-
FCP X – 15 films/5 days/clunkety clunk!
As the title suggests, I recently finished a large 5D project editing exclusively with FCP X over a 5 day period. We cut 15 films averaging three minutes in length.
Approx 9 hours of rushes.
There was no time to transcode media so I took the plunge and opted for FCP X over CS5.5 for the simple reason that the ability to rapidly skim through media clips would give me more time to concentrate on the edit, albeit a uniquely idiosyncratic new way of working, which often caused lengthy periods of swearing.
The initial ingest was problem free and I quickly organised my footage using keyword collections. Nice. As the edit progressed however, FCPX became increasingly buggy and clunky to the extent that, in my sleep deprived state, I thought that I was back in the 90’s creating simple lower thirds at the rate of one letter every three seconds and then to my horror realised it was 2011, the year of FCPX.
As most people have already suggested, FCP X will be great, eventually, but it seems to me that the power of its 64bit processing is somewhat diminished by the amount of new work it has to do, and we really don’t want to wait for the basics!
Here is a list of the bugs and observations that came up during the edit:
My mac: 2010 iMac 27″ i7 8GB Ram, cutting on a 2TB GRaid Raid 0– The 5D footage was 25fps but I had to insert some 24fps promo footage, which FCP conformed to 25FPS but without retiming the footage so the footage played faster. I didn’t find a solution within FCPX and had to sort it with compressor.
– Breaking apart a compound clip at the latter stages of the edit caused FCPX to crash every time so I had to find a work around.
– Adding transitions is easy once you get your head around the storyline concept but why in God’s name does it add a second transition at the other end of the clip?? Idiotic!
– You can tell when the autosave function is no longer working when cmd Z causes a beep sound instead of undoing your last action.
– Changing the keyframe interpolation for multiple moves on a single clip using the transform tool was not even as useless as FCP7. Am I missing something? Why when you apply smooth interpolation does it do bugger all? I probably missed a meeting or something.
– The editable audio function has seemingly disappeared from the timeline in its most condensed mode, which is how I like to edit. I don’t need to see the waveform nor thumbnails but I do need to adjust audio so why has this been taken away?
– I like to zoom in and out of the timeline as I’m playing my programme but this doesn’t work well at all and is often way off center or even in a completely different segment of the timeline. Not useful.
– It does feel a bit fascist at times, particularly with regard to export settings and the inability to export a range within a project. There’s so much emphasis on FCPX’s in house capabilities so having to send whole projects to compressor is not big and it’s not clever. Give us some choices back!!
Let’s be honest, we’d all feel a little bit pleased with our selves if we’d invented the ipod, iphone and ipad but this new FCPX is so far off being ready for a professional workflow that releasing it in what is an unfinished state smacks of arrogance on behalf of Apple and shows a blatant disregard for its professional users.
-
34 Replies
-
You probably weren’t using it right / holding it right / understanding it right / stuck in your ‘old’ ways / antiquated / just not getting it / or a grandad [delete as applicable]
-
[Julian Bowman] “You probably weren’t using it right / holding it right / understanding it right / stuck in your ‘old’ ways / antiquated / just not getting it / or a grandad [delete as applicable]”
You forget “afraid of change” : )
Professor, Producer, Editor
and former Apple Employee -
[Julian Bowman] “You probably weren’t using it right / holding it right / understanding it right / stuck in your ‘old’ ways / antiquated / just not getting it / or a grandad [delete as applicable]”
FCPX is perfect, so you know Boris, back to school.
You are old fashioned. You need to wash your brain from all the old crap you have inside.
That’s the only way to be the video editor of the future.
The new order has arrived.
rafael -
Boris! ellloo..
brave man for jumping right in there tho. Do you find yourself using the position tool a lot, or do you end up going along with all the ripple mode?
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
Could I just point out that FCPX is a version 1.0 product and you really should expect problems with any project you undertake with it at the moment.
Whether you like the new interface or not, version 1.0 products are always going to be laden with bugs.
Steve Connor
Adrenalin TelevisionHave you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.
-
In the interest of brevity and clarity, I suggest we replace the phrase “remember FCPX is version 1” with the phrase “piece of crap”. Much shorter and more to the point 😉
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
deleted
-
Yes and Premiere Pro, which is being eulogised on this forum was also a piece of crap at version 1.0.
Steve Connor
Adrenalin TelevisionHave you tried “Search Posts”? Enlightenment may be there.
-
Enough excuses. It is what it is…that may or may not change tomorrow or that day after that or the day after that or the day after that. But right now its a POC 😉
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / PrP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
[Boris Jansch] “- Adding transitions is easy once you get your head around the storyline concept but why in God’s name does it add a second transition at the other end of the clip?? Idiotic!”
Using the trim tool (T) select the edit point at the end of the clip rather than the whole clip.
NT
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up