I’m going to sound like an old guy here, a veteran of the media wars. “It was terrible Timmy, we had competing operating systems, competing processors and the bombs were falling left and right”

BUT during the time that Apple switched from it’s custom powerpc chips to intel chips (circa 2010-ish) everything seems RIGHT with the video world. FCP was a powerful tool, much more powerful and preferred than Premiere and Apple hardware ran it. Of course it had a problem upgrading every year, but if you were careful it would be ok and you’d be able to continue working on your projects.

FCP then had this great feature that I still don’t quite understand why they discontinued it. When you kick out (render down) a project you typically use a significant part of your computer’s processor-both normal and graphics card processors to compress a file. In the pre-intel days, FCP allowed you to network files and projects in order to compress across your own mini-render farm. It was neat, as I used to edit on both a laptop and a desktop, and when I needed to kick that file out, I would use both, or even another desktop to help compress the file.

This required the help of another app integrated into the software called “Compressor”. If multiple machines had it, and were connected to the same gigabit network, you could call them up for multiple processing and farm compressing. This was also awesome and I felt it cut down on render time. I even went so far as to create a mini-network within my offices at the time that handles distributed processing as well as distribution with media assets using FCP Server (more on that in a second).

There are some people who argued whether it really truly had the full capabilities, but again, I felt that at the time I could kick out files much faster using the network feature. For a small shop with multiple creatives it was awesome in my opinion. I had a gigabit ethernet hooked up, which was still relatively new at the time, and had a gigabit hard drive server component as well, so the data flowed across the network for sharing, access, writing and rendering. These were also shared by FCP Server.

**Adobe Media Encoder allows for parallel and distributed processing, but that isn’t the same as having multiple machines compressing the same files at once as compressor used to do**

At the time, FCP came out with FCP server, which allowed the sharing of media assets. You could “check in” and out assets for creatives. If someone took a photo, it would be added and tagged into the system so that multiple people could access it and use it for their purposes. Photo guys take the photos, Graphics guys could edit the photos, video guys could add them into the pipeline for videos, kick out the videos and then web guys grab all of the above for publishing. I’m using the term “guys” loosely here, ‘cause there were plenty of women in the office. FCP server was based on some web/java script sharing system and it was a  bit clunky, as I remember it wasn’t an Apple product, just a rebranded one. My office at the time had only partially embraced the tech before I ended up leaving the system behind, but for what I envisioned, it worked out well for a shop. Then it came crashing down when they discontinued those versions for the upgraded Intel versions which at first were only shells of professional hardware.

And the whole point of this is that I miss the concept that it could have become. When Apple switched the Intel, they changed the whole game of FCP and in my opinion it caused me to never look back. Upgrading incredibly expensive hardware every year is both financially impossible for small businesses, and when Windows and Adobe finally stepped up, they created a better eco system than Apple had. I found myself switching alliance so easily, because what I needed just worked on Windows (considered taboo for those times) after Intel. You could edit on cheaper pcs, and when the graphics switch become more apparent-reliance on heavy duty graphics cards, it truly ended my time with Apple. And the network distribution option never became important as it was before that. Apple had created systems that were accessible to small businesses and shops-not giant rendering farms running custom software, but small shops that could actually afford to create a few distributed nodes and the ability to create small time productions with great tools. It’s kinda been a lone wolf journey ever since, but I suppose things are never going to remain the same, it’s the nature of the business and the nature of life. Sigh…I told you it was an old story.

Oh, the real point is that you do definitely need to organize your media assets. There are ways to do this-and ways to do this over the network, but they’re not as easy as that vision that once was. Databases and database software has come a long way, and that’s the sure route, but it isn’t as fully direction as it once used to be as a small shop friendly interface.