[Charlie Austin]

[Chris Harlan] “Nice list. I agree with a number of the things you say. I can see why you might prefer it, though for me its missing quite a lot still. I would say there are three things that I would need to see before I could see it as being better than 6/7.

1: A mixer with Master channels. It would also be nice to see them take it to the level of Adobe and include busses and subs.

Agreed. In my case it’s not an issue since most everything I do gets mixed at a dedicated post facility. Most of what i do is offline, which colors my perception/needs to a great extent. But you’re right. I really think if they can utilize the power of roles with an actual mixer stolen from Logic or something, it’ll be amazing. We’ll see…

[Chris Harlan] 2. Support for Control surfaces.

Would be nice, yes.

[Chris Harlan] 3. Some sort of organizational device that allows me to see at a glance the position of all my audio types. Right now, in all other NLEs that is track position. In the case of X, color-coding of roles would probably be sufficient.

Yeah, it’s real close, and as you know you can see all of one role at a time, but color coding/grouping multiple roles would be (will be??) awesome.

[Chris Harlan] Sync info is also important, but maybe not directly related to the “better-ness” of the audio component.

Agreed, once you break the audio off the picture you need to pay attention. Of course if you leave it attached it’ll never lose sync. I’m just used to breaking it out, but now that I’m more comfortable I’m starting to mess with storylines and other X “innovations” more, maybe leaving sync audio, (usually DIA) attached to the pix might be nice.

[Chris Harlan] So, yes–I agree there have been some improvements, and maybe this next round will take it the whole 9 yards, but right now Audio in X is, overall, a step backwards for me.

Makes sense, as you said, if you need a Control surface you’re currently SOL. My MCU is very sad these days… 🙂

[Chris Harlan]

[Charlie Austin] “In X, I hover over the clip I want to solo, press C to select it and option-S to solo it. To hear the other clip I right click it and “add to soloed clips”. Same for the FX or anything else. Or just select of bunch of random clips wherever they are relative to other clips and solo ’em. It’s really nice.”

That sounds cool.

Yeah, That’s one thing I seriously love. Drives me nuts not having it in 7…

[Chris Harlan]

[Charlie Austin] “-The “Audio Enhancements” inspector tab for each clip in X is awesome, especially the “Loudness” settings. …”

I think I’d like that as well. Just FYI, there is a loudness solution in 7 that goes beyond +12db. You access it through Modify Audio and it allows you to by-bass the need for doubling up.

True. But the cool thing about the X settings is, in addition to cranking the loudness a ridiculous amount, you can select the degree of normalization as well. So a dialog line that’s too quiet overall, and also starts loud and falls off, can be simultaneously cranked overall and normalized. Really useful.

[Chris Harlan]
I use the faders a lot, and not the key-framing tool. But I agree, they are fiddly. I prefer a control surface for mixing as you can be controlling several tracks at the same time. I can be bumping DIA and dropping MU simultaneously.
…
[Charlie Austin] “related to keyframes… In X you can do range based audio level changes. To dip MX under some DIA in 7, you can switch gears, grab the fader and play through the section and mix it, or you need to either create 4 keyframes and then grab the level bar thing and lower the audio between them, or cut the MX clip on either side of the dialog, add dissolves (or not) and lower the section.
”

Some nice advantages. Of course, if you want to use a control surface, you are SOL.”

Yep, though the fact that you can do range based keyframing, and the fact that the audio level slider moves as you play through volume changes, gives me a little clue that mixing of some sort is coming. With roles, it seems like you’d be able to “assign” a specific role(s) to a specific fader(s) or buss or whatever.

There’s a bunch of other stuff I left out… Compound clips and the ability to add effects and/or keyframed levels to them, sort of like a mix group/buss. The dynamic waveforms I really like. And the fact that I can cut clips, extend, move, change levels, solo, mute them etc., with out ever stopping playback is really really nice.

Oh, and the evil magnetic timeline. Just cut stuff in, move it, copy, paste etc and never have to worry that i’m gonna write over something I don’t want to. It took a while, but letting go of traditional fixed tracks has made editing way easier for me. All i need to think about is “I want this clip to go here” and put it in. No patching or rearranging beforehand, just make the cut and move on…

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Chris Harlan] “So, maybe you could start a thread “Why FCP X audio is better than its competitors.” I’ll give you a pass on the 1000X. And, hey–I think it would be terrific if you are right. I’m very willing to be schooled and shown the errors of my way. But given what I can see currently, I can only see a case for “Charlie Austin enjoys the FCP X Approach to Audio more than other Approaches,” not “FCP X Audio is WAY better.” So, school me.”

