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I got an advance copy of FCPX today and …
… it’s brilliant!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Magnetic Timeline – great to use. Precision Editor – brilliant tool. Context Menus – fab. Audio editing tools – amazing, so easy and quick. Interface – just dandy. Metadata Search – very powerful. Face and Shot Detection – fun but a bit of a novelty. All this and so much more. You should try it out. I tried out pretty much everything that Randy Ubillos demo-ed on the night to cheers from the massed ranks of industry professionals – everything pretty much present and correct (bar the colour matching tool, dammit!).
My version only cost me nine of our English pounds direct from the App Store, which I thought was a real bargain.
You could get it too – just go looking for iMovie 11 and you’ll be sorted!
Yup, there is absolutely no question about it – FCPX, despite the name, is quite obviously exactly the same product as iMovie. It has no connection whatsoever with the product currently known as Final Cut. No-one who has spent a little bit of time with iMovie 11 could be in any doubt about that.
There will not be a Classic Mode of FCPX that looks and feels anything like the current software – really.
Apple have done the sensible thing – FCP was not upgradable as it stands, iMovie is a 21st century product with massive potential. FCPX is the logical growth of the latter.
Whatever, if you want to get ahead of the curve with FCPX, then there’s no question that you can do so with iMovie 11 – and you’ll probably enjoy it quite a bit. Though you might be left wondering how it will make the ultimate migration to doing all the really pro things we need it to do.
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12 Replies
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This is so reassuring — thanks for the tip on the 9 Quid — I was so worried about upgrades concerning the upgrade from the free version that shipped with iLife. I think charging for it is such a rip off. Damn those greedy misers at Apple.
jPo
You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?
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£8.99 actually! Makes you wonder how they justify charging $299 for the “Pro” version 😉
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Extra tracks. Wait, they don’t have tracks. Maybe the extra charge is the ability to turn off the magnetic timeline. Someone please tell Randy this is not a new invention and that the correct term is Ripple. And it is something you use very little of because it wrecks your timeline. It wrecks his too if you watch close. I keep looking for a way to turn it off in iMovie, hoping it’ll be there in FCP X.
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Apple still treating us like morons as well with this £n.99
Why can’t they, like the rest of the world, see that it just looks cheep and is rediculous.
Alan
FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
G5,MBP,Vista64,XP -
All the hand wringing about this. I don’t care about FCP-X’s pedigree, just so long as it works. Yes, do take iMovie for a spin. I was really surprised with it’s capability and performance. This was weeks ago before NAB. Realtime effects previews had me gob smacked.
Just because a new editing paradigm showed up first in the ‘shape’ of iMovie doesn’t mean it’s ‘shape’ isn’t the new paradigm, if you get what I mean 🙂
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The point I was trying to make was that instead of feverishly speculating about what FCPX may or may not be, why not grab a copy of iMovie 11 (now fortunately unbundled from iLife and very cheap indeed), and start working with it?
Personally I plan on getting as familiar as I can with iMovie so that I am completely at home with this way of editing when FCPX comes along. It does take a bit of getting used to the new timeline, especially the film strip idea for range selection and the Precision Editor, but it feels like it could become very intuitive very quickly. Make no mistake – this is what you are going to have to get used to with FCPX, like it or not. For myself, I reckon I’m going to like it.
There will be more to FCPX obviously (should hope so for an extra $280 odd!), but the basics of how it works are clearly identical.
Frankly, it seems crazy not to take this opportunity to learn and evaluate the “new paradigm” when it’s so easily available.
As to whether Apple have pulled a fast one in serving up iMovie 11 as the new FCP, I don’t really care one way or the other!
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Just one of my many concerns is that since it will be available only as a download it will mean that the $299 price will apply to only one Mac. Guess you will have to pay double to also download it on your laptop. I run SL on the desktop and Leopard on the laptop, guess I will have to install SL there as well.
SteveSteve Douglas
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[Steve Douglas] “Just one of my many concerns is that since it will be available only as a download it will mean that the $299 price will apply to only one Mac. Guess you will have to pay double to also download it on your laptop.”
That shouldn’t be a problem. See here for discussion of App Store licensing rules. In particular:
When you buy an app on the Mac App Store, you’re getting the rights to run that program on any Macs you own and operate, for your personal use. Basically, if your household has a half-dozen different Macs, including desktops and laptops, you can buy a copy of Gratuitous Space Battles and play it on every single one of them. Consider a purchase of consumer software via the Mac App Store to be a bit like buying a household site license for the app.
The situation is slightly different for apps that are considered commercial or professional in nature. For apps that fall into this category—Aperture’s a good example—the Mac App Store license says that you essentially can install that item on computers you use or on a single computer shared by multiple people. Basically think of it as a one-seat license for a pro app.
It’s no more restrictive than standard software licensing, and there’s less obnoxious technical enforcement than a lot of apps have; if an App Store app manages to de-authorize itself, all you have to do is log into your iTunes account to reauthorize it. You don’t have to call someone on the phone and beg them to let you use the software you’ve paid for. Ditto for transferring the app to a new machine. In fact, you can just authorize the new machine on your iTunes account and then flip over to the ‘Purchased’ tab and install your apps right from there.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.
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For those concerned that Apple is just repurposing iMovie ’11 as the new Final Cut, don’t you think it’s possible–likely, even–that the new interface was originally designed for Final Cut, and only rolled out to iMovie first as a test?
Bear with me: If I were designing a radically new user interface, I’d want to test it out on a small, consumer app to verify that it worked and resolve kinks in the basic functions before rolling it out to a large professional app.
But even if I’m wrong, and this wasn’t all planned, who cares? I think we get far too hung up on what “pro” means, when the real question is, “is it reliable, powerful, efficient, and compatible with my workflow and other tools?” If the answer is yes, it doesn’t matter if it has a cheesy-looking magic wand icon or a Share menu. 😉
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[Benjamin Reichman] “For those concerned that Apple is just repurposing iMovie ’11 as the new Final Cut, don’t you think it’s possible–likely, even–that the new interface was originally designed for Final Cut, and only rolled out to iMovie first as a test?”
It’s both simpler and more complicated than that. The same dude is now in charge of both.
That’s typical of how Apple’s acquisitions work. Bring people in to work on their original project (in this case, Ubillos and FCP), then roll them into other roles. It has nothing to do with consumer-izing FCP or other speculation that feels silly to me…although who really knows yet? Instead, it’s a guy who understands video editing, who has ALWAYS tried to do new and interesting things (only Sony Vegas approaches FCP’s combination of compositing and editing in one place) – now he’s in charge of everything video at Apple.
Creative COW Magazine ran an interesting story on this – one of the original developers of LiveType became the manager of FXPlug, and left to create some of the bestselling business apps in the iTunes store (the first of which was AirShare). Check it out.
In the meantime, no matter how insanely pro FCP X winds up being, grabbing iMovie is great advice.
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