s almost 20 years later, and what did I spend yesterday talking about at the IFP Narrative Lab? Deliverables.

What I think Scott Macaulay is missing here is that creative people don’t want to do heavy lifting. The tools have gotten slicker, the industry has gotten smarter, but filmmakers still don’t know how to deliver a film. I don’t think they ever will, and that’s a good thing. Let them keep the creative juices swirling, leave the boring transcodes and captures to the rest of us.

UPDATE: Great point from Scott via Twitter I didn’t consider before opening my mouth:

@FilmmakerMag: @poritsky I’m using the term “filmmakers” broadly. #ifplab includes producers too.

The problem may then be producers not realizing there is more heavy lifting involved in their job description than they imagined.