[Alban Egger]

Herb-
I agree in most of your points from a businessman standpoint. The way Apple forces us to switch to a new NLE is astounding brutal and illoyal.
I made a small switch already by investing Euro 249&89 for X, Motion and Compressor.

There are some important features missing that force me to use FCP7 on some projects, not all though. And the missing features are mainly involving the output process.

But the rest, the ingest and media-managment and the editing itself are simply great in X.

you are right: Apple has left the highend market. But , and here comes the difference in our view, FinalcutPRO10 has not left the highend, it has just not entered it yet.
Apple built a great NLE that is just that. An editor. As non-linear as can be.
It will be up to the third party vendors to provide us with the tools needed. I won’t need tape output ever for example. And many of the features that Scott mentioned and you claim essential in an NLE are not needed by all. So we will have to add what we need. It won’t be cheap, but if it is used professionally that won’t matter too much.

Color roundtrip? I’d prefer not to. The colourboard in X is imagequalitywise up to par with Color, but it misses a few tools. It’s own layout has to accustomed to, but it works very quick and it allows for secondary corrections easily.

My workflow is kludgy, agreed. It is stupid to use two NLE to do tasks one should be able to so. But i want to be ready when X is and not start then. And after all even with the roundtrips to 7 i am working quicker now!

[Alban Egger]

Yes the missing proper preview is a dealbreaker, if Apple and their 3rd party vendors don’t soon provide us with a solution they will lose more mid- to highend customers.

I have written more about that in my blog in the “conclusion-post”.
For now I rely on the scopes and make testrenders that I watch on FCP7 / MXO2 on critical shots.

[Alban Egger]

[Herb Sevush] “Alban –

Scott listed a series of industry standard features shared by every other professional NLE in existence. Other than 64 bit and background rendering, which are desirable features for any NLE, you counter with a bunch of FCPX specific attributes that many editors would be happy to live without.

no skimming – don’t care
no keyword tagging with smart collections – bins with automation that I don’t want.
no magnetic timeline – thank the lord
no “conform” within the timeline – have no idea what it is.
terrible 3-way color corrector – The combination of 3 way CC and Color beats FCPX hands down.
overcomplicated editing-tool-selections – not overcomplicated for me, but then I’ve been out of school for more than a few months.

“

Herb, Scott listed a bunch of features that are indeed missing and needed by SOME editors on SOME projects, including myself on SOME of my projects. But I get around it, because I still have FCP7 and guess what….it still has all the tools it had on June 20th.

I am wondering about your reply to my list, because if you don´t realize how good the skimming feature is then I don´t know what to say. It is saving HOURS of time no matter what you do and how you do it. The 3-way color corrector in FCP is pracitcally unusable professionally now, because it simply doesn´t have a good quality. In FCP7 you need Color, true….and in FCPX we will need another 3rd party tool (or Color again) once the XML works. But the NLE FCPX itself has a much superior colortool. MUCH!

FCP7 is full of workarounds. The editing was by far the worst I experienced on any NLE in its time. In fact FCP7 is FCP6 (what did they bring so valuable since 2007 to call it 7 anyway? Alpha transitions and reflections in Motion?) The software stalled years ago. And it behaves like it. It is clumsy, it crahses when you throw a few thousand waveforms and thumbnails at it. It uses 400% of my 1600% and it uses 4GB when I have 16GB of RAM.
It is made for a workflow from the 90ies and it shows.

..well, Herb, I am out of school a while and edit for 20 years on all different NLEs from SpeedRazor to Edit* to Liquid, Edius, FCP, Premiere…..I used everything but AVID and Media100. Just because I understand what FCPX does better, doesn´t mean I am 17 and it doesn´t mean I don´t produce broadcast programmes. It only means I make them faster even with the extra loop I need to take to bring the project to FCP7 to output it for the network.

I wish XML, OMF, HD-SDI output and all those features were here already, but they aren´t. But that is no reason to bash the rest of the software. It is a delight to use it if you really school yourself in it.

P.S: FCP7 is overcomplicated and you say you know how to use it. Well I do, but other NLEs (not just FCPX) understand what I tend to do just by reading my mouseposition. No more “R” “RR” “S” “SS” etc to start slode, roll etc, the NLE has to understand that just by seeing I am in the clip or on the end of it. FCP7 doesn´t. That´s what I meant and I am happy to hear your argument why less keyboard-shortcuts are such a professional way of doing things.

[Alban Egger]

[Scott Sheriff] “You heard right. No tape I/O, no XML, no OMF, no multi-cam, no ability to open legacy projects, no way to share a project with another editor due to file structure, no way to assign tracks. Theres more, but that should give you an idea.”