LOL… I guess I was being a little hyperbolic there. I think your description is more accurate. 🙂 Maybe a separate thread would be good, but here are a few things off the top of my pointy head. 😉 I should start by saying that I almost never used the faders/”automation” in FCP 7. It’ll be nice if/when that comes back, but I don’t miss it at all. YMMV on that one. I should also point out that I don’t use the primary story line at all, and always break the audio off from the video, so my timelines pretty much behave just like they did in 7. What I like about X’s approach is mostly related to editing, and honestly, you can do similar stuff in 7, but it’s way easier in X for me. Anyhoo… what I think is better…

-The clip based paradigm vs. track based. Soloing bits of audio is a pleasure for me. Say I have 2 clips butted up against each other but I just want to hear the first one:

In 7, I move the second clip off the track, follow the track I want to solo all the way back to the beginning of the sequence, solo it, move back to the clip and play it. Then I want to hear the second clip too, so I either un mute the track I moved it to, or move it back to the soloed track and play it. Then maybe I want to hear the FX under those clips too… back to the head, un mute that… etc. click click move click click on and on.

In X, I hover over the clip I want to solo, press C to select it and option-S to solo it. To hear the other clip I right click it and “add to soloed clips”. Same for the FX or anything else. Or just select of bunch of random clips wherever they are relative to other clips and solo ’em. It’s really nice.

Or I can disable clips to mute them which sometimes works for what i want to hear, but In X enabling/disabling a clip only requires one keystroke, V, instead of the CNTRL-B stretch.. faster.

-The Audio filters in X are better, many of the Logic plugins are there in addition to the usual AU stuff. Things I might have had to round trip to STP I can do right in the timeline. Faster.

-The “Audio Enhancements” inspector tab for each clip in X is awesome, especially the “Loudness” settings. I don’t know about you, but in 7 I often have to double/triple/quadruple, or throw the DynamicsProcessor filter on quiet audio clips to get them to the right level for a specific mix. Not in X. Open the tab, make a couple quick adjustments, done. The Hum and BG Noise removal adjustments are nice too. 3 common audio fixes in one place, easy. Also available for compound clips, so you can put all your crappy dialog in one clip and effect it all. Faster.

-In X, you can move audio clips in subframe increments, not just the keyframes, the clips. This makes cheating dialog and cutting music really precise, way better than 7.

-The fade handles on each clip are awesome. While I am used to being able to just throw a dissolve effect between adjacent audio (and video for that matter) – in X you need to create a secondary storyline to do that, which isn’t that big a deal really – grabbing the fade handles is super fast and gives you much finer control than in 7. Just right click to change the fade type.

-Keyframes in audio clips really are 1000 times better than 7. Really easy to grab/select/add/delete and they move where you want them to. They’re way too fiddly in 7 for me.

-related to keyframes… In X you can do range based audio level changes. To dip MX under some DIA in 7, you can switch gears, grab the fader and play through the section and mix it, or you need to either create 4 keyframes and then grab the level bar thing and lower the audio between them, or cut the MX clip on either side of the dialog, add dissolves (or not) and lower the section.

In X, hit R, select the range in the MX clip you want to lower, and CNTL +/- to get the level, it adds the keyframes, which you can of course adjust if you want. faster.

… so, I just previewed this, and it’s a freaking book and I have more to blather about. 😮 I guess I’ll stuff it in a new thread and continue huh? Anyone interested in my blathering? 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “I don’t think this is hard to understand, I don’t need an NLE to wipe my brow or make me chicken soup but I do need a time code window and the ability to work with multiple audio tracks disconnected from their video sources, and I want to visually organize my work with tracks that stay where I put them.”

I totally get it Herb, and as i said, it just popped into my head when reading your post so it honestly wasn’t directed at you. Hopefully X will get the features you need soon, because I understand your reluctance to move to MC. A while ago, before I discovered that X actually was useable, I grabbed the trials of both Pr and MC just to see where they were at as it’s been a while since I’d used either one. Pr was ok I guess, but MC was still the cluttered, bloated, archaic mess that it had been last time I used it. More so really, since they’ve bolted a slew of new “features” onto it. So… I feel your pain. 😉

I’ll say again though, as an audio guy who started recording stuff on 1/4″ sound on sound machines, and ended up as a post audio mixer here in L.A before I accidently became an editor… working with audio in X is a thousand times better than in 7, or any NLE that I’ve used for that matter. Despite the lack of tracks and “faders”. I’m really looking forward to whats coming next….

