[Frameworks] query for those who teach filmmaking

[David Tetzlaff]

> We spend a lot of time with the learning curve of the software, and not as much time as I'd like with the conceptual aspect of creative work.

BINGO!!

Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would abandon FCP7. When Bolex stopped making the H16, schools using film didn't rush out and buy Arri SRs. A 40 year old Bolex still does what it always did: is still an excellent tool for shooting 16mm MOS. By the same token, a 5 year old FCP7 system still does what it always did: edit digital video in a powerful yet easy to learn interface at a reasonable cost. It can handle any SD or HD codec used in the current cameras a school would have or buy now, and no new camera technology that promises to leave FCP7 behind is on the horizen. And so what if one does show up? Truth be told, good ol' SD DV is a perfectly excellent tool for teaching filmmaking. If that was all you had available, you could still teach students every important creative aspect of motion picture work, and the output looks very nice. HD is just gravy pedagogically, and the HD codecs FCP7 can handle aren't going away, AVCHD in particular. 

(Heck, if I was still teaching, I'd be holding onto HDV, because tape offers a benefit to beginning students: The stock is so cheap, you have them use it like film. Record a tape, capture the footage to a hard drive, then put the tape away in a box. That way, when someone's hard drive crashes, as it invariably will at least once a semester, they just fire up a batch re-capture from FCP, and voila, the project is restored and they don't have to start over. With solid state media, you're not going to be able the kids to do that -- put their full SD cards (or, God forbid, P2 cards) away in a box. They're going to re-use them. Then, when their drive crashes, they're screwed, and you're screwed too because you have to put in extra time and effort to help them get back on their feet and make extra accommodations for the fact they've fallen behind schedule. Of course, that wouldn't be an issue if every student had TWO hard drives, and kept rigorous backups of all their captured media, but that's not going to happen either.)

But I digress from the key issue.

When I was teaching, I INSISTED on minimizing the time students spent learning the technology, in order to maximize the class time devoted to the conceptual skills of filmmaking. FCP was perfect for this. I would spend two class sessions in Intro showing the students how to edit in FCP, and then turn them loose to figure the rest out for themselves. Which they all did, and these were liberal arts students who were generally utter noobs to any kind of production. Try that with Avid, (make me laugh...).

For my own work, I'll give up FCP7 when they pry it out of my cold dead hand -- or when some Mac developer sees what kind of significant market hole is left by the Hobson's choice between Avid, Premiere, and FCPX, and creates a sort of FCP7 clone in pure 64-bit code and offers it at a reasonable price -- which, alas, I don't see happening in the current state of consolidation in the software biz.

If I was still teaching, I would be even more adamant about my program holding onto FCP7 (well, the whole Final Cut Studio actually) and all the other tech stuff that goes with it: last generation Mac Pro towers, Mountain Lion, AVCHD, etc. USB 3 is nice, but you can get a USB 3 card for a PCIe Mac Pro for $15, so no problem there.

They say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I say "If it ain't broke don't replace it with something that is some combination of less useful, harder to learn, buggier, more expensive, and/or loathed by huge segments of the creative and professional communities..."

One thing I wrote to Irene off-list that none of the posts here so far seem to get goes back to her schools current dilemma of having different sets of instructors using different software in their classes in a kind of free-for-all. This is pedagogically unconscionable for most 4-year college programs. We're not supposed to be training students in the range of professional software packages they'll need to master in order to get jobs as online edit technicians. We're supposed to be teaching the art of motion picture making. Forcing students to keep learning new editing programs each time they take a different class is like a Creative Writing program forcing students to learn a new word processing program every time they take a new class (well, it's worse, since word processing programs aren't that hard to learn). In order to have students and faculty concentrate precious time in class and out of class on the things that really matter, using a common set of tools is essential. And that effectively makes FCPX a non-starter. No group of experienced faculty will ever agree to standardize around it. And if they did, the next time a position opened if the job description included "must use FCPX" that would seriously bugger the applicant pool. On the other hand, (and this is only mild hyperbole) nobody doesn't like FCP7. Some might PREFER Avid, or Premiere or even (barf) FCPX, but virtually everybody knows FCP7 and can use it effectively. (The exception being die-hard Windows geeks who detest anything that only runs on a Mac, and frankly I don't have the time of day for those folks, as I rate them as having only slightly more sense than Young Earth creationists.)

Anyway, if somebody actually has a GOOD reason for abandoning FCP7, please enlighten me (and no, Chris, don't waste your time with 'FCPX is easier for noobies to learn,' because even if you could convince me of that -- which you can't -- it just doesn't matter for the reasons I've already outlined...)