I don't have or use Aperture. While I can't compare video to photo management, I hope you are correct. I assume though video is far more complex than photo: more storage is required, files grow corrupt, thousands of assets are associated with a single project, streaming is a beast of a discussion itself. Cant imagine where you are going with this. Explain? Hopefully you'll reassure fcpx's future for me.
You're talking about the technical stuff behind the scenes.
I'm talking about how you relate to the media from a UI perspective. Final Cut X (and Aperture) seem to take the viewpoint that the things
in your photos and video are what you actually care about. In other words, the people and places you shot. Not the files themselves which are often just based on things like when you had to switch your memory chip. (Why should
that matter?)
The old Final Cut (and, let's say, Finder for photos) was more concerned with individual files. What bin do you want it in? What title do you want to give it? Is there a lot of stuff in there? Should I sub-clip it for you thus making even more clips and more bins?
Aperture did away with the 'find your file' concept by managing the files and letting you sort, label, and edit based on what your photos are about. (
And I'm not saying Aperture was first program to do that. It's just a good example of how the photo-people were getting into this years before us video folks were.) You want to do 8 versions of that one shot you love? Go ahead, Aperture will deal with where the actual file is...you'll just see your 8 versions, or if you prefer, you can collapse it back into a single photo to keep things neat. You wanna keyword it and then search by a string of perimeters? (
All shots of Phil with James that I took with the 7D.) Easy!
Now, you may say
"Final Cut Pro always managed my files for me too!" Sure...it hid the files and folders from you, but it just turned them into 'clips' and 'bins.' It dressed everything up in the same costume it wears in Finder. Not really a change, just different names. What I'm talking about here is a real change...something that's not at all like how Finder sorts Quicktime files.
There's a lot to Final Cut X that's changed, but I think the most important thing to understand
is the range-based keywords. Is it the biggest feature? No, but I really believe it's the most influential feature. Wanna know where the future of Final Cut is headed? Think about range-based keywords and you'll get some clues.
Range-based keywords is to Final Cut as 'the finger' is to the iPhone. Everything flows from that concept.