Trojan horses
Not long ago I almost linked to Micah Walter's Inside Aperture article Seeing RED. He's now doing more video and is having problems managing the new file types:
What would save my day would be Aperture. If only Aperture supported AVCHD (and many of the other tapeless formats) I could import my AVCHD card just like I do with my DSLR. It could import any stills from my HD camera, as well as all of my native clips. It could allow me to preview my clips, maybe even set in and out markers and I could select a batch of clips and still frames to send off to Final Cut Pro for production. Final Cut could be responsible for converting the clips to QuickTime format (or not) and everything would just be in one place in an Aperture project.
Can't recall why I didn't link to it - probably because he is explicitly talking about "proper" digital video - but now it's worth comparing with Sean MacCormack's post Video and Lightroom:
In these days of convergence, where 2 of the newest DSLRS offer HD video recording capabilities (albeit basic), and almost every compact has some kind of video mode, I'd like to see Lightroom support Video. At minimum, I'd like it to import the video with my images. Preferably, I'd like to be able to playback the video and perhaps add basic metadata (copyright, keywords etc). I have no expectations of being able to edit video, or even work on colour, brightness etc. I just want to have my video managed with my images.
What we're seeing is the start of a battle for the soul of Aperture and Lightroom. Yes, I know that sounds almost as ludicrously-hyped as the Strictly Come Dancing judge saying John "the dancing pig" Sergeant had made the show a laughing stock, but both Aperture and Lightroom users fall into two distinct camps over this issue. On the one side are those who only see the Aperture and Lightroom as Photoshop substitutes for the DSLR era. And on the other are photographers who need a tool for photographers - which need not be limited to photographs.
I have negligible interest in video - photography's decisive moment satisfies me much more than video's hoovering-up process - but I've always been very much in the latter camp. As part of photography-centred projects and tasks, I might have PDFs such as contact sheets or layouts, Word documents such as correspondence or invoices, sound clips to include in the DVD of a wedding shoot, while it's crazy that Lightroom can send to Photoshop HDR merging yet be unwilling to manage the 32 bit output files.
I'm very much a believer in database-powered applications for managing picture collections, so the solution isn't Bridge, much-improved though it is, as it remains a Windows Explorer or Finder with knobs on, which can only ever tell you where files happen to be now, not where they should be. So I've always wanted Lightroom to be an iView with raw processing, not a narrowly-pretty face for Adobe Camera Raw.
I'm not sure if proper video and the convergence issue are a pair of Trojan horses (these are the days of Boris says teach yobs Latin and Greek and Obama's classical oratory) or perhaps they are twin battering rams? Either way, wheel them up, now please.
Update - 5-6 comments were lost during my web site changeover. They were both pro and against.