So I went off on a rant about FCPX on the “FCP” forum…

[Mark Dobson]

To my mind the forums seem pretty well titled as they are.

A huge number of editors are still using FCP7 (not me!) and FCPX has 2 active forums, this one which seems to look at how FCPX fits in within the NLE world and encompasses more esoteric and philosophic debates, and FCPX Techniques which does what it says on the label.

I’d admit that this forum has lost some bite since Adobe ring-fenced its software but it’s still a good place to hang out whilst you are waiting for things to render.

[Nikolas Bäurle]

In most cases it really is an aversion to change, and there’s still a lot of misleading info out there. I’ve even talked to producers who believed that Apple had officially decided to leave the Pro Market and FCP X was going to be the last version.

With editors the problem a lot of the times is the fear of loosing work by not being able to adapt quick enough, especially young editors who just finished learning Legacy. Or if your company just invested in some expensive equipment.

I still hear the argument that X is too much like imovie and it doesn’t let you do things manually, and that magnetic timeline…Nik, you can’t use it for features films, you can’t even export tracks…excuse me? I’ve delivered multitrack files to TV directly exported from X, it took me less time to get the timeline organised and exported than it would have in Legacy. And the fact of the matter is once you start understanding the way X deals with audio, you spent less time worrying about out of sync than in Legacy.

I many cases though people don’t need to change. As editors we are (most of the time) evaluated based on our editing skills, which have nothing to do with the software. If you have enough clients, who usually don’t have a clue what’s going on in the editing software world anyway, why would you need to change. However I do believe that soon the places still working with Legacy will have to make a decision for one of the As, FCPX is so much faster than Legacy. The other day, on FCP7, a client wanted a Vignette, FXFactory, on a 6 minute piece, I also built a simple lower-third Title, color generator black, cropped, 50% opacity + white Text with drop shadow. The system we used is very fast, but there was some editing and color correcting going on in the other suites… It took about 60 minutes to export (unrendered). Now, I get payed for that time so I don’t care, but in X that would have taken no more than 10 minutes on my Laptop.

Where I do see FCPX gaining traction is in small companies, and those not specialised in Editing but needing it for their Video content. One of the places I’ve been working for this year, Promiflash in Berlin, one of Germany’s most popular Star/Gossip providers, decided to start doing internet TV. FCPX works perfectly for this environment. I trained one of our editors who only had Avid experience… she was able to use it within a day, not perfectly but it worked out fine. The producers ingest footage and make their selections before the video-editors arrive. I rarely get troubleshooting calls.

“Always look on the bright side of life” – Monty Python

[Andy Field]

[Nicholas Zimmerman] “I honestly can’t see any reason to stick with Legacy other than an aversion to change.”

Actually there are quite a few reasons. I’m consulting with a large federal agency that has over 500 seats of FCP 7 and 6. It integrates with their Dalet server and they broadcast programs around the world. Some are still on FCP 6…some are still cutting SD DV material……

it will cost them 10’s millions of dollars to switch over to another system – and they are evaluating FCP X (which their engineers view as a closed island and too much trouble to network with what they need)….also the downtime to train thousands of editors/reporters/shooters on a system that is unlike anything they’ve worked with.

They can’t even upgrade some systems to FCP 7 because Apple won’t sell them the seats.

So they are evaluating Premiere Pro – who’s engineers are gladly twisting themselves into pretzels to accommodate this potential multi-illion dollar contract.

so it’s not just about “we don’t want to change” but in many cases it’s the time and cost of retraining many people.

As for FCP X – even a simple thing as “bluring” in a title doesn’t work correctly – I tried showing someone how to do it (in FCP 7 – you apply the blur transition to a title above a main track of video – voila – no fuss – it blurs In FCP X the blur also blurs the underlying video? Have tried nesting, making connected clips, secondary story lines…doesn’t work.

Try explaining the nuances of the FCP X workarounds for split track outputs..multi-language splits and translations in FCP X to thousands of workers just trying to do their job…and you quickly see it’s not all about people afraid of change.

Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852

[Dennis Radeke]

[Nicholas Zimmerman] “I honestly can’t see any reason to stick with Legacy other than an aversion to change. If you want to edit in FCP7 with a modern UI and 64-bit speed then get Premiere Pro, if you want to have a major speed boost in both tech and editing systems then move to FCPX. If you work in a massive multi-user environment with a lot of others, make the move to Media Composer. “

You are making some assumptions on Premiere Pro that may not be true. You assume that it is merely a 64-bit ‘knock-off’ of FCP7 which it is most definitely not. You assume that you cannot be as fast as FCPX, which is merely an argument that your hammer is better than mine. In the end, it’s the person who wields the hammer that makes the difference and that decision is up to each person to decide for themselves. You also assume that only Media Composer allows a multi-user environment when in fact there are lots of products out there that enable multi-user for multiple NLEs. EditShare, Film Partners and others exist today for Adobe, Avid and Apple. Adobe also has Anywhere coming in just a short while as well: Adobe Anywhere

That said, I will always reiterate that choice is good for everybody as is the competition between multiple vendors for your attention!

