I just had a rather frustrating experience with my iPhone restoring from a previous backup. Sometimes instructions are lost in translation when describing a user action—and that's what happened to me.

When you plug your iPhone into your computer, there's 2 buttons that stand out. "Check for Update" is very obvious, but the little "Restore" button below appears to be a maintenance aid when solving issues you might be having.

If you are experiencing problems with your iPhone, you can restore its  original settings by clicking Restore.

I have done this many times over the years with various iPhone's and iPad's. The simple theory is this: backup your device with iTunes first, transfer any purchases you need, and you have a file in your system to revert back to. After you "Restore" to the factory settings, this is the last backup that iTunes will then apply to your "fresh" device so everything is as it was.

This is where the problem comes in! (or the appearance of one)

After you successfully backup, restore and then restore from backup, you think everything's fine. Then your device shows in iTunes with the same message: "This computer has previously been synced with an iPhone or iPod" and asks you to "Set up as a new iPhone" or "Restore from the backup of:" and the same drop down list you picked before. Didn't I just restore from my last backup? Did something go wrong?

Upon inspection, your phone seems to have all photos, email accounts, texts, etc copied back—but no Apps! The job appears to have been completed halfway!

And the revelation

After your iPhone has come back with the partial restore, iTunes isn't being as forth coming as it should. The option for "Set up as new iPhone" seems scary, since there is no reassuring description of its action or a help to read more. You are given the ability to name your device again before it finishes the job of the restore. That's it! I renamed mine so I could manually go and delete some old backups (with the old name) from the iTunes preferences. This is really just the second step to restore and all of your apps, videos, etc will continue to copy back to your phone.

"Set up as a new iPhone" should be translated to "Name your device again or keep the same dang thing."

Launchpad

This was supposed to be a feature right? Someone didn't tell Adobe how to hide their 500 apps from showing up. But how can you hide them without deleting them or using Terminal? Download and install Launchpad Control and command Launchpad from your System Preferences.

DVD's Don't Work!

Googling "OS X Lion Boot DVD" will show you how to create a backup and installer of 10.7. This is very useful if you want to do a clean install, or you don't want to download Lion for each computer. After testing though, the DVD doesn't work as an installer. For whatever reason, the DVD won't finish copying to the new drive. Go find an 8GB thumb drive and format that for your Lion installer.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

During the install, Lion creates a separate partition that's used as a recovery drive. You can boot from it and repair or reinstall Lion onto your main drive. Since this recovery partition is on the same drive as your OS, this doesn't solve a complete drive failure. Apple has made a separate Lion Recovery Disk Assistant available that you can install on a smaller thumb drive (1GB of free space). So what's the catch? You have to make this Lion Recovery from a system with Lion already installed (and that recovery hd already built into the OS drive). Since this drive only needs 1Gb of space, I wonder how much is used from the thumb drive and how much needs to be downloaded during install. The method above, actually making a Lion installer doesn't need internet access to install.

Repair Permissions

If you have done a clean install, or just an upgrade, Lion will run better if you repair permissions. Open Disk Utility and select the drive the OS is running from (Macintosh HD) in the list to the left. Now, select "Repair Disk Permissions." If you get a long list, repair again. It helps to do this after updates or Adobe software patches.

App Exposé

We all got used to that "show app windows" trick in the other cats, but Lion seems to be limited to Mission Control. Or is it? Open up your System Preferences and find More Gestures under Trackpad. Make sure App Expose is checked. While this won't show you "all windows" like before, you can still see "all app windows." I guess they felt Mission Control was cleaner than 500 windows spread out on your screen.

Other Resources

TUAW has posted a collection of all Lion tips to checkout here.

See all 250 Lion features from Apple

The briefing in London is over and it's quickly getting around now that Apple is updating Final Cut Pro X very soon and it looks like most of the needs for high-end edit houses will be met.

Between Sam Johnson's tweets and Peter Wiggin's post on fcp.co and a few other sources, I can put some other details together. Here's what I got out of everything:

• XML in/out is coming third-party (but part of FCPX)
• EDL is coming from Apple
• AJA is taking care of tape layback and capture
• AJA and Blackmagic are both taking care of broadcast monitoring
• Codec support coming from third parties (RED)
• Multicam is coming and will be a free updated (leaked)
• XSAN is a part of Lion and will likely add support once 10.7 is released.
• Specific updates are coming with Lion

The timeframe for most of these updates is weeks, not months.

Let's see what next Tuesday brings.

