[Alban Egger]

Dominic, I agree Edius is extremely strong and has some good features. It played stuff back natively ( P2 etc) years before FCP and Premiere did. It also has a great bin-structure which is superior to FCP7.
I moved from Edius to FCP6 a few years ago and was shocked at how clumsy Finalcut was.

But since everyone used FinalCut around me and it had better effect-controls, I sucked it up.

Then came FCPX and it has all the features I loved about Edius and FAST (Liquid).
It works natively and play back in realtime no matter how many layers and effects I use. It has a great ripple mode (which can be turned off), it has a nice titler whose UI is on the screen and it has the best media/bin structure and management out there.
Heck even the “burn DVD from timeline” which was so cool in Edius is in FCPX with some add-ons (BluRay, E-mail, Vimeo etc).

There are a few things in FAST, Edius, CS6, Avid, Vegas that I would like also. But the NLEs have to compromise. They all will have strengths, and weaknesses and you will have to have a workaround ready on all of them for one or the other feature. You can build a table in many different ways with different tools……

[Alban Egger]

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/04/15/apple-reveals-2012-final-cut-pro-x-update-with-multichannel-audio-editing-red-support-and-more/

Apple promised source viewers

[Alban Egger]

[Walter Soyka] “the insinuation that either position is bought and paid by a sponsor is a little ugly, don’t you think?
..
You’re right that these have nothing to do with FCPX at the BBC, but they come up organically and it’s a topic worth discussing for anyone who has to make the decision about what system to purchase. You know, anyone who has to decide “FCPX or Not.” (Personally, I think FCPX AND Not is an interesting move.)”

What irritates me (and I have posted that before) that basically EVERY thread gets into a “FCPX or NOT” discussion, even if that was not the OP´s intention, and the same arguments are brought from the two sides. And maybe what irritates me most is the fact that many who write “against” FCPX are doing so without even knowing it or based on stuff they read on the web.

And sometimes it seems to me not very organical how the pro-CS6 arguments pop-up. They pop-up in the first two or three replys. I am not so naive to believe threads are not viewed by Adobe, Apple and Avid. If you go to dvxuser you will always have Panasonic in the back of your head when you walk away. Here it is Adobe.
I doubt it happens that way in Avid or CS6 parts of the Cow. Maybe the FCPX users are too busy to spill bad blood elsewhere. It just has a bad taste at the moment in this FCPX-or-not forum.

[Alban Egger]

First of all thanks Craig for explaining your workflow. It pretty much matches ours and we also have a similar experience of having an easier job, being quicker to adjust to customers`/ directors wishes etc.

It is a bit sad that this thread like so many others here, which starts as a story about BBC using FCPX turns into a CS6 – promo show (they are sponsoring the cow and Apple doesn´t, right?) and a PC-Apple religious-talk.

I have recently read the Belgian national TV was using FCPX at the Olympics in London, we use it for Austrian TV and Red Bull´s ServusTV, there are TV series in the US and germany edited in FCPX, so there is no doubt anymore, that it is a tool with as much entitlement to be in the industry (whatever that is nowadays). I don´t see it in danger of becoming a new Vegas, because within 1,5 years it is further than Vegas was after twice the time.

[Gary Huff] “And this “faster” thing is completely nebulous.”

Is it nebulous? Maybe when you are paid by the hour or have an assistant who is paid by the hour.
Skimming and Keywording/SmartCollections alone save me HOURS every week. Hours I can use for other projects or simply to spend it elsewhere…or maybe even to give the project more time in the finishing (grading, audio) as I would otherwise have.

And I am not even considering auditions and the various export-tools (“e-mail to client out of the timeline” comes to mind), because I don´t use these on a daily basis.

FCPX is NOT perfect. Nor is any other NLE and NONE will ever be working for all. FCP7 wasn´t (never worked for me really), CS6 isn´t and Avid isn´t. They all have strengths and weaknesses. For me and my projects (documentaries up to 52´, commercials 60´´, image-clips 3´-8´, and Live productions) it is perfect. I cannot speak for 3D and not much for dialogue-based movies, it works great and we have now a couple freelancers who jumped ship and work in it also.

I played with CS6, but I wouldn´t feel to have the authority to tell anyone over there in their forum what CS6 is supposed to do which works in FCPX (and there is A LOT that is missing in CS6 when coming from FCPX).

[Alban Egger]

In his initial postings about FCPX and CS6 it seemed like he had deadlines and no time to learn anything new on that side of the production.
In the long term he might regret it, because in particular in his field FCPX would prove itself extremely fast and helpful.

[Alban Egger]

I agree partially. It is tough to keep up with technology’s pace when you have bookkeeping to do and decide beforehand how long a device is working for you.

But usually when the decision is if I want a 3% speedboost via a new driver on a Windows graphicscard or CPU upgrade or I take the 200%+ speed boosts by Apple’s state of the art shifts (eg FW400 to FW800 to Thunderbolt) every 3 years, I welcome them and pay 30 for another adapter per machine.
My Macs simply work. Its technology is supporting me, wHile with Windows I constantly was looking for new drivers, swapping graphics cards every 9 months….but that was me. I now have one PC Edius seat left, which is 6 years old and still works fine (until I need to render 1080 out). So of course in Windows you can work perfectly, if you build a good machine in the first place.

[Alban Egger]

Here is a snapshot from a friend of mine´s edit. We shot this with the London Symphony Orchestra.
It was less than 50 tracks of video but it is possible and with secondary storylines and compounds we can package certain scenes into one track in the process…..

https://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/523364_379141292125623_431812861_n.jpg

[Alban Egger]

Whi am I to doubt Murch’s workflow, but really why do you need 50 SFX tracks? Do you ever hear 50 SFX at once? And if you do and you have to do it in an NLE instead of a proper audio-program, FCPX offers compoundclips, which in the end are only one Track on your videotimeline.

So yes, it can be done and it might look tidier than in FCP7 or other trackbased NLEs.

[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.

[Alban Egger]

1) FCPX paradigm is more than the magnetic timeline. You can fake some advantages of the magnetic timeline by grouping in a trackbased NLE, just like you can fake it vice versa. But the abiltiy to have different layers in different modes (ripple or not) on different tracks and the benefits of the magnetic timeline where every clip is dragged towards the center and beginning of your primary storyline cannot be reproduced easily.

2) it is more a theoretical question than a practical one IMO and it comes down to one’s preferences. A timeline is constructed of both, clips in relation to each other and cips that have to have a relation to a certain time in the timeline. So IMO none of the two paradigms are perfect, therefore it depends on your preferences and projects as to what works. What is interesting though, is that it seems like those who really tried out FCPX and understood its way have problems going back to the restricted ways of tracks, where due to the necessity of certain timerelations your edits are blocked or messed up.

In the magnetic timeline you can try more without risking to mess with your overall project, because the cliprelations, which basically are your story, stay, even when you break the timerelation. In practical words: When I add another angle of 4 seconds between two clips that I find explanatroy for my story, I don’t care about the 4 seconds as much as I care about the logical build of my story. I can deal with the 4 seconds later. But I won’t have to deal with any syncing issues for now. When I then adjust the overall time, timing and pacing I can again add and take from/to clips without worrying about the cliprelations and syncs. That’s one of the benefits I see in the relations FCPX creats with its magnetic timeline.