FCP X just another app.

[Chris Borjis]

[Neil Sadwelkar] “FCP X is the future. FCP 7 is the past. And for a short while we need to straddle both worlds. That’s just how it is. I feel that way about FCP X.”

As do I Neil.

[Daniel Garcia robles]

Come on Neil, you are using your common sense which is pretty sound, but when thinking about the way Apple has launched this product. They didn’t announce it as “another” app, but as THE APP.

Everybody here knows what the product does or not for them and they may find it more or less useful for their respective line of work. But Apple shouldn’t try to present it as something which confuses his already established user base.

I am tired of this hyped-up way Apple presents its new products. They keep losing credibility again and again.

[Clay Couch]

Well said.

[Stephen Bakopanos]

Good post!

After giving it a go for a few hours myself, I think everyone just needs to take a deep breath, disconnect from the internet and actually sit down and use it for a few days.

When I first loaded the program I was going nuts trying to work things out – I couldn’t find the slip tool (turns out its been incorporated into the trim tool) and I thought there was no easy way to manage keyframing (select clip, Ctrl+V then use Option+Click to add new keyframes) – but as you can see, both tools are there and both are just as good, if not better than in FCP 7 (heck, anything’s got to be better than FCP 7 keyframing).

I’m still trying to wrap my head around Events and Projects, but I think I’m starting to make sense of it. I’m hesitant to let Apple control everything, so I’ve turned off all the “automatic” features. I then create an Event (read: project) on the drive I desire and drag and drop all my media into the “event” as I would with the FCP 7 project window (until there’s proper Canon DSLR support, I’ll either be using FCP 7 & E1 Plugin or Magic Bullet Grinder to ingest my DSLR media on to the drive, and I’ll be using FCP 7 to ingest footage shot on tape). I then create a project (read: sequence) making sure it’s on the same drive as the event. If you can keep your events, projects and media all on the one drive, you should then be able to move drive between computers without much hassle. I’ve found the best way to deal with the events viewer is to put it in list mode and enable sorting by “media kind”. I’ve also found that once you turn OFF audio and video skimming, the program starts to feel a bit more familiar and less iMovie-like.

Now, some gripes:

– Project Management: Projects (read: sequences) need to be grouped by Events or else I’m going to have one hell of a mess of unrelated sequences floating around in the project library. I know that I can manually do it by creating Bins/Folders, but in this new dawn of “revolutionary, automagical organisation” I don’t think I should have to. You associated the project with an event upon creation, so it should be categorised that way in the library. I don’t want projects from Client A mingling with projects from Clients B, C, D and Q – it’s confusing for me, and it’s unprofessional when you have clients sitting with you potentially looking at videos from their rivals (what can I say, my loyalty is to my back balance)

– Speaking of bins – BINS! Yes, I know I can use “Keyword Collections” in place of a bin, but I’d still like the option of dumping a bunch of files in a folder and NOT having to have some random keyword associated with them. I can live without them, but it wouldn’t hurt to have them there anyway, just for those of us who like to keep things old school. In the meantime, the best workaround is to use “Keyword Collections” in their place and to organise your event library by media type (for those of you who used bins to sort audio from images from video, etc).

– Colour Correction: Whilst I’m warming to the colour board (still not entirely convinced) and am happy that Apple realise that a round trip to Color is too complicated for the bulk of small to medium sized projects, I’m a bit annoyed that they didn’t bring any of the more advanced features of Color across. My biggest gripe at the moment is that it’s all well and good to have masks for our corrections, but I need to be able to track them on to moving subjects. What happened to the tracker? Bring that back and you have a pretty good tool here. Of course, anything SERIOUS should be sent off to a DaVinci Resolve. Which brings us to:

– XML!!!!!!!!! As much as Apple wish their products were the be all and end all for us editor, they’re not. We NEED to export to other programs. I need to be able to spit out XMLs to use in After Effects. I need to be able to create EDLs to send to colorists. I need to spit out OMFs to send my audio to Pro Tools. Without this basic functionality, FCP X is dead in the water. I can’t understand why it shipped without it. I reckon if the had included these three little things, at least 50% of the negativity we’re seeing now wouldn’t have happened…

– Thumbnailed Timeline: Don’t like it. Perhaps I’ll warm to it in time, but for now I’d like to be able to switch it off. It makes it so much harder to see edit points.

– Gaps: Yeah. I like ’em in my timeline. I want ’em in my timeline. Heck, I NEED ’em my timeline. Why does FCP X seem to hate them so? The only way I can get them is by putting a clip up on another track or by duplicating a clip and converting it to a “gap” (read: slug). Maybe I just need to understand the workflow better, but at present I’m finding it annoying.

I’m sure there’s more for me to rant about, but I’ll have to spend some more time playing around with it first.

For now, I think it’s safe to say that there’s a lot for me to like and a lot for me to learn. And for Apple, there’s a lot for them to add. Let’s hope they get to it…

[Rafael Amador]

FCX crushed my FC7 on installing, without asking me any thing.
What Apple has done is a shame.
Yes, we can consider as one of those tools that we use for those specials tasks, although I don’t know yet which tasks.

How to change project from 1080 to 720 in the middle of de edit?
Hot to tell FC that is misinterpreting a field-order?
Have you se the “Broadcast Safe filter? Jua, jua, jua
Where are basic filters like a de-flicker?
No control in any parameter on exporting.

Congratulation Apple.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Geoff Dills]

[Stephen Bakopanos] “- Thumbnailed Timeline: Don’t like it. Perhaps I’ll warm to it in time, but for now I’d like to be able to switch it off. It makes it so much harder to see edit points.”

You can. At the bottom of the timeline on the right is the Clip Appearance Window which you can switch to a variety of settings; one has no thumbnails for the video.

Best,
Geoff

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Geoff Dills] “You can. At the bottom of the timeline on the right is the Clip Appearance Window which you can switch to a variety of settings; one has no thumbnails for the video.”

Well there you go. Another gripe bites the dust. Told you I still had plenty to learn!

I think once we get XML, OMF and EDL a lot of concerns will go…

[Sohrab Sandhu]

[Neil Sadwelkar] “For that matter if you’re in the market for a new FCP system, you can certainly go out and buy FCP 7… still.”

For how long? Its not available in App Stores anymore.

And whats the surity that FCP 7 will work with OS X Lion and other OS to follow? If FCP X is such a revolutionary rewrite why can’t somebody from apple come forward and lay out some kind of roadmap for their professional app development work.Don’t they have any moral or ethical obligation towards their loyal customer base?

Sohrab

2.66 GHz 8-core, ATI Radeon HD 4870,
FCS 3, AJA Kona Lhi

“The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth-century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months, or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.” — Carl Ally