Yes, and FCP7 is 32-bit, has no background render, no skimming, no keyword tagging with smart collections, doesn’t playback different codecs as smoothly, needs renders on even the simplest composites, no magnetic timeline, no “conform” within the timeline, terrible 3-way colorcorrector, overcomplicated editing-tool-selections…I could go on for a while. How anyone call it a professional tool in August of 2011 is beyond me. Oh yes, because their workflow is dictated by the investments of 2004. That must be it.

[Alban Egger]

[Rich Kaelin] “1. I have heard that FCPX will not open projects from older versions, that would be a HUGE con.
2. Can you have 7 & X loaded on same machine at same time with no issues?
3. I hear that FCPX is missing a lot of features real editors would be loathe to give up.
4. In direct relation to 3, I hear FCPX is a “work in progress” and will have many upgrades soon to come, in other words, it was released too early and incomplete.
5. What exactly comes with FCPX package? ie-motion, compressor, color? you see, I am having a hard time with the app store, and can’t even find it on there…my searches return lots of final cut stuff, just not FCPX.”

1. It cannot open FCP7 projects.
2. Yes, have it on a Lion and on a snowleopard
3. Depends on your needs. We have produced several broadcasts with FCPX already and while we miss some, I would miss some on every platform. It is not finished with features, but you can work with it on a high level already.
4. Again….i can work with it, although i miss features that are yet to co,e.
5. ? Weird. Fcpx, Motion and Compressor are 3 different apps to be purchaßed within the Appstore. Maybe you need an upgrade of your Osx?

[Alban Egger]

I never tried 4444, but I was able to import ProResLT (which is also not yet part of FCPX) without problems, so I guess all ProRes files should be accepted.

7D footage: “import from camera”, point at the 7D folder (should be the same structure as on the CF card) and optimize media.It will be 422 and you cannot swap to 4444 (yet)

[Alban Egger]

The auto-match is not working too well on my side. I need to do test, but maybe it is working with the metadata and matches shots from the same camera better than when mixing different cams. Looks like that to me.
But in some shots it works fine. The problem is: all your colourcorrection tools stay at their presets: so you don´t know what FCP did to the image.
It is really a consumer feature and in no way a real colourcorrection or even grading tool.

I mean you can try on a shot, if it worked, great, but if it doesn´t then you still need to know how to get your image where you want it. So educating yourself on colourgrading is always a good idea.

[Alban Egger]

[Robert Brown] “Hi Alban, actually that wasn’t my quote but from somebody else. In any case the quote still makes sense to me because even though you may live on the cutting edge do you think you are Apple’s target customer? It appears Apple is going for huge numbers and I guess their sales are mainly coming from tablets so that’s where they’re going. The theory is Apple sees the “Digital Kids” are the future if not the now.”

Yeah, Robert I agree. I just wanted to point out that devices like the iPads are not only “gadgets” and using them is nothing to be looked down at.

[Alban Egger]

yes you are right and it is probably a limitation of the OS. The only real multitasking OS I ever used was Amiga´s OS.

Indeed FCPX stops when you work, but it is still never needing to render, everything I threw at it so far played without a needed render. And once you stop a few seconds the 64-bit make sure your hardware gets used, so the renders are done MUCH quicker than in FCP7.

So in a practical it feels like a background render. And I am happy for that, because when I have compressor working the rest of the OS gets laggy, so I rather have all processes with me when I edit and when I don´t have all the power I paid for.

[Alban Egger]

[Robert Brown] ” I already saw someone using an iPad as a 2nd display for FCP X and how some functions were already touch screen enabled. Those pissed off edit suite owners may be pissed off at what Apple has done, but just wait till all those up-and-coming digital kids start to see those very expensive edit suites as dinosaur grave yards.”

That iPad was probably seen on my blog about the bicycle race we shot for two networks.
But we are not digital kids, in fact I am in the business for almost 20 years and installed the first online editor on an Amiga (with an extremely expensive Applied Magic videocard) within 500 kilometers.

Since then I have always tried to follow the speed of technology and it´s pricedrops and conveniences.
From 16mm to tape to P2, from SpeedRazor to FCPX, from huge BetacamSP cameras to Canon DSLRs.

To think only Digital Kids are changing the industry is superficial. Deep inside everyone wants to get thinner, faster and more efficient. And for some FCPX might be that, regardless of the size of their productions; for some it won´t fit the job-description, even when they are digital kids.

But the industry is evolving. The VX1000 was a jumpstart to digital filmmaking 15 years ago, now the DSLRs and the SONY F3…they changed the game all the way to corporate productions (the F3 will replace Super16 and HDCam to shoot TV-shows), and the post will have to keep pace, and FCP7 in its current state couldn´t do that for long anymore.