Any happy users of FCS2?

[Jonathan White]

So far I’m really happy. I was nervous upgrading given all the negative posts but I cloned my system ( 2.5 ghz G5 PPC, 2 gigs ram, ATI9800xt card, Blackmagic Decklink Extreme ) and just did a straight upgrade. Went fine. I haven’t done any major jobs on my system, which is usually where I find the bugs but I’ve done some small stuff and all seems great. FCP seems stable, everything seems to work as it should, motion has given the odd crash but it’s so sophisticated now I haven’t really done more than play with it. Color took a while to get my head around but I like it more and more, it’s a bit buggy but not as much as I thought from the posts, surprisingly useable on my low power system, I’m getting about 15 fps with DV and uncompressed, round trips have worked ok so far. Soundtrack seems good, definitely more useable than the previous version. Compressor seems a bit odd as the batch processing window takes a while to update so I’m never sure if it’s working but I’ve done some DVDs and they look fine (surprisingly it’s the app. that’s hardest for me to get my head around).

All in all I’m glad I upgrade…of course that could all change tomorrow when I discover some major problem but so far so good.

Johnny

[David Roth weiss]

I think its a remarkably fine software release, especially for a new version.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Tom Wolsky]

I guess this begs the questions: what really annoying problems are you talking about? What are you seeing that’s not working right?

All the best,

Tom

Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” and “Final Cut Express Made Easy” DVDs

[Ian Webb]

One thing working in the Customer Service industry taught me was that you only hear from the people with problems.

If the Cow isn’t full of threads cheering the release to the sky, don’t assume nobody likes it. The people who haven’t run into problems aren’t posting here for the most part – they’re busy cutting footage.

[Jim Calahan]

What I think he’s getting at is there are a lot of posts in general about FCP 6 issues, but with 800,000 plus users most seem to be problems with projects that had something that didn’t like the update done in the middle of it. Which kind of supports the idea of finishing what you can before you make the change over.

Jim Calahan
KVIE, Sacramento

[Jim Calahan]

Apple wishes there were 800,000 FCP 6 users instead of overall FCP users. That’s what I get for trying to think at 4 in the morning.

Jim Calahan
KVIE, Sacramento

[Oliver Peters]

Funny… I see relatively few posts regarding any problems. Most deal with issues like the ability to capture ProRes422 HD on older machines. These aren’t problems. Compared to some past issues with point releases, the traffic has been remarkably small.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Rafael Amador]

What I see as well is a lot of questions that denote a very little experience working with Mac and with FC. It seems that for many people FC6 is their first contact with the application.
Rafael

[Michael Belanger]

Not to beat a dead horse but some of us have barely one year old “older macs”. In my case a quad G5 and I am still flabergasted that you can’t use Pro Res with a machine such as that/
I find it hard to believe that a quad Intel is THAT much faster than a Quad G5. In fact, some people have found that there is a marginal difference, ie barefeats, and in some cases the Quad G5 is faster. what bugs me is that Apple wrote that codec solely for those who own Mac Pro machines, which is by far not the greatest amout of users. Most of us upgrade annually or within 18 months but this kind of forces peoples hand to move up sooner than later. Although no one has definatively determined how good Pro Res really is. At NAB they said something about 10 generations but really did not clearly explain what they meant by that. Anyways, I have yet to update my G5s but just did the MacBook Pro and had it crash on using Motion and some of the media from the collection provided by Apple.

I will do way more tests before I move the big machines over. Perhaps I will wait a month till Apple comes up with some new fixes.

Mike Belanger
Dandelion Editing

[Oliver Peters]

Mike,

It’s not a question of processing power, but how well the codec is optimized for a specific processor. Your Quad is right on the edge of the qualified machines, so have you looked into whether ProRes would work with more RAM? Is this with ProRes or ProRes HQ? Of course, you don’t have to use ProRes for HD. You can still use DVCProHD, or 8/10-bit uncompressed.

Both Avid and Canopus have their own intermediate codecs. Likewise, these run on various levels of machines, but aren’t guaranteed to run on every machine that can run the rest of the application. As an example, I can use Avid’s DNxHD 145 on a machine that won’t work with ProRes422, yet if I tried to use DNxHD inside FCP on that same machine, it won’t work. Again, each is tweaked for different purposes.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com