UPDATED:

It looks like Apple is taking their sweet time with a few of their promised updates. Reading over the list again, it may only be an audio track export option, or at least a way to label tracks as various "tags" for export. Who knows if it will actually allow for the export within FCPX.

Conforming 60p to 24p for a slow motion effect with Final Cut Pro X

This used to be easy with previous versions of Final Cut Studio and the bundled Cinema Tools. How do you conform your footage if you don't have Cinema Tools?

Retime > Conform

It's now even easier than before. Drop your 60p footage into your 24p (23.976) timeline. Select the clip and choose Conform from the Retiming Menu.

Your footage is automatically conformed to fit your 24p timeline, changing the speed to exactly 40% (the difference of speed spreading 60 frames per second across 24 frames).

This should save some people a lot of time, especially when conforming 60p footage shot on a DSLR.

What I used:

• Canon 7D
• Canon EF-s 17-55 f/2.8 IS
• Redrock Micro Field Bundle

Full Tutorial:

My original conform test:

Before I get into Final Cut Pro X, I want to illustrate a few tasks that I perform quite often.

Organizing clips into sub clips:

On some longer shots, my first task is to break up these into shorter clips (sub clips) and name them. I will either mark an in and out point and make a sub clip, or watch the clip in the Viewer and hit "M" to put markers at various places. I can then break that clip into sub clips with each subclip's in-point starting from each marker. If I used markers to mark out-points as well, I have a few gap clips to cleanup and delete with my naming. This seemed easy and let me do some tedious cleaning up.

In Final Cut Pro X, there are no sub clips and no Bins.
Just Keywords and Smart Collections.

Marking In and Out in the Viewer:

Before editing a shot/clip into my timeline, I would refine the in/out points further in the viewer. Those in/out points would stay appended to that clip for future use, which was quite handy. No matter what Bin I moved that clip into, those in/out points would remain until I changed them in the viewer. Great.

In Final Cut Pro X, you can still add in/out points with "I" and "O" while using the same J, K and L keys. That's good. But when you leave a clip and move on, those in and out points you set are gone! Fabulous.

Now it's time to open your mind, Neo

Sub clips to Keywords

Was the sub clip method in Final Cut Pro (previous) the best way to work? No. Was it easy to get lost in a sea of clips? Yes. But is this new way of working better, because it seems to require more work?

People who have experience with Keywords will be fine. Everyone else that want a folder structure is going to hate it—initially. The fact is, this is a much more powerful way to work. Since this is a new application for you, default Keywords aren't setup. But we can work on that. Just start adding Keywords to clips and it will start to form. Photographers and Graphic Artists are good at this. After all, aren't all photo, video and sound libraries based around keywords to help us easily find what we are looking for?

Keyword-friendly people are also versed in Rating. That's no iLife concept. Aperture, Lightroom, Bridge—you can rate or reject files to remove them from view. It's very handy—and more friendly than endless bins and folders.

1. Setup a smart collection for your audio-only files
2. Setup a smart collection for images or graphics you plan to use
3. Create a few more for various keywords you would normally make as bins (broll, beauty shots, vfx, etc)

While this seems a bit tedious, all new files you add to the project will automatically go into these groups for you. Others can move in and out by simply adding or removing keywords. You can even Reject clips in your smart collection and set it to hide disabled clips. You can toggle this function as needed.

New selection theory with In and Out

Up above, I had mentioned a scenario where in/out points stayed with a clip after you deselected it. In Final Cut Pro X, this selection disappears. But why? Well, after taking the red pill, we have jumped down the rabbit hole into a new world of Keywords and Ratings. While the old Final Cut Pro would maintain an in and out point, it wouldn't stay forever. You could easily update this in the Viewer with a new in/out point or by dragging the range handles. Well that system is a bit broken.

Anyone use any 3D software? When you make a selection, you might want to save it for future use. But, you might want multiple selections depending on what your task is for a particular shape. And all of those selections you will want to save for later. With this new line of thinking for editors, keywording and rating is a new way of saving selections. You can rate a selection of a longer clip and that selection is never lost. You can always bring it back by selecting the upper portion of the clip. That's handy, but I liked my in/out points before. Really? No you didn't. We both complained when we went back to a clip and sighed because we had to set a new in/out point or clear the already selected in/outs. Now, because they clear on deselect, this isn't an issue anymore. And I will say that the already present in/out points were more of a hassle making use of them being there from a previous edit.

