Project 15% done in FCP7, but FCPX seems more future oriented, faster– Continue with…

[Dominic Deacon]

If you directed the footage I reckon your probably the best man to edit it. Don’t be intimidated by the software. While you can invest hundreds of hours learning every little detail of the software you can edit narrative really well with very little knowledge if you’ve got the flair for it.

As to whether you should go with FCP 7 or the “future oriented FCPX” just use the one that feels most comfortable. In editing your just try to tell your story so use the one the you feel gets in your way the least. As to X being future oriented it’s only Apple’s future. My opinion is that it’s prett unlikely the rest of the editing world will follow them to tracklessness so any skills you learn using FCP 7 should be transferable to other programs.

[Alban Egger]

If you are new to the process FCPX will not only be faster to use, but also be faster to learn.
Your Mb from 2011 is good enough, but I suggest putting as much RAM as you can afford when going with X.

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

My opinion is you should better keep on editing in FCP7. First, you already spent several hundred hours learning it (your words), so it would be pretty hard to finish your work any sooner in FCP X. Given it’s a completely different interface and workflow, you should spend about the same time in it to achieve the same skills. Say it’s actually faster to learn (I happen to find it much harder, but it could be just me), say 50% faster, you would still not profit on this editing two short projects already at 15%. You say you do not have money to waste, and I gather you already have a FCP7 license and some plug in’s, so I would not spend the extra money. About FCP X being future oriented, I agree with Dominic. Maybe it is for Apple, but I still have to see if it is for me as well, after buying a license right after it was on the market and after having spent some time on it (I am a professional free lance film maker delivering about 12 x 24′ underwater documentaries per year to a satellite TV channel, about 12 years on this market). I don’t like the trackless magnetic timeline, the FCP X driven media management, the limited options when working with multiple displays, the impossibility of renaming the file to match clip, or naming the clips with a meaningful name on capture, the impossibility to export a portion of the timeline without having to send it whole to compressor and setting the in and out points there, and a few other things. I really don’t get why they could not just add the new features as options to the existing and working structure, together with an upgraded support to newer formats and cameras, or having to build the new software from scratch, why they forgot or left behind so many crucial issues. I think the next FCP X upgrade and the next release of a new Mac Pro will tell us something more, so I’d wait.
Best regards

Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy

[Massimo Verona]

Thanks for all the input. Although I had gotten to [very] basic competency in FCP 7; I played a bit with FCPX and am going to use that.

I have some attention problems, and the repeated interruptions for rendering , even for minor changes such as shortening an audio clip, made FCP7 almost impossible for me not to get too discouraged.

I know there are workarounds to avoid constant rendering to some extent, but why learn the workarounds on a 32 bit architecture that will get relatively worse and worse.

I also see the confusing nature of FCPX media management, but there is some system, it will just take time to learn.

The overriding factor in my decision is just how much easier placement, shortening and lengthening, and maintenance of audio sync is.

I can just throw clips around, change lengths quickly, and that part happens at least 3x faster ( for me anyway) than in FCP7.

At this point I’m wondering if I should spring for the extra $100 to go from 8 GB mem to 16.