Old Skool Animation in FCP X

[David Mathis]

Very neat. It is amazing what FCP X is capable of.

[Bret Williams]

Very true. But before we get all high on ourselves, there is nothing he did that is FCP X specific. His methods are so crafty and manual that they could be done in any NLE. It’s all him. He’s the artist here. In fact, his reliance on keyframing suggests an app thats better at keyframing would be more suitable. FCP isn’t really known for its keyframing excellence. My guess is he chose FCP X because it was cheap, he could own it, and it works. I notice he’s using a 2007 Mac pro, he works from his home studio, he shops at the dollar store, and he’s not even buying up plugins. I wonder is he has a CC subscription or if that’s PS CS5 (or older) he’s using? 🙂

Amazing stuff.

[Charlie Austin]

[Bret Williams] “My guess is he chose FCP X because it was cheap, he could own it, and it works.”

That’s probably part of it, but not all. read the end of the article. Here’s a little bit:(emphasis mine)

“It took me three days to get up to speed, but once I arrived I found I could edit in half the time I was used to.

Why? It has such great tools for organizing and finding your footage. You can track and preview tons of clips in no time, allowing you to stay with the creative flow and concentrate on your editing. I also like the trackless magnetic timeline. It’s very intuitive to work with. I love how you can just move clips around while keeping everything connected. Sometimes this can get in your way, but then you just press a key to temporarily switch it off. So you have the best of both worlds.”

It’s a very balanced article noting both what he likes and what could be better.

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Bret Williams]

Alright, I skimmed that part. Very true! That’s why I like it as well. But I wouldn’t call it editing. That’s compositing of a very high end nature.

[Ronny Courtens]

Just to make a few things clear:

He absolutely didn’t start using FCP X only because of the price. I know him and he can afford anything a man can dream of. It was just a natural transition from FCP for him. Previously he worked with Lightworks, Avid and FCP. He still has these BTW, as well as ProTools for audio. But he has decided only to use FCP X for the majority of his work, and in the article he clearly explains why.

I had him on the phone for a few hours to talk about the article, and he explained that he has been waiting to upgrade his hardware because everything has been working fine for him until now, so there was no urgent need. The main reason he is buying the newest hardware now is because he wants to update FCP X and purchase some extra plugins that are not supported on his system, such as SliceX and MObject. Also because he would like to learn Resolve for grading, and Motion 5. He also says he finds keyframing in X works very well. But then again he has a lot of experience with keyframing, so he knows how to work around any pitfalls. As said in the article: a talented man like Clayton could use any given software to achieve this. But that’s not the point. He likes FCP X, and he also explains why.

– Ronny

[Bret Williams]

Oh very well. I meant it as a compliment that a true artist doesn’t need the latest fancy gear (and subscriptions) to accomplish great stuff. I wonder if that 2007 is actually the late 2006 that I still have. It still functions very well, but I’m not sure I can hack it to run yosemite. I had it running Mavericks until some version broke that and I had to reinstall everything. Now it’s stuck back at Lion.

[Ronny Courtens]

He works with the early 2007 dual Quad Clovertown, and Lion is as far as you can go on this machine. And you perfectly summarized the intention of this article: in the end it’s the editor who makes the real difference.

– Ronny

[Bret Williams]

Oh geez, I was running the earliest MacPro (2006) ever. I even downgraded it when I bought it to the dual 2.0 ghz to save money. I was able to update it to Mavericks by hacking the firmware. It actually ran better than Lion. Mountain Lion would probably be the sweet spot as it was sort of the bug fix to Lion, like Snow Leopard was to Leopard. And it ran the latest FCP X pretty well too, until I got greedy and tried to put the latest Mavericks on it and either the drive died coincidentally or it broke the firmware hack.

[Mark Suszko]

Ronny, when he gets the hang of Motion, he’s going to be cussing the way he used to do some things more manually.:-)

[Ronny Courtens]

Absolutely, Mark. And I think a guy like this will be up and running with Motion in no time. Cannot wait to see what he will get out of it.

– Ronny