A few other annoying things:

1. Remember your frustration going through 100's of clips that you had already seen? First, you had to double-click a clip to load it in the Viewer, then your playhead was somewhere near the tail of the clip because you had already skimmed it before. You had to scrub through the clip to remind yourself what else was in the shot. With no Viewer in FCPX, this is much faster and easier to see what media you really have. You can't argue that! And Avid and Premiere have the same problems.
2. If you loved the scopes and 3-Way Color Corrector in earlier versions, you really overlooked a lot of hassles and issues. While you never really could get any precision at all (which is why the artistic editors turned to Colorista) and having to load clips in the viewer, select the effects tab and then open the corrector took forever. Not to mention all the workarounds to match color visually. No wonder we have specified colorists in task-specific apps to do this. Now that FCPX has much better tools and views to correct color, it is easier and more intuitive to do this in the same app. I will say that there will be a need for colorists and XML export will be key for FCPX in the future. Editors aren't colorists and rarely know what good color or style look like. Leave that to the CD. You tell the story and get the timing.

CreativeCow has a few short tutorials for Final Cut Pro X that should get you in the software and working rather quickly. Since 8 out of the 11 or so posts are just complaints and whining about FCPX, I'm going to link straight to the videos themselves.

1. Kicking the Tires: Lesson 1
2. Kicking the Tires: Lesson 2
3. Matching EQ
4. Working with Keyframes
5. Taking Projects On the Go

And if you are curious what "Pro" features are there for you now, Apple has a somewhat hidden page listing everything here: Built from the ground up for video editors.

For some reason, my new blog has turned into a Final Cut Pro X blog. I swear I'll get to some training!

In the meantime, there are some deals out there brought on by Apple's FCPX release. Avid had been advertising Final Cut Pro crossgrade discounts the moment Apple demoed at NAB this past April. While Final Cut Pro 7 and Avid are both industry leading NLE's in Hollywood and other large productions, Adobe is becoming more attractive to the lower to mid-level post and edit house.

Anyone using Premiere Pro in the past remembers how slow or what a complete waste CS4 was. But, Adobe has come around with many new (well new last year) and exciting features with CS5 (now CS5.5). It's always good to have as many tools at your disposal as possible, especially when you are in a business of servicing other editors or consuming edits for print-to-tape and other processes. Now that Adobe sees their opportunity to take some of the rather small fraction of editors leaving the FCP world, they are offering some great deals. Premiere Pro is 50% off, totaling $399 and the CS5.5 Production Premium at $849 (with discount code SWITCH).

Premiere Pro + After Effects + Photoshop Extended = $849

Whether you like Premiere or not, this is a great deal to get another license of Photoshop and After Effects. I can't say that I would use any other piece of the suite, and can't really suggest anyone spend time learning Encore or Audition—or even Flash for that matter. But the main pieces of the suite are very useful. If you are a small to mid-level production house and want to add another seat or another tool to your box, it's not a bad time to buy. Who cares if you hate Premiere's slowness with QT files! It's still AE and PS!

Honestly, I have never seen Adobe do a discount like this. It proves that their life is only in charging for CS updates, though. And the larger the userbase, the more upgrades they can sell with minor additions to each CS release. Did we upgrade to CS5.5? No. Will it have saved us any money going from CS5 to CS6? Probably not. But, it is what it is and Adobe does hold a few software footholds in the professional and semi-professional world.

Does that mean you can't make professional work in Final Cut Pro X?

No. Not in the slightest. But if all the features are enticing and seem to meet your needs, here are a few "gotchas" with the current version of FCPX.

1. If your current pipeline consists of EDLs, Final Cut Pro X won't work for you (and probably won't ever)
2. If you are currently working with RedRAW and want to roundtrip and edit into Color or DaVinci, FCPX won't fit for you (although there are a few workarounds)
3. If you consistently export XML to a ProTools or Logic suite for sound mixing, FCPX won't work unless you have Automatic Duck for exporting (FCPX code shows XML export, but who knows when Apple will turn it on)
4. If your projects depend on multi-cam editing for lengthy events, FCPX isn't for you right now (but Apple plans on adding this as a feature and will probably be much smoother and efficient than FCP7)
5. If you have specific needs and workflows on Fiber Raid drives for asset storage and file share and don't want to look into changing anything now or ever, FCPX isn't for you.

But, who is this for?

1. If you shoot DSLR or sync-sound and match with PluralEyes or manually, FCPX can save you a ton of time!
2. If you are a single editor, FCPX is for you.
3. If you work with a small-medium team editing and are tired of 10year old methodology, then FCPX offers a faster workflow than any of the other NLE's
4. Do you want to make advanced audio adjustments in the timeline without round-tripping to Soundtrack Pro? FCPX is great.
5. Tired of dropping in basic AE project files into Premiere and waiting to render? Motion 5 integrated projects with the "share" function gives editors unparalleled control without any rendering needed. Sure this means you might be learning Motion for the first time, but for editing speed and creativity, it's worth it!

