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2023
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November
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8th November 2023
...and that's a wrap!
Today was day three, and the final day of the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit.
This is the first time I (Chris Hocking) have personally attended the Summit, and it's a looooooooong and expensive trip from Melbourne, Australia.
HOWEVER, this conference has been absolutely awesome and worth every penny.
HUGE thank you and congratulations to both Future Media Concepts and Apple for putting on such an incredible event.
Ben, Megan, Jessica, Elise and the rest of the FMC team, you've all done an insanely awesome job. Thank you for making us all feel so welcome, and part of your FMC family. Putting on a huge event like this is a MASSIVE job, but you nailed it. Thank you.
MASSIVE thank you to Nick Harauz (Director of Product Marketing at Boris FX) for all the incredible work he did putting everything together, but also his insanely awesome leadership/MC'ing on all the panels throughout the Summit. He's a REALLY great interviewer.
Bill, and the rest of the Apple team, I can't imagine how much politics and incredible hard work it was to get us into Apple Park, so thank you, thank you, thank you. It was a one in a lifetime opportunity to visit the campus, and something I'll never forget.
CoreMelt, MotionVFX & Hedge - thank you for supporting this incredible community financially, and allowing the conference to happen at all. Please support these three awesome companies!
Thank you to Richard Taylor for allowing people at home that couldn't attend the Summit in person to still feel connected to the event via his live streams.
Over the last few weeks, I've had... concerns, about whether or not flying across the world to hang out with a bunch of Final Cut Pro editors would be a... bad investment/waste of time or not. By the time you add flights, accommodation, conference cost, food, social drinks, etc - it becomes a very expensive endeavour, and a long time away from my young family. However this conference has been unquestionably worthwhile.
I've had the incredible opportunity to meet people I've only previously known via the Internet. I've got to meet and make new friends from all over the world. I've been able to connect with people who use this site and my software to do absolutely incredible things. I've been able to casually chat with the team behind the tool I use every day, Final Cut Pro, as well as all the 3rd party developers that make the Final Cut Pro ecosystem so unstoppable.
Again, I've never been to previous FMC events, however what impressed me was both the turnout, and the quality and passion of the attendees. I had the honour and privilege of meeting talented people, from all walks of life, and all different parts of the industry, that use Final Cut Pro at a very high level. Everyone's a hardcore Final Cut Pro end-user.
It was pretty incredible how many people travelled from Australia, the UK, Germany, etc. to come to the Summit - it truely was a global audience.
So... what happened today? In terms of sessions, they were some of the best of the week.
First up we had:
- AI Person Masking, Tracking and Paint in ShotAnvil, a session presented by CoreMelt with Ché Baker
- Shooting and Editing Captivating Interviews in FCP with Abba Shapiro
- Word Play: Advanced Typography Techniques in Final Cut Pro with Jenn Jager
- Hooking in Hardware with Iain Anderson
- Social Media Workflows with Nick Harauz
- Hide and Seek: Advanced Masking and Tracking in FCP with Robin Kurz
I had the pleasure of attending the CoreMelt session first up. Ché Baker & Roger Bolton did an excellent demonstration of the new CoreMelt ShotAnvil tool.
You can get 30% off ShotAnvil and PaintX by visiting their special Final Cut Pro Creative Summit page here.
Next I attended Iain Anderson's Hooking in Hardware session - which showcased how he uses CommandPost + MIDI Controllers + Tangent Ripple + Monogram Console to control Final Cut Pro in fast and powerful ways.
You can watch one of Iain's older YouTube videos on MIDI controllers here:
After another delicious boxed lunch pack in the sun, we had:
- Chaos to Clarity: Mastering Clip Organization (iPad) with Dylan Bates
- Controlling the Color Pipeline: HDR Workflows in Mac and iPad with Steve Martin
- Media Management Techniques with Mark Spencer
- Becoming an Accidental YouTuber with Lee Herbet
- Custom 3D Objects in Motion with Iain Anderson
- Session Presented by MotionVFX with George Edmondson
Steve Martin's (from Ripple Training) course on HDR was incredible. It was by far the most polished and slick talk of the whole conference - I really felt like I was in a University classroom for the 45mins. Steve is such a great educator and communicator - he really takes it to another level (Mike Seymour-level as I like to call it).
