Custom workspace in FCPX

[Andrew Johnstone]

Ronny,

Thanks for your kind offer of help.

I actually had a one hour one to one session with Jas one of the BBC trainers who was down from Brum in Plymouth yesterday and it was very useful. I have ironed out several issues for me. One of the interesting things seems to be that FCPX works better with snapping on than Premier does as it minimises the magnetic timeline’s tendancy to make clips hops about in the work space – somethign that really annoys me! I am used to putting a clip in a spot and it stays where it is put..! #oldschool

I am afraid I am utterly auto-didactic and I have to find my own way of working and I have to wrestle with the beast until it is tamed, but Jas’ help was bang on and I have had to sheepishly admit that FCPX is not a shit as I first thought. (You won’t find me admitting that publicly on a forum though…ooops…!).

Part of the issue is how the BBC has set up it own workflow & media storage) which make sharing projects between users harder than it might other wise be, but we plotted a work around for that.

I am still not convinced that I will abandon Premier Pro yet for longer form projects or for work that has to go out to post/grading, but I have been impressed with how easy and fast it is to grade Slog footage in FCPX. The system is fast, even on my creakingly old iMac, but with the timeline now over 10 mins, the system is slowing down as I am pulling so much data off my Thunderbolt 2 project drive. The only solution to this I think is some new kit.

Anyway, thanks for your offer of further help and I’ll drop you an email of the forum.

Andy

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com

[Tangier Clarke]

Would this not be capable using the macOS feature to split the screen between two apps? I’ve done this using FCP X – having a document on one side and FCP X on the other; rarely would I do this though since I use two monitors generally.

[Tangier Clarke]

Andrew I hear you on the pain of learning it and Oliver you are so spot on with regard to difficulties experienced editors may face. I grew up on AVID, then FCP 7, then FCP X while using Premiere when needed. Even with the very buggy FCP X v.1 that my job tested in our workflow, after a week my productivity was so vastly greater than it had ever been. I was astounded. I expected marginal differences coming from FCP 7, but it was no contest; particularly when I let FCP X be it’s own thing and stopped trying to fit it into the mold of other previous NLEs. I’ve been using it so long now and generally satisfied, that I look back on my years of FCP 7 now and wonder how I got along like that. Such is the nature of change I guess…if you’re willing to embrace it. This is not to say that there aren’t features I miss (using T on the keyboard to select everything forward for instance), but it was clear Apple was leaving the many editorial conventions behind now that the had the OS level power of AV Foundation and Core Data, and had a clear pathway in this media/data convergence era. I will say though that folks who learned AVID [Media Composer] seemed to have a better grasp of low level video technical details. Modern apps seem to hide those now and just handle things for you so you can get on with it.

Good luck.