At the end of the day these are all tools

None of these NLE's do the work for you. It's still your job to tell a story, take away distractions, deliver a project and meet a deadline. You don't have to be a fanboy to do great work. The talented storyteller can make anything work, from Avid or Smoke to iMovie on the iPad.

A great resource and community for Christian designers in and around the church world is CreationSwap

They have many free designs in PSD and AI formats, even a few from yours truly. They have even gained talented blog writers like Brad Zimmerman of churchmediadesign.tv to post "update videos" specific to the church design community as a whole.

But, guess what. Final Cut Pro X is such a hot topic that even Brad himself has decided to put his own twist on things, largely based on blogs and tweets he has read from others. It doesn't seem any actual research was put forth on his part to give the best advice to anyone that is interested in FCPX.

Here is the CreationSwap Update 2 video with a "review" of FCPX:

Now, you know I have some arguments to this video...

1. The Suite
The biggest and most used features of Soundtrack, DVDSP and Color were merged in with FCPX. No more round-tripping needed and who, besides colorists (where that's all they do) actually did any advanced node-corrections in Color anyways? This wasn't the controversy at all anyways, but a welcomed advancement for FCP.

2. Everyone said it wasn't ready for professional use
I don't know about "everyone", but the biggest Adobe paid blogs sure have done their best to tear it apart. This includes Walt Biscardi, Rich Harrington and others. I don't really consider some of these people "industry leaders" anyways, but they definitely have loud voices because of their past training and blog entries on creativecow.net. Dan Rubottom, a higher level player in the industry, actually likes the new FCPX a lot, as do I. The old-school, tape-based, non-creative editors hate it because, well, creativity doesn't fit within their workflow.

3. Professionals or unique professional workflows?
There is a key difference here. Some workflows in a large production company are set to work in a particular way. They have outlined a process to spit out as many edits as possible and aren't necessarily telling a story. This doesn't mean FCPX isn't ready for "Professional Usage" because I can use it now. I just don't have a system for a cookie-cutter edit pipeline for car commercials, corporate meeting videos, etc.)

4. A ton of different missing features and formats
Again, I don't know where a "ton" is pulled from 4-5 missing features. I think 2-3 of those features have been tweeted a ton, but there sure aren't a lot. Missing currently include: multicam, xml import and export, edl import and export, broadcast monitor output (well yes it is), and FCP7 project import. That's not a ton to me. XML translation is already in the build of FCPX, but I'm sure there are a few bugs they are working on before they turn it on. AJA already has beta drivers for broadcast reference monitors, but soon AJA and Blackmagic will have full support for this. EDL is too old to support (and Apple stated this) and I never see a FCP7 project import option. No one needs to keep opening an edit from 2006 to make changes, as some have screamed they do on a regular basis. FCPX is for new projects with a new, and honestly a vastly improved workflow. Multicam has been promised by Apple to be coming. And I don't know which "ton" of formats aren't supported. Seems to me that all are already supported, except RedRaw. Apple is also working with Red for a streamlined support of this too. This should have been described as "a few" missing features for SOME professional WORKFLOWS, not for professionals as a whole.

5. Only importing iMovie projects
Okay, so the iMovie we know was never supposed to be iMovie at all. It was called "First Cut" and developed for the sole purpose of going through dailies and footage before importing into FCP. This was developed into a new editing paradigm and introduced as "iMovie08", but was always intended to be in a new professional workflow. Just because iMovie got features before FCP that doesn't mean it's not professional. It means some non-creative editors that have jobs because they know a particular NLE or have money invested in hardware are feeling threatened because their only stake in the word "professional" has been expensive hardware and software. It sickens them to have their editing software available to a larger audience. But their group is quickly shrinking—just like Flash web designers that stuck their noses up to real HTML and CSS.

6. Quicktime X and be careful?
You have missed some technical aspects of Quicktime. The QTkit/Quicktime architecture will always be 32bit—and it's over 11 years old! Apple has been moving to AVFoundation for 64bit support. The Quicktime changeover has been a major, backend project for years—which is why a new framework needed to be built for 64bit before FCP could be 64bit natively. FCPX is 64bit and built around AVF. AVF actually first made it's debut in iOS, actually. But that doesn't mean FCPX belongs on an iPad! It means newer products get newer functionality first, especially if they are being released sooner than a much longer project (like FCPX has been). Quicktime X will be 64bit in Lion. Because the new OS will have full AVF support. Did you know that Adobe Premiere is still 32bit when working with quicktime files? Hmm...

