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2025
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May
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15th May 2025
Introducing Off-topic Rants! 🥳
Over the years, I've written hundreds of blog posts on various personal and LateNite websites, as have some of my friends, collaborators and co-workers at LateNite.
When we re-designed the LateNite website a few years ago, we simplified it, and removed links to the very old blog - the pages were still online, but kinda hidden, only to be found if you Googled them.
However, rather than letting all that content die, I've decided to keep it alive here on FCP Cafe in the *Off-topic Rants section.
Yes, I'm a digital hoarder. We have 267 hard drives in NeoFinder and 353 LTO tapes. ðŸ«
I also created Unreal Cafe and Resolve Cafe very shortly after setting up FCP Cafe, but they never really took off, so I've moved my Unreal Cafe blog posts here, and have taken down both these sites, so I can just concentrate on Final Cut Pro. 👋
So basically... Off-topic Rants is a random collection of blog posts that contain technical information, creative information, film reviews (apologies if I wrote something bad about your film!), and who knows what else.
Some interesting posts from over the years include:
- Philosophy of Open Source (13th September 2006)
- Post Production Workflow (23rd December 2008)
- Final Cut Studio 3 Predictions (21st February 2009)
- Avid vs FCP – My thoughts… (10th May 2009)
- Mac Hardware Predictions – Death to the Mouse (22nd June 2009)
- Assistant Editor Lecture (30th October 2010)
- Waiting on Sound (16th September 2012)
- The Hard Drive Challenge (12th December 2013)
- FCPX Rant (28th January 2014)
- Directing The Wizards of Aus (20th December 2015)
- Superannuation for Filmmakers (6th June 2018)
Some of the old blogs have formatting issues, broken links, and missing content, so feel free to submit a pull request if you come across anything, or just let me know on the Discord or GitHub.
Also the main Off-topic Rants page currently doesn't list everything, so you can only find a lot of the old blogs by searching, or stepping through the blog posts page-by-page (which will take a while, as there's currently 349 posts!).
If nothing else... all these decades of old blog posts will probably explain why I'm so crazy... 🤷
Enjoy!
Jumper for Final Cut Pro has been on display at MPTS show at Olympia Grand Hall in London today, and will be back again tomorrow! 🥳
The amazing Ronny Courtens from OWC (Head of Enterprise solutions - Jellyfish/Jupiter/LTO) and Max Lund from Witchcraft Software (the lead developer of Jumper) will be on the stand demoing Jumper, running large shared media volumes and on-premises machine learning datasets off a Jellyfish NAS.
Ronny is giving live demos of their latest high-performance Jellyfish NAS systems, their powerful new Jellyfish Manager v3.0, and the very first release of their brand-new Jellyfish Media Management software.
The Jellyfish systems is connected to super-fast OWC Thunderbolt 5 hubs, docks, and drives, to demo high-speed edit-while-ingest collaboration workflows.
If you want to see the fastest and most user-friendly storage solutions for creative teams, and the latest developments in on-premises machine learning, go and visit MPTS on the ccktech booth, Stand B42.
The event runs:
Thursday 15th May - 09:30 - 17:00