Cheers,
Dennis – Adobe guy

[Bob Woodhead]

[Andy Field] “As for FCP X – even a simple thing as “bluring” in a title doesn’t work correctly – I tried showing someone how to do it (in FCP 7 – you apply the blur transition to a title above a main track of video – voila – no fuss – it blurs In FCP X the blur also blurs the underlying video? Have tried nesting, making connected clips, secondary story lines…doesn’t work. “

Not impossible. More convoluted than it should be, I agree.

Andy Neil gets the props for answering this one first (Cliff notes: open trans in Motion & disable “to” or “from” clip):

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/13420#13422

[Bob Woodhead]

[Dennis Radeke] “choice is good for everybody as is the competition between multiple vendors for your attention!”

Bingo. Well said, Dennis. Keep making PPro better and you might switch me off FCPX for the daily breadmaking… 😉

“Constituo, ergo sum”

Bob Woodhead / Atlanta
CMX-Quantel-Avid-FCP-Premiere-3D-AFX-Crayola
“What a long strange trip it’s been….”

[Dan Stewart]

[Dennis Radeke] “You assume that it is merely a 64-bit ‘knock-off’ of FCP7 which it is most definitely not.”

This is true. It’s developed into a very serious competitior. The only serious issue with PP now is that you have to let Shantanu Narayen screw your sister.

[Scot Walker]

Final Cut Pro X is definitely not iMovie. iMovie can scroll the timeline during playback! 🙂

I cut a feature film on FCP X last year on a Mac Pro with 24 gigs of RAM, Radeon 5770 1 gig, using a $1,000 PCI card raid SSD as my hard drive for the event and project. This system, which is lightning fast with Premiere Pro CS6 (even though the Mercury is software), is very non-responsive with FCP X and sluggish. I get the spinning wheel way too often.

I need a 3rd party utility to manage my events and project folders so FCP X doesn’t take a year to launch because it’s dealing with so many events and projects.

I need a 3rd party utility to delete the preferences because they get corrupted so often and FCP X will refuse to launch.

My guess is a very large percentage of FCP X users own those two utilities.

I’m getting a 3rd party plug-in that lets me do something radical – place custom guides on my viewer to allow me to align objects. Wow!

The iMovie comparison probably stems mostly from the fact that the user interface can’t be customized like a pro app should be. I really don’t understand Apple in this regard. Their other pro apps were wonderful in this regard. To this day, Motion allows me to drag individual palettes all around. With FCP X, I can look at the Audio tab or the Video tab, not both. I can look at Transitions or Effects, not both….etc.

The import dialog is basic and less powerful than the file dialog of TextEdit (no Spotlight, only one view option, my system-wide favorites on the left side pane are gone).

I really have no idea why a small XML-based project file that points to my media on my hard drive in my folder where I want it is inferior to FCP X having this whole Events/Projects methodology. What was Apple trying to accomplish by being so radical with my media and project files? I want to do a simple thing like make a duplicate of a project file just in case the original gets hosed. For decades, that was a very simple thing and quick. Just do a Save As and name it differently, or go to the Finder and duplicate the file. It’s just a very small XML file. In FCP X, I have to go to the Project LIbrary and wait while it gives me a spinning wheel and renders out thumbnails and this takes a lot of time if you have a normal number of projects (reason why I use a 3rd party utility to manage them). You then duplicate it and make sure you tell FCP X to duplicate just the project file and not the rendered files (that are huge ProRes files) and not the references files (which are huge). You think this wouldn’t take long to simply copy a project file without the media, but it takes a while, and then when it’s done it has to render the thumbnails of that project file in the Project Library.

Want to delete the media in an Event that isn’t being used? Simple, right? Just tell FCP X to select the unused media and then press the DELETE key, right? Nope. That basic feature isn’t there. The workaround is to duplicate the entire project and hundreds of gigs of referenced and rendered media and then delete the one you duplicated.

I can’t lay down 4 clips and tell FCP X to trim all 4 at the same time. I have to go to each one and trim them with snap turned on so they trim to the same point.

For me, personally, this application isn’t fully baked and I don’t recommend it to my Premiere Pro-using friends. I love, love, love Motion and I’ve been using it since version 1. I think Apple just lost its way with pro software after making billions on phones. Just my opinion. I’m rooting for it, though.

[John Heagy]

Collaborative workflows on shared storage is what Apple needs to fix before we could use FCPX. It comes down to the nature of events for a local storage single user vs groups using shared storage. In a local system events can be shared with all projects, in shared storage they can’t. Oh… and copying is not sharing… it’s copying.

Admittedly not a concern for the vast majority of users and therefore not a concern for Apple it seems.

John

[Andy Field]

Bob – thanks for solving that problem….good work around…but it’s the structure of effects in FCP X that requires that work around in the first place….there’s no way even an intermediate skilled FCP X editor would have figured that out….Apple has taken things that worked in one step and required a half dozen in some cases.

Andy Field
FieldVision Productions
N. Bethesda, Maryland 20852