-
Long time editor’s frustration with FCPX
-
David,
That is a good question and I struggle a bit to give specifics but here are a few.
– The Library/Event/Project nonsense of course.
– The cartoonish icons for the effects and transitions. This is especially egregious . . imagine sitting with a feature director behind you trying to hide the “earthquake effect.” It’s asinine, my editing interface shouldn’t embarrass me but it does. That is galling and infuriating and we (the professional FCPX editing community) should show up with torches and pitchforks at Apple HQ. What happened to class?
– There is something about the font, but I’m not savvy enough o know what it is.
– The cheesy icons . . keys, stars, wands, etc.
– And the waveforms . . . ugh! Cartoonish.
– Locked in windowsAnd yet . . . I appreciate so many of the innovations . .timeline index, magnetic timeline . . amazing multicam, automated renaming of clips, metadata workflows, third party plugins . .
But the Fischer Price packaging is killing me. Bottom line, after 20 something years of non linear editing interfaces I should not be embarrassed to share my screen with my clients. How the heck do we justify our professional rates when the interface looks like it was designed for 14 year olds?
BM is doing a good job of ripping off FCPX feature for feature. Maybe Resolve 12 will be mature enough to jump ship.
David
Post Office Editorial -
Interesting. I have the 30 year badge too. I find the simple elegance of X wonderful.
I am doing a Premiere Cc job now and I have come to loathe the interface. Crowded, dim and seemingly forced to look “techy”. Don’t get me started on the title tool (I am making a list for a later post). Or media import. Or going back to tracks. But that’s for later and I want to give PP a fairer shake.
Give me the clean simple interface combined with the power of X any day, cartoonish or not.
Scott Witthaus
Senior Editor/Post Production Supervisor
1708 Inc./Editorial
Professor, VCU Brandcenter -
[David Berez] “- The cartoonish icons for the effects and transitions.”
Yet this is one of the things I like about the interface. No doubt a Ubillos thing going back to his work on Premiere. I hate having to decipher cryptic and often conflicting names of FX and Transitions from different developers. I like seeing the visual representation and I love being able to preview the effect rather than the endless add followed by delete I had to do with other NLEs.
[David Berez] “- And the waveforms . . . ugh! Cartoonish.”
I guess the folks at Blackmagic would disagree since they use the same representation in Resolve.
I like that they’re dynamically interactive to applied audio FX.And, if at any given point they are a bother, you can disable them whether in Browser or Timeline.
-
[David Berez] ” I drool with envy when looking at Resolve 12 “
Why?
Doesn’t the 12 UI look “toy like” also? I mean……………it’s trying it’s best to be like X
What makes X look simple is when the audio and the video are together as one clip.
The timeline looks simplified that way, but you can expand your audio out and it looks like 12 or other track based NLE’s
Do you expand your audio out or do you just leave it together?
You can take a very complicated project and with it all “compressed” it doesn’t look like anything in X
Especially if you use compound clips.I remember when they first introduced X and took a complicated timeline and then looked at the same info in the X timeline, and then said “doesn’t that look great”. The flip side to that is that it looks easy that way. Like you are not working on anything that takes a lot of skill.
-
Also 30 years plus as an editor and with NLEs dating back to CMX6000.
I like the way various windows open and close as needed. I do wish I could move them to other places. I’d like my Scopes, Time Line Index, FX to open where the Inspector is a times so my timeline doesn’t get shoved left and right. I’d like the Viewer to be locked to a size without getting shoved around by opening and closing windows. There’s so much space for user created buttons next to the time display.
I don’t find anything Fisher Price about it even given the limitations on customization. I much prefer the minimalist look of things, the contextual opening and closing of things. I think, very fundamentally, Apple design ethic in all their hardware and software is to tend towards minimalism so that’s not going to change any time soon. As they add more, they’ll be done contextual. They are very much the opposite of window/palate happy Adobe.
-
Craig,
Yep, that’s true about the waveforms. And the dynamic nature of them is cool. Love seeing them change with effects applied. As someone else pointed out, U/X is such a personal thing. I guess having spent a lot of time in Resolve lately . . I’m really taken with that software (the grading portion). Its just clever and does not feel dumbed down. It feels like software a dedicated professional would use.
By contrast, FCPX is very clever and immensely powerful too, (almost exclusively a RED workflow) but there are days (many of them) where I feel I should apologizing to my clients for the look and feel. That pisses me off. The software underneath is way more sophisticated and powerful than the interface would leave you to believe.
David
-
[Douglas K. Dempsey] “The idea that you can or would sort clips as events comes straight from iMovie and iPhoto and presumes you are a hobbyist who hauls out your camera for a birthday or a wedding.”
But who would presume I was a hobbyist? Everybody that knows me knows I’m working on the NHL Playoffs right now. They don’t think I’m at a wedding because they know what I do for a living.
Doesn’t everyone else’s family and friends know what they do also?
The word “Events” doesn’t bother me at all. First off I’m not even looking at that word on the screen.
When I create a Library it doesn’t say “Event” up there it has a date. (until I change it)For me I find the date a powerful search engine by itself.
I have a Library called “Scenics 2015” It’s all shots that have been taken from around town.
In this case all I need is the date. I don’t need shots that were taken in January for an April game.
It could be the best shot of the Arch ever, but if folks are wearing their winter coats and there are no leaves on the trees it’s unusable.
I could go to Scenics 2014 April (event) and get away with those shots.
Within the events I tag baseball or hockey and so on.
It makes sense to me.
-
30 years plus here also. Have been using FCP X since day one.
No problem with the interface or the naming conventions.
I have never had a client who cared about anything but time and budget.
3D Text is nicely implemented. Will use it where appropriate and necessary.
Back to work…
anickt
-
I think the key difference between Apple’s UI and others is that it’s designed to be easily manageable on a 15″ Retina or a single screen iMac.
Other interfaces allow you to have lots of things open whereas Apple is geared towards single screen. Probably one of the bigger limitations in in FCPX is what you can put on a second monitor.
For some, it can get tiring opening and closing windows. It would be nice to keep the main monitor for Viewer(s) and Timeline and the second monitor for everything else such as Browser, Scopes, Inspector, FX Browsers, all open and just keystroke to the window you want to use.
Resolve handles this by having separate work spaces for editing, grading, export. FCPX handles it by having windows open and close as needed.
-
How does this look like a toy?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up