Lee's talk was also great - very interesting and engaging. You can follow his YouTube adventures here.
MotionVFX's session was also insanely awesome. What I didn't realise was this wasn't a MotionVFX session - as in, there were no MotionVFX staff attending. MotionVFX basically just paid for one of their external contractors, Seed Media to do a talk about MotionVFX's new subscription tools, CineStudio.
George Edmondson and his team are one of MotionVFX's external collaborators, and produce and edit a lot of their online tutorials and promotional content - and what they do is really next level.
For example, George and his team made this entirely in Final Cut Pro:
George is such a great communicator and storyteller - but also the work Seed do for MotionVFX is world class.
You can learn more about Seed Media here.
You can learn more about CineStudio here. You can currently get 30% off all MotionVFX plugins here.
At 4pm, we had Storytelling in Final Cut Pro panel with Josh Meyers, Mike Yanovich, and Robin Moran - with Nick Harauz moderating.
These kinds of panels are what makes the Summit so powerful and so useful - true industry professionals, doing world-class high-end work, talking about their craft. Josh, Mike & Robin are all three of the nicest, smartest and honest people you'll ever meet - and it's such an honour to hear about how they make their amazing art.
We hope to have detailed case studies with all three panelists on FCP Cafe in the not-so-distant future, as their projects become publicly accessible.
Then finally, to wrap up the conference, we had a Q&A with the Final Cut Pro team - what a perfect way to wrap up the event!
This event wasn't under NDA - however they asked for no photos, videos or recordings.
Microphones were handed around, and anyone could ask anything.
There were six people from Apple on the stage from marketing, engineering, quality control, user interface design and product manager for Final Cut Pro for iPad.
Obviously, with Apple being a giant complex company - the team couldn't talk about anything unannounced or future product plans.
The Apple team said that Final Cut Pro and ProApps are "alive and well" and the team is "super excited about the future".
They said "don't worry about the Aperture thing... it's not a thing" - referring to the fact that Final Cut Pro won't go the way of Aperture, and be suddenly discontinued.
They mentioned they're really interested in seeing how people are using Final Cut Pro on iPad. They encourage people to send feedback to them, explaining in story form how you use their devices in the real world.
The audience all learnt a new term - S.P.O.D'ing - spinning pizza of death (i.e. the spinning wheel of death). They explained that if you do ever run into the spinning wheel of doom, sending detailed feedback of exactly how you got into this state is very, very helpful.
You can send Apple feedback in any language - they have teams dedicated to translating the feedback.
Apple has a plan for Final Cut Pro and the rest of the ProApps for the next few months, AND the next 5-6 years.
The Final Cut Pro team constantly have meetings with the wider Apple teams - for example, they're constantly meeting with Machine Learning teams to see what technologies and techniques they can bring back to the ProApps.
I personally asked if we'll ever see WWDC sessions on Final Cut Pro Developer technologies like FxPlug and Workflow Extensions - and they acknowledged that this is something they'd LOVE to see.
Overall the Q&A session was calm, civil, fun, personal and entertaining. There was no NDA secrets shared. The audience got to really connect with senior members of the Final Cut Pro team on a very human level.
It's always nice to remind yourself that the people behind our favourite tools are just human after all.
And just like that, three days of the Final Cut Pro Creative Summit was over - but the discussions kept flowing in the Aloft hotel bar for many hours more.
Again, a HUGE thank you to everyone at FMC and Apple for making this event happen. Thank you to EVERYONE who presented, and EVERYONE who attended.
It was such a privilege and an honour to attend - and it was so humbling to connect with people that use CommandPost, BRAW Toolbox, Gyroflow Toolbox, Fast Collections and even the TestFlight version of Recall Toolbox!
You can watch Richard Taylor's live stream directly after the Q&A session on YouTube here.
You can refer back to the FCPCreativeSummit hashtag on Twitter here. There's some fun photos in the feed!
Onwards & Upwards!
