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why would anyone want to use FCPX (SERIOUS discussion – no bashing)
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[Michael Paul] “the Apple page isn’t very convincing”
So I guess you never made it this far?: https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/in-action/
At least it strikes ME as pretty convincing. And there’s a lot of reasoning everywhere.
[Douglas K. Dempsey] “FCPX is not full-featured enough for a high-end artist like Murch …”
I’d be very curious to hear which full-feature it is you’re thinking of.
– RK
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Deutsch? Hier gibt es ein umfassendes FCP X Training für dich! -
I have been an outspoken critic of FCP X since its launch, and at the same time I have been using it continuously since day one – sounds contradictory, I know, but here’s my take.
Any editor who isn’t using FCP X at least in some way is seriously missing out.
There are things about Media Composer and Premiere that please me and things that displease me but overall I am fairly indifferent about them, whereas there are things about FCP X that I loathe with a deep abiding passion and things that I absolutely love. That’s the big difference.
I won’t go into the details of what I love and loathe here – do check out the links that others have given you and especially read what Oliver Peters has to say.
Don’t be swayed by the fact that Walter Murch is not using it – he’s missing out too. There are some really clever, talented experienced editors using FCP X (people like Oliver, Charlie Austin, Tom Carter, Ronny Courtens) and they have devised extremely impressive workflows that make the most of FCP X’s many unique strengths.
The very things that you are now looking at and seeing as weaknesses are the things in which the real power of FCP X actually lies. Secondary storylines, for example, which seem to make no sense to you, offer truly unique possibilities – once you have used a secondary storyline for cutting music, for instance, you will want every other NLE to have the same capability.
Could Apple do better? Of course they could. FCP X is far from perfect (and some things will just never be good enough in my view) but the things it does well, it does so well that nothing else comes close for the sheer fun and speed of it. And the key word there is “fun” – you’ll find a lot of FCP X editors describing it this way and for a very good reason. And if an NLE can be fun, that has to be a good thing!
So learn it – properly and in depth – and use it for the things it does well, even if that means that it only forms a part of your overall workflow, as Doug has described elsewhere in this thread. A lot of editors are doing just that – it’s a great toolbox of useful features and you’d be crazy not to add it to your arsenal.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I won’t go into the details of what I love…”
But isn’t that what he’s asking? 😉
– RK
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Deutsch? Hier gibt es ein umfassendes FCP X Training für dich! -
[Robin S. Kurz] “But isn’t that what he’s asking? ;-)”
Since he doesn’t even know the basics of how it works, talking about the details of how it works is probably not the best way of convincing him at this point 😉
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki -
[Simon Ubsdell] “Since he doesn’t even know the basics of how it works, talking about the details of how it works is probably not the best way of convincing him at this point ;-)”
Fair point I guess. But then I personally don’t see what is in fact SO horribly different about X outside of its, IMHO, far superior organizational tools. Overall, whether you’ve actually used it or not, I think there is a lot to be said for it, that anyone that has ever edited with anything before could easily understand in principle. Even if they can’t actually recreate whatever it is on their own off the bat.
[Michael Paul] “There must be a reason why people use it and what’s great about it”
Again, I recommend the “In Action” pages. There is a lot and often very different things listed in each story that people uniquely love about X. I for one love its SPEED first and foremost. I’ve been editing for nearly 25 years and have never gotten from A (ingest) to B (export) so quickly and effortlessly. And yes, that is something you can really only understand and recreate with respective TRAINING and subsequent experience. X is NOT an NLE that you can just jump into when you are “handicapped” by previous NLE experience. Which, no, is not a BAD thing. Unless of course “different” is a bad thing for you in general. In which case… stick with what you have.
FIRST go to https://training.izzyvideo.com/courses/final-cut-pro-x-tutorial or even better https://www.rippletraining.com/categories/final-cut-pro/ , actually LEARN it, then come back and tell us what you think.
– RK
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Deutsch? Hier gibt es ein umfassendes FCP X Training für dich! -
[Michael Paul] “So why do you use FCPX? What are your reasons? What’s great about it?”
