Final Cut Pro X Pro Users Only??

[Jason Brown]

I sat in the presentation and my impression was initially good, it was very vague, so there will be much more to come and examine. But this new app isn’t for consumers…how many home videos are shot in 4k?

[Tim O’grady]

[Jason Brown] “But this new app isn’t for consumers…how many home videos are shot in 4k?”

FCS is capable of doing a lot of things now, but that doesn’t mean everyone uses all of it’s full capabilities. So iMovie will continue to evolve for the consumers while professionals and courageous amateurs will pony up the $299 for FCP and $1000 for FCS, whether they need 4k or not. As someone who teaches both FCP and FCE to students who have never worked with an NLE before, FCE, being so similar to FCP, is not much easier to teach. Maybe someone at Apple finally decided that there’s really only two markets, iMovie for consumers and FCP/FCS for prosumers/pros.

[Craig Seeman]

I actually think Apple has realized something important about market share and even hardware sales as well as brand loyalty. Today’s 10 year old iMovie user is tomorrow’s Broadcast, feature film, corporate editor. Give them a good interface and a feature set that meets the demands as the move up their career path, is going to result in long term growth in software and hardware sales. It locks people in early and yet the feature set and, more importantly IMHO, the hardware must be there as they move up.

[Erik Lindahl]

I wouldn’t make any decisions before I try the package. FCP 7 will cover my needs for “years to come” and if FCPX is a fail-boat there are a lot of options out there.

Features that sound perfect for me:
– 64 bit
– Unlimited menory
– Uses Open CLI and Grand Central Dispatch
– Color fully managed with ColorSync
– Resolution independent playback system up to 4K
– Mix & match all content in timeline without transcoding
– No rendering, it does it in the background using every available CPU cycle
– Can plug into cameras and edit whilst ingesting
– Non destructive color balance on ingest
– Stabilisation on ingest
– Audio cleanup on ingest
– People and shot detection
– Range based keywording – metadata attached to part of a clip
– Smart collections – like smart folders
– Clip connections, primary and secondary media locking together
– Magnetic timeline -moves audio out of the way to avoid collisions.
– Single keystroke nesting
– Compound clips – collapse clips into a single clip
– Inline precision editor – simplifies trimming of clips
– Auditioning – sampling of different versions of edits
– ‘Skimming’ media previews when you move the cursor over
– Timeline Index- an index of all the clips in the timeline
– Automatic control of number of tracks – add and go when needed
– Sync clips with Plural Eyes style featue (Not Plural Eyes)
– Pitch corrected audio skimming
– Waveforms show levels in realtime
– Retiming in the timeline
– One click to match color between clips
– New advanced color correction
– Improved keyframing, bezier paths and curve display in the timeline
– Color & Soundtrack now in FCPX

Features that make me.. worry:
– iMovie like filmstrip view
– Color & Soundtrack now in FCPX
– Automatic control of number of tracks – add and go when needed
– Smart collections – like smart folders

It all boils down to HOW they’ve integrated new features in conjunction with keeping what people used in the past. GUI / Eco-system (i.e. i/o options) is really important. Multiple timeline support is important. But it’s too early to say. And like other posters have commented I think Apple is prematurly seeding select info to prove “it’s not another Copeland, FCP lives in FCPX and it will be awesome!”.

Let’s hope it is.

————————
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Victor Perez]

At $299 Apple couldn’t have made it any easier for pro users to afford purchasing both FCP X & Avid.

Victor
http://www.editvictor.com
http://www.hbhm.tv
http://www.itvisus.com

[Jason Brown]

Nice post Erik, I know it’s sad…but my favorite in your list has to be pitch corrected audio skimming… 🙂

I was bothered that in his demo, he never set an in or out point…we live and die by in and out points, and I don’t think we’ll ever get around that…

-Jason

[Erik Lindahl]

Also regarding the price I don’t see this as pro vs consumer anymore really. Blackmagic and their acquired Resolve proved this. Imagineer Systems Mocha proved this. Even Autodesk to a degree proved this with Smoke for OSX.

If Apple can triple the amount of sales of FCPX for $299 vs 999 and keep a similar or better product, hurray for all of us. If Apple choses to break down the “Studio” to separate products so we as user have a choice in the end, hurray for us. If in fact FCPX turns out to be “iMovie Pro” well.. Let’s hope not.

————————
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Helge Løken]

As many of the previous posters have mentioned, there is still a lot of questions to be answered. However, from what we saw I think it’s a clear shift from Apple towards democratizing editing even further which means a simplification of the application which may or may not be a “dumbing down” of FCP. I believe that Apple sees a bigger potential with the millions of people who’ve just purchased a mac, have got iMovie and has a DSLR camera that shoots video.

Sure, they’re not going to abandon the pro-market but I don’t think they’ll focus on features that make our life easier if it makes the application harder to use for those with limited editing experience. Therefor this will probably be a great application for consumers, semi-pros and those pros that work in a “closed loop”, doing everything themselves and outputting to the web. I believe for broadcast and others who work in a shared environment it may not be the product of choice in a year from now. The killing punch for me is the iMovie / iPhoto style browser which stores everything in its own hierarchical folder structure. And as someone who works in a facility where audio output routing is important for archival, versioning and repurposing I wouldn’t know how to achieve that when there’s no audio tracks and the tracks jump up and down to help you keep everything in sync and not inadvertently ripple anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple has shown an amazing application that will potentially increase their sales 10-fold. But, I think for most pro users it’s going to be a problem fitting it into the workflow.

[Erik Lindahl]

This is what I’m worried about. The iMovie metaphor is horrible for pro-work. We live for in and outs and I often have a 3- or 4-up display depending on what I’m doing. BUT if Color and STP is integrated perhaps this is done in different “rooms” of some sort. For pure editing, I’m curious how this will work.

————————
Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[James Mortner]

Yeah Alex, chill out mate. Still lots to see and question before raging on a forum…