upgrading to final cut X Yes or no

[Craig Seeman]

If you like Premiere and have an interest in FCPX do both. If you’re on the Premiere subscription plan or paid for outright ownership, you have to consider how small an additional $300 is. That’s assuming FCPX has value to you. Things don’t have to be either/or at these prices.

On the other hand if you like one and don’t want to invest time in the other than go with what you like.

You have to define “worth” for yourself for us to give you “worthwhile” advice.

[Mark Dobson]

[Cameron Hall] “Is it worth the extra money to buy Final cut X or upgrade my existing Premiere Pro with motion on my Mac operating system?”

Craig’s right it’s not a lot of money.

And FCPX is available on a free 30 day trial basis.

What might be more crucial is the amount of time you are going to have to spend getting used to the new working protocol of FCPX. So if you are happy with the way you are working with Premier Pro you would find it easier to take that upgrade route.

However if you fancy a fresh editing experience FCPX 10.0.6 is a very different NLE system from the one that was released last June, our company has been making a living with it for a year and half, and it’s slowly gaining traction in the broadcast market for certain kinds of jobs.

[Patrice Freymond]

Another thing to take into consideration is your hardware. Aside from likes/dislikes of the philosophy behind the software I see a lot of frustrated people trying to run it on hardware that can’t do it properly.

FCPX will satisfy you if it has the hardware to run on. Currently the best is a recent iMac with maxed RAM memory.

hope this helps,

Patrice Freymond

Editor  Certified Trainer FCP7/X
Post Consultant

Always learning…

[Bernard Newnham]

Oh for goodness sakes!

Upgrade to CS6, because you know the system and it works perfectly well. Buy a pc version and a pc. Put the two together and there’ll be be no more overpriced pretty gear, no more waiting, surmising, suggesting, hoping, wanting, angst-ing…….

And when you want to upgrade your box or boxes you just open the old one and put in the upgrade bits you need – a graphics card, an SSD, a power supply, memory, whatever, and carry on editing.

I realise – again – that this is heresy here but sometimes I just have to let go……

B

Bernie

[Mark Dobson]

[Bernard Newnham] “Upgrade to CS6, because you know the system and it works perfectly well. Buy a pc version and a pc. Put the two together and there’ll be be no more overpriced pretty gear, no more waiting, surmising, suggesting, hoping, wanting, angst-ing…….”

Wheres the fun in that?

[Bob Woodhead]

Why would you want to run Motion w/ PPro, instead of After Effects? AE is the more capable app, and integrates into PPro.

“Constituo, ergo sum”

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

[Craig Seeman]

To be more specific, key is Sandy or Ivy Bridge Quad i7, the latter (more recent) the better. I believe FCPX takes advantage of functions present in those two processors that may not be present in the older Xeon processors Apple is still using in the MacPros. Of course Xeon’s brute force helps but you may find a 4 core Ivy i7 better than on older 4 core Xeon and maybe even an 8 core xeon (I’d love to see that test though).

GPU has become a significant factor and I suspect the MacPro ATI/AMD 5770 and even 5870 is eclipsed even by the newer GPUs such as the 2GB version in BTO iMac and the upcoming 27″ iMac may push things further. The current (2011/2012) 15″ MBP/rMBP are certainly good.

[Craig Seeman]

To me, the biggest Mac advantage is a world with Thunderbolt which, once integrated in the Mac Pro replacement, makes for affordability portability. Being able to attach professional peripheral from MacBookAir to BTO iMac and to MP Replacement will be a major cost savings in many circumstances.

That one can move a single RAID, Video I/O, PCIe to Thunderbolt chassis to any system can be an important convenience.

[Bernard Newnham]

“…..is a world with Thunderbolt….”

There seem to be a few motherboards that can provide you with that –
https://tinyurl.com/btdnnbf . Add some other bits – the latest GForce, a decent monitor or two, a few Gb of RAM, an SSD, and you’ll see off anything.

B

Bernie

[Tom Sefton]

I’ve used Premiere Pro for years. From version 1.5 right the way through every version until CS6. I also used to run FCP7.

I just purchased a new Macbook Retina 15″ and I’m running CS6 suite on it – it’s VERY impressive. I’ve installed FCPX on there because it is only £200 and it allows me to export ProRes files for post work. I can see it is very slick, but being used to CS6 already I can’t find a reason to use FCPX instead…..