I use FCP X because the magnetic timeline is absolutely brilliant once you understand it. It’s a completely new way to approach story telling. A primary storyline that drives forward with secondary storylines that support the primary story. THAT is how I want to think about the story that I am telling. Tracks do NOTHING to help me tell a story except get in the way. After editing with the magnetic timeline, I would never use an NLE that was track based again. It’s just a strange way to approach an edit now.
The problem with other NLEs is that, in an effort to give editors something familiar (e.g., razor blades, bins, etc.), they have limited themselves to what the physical world can do. If early software developers designed the word processor the same way that Avid and Adobe (and others including FCP 7) approached the NLE, your computer would ring a bell when you reach the 72nd character of a line and you’d have to press return before character 80! You would also be reaching for the White-Out icon to fix your mistakes, and you would be manually adding another piece of digital paper when you got to the bottom of the page. Making a computer act like a typewriter would have been a very bad idea but that’s essentially what developers did with video editing software.
Apple has re-imagined how telling a story with video should be and once you understand their new approach, you will see how much more productive you can be. If you try and fight it and use FCP X like track-based NLEs you will be very unhappy and frustrated with it.
With FCP X you need to unlearn as much as you need to learn. You need to open your mind to the fact that emulating physical bins may not be the best approach when you can use metadata tagging to group and find media effortlessly with smart collections. When I drag an interview section to someplace else on the timeline and the lower thirds and cut-aways that are connected clips move with it without me thinking or grouping or ungrouping or anything, and media in the new timeline location just moves out of the way to make room for the new video, I wonder why anyone would want to worry about tracks and making holes and making sure that you don’t hide edits under other edits.
So I edit with FCP X because it’s an extremely productive way to work, and telling stories with tracks that I need to manage seems archaic to me now. It’s not for everyone… some writers still use typewriters. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Some NLEs waltz in 3/4 time. Others rock in 4/4. FCPX is free jazz.
Organize as simply as you want or with a complexity and depth of multi-catagorizing sources as you see fit with Keywords, Smart Collections, Favorites, multiple in/out points per clip.
Rather than being limited to rigidly constructed relationships, connected clips, secondary story lines, auditions, allow situational flexibility at any point in time.
Roles allow you to organize the clip’s intent without the constraints of visually linear arrangement.
While non everyone appreciates free jazz, I think it’s important to have an NLE that offers the professional the creative freedom away from the constraints of traditional time signatures and harmonic structure.
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Because it works incredibly well, and is very stable with raw footage – in particular R3D. The playback quality, editing performance and export speed with 6K, 5K and 4K raw media is better than Avid, Resolve and Premiere in our experience.
It also lets you collaborate with plugin developers so that you can build workflows that are not possible when using Avid, Premiere and Resolve.
You can also utilise incredibly cheap and effective shared storage from people like Lumaforge so that multiple people can collaborate on a large project, for much less investment than that of an equivalent edit system.
It does need some tweaks for exporting custom bitrate files and for how it handles embedded audio, but overall its fantastic.
Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk -
[Craig Seeman] “While non everyone appreciates free jazz, I think it’s important to have an NLE that offers the professional the creative freedom away from the constraints of traditional time signatures and harmonic structure.”
+1
Just skeep-beep de bop-bop beep bop bo-dope skeetle-at-de-op-de-day! 😀
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
A number of great “in action” stories have been linked. I would also suggest these from Steve Hullfish’s “Art of the Cut” series. Steve does the best editor-to-editor interviews on the web, because he gets deeper into why a lot of editors do what they do, particularly when it comes to the software.
https://www.provideocoalition.com/whiskey-tango-foxtrot-co-director-glenn-ficarra-editing/
https://www.provideocoalition.com/art-cut-whiskey-tango-foxtrot-editor-jan-kovac/
https://www.provideocoalition.com/art-cut-clayton-condit-cuts-voice-stone-fcp-x/Then there’s still the Honda commercial cut by Thomas Grove Carter. This is a very innovative way in which FCPX was used that’s hard to match with other NLEs.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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