Adobe Production Premium CS5.5: The future for Final Cut Pro users

If you've paid attention to the recent Final Cut Pro X debacle and are wondering like so many others if Apple has either lost their mind or, given up on the truly professional editor, the answers to both should unequivocally be, "Yes".


There are a handful of posts from people with a great deal more direct-Apple information than I have, who've very simply stated two things about Apple's perspective on "pro" users.

One:  Apple has always - and arrogantly - assumed that it's own direction, rather than listening to it's user-base - is the best direction, period.  End of story.  Apple may once in a while, give into mass-grumblings when things go really badly or if there's a widespread problem will issue a fix, but as a general rule, it's the Steve Jobs way or the highway.

Second, Apple only wants to produce things that nobody else is doing.  They don't want to fortify someone else's idea, expand on existing product structures or simply "update" older software/hardware.  They want to go Apple's direction only, and continue to feed the Jobs lemonade to the world.

And from the outside you'd be hard-pressed to think they've got it wrong, just recently during the week-long roller-coaster ride on Wall Street Apple was listed as *the* most valuable company in the world, with Exxon-Mobile coming in second place.  Apple has billions - yes, Billions of dollars in CASH and they've gotten there by concentrating in one single direction:  iProducts.

Apple has been, ever since the introduction of iTunes a consumer-centric and iProduct tunnel-visioned company and they've reaped their rewards.

So even if you're a loyal Apple customer and have been paying the bills using "professional" Apple products, and Steve Jobs decides that your current software - that being Final Cut Pro - is in need of drastic makeover and needs to be different than every other NLE on the planet, so different in fact that you no longer have a future path forward with your "old" version of Final Cut, Steve Jobs doesn't care.  Not one bit.

Why?  Because you're a pain-in-the-ass pro customer, and he's making his billions off the general consumer.  And so he's going to finally squeeze you out of the equation by turning Final Cut Pro X into "iMovie on Steriods" and laugh all the way to the bank.

In the meantime, you're sitting left feeling less like a professional editor and more like the red-headed step-child nobody will sit next to in class.  So if you're Mac-based are you now doomed to a future where you're  using old technology while your PC counterparts vault ahead of you in capabilities?  Of course not.

Just a few short years ago Adobe's Premiere Pro product lagged behind Final Cut and the rest of the NLE marketplace for years.  Why isn't quite clear, but what IS crystal clear ever since NAB 2007 is that Premiere Pro is back, and in a very BIG way, and in point of fact trounced FCP's capabilities starting with the version launched at NAB '07.

Today Premiere Pro and it's pro suite offering, Production Premium, is so far ahead of both FCP 7 and "X" that it's almost laughable to make a direct comparison.

I've spent the bulk of this post flushing out the future of pro-apps for Apple's software lineup, but my next post will talk about WHY every Final Cut Pro user on the planet needs to take a serious look at the Production Premium bundle from Adobe, and never look back.

Max OS X Performance Tools - The cool hidden tools!

Dig Deep into your own Performance

While OSX has a handy tool called "Activity Monitor" that can show you how hard your CPU cores and HDD's are working this is just the high-level information. If you *really* want to see inside your hardware's performance from an electrical surgeons point of view and actually see exactly how your CPU, GPU and RAM are crunching data - and how efficiently - you have super-cool tools readily available to you built right into Mac OSX.

Get out your Mac OS install disk and in the Optional Installs folder install the Developer Tools. This will install a host of code-monkey and other diagnostic tools that can do a lot more than just provide performance benchmarking, there are things that can show software hangs, "busted" code, control the spin-down of HDD's... it's just amazing what's available. Windows users have never had tools this powerful - unless you pay hundreds of dollars for a Windows SDK.

Specifically the 2 tools you can call up to dig into your GPU performance are the "OpenGL Driver Monitor"; this shows a plethora of stats you can apply to the performance window and watch in real-time as you work, how the GPU is being used by any application - especially Compressor or FCP during renders. This is a developers tool so there's no simple bar-graph like in Activity Monitor but you can choose as many parameters as you like and watch your video card at work.

The second is a multi-tool called, "Instruments". This one has many sub-diagnostic tools which amongst other things can display the performance of your multi-core CPU, threads and CPU performance.

The Developers toolkit does come with a PDF which explains each tool and how to use it, so read over that stuff before you go digging around but these 2 tools can very easily show you how well - or not - your system is crunching renders and encodes on ANY application, not just FCP.

Self-Healing Mac: Snow Leopard to the Rescue!

A lot of what I do the past 5 years is test, experiment and basically dig deep into how our tools of the trade actually do their job. When it comes to computers that means literally taking apart the OS and either reverse engineering it's core setups or worse, turning a good running system into a barely running shadow of it's original self - non-destructive testing for software I suppose you could call it. But all this tweaking also means I have to then restore all my bungled surgery back to it's original condition so my once pristine system regains it's former healthy status.

Before Snow Leopards' release, restoration was an often painful task (and forget about any version of Windows, painful doesn't even come close to being a good descriptive) simply because the restore process really didn't take me back to a 100% restored state but more of a hybrid of good code with bad sitting in an old folder - just in case you end up having some parts of the OS that require needing it's parts manually replaced.

Right away some people are thinking, "Why not simply make a backup prior to all this testing?". But therein lies the point: Many people get themselves into a situation where they've gotten their system in a poorly running state or worse, had corruption caused by user error or a poorly written app that's gone amuck. It happens even in Mac-land. These same people often do *not* have any backup strategies in place so all they have is their single install on their main machine - and they're desperately trying to fix their broken or crippled OS.

Well fear no more: Snow Leopard is now *nearly* 100% self-healing. I say nearly, because nothing replaces having a stable clone or backup OS on safety-standby but now you can fix things quickly without the fuss of before...

If you're running Snow Leopard and get into trouble with OS stability you now only have to do one thing: Insert and boot from the OS disk and re-install the OS. That's it.

Worried you're going to erase your previous installation and all your apps or, like the previous OS's where "Archive & Install" simply put a new copy of the OS and moved the old off to a new folder? Worry no more.

In fact what happens is quite brilliant: Snow Leopard's install routine is now by default (as in hard-coded into the install routine) always in "Analyze and Replace" mode, no more archiving old code (although technically it does move a few things into a safe, hidden folder). What happens is this: The install routine looks at all the current code installed on the machine, analyzes which code is good and which is bad and simply erases old core files and replaces them with original code and puts all core services back to a fresh install state.

But the best part: It does NOT erase any apps, preferences... nothing. All your previous data is kept in place - as long as those user-created core OS files are not corrupted - and not moved off to a "previous OS" folder. (no effect on third-party software prefs at all). That means you get back an entire OS - albeit reverted back to 10.6.0 - but in perfect running order and exactly the way you had it setup. All you need do is run Software Update to bring you current to the OS state and you're back in business. End of story.

I'm often very critical of what Apple doesn't do properly, but their golden child, Mac OSX, has just gotten brilliantly better for us all.