My advice to almost everyone in the church world:

1. FCPX will speed up your projects now. If you do 411 or announcement videos at your church, FCPX will increase your speed tremendously right now. No more learning various applications that Apple had purchased (Color) for you to do quick and complex color adjustments or fix audio problems with needless roundtrips to Soundtrack Pro. You can do these things faster than ever before.

2. Motion 5 is an amazing upgrade. You can get integrated titles and whole designs inside FCPX without rendering, and even edit Motion projects inside FCPX without opening Motion at all. Still no rendering.

3. If you want to make a DVD or Bluray, FCPX still has DVDSP templates to do this.

It's cracking me up how many people are praising Apple or ripping them to shreds. I've lost respect for so many people in the editing world that I once held in high regard. Whether they are really pros or not, there are many forum and blog leaders that are using this whole release as a marketing scheme. CreativeCow can't decide if they are going to give tips or express their personal feelings of betrayal and mock those who find Final Cut Pro X very useful. But they don't want to admit that this app is very feature rich for professionals now. It just doesn't work with their current, sausage manufacturing video edits. I wish Rich Harrington and Walt Biscardi would change their diapers and get back to helping people.

That said, I'm working on some tips for Final Cut Pro X and will be posting them soon.

Update:

Dan Rubottom has posted an excellent recap of new audio improvements in Final Cut Pro X over version 7. Checkout his post called What Apple Did Get Right in Final Cut Pro X. Dan is definitely a pro and one of the most talented people in the industry, producing broadcast productions anywhere from Joel Osteen to Rascal Flats. Checkout some of his work on vimeo.

Final Cut Pro X. A name that's receiving more negative feedback than the Gap logo redesign. You can't help but see comments everywhere you go on the web. The new Final Cut Pro is definitely here. Too bad Adobe's CS5.5 release didn't get so much attention.

Have you read all the blogs? All the Twitter comments? It sounds like a disaster. People are yelling at the top of their web lungs that it sucks. But not everyone. Even the App Store shows that some love it and some hate it—there's no middle ground. Some just don't want to associate with an app they feel isn't out of reach to the consumer market. Others have legitimate issues. There is a learning curve to Apple's new paradigm of editing, but isn't every editing app on the market exactly the same? Editors have cried out for years to have something rebuilt, re-invisioned. Those same editors are the loudest voices now claiming they don't want change. Well which is it?

I bought Final Cut Pro X within a few hours of the release knowing full well I wouldn't do any paid jobs with it yet. We all still have Final Cut Studio installed and it's just as stable and usable as it was a few days ago. And I'm still going to produce my projects in FCP7 for the next few weeks. When will I make the switch? Will I make the switch? I need more time to test and learn.

On a side note, while now Walt states that FCPX is his reason for switching his production company to Adobe Premiere, he stated that the decision to do so had been planned for 6 months. That really means back in December, a full 4 months before FCPX was previewed at NAB, he decided to go the Adobe route. And that's fine. People like different tools. But he sure can't say now that it's all because of this release of FCPX this week. And has anyone noticed how much money Adobe is dumping into CreativeCow.net for ad space? I can barely find the content anymore. It's no wonder these guys are switching.

So what does this really mean to all the confused independent editors out there? Is everything these guys are saying true? Nope. Not all. There are a few features left out that mostly affect high end post houses that depend daily on EDL's and OMF exports to other apps or other teams. But other comments both of these guys made via their almost 2 hour rant-cast were based on their brief time in the app and lack of understanding or knowledge of how Final Cut Pro X works. Heck, this is day 2 for me with the app and I haven't spent enough time with the new system to formulate an opinion, more less give it a rating or review in the store. Granted there are a few things missing for a full studio to embrace it this week, but will that change in another week? Will everything be solved with Lion next month? I'm pretty sure it will be.

In the meantime, I'm going through FCPX very thoroughly. Over the course of the next week, I'm going to blog, comment, add in some tips and examples as I learn it, and get to a point where I can really make an informed decision if it's going to work for me or not. There's no doubt it will work for the single editor, or the small firm that wants to make editing easier and faster. And for people that have hit the ceiling with what iMovie has to offer, it's a great option. Music videos, weddings, DSLR productions, independent films, short commercials—all can work fine with Final Cut Pro X as is. But how can I work with After Effects? How can I add sound effects or mix in another sound specific app? I have a whole list of things that I want to know based on my post and VFX workflow. Hopefully it will be a learning experience that others can benefit from too.