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One thing I won’t be doing if FCPX is a dud …
… and that’s going back to AVID!!!!!
Of necessity I have spent the last week back on Media Composer, the all new 5.5 version, and I am just hating it.
The Smart Tool aside (and that’s finally a move in the right direction, for my money), theUI feels amazingly clumsy by comparison with FCP with far more keystrokes and/or mouse action needed no matter how well you customize the keyboard. The fixed two-monitor set-up feels so antiquated and limiting – I really miss having a large Canvas in front of me (personally I am really looking forward to the single “monitor” concept of FCPX from what I’ve experienced of it in iMovie). Most of all I miss my tabbed sequences for editing between sequences. And don’t talk to me about the tiresomeness of audio levelling!!! I could go on but there are loads of features of editing functionality that you’re stuck with that just seem quaintly out-of-date and massively irritating.
And frankly it seems very much less stable than FCP running in the same 8 core machine, with continuous erratic and unpredictable behaviour, requiring full system restarts to resolve (though to be fair I didn’t have the luxury of doing a clean install this time so it may be down to that.)
I say this as someone who adopted Media Composer very early on indeed and worked continuously with it for a very long time and became exceedingly quick at using it. But now there’s no way it’s going to be my NLE of choice unless I am really stuck and simply have to use it (as I need to this week and next). Amazingly, Media Composer as a basic editing tool just hasn’t advanced that much in the twenty years that it’s been around – and over the years it’s taken quite a few steps backward in my view.
I very much doubt that FCPX will disappoint enough to make me switch to something else (and in my line of work the only real “choice” is AVID for compatibility reasons) but in the event that it does I will keep plugging away with FCP7 for a good long while yet.
Anybody else feel the same way?
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
21 Replies
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Thanks, great info on Avid.
Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
MacPro Two 2.8GHz Quad Core – AJA Kona LHe
FCS 3 OS X 10.6 QT 10 -
I use both. FCP has some great things, but so does MC 5.5. But as any serious editor knows…it’s not the tool it’s the person using it. To just make a blanket statement about never going back or not using a certain editor is quite immature. The same goes for all those chastising FCP X.
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Sometimes Mike the issue IS the tool. If you have 500 holes to drill in a short period of time and your choice is to use either a hand drill or a power drill, obviously the tool you use is critical to your success.
Now substitute the drill concept with NLEs. One requires you to manually transcode all footage to edit with, and one allows you to power edit immediately with no transcoding at all. Since you are so mature about things, Im sure you can grasp the concept presented here. One system is efficient (Adobe, Avid) and the other is not (FCP 7). I wont waste and time speculating on FCP X until I have it in hand.Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “And frankly it seems very much less stable than FCP running in the same 8 core machine”
I won’t address the issue of preference, but your stability issue isn’t typical. There are plenty of editors with MC and FCP co-installed without any issues. I have had various versions of MC, PPro and FCP installed on the same volume on both Mac Pros and MacBook Pros and never had any major stability issues.
You do have to be careful of staying on compatible QT and OS versions. For instance, 10.6.7 is to be avoided, including for FCP.
Right now, I’m on 10.6.6 with Avid MC5.5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and CS 5.5 (beta) and FCP 7.0.3 – plus various audio and motion graphics apps – and all are equally stable. Do they crash? Yes. But none any worse than the other. In fact, I’d pick MC 5.5 at the most stable in this batch. But YMMV.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Oliver, what are the issues with 10.6.7 and FCP7? Ive been on it and noticed no problems yet.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
There were driver issues with NVIDIA cards and Matrox MXO2 units, from what I understand.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Thanks. I have the ATI Radeon card which explains why I had no problems.
Tom Daigon
Avid DS / FCP / After Effects Editor
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
[Oliver Peters] “your stability issue isn’t typical”
In fairness, I should say that a) as I mentioned before, I didn’t have the opportunity to do a clean install which may have helped possibly, and b) I shouldn’t have referred to stability – the issue is not crashing, but rather what I am guessing are memory issues in that a few hours into a session the UI starts behaving erratically and unpredictably, along with “hanging” temporarily.
I should also add that it is significantly slow to save bins (to the point of interrupting the workflow), something that has always been the case with AVID in my experience across a very wide variety of machines and set-ups.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Mike Chedwick] “as any serious editor knows…it’s not the tool it’s the person using it”
Seriously, Mike, there ought to be a fines penalty system in place for anyone who uses this tired and complacent old chestnut of an argument 😉
I am and always have been prepared to use any “tool” I am obliged to use to get the job done, way back to when I started editing on film and tape before NLE’s were even thought of. Inevitably I will continue to work with Media Composer in the future, but as I said it will not be my NLE of choice any time soon.
My guess is that MC is the preferred option for editors who actually like to work at a slow pace rather than push the limits of what is possible in terms of speed of operation – an opinion based on having observed the working practices of many, many professional AVID editors down the years.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com
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