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Have conclusions? Please add. Also, please disagree.
These are the conclusions I’ve drawn.
* It is not Final Cut Pro anymore. Final Cut Pro has been EOLed. This program has been given its name, but has little in common with it other than that. Calling it Final Cut Pro is purely a marketing decision made to tap into your brand loyalty. If you want to think clearly about this program, you need to understand that.
* The”event” paradigm for fcpX seems to me to be closely related to consumer social media “experience” paradigms like iPhoto, where relational metadata is paramount in the underlying structure. This is an interesting idea for some. Let’s say you make a living off of covering car shows or extreme sports or local events. Your ever growing event database, with all of the indexing available to it, will grown into a very powerful library of many multiple’s of events that will be cross-referenced and available to you in some pretty exciting ways. If you are local ENG, this could be a real plus.
On the other hand, if you are a traditional broadcast editor whose focus is strongly project or episode-orriented, the event approach is not only not of use, but quickly begins to add needless clutter and overhead.
* X is very locked down compared to FCP. If what you loved about FCP is its ability to put viewers and sequences wherever you wanted them, you will not like the X interface. If one of the things you disliked about FCP was that it felt cluttered and overly complicated in terms of where things were located, you might like the interface. The old FCP was layered with a myriad of approaches, so that everything you needed to do could be done in three different ways. Not here. Their way or the highway. For me, the freeform customizability of FCP was one of its greatest assets. That is now completely gone.
* tools are / are not there for the professional. I can’t do my job on it, but maybe others can do theirs. I’ve decided to stop saying it is not ready for professional use, and, instead, refer to broadcast industry use. And, as I look at the design, I question if it will ever be ready for large-scale broadcast use. But we are increasingly a niche, and some broadcast, particularly some kinds of unscripted, might thrive on this, if they can ever figure out how to efficiently work with the other elements of Post, and ways to meet their ancillary delivery specs, like split audio tracks and stem creation. Right now you can’t. You can’t cut a feature film on it. Sorry. I mean, I know some people are going to, with DSLRs and a group of buddies. But whatever next year’s Social Network or True Grit are cut on, it won’t be X.
* This is a program aimed at giving wings to the novice or non-editor. Almost all the touted gizmos are hand-holders for the insecure, especially the magnet timeline. I hate the thing. All of the simplicity is aimed at making you work in a very specific and guided way. I don’t find it freeing. To the contrary, I find it very confining. Others may love it.
I do not see Apple changing course, though they will add fixes. The one thing they can’t fix is that it is no longer Final Cut Pro. I really liked Final Cut pro.
My plans–I’m already spread across several platforms. A lot of my decisions depend on the decisions of my coworkers and clients. In my world, I think abandonment of X is a very strong possibility, though I have talked to more than one executive who seems excited by it. Everyone I’ve talked to has agreed that we can squeeze another 6 months to a year out of FCS3. Investment and infrastructure issues push and pull at these decisions, but the economy is tough enough that I don’t see change coming too swiftly. I have gone and gotten my own version of Avid 5.5, and I spent two hours last night pleasantly poking around Premiere. So glad it came with AE.
What conclusions have you drawn?