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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

> A tangent, but I've found the iPad Pro to be fabulous for video editing

Doesn't the sandboxing and limited access to the file system get in the way?

Can you export video to non-Apple formats, collaborate with other people via a version control system, easily import footage from non-Apple devices, and so on?

Can you even cleanly separate your video editing project from your personal holiday photos/videos? (Does iPadOS expose a directory structure to the end user yet?)

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> Doesn't the sandboxing and limited access to the file system get in the way?

Why would it get in the way? Any video editing software on it's going to be designed with that in mind, and will share with other video-related software just fine. Lots of desktop video editing software (Premiere, to pick one) start with "OK, step 1, import all the clips/videos for this project into this program" so even in the worst case it's gonna look a lot like the same workflow as video-editors are used to, and those workflows exist and became the norm on desktop before iPads even existed.

> Can you export video to non-Apple formats

Of course. Why wouldn't you be able to?

> collaborate with other people via a version control system

Never seen it for video editing, including when I worked at a video production company, though that was years go so maybe version control's normal even for amateurs and small shops now? If it's around and popular I'd be surprised if there's not "an app for that" or it's not built-in to some of the higher end editing software on iPad. If things still operate like they used to then you're talking a NAS shared over SMB for largish projects, or Dropbox for smaller ones, for collaboration, probably, and both those are fine with iPads.

> easily import footage from non-Apple devices

Sure, why not?

> Why would it get in the way?

How do plugins work on iOS?

Not sure that they do. They could, but I don't know of any significant video editing plugin ecosystems on iOS. Stuff's too rich for my blood—$200 to make overlay text look a certain way? $400 for a noise-reduction algo? Not for me and my casual stuff. Again, if you want actual pro software, you're looking at one of a couple desktop application vendors, that's true. If you're looking for pro-tier software for home use, and learning that pro-tier software is your main goal and/or you actually need what it can provide, then you're probably talking Adobe Premiere, specifically, and yeah, that's desktop only (and about $250/yr). If you just want to learn the process and techniques of non-linear video editing and put together (potentially quite good) edited videos or films, the iPad's capable enough (with the benefit that, in the original use case posted here, it's also a damn good drawing tablet and you can use it to shoot your videos, too, again, if you don't have actual pro-level needs), but I wouldn't argue it replaces a desktop with Premiere, for a bunch of reasons including that everyone assumes you've got Premiere (and often Aftereffects, too) available, when it comes to plugins.

> collaborate with other people via a version control system

LumaFusion has pretty nice integration with Frame.io, which is as close to something like GitHub for video as I'm aware of.

(Disclaimer: My day job is as an engineer working on LumaFusion.)

Have you ever used an iPad? I get the feeling you don't really know how it actually works.

Haven't used one since the iOS/iPadOS split, so honestly don't know how much more flexible they've become.

More familiar with iOS on iPhones though, but can't see how I'd do 'serious creative work' - which usually ends up involving large numbers of files that need keeping organised - on an OS that's traditionally tried so hard to hide the underlying file system from the end user.

And I've never tried connecting a camera or video capture device directly to an iOS device, so not sure what is or isn't possible in that area.

Unless you were part of the team designing and building them I'm not sure you know how an ipad works. Pop Quiz: How does an ipad work?

Not sure any single person who worked on it knows how it works either.

Not a single person understands all of unix either but many can tell you how it works.

It's unfair to change the verb from use to build.

I didn't say how to build I asked how does it work. If someone knows how to use something they can explain how it works at least in their mind.

> If someone knows how to use something they can explain how it works at least in their mind

Can you explain how this squares with your other comment about how I couldn't possibly know how it works if I wasn't on the team who built it?

> Doesn't the sandboxing and limited access to the file system get in the way?

No.

> Can you export video to non-Apple formats, collaborate with other people via a version control system, easily import footage from non-Apple devices, and so on?

Yes.

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