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] “The big difference here is that no one ever took a market leading application and dumped it in the toilet before – that’s Apple real innovation.”

lol… This isn’t directed specifically at you Herb, It just popped into my head reading your comment, but there really do seem to be a lot of jilted lovers in FCP land these days. 😉 Be honest though, the one you loved was getting long in the tooth and their looks were really only still there due to lots of plastic surgery. Great personality, arguably the best of all the old dames, but now she’s left you. You could take up with one of her old friends but…. there’s someone new and available. And the new girl is really great. Immature and a little annoying, but a real stunner. And in the edit room, she’s got some serious… skills. One can mourn a lost love for a while, but at some point… 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Jeremy Garchow] “‘US’ was a teeny tiny microcosm of the editing community.

It was a joke to the “pros” of the time.

About three years after that, it was no longer a joke, but a topic of conversation.

You have to remember XML wasn’t included until v4, 4 years after its initial announcement.”

I think the majority of people who use, love, and are horrified by the passing of FCP “classic” probably started using it around version 3 or later. They don’t remember the sneers and derision that greeted the first couple versions. Or the lack of “pro” features and complete lack of interoperability with other systems. I get deja vu a lot these days. 🙂 I’ve been using FCP professionally since version 1.something or other. I still use it and love it. But honestly, I won’t be sad to see it go. Final Cut is dead. Long live Final Cut. lol

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “FCPX is utterly rejected by precisely the people who brought its predecessor to prominence, because it is an irritating, intellectually reductive, detestable prosumer mess.”

No, it’s not. So there. :-p

Actually, your post reminded me of an article I had read when X first appeared. I hunted it down, here’s an excerpt:

..Or is (the backlash) coming from non-Final Cut Pro users who see the $299 writing on the wall and realize that they’ll soon very likely have to learn something dramatically new and different from outside their comfort zone? Apple’s previous Final Cut Pro versions have not stopped working, nor has Apple stopped work on FCP X – in fact, they’ve just started working with a paradigm-shifing, extremely strong and powerful foundation upon which to build. Have a minute of patience, please. I heard the same sort of whining when we went from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X and some had to be dragged kicking and screaming. People stopped crying over Mac OS 9 in short order, too.

Or… perhaps some editors feel a little bit threatened that “non-pro” users will be able to edit so well for so little? And/or perhaps it’s coming from Apple’s now price-demolished competition who simply cannot crunch their numbers and make them come out profitably if Apple is going to offer Final Cut Pro X for $299?

🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Craig Seeman] “These facilities aren’t about to jump wholesale into FCPX but each of the above occurrences lands one more beachhead for Apple. At some point, maybe within the next year or so, some places will reach a tipping point if they really see improved productivity coming out of the FCPX room. As a very few facilities hit that tipping point, a few others will start to look. And so it goes.”

I concur. And honestly, the exact same scenario played out with FCP “Classic”. I was a movie promo beachhead. 🙂 Cutting (and finishing using some very convoluted workarounds) stuff on version 1, Switching my bay over and beta testing with versions 2&3, and by version 3 other trailer companies in L.A. were trying it, and our whole company switched from Avid. Others followed. Will the same thing happen? Who knows. It’s a different market now, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

I’m with Marcus as well. Great post. 🙂 On an unrelated note… You emailed me a while ago and all my replies bounced… weird. Probably a moot point now though. 🙂

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Herb Sevush] ” and once they realized they would have to make a total change in their editing environment not matter which way they went then PPro / AE with dynamic link made the most sense.”

Fair enough, though in my opinion using FCP X is not a total change in the editing environment. I realize there is some disagreement on this point… 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~

[Charlie Austin]

[Craig Seeman] “It’s creeping into more broadcast work. In a few cases large scale in many more instances a case by case bases. You don’t hear about them because the backlash has been so negative that they feel they’re rather stay out of it.”

That’s actually where I’m at right now. I know there are a lot of folks, like me actually, who are generally interested in, or are using FCP X in broadcast/theatrical contexts. We like it, we know there are still some issues that need to be addressed, and we believe they will be. I mean, I like it enough to have written a little article here, and I waded into the forums to try to explain what I like about it. And I totally get that there are some workflows for which FCP X isn’t suited to yet. Hell, I’m still not convinced that it’s 100% ready for our workflow, but… I believe it will be.

After a while though, reading all the “Apple has abandoned us!” laments, and the “it’s not a pro app!”, “It’s dumbed down!”, “it has no tracks!”, “Another FCP user switched to Premier!” posts and comments gets old. Apple clearly screwed up on the release of X big time. And honestly the 1.0 version pretty much sucked. But that’s the past. The current version does not suck at all. In the present, I can cut stuff, get it approved, and send AAF audio (nicely split out and trimmed for me by software) and EDL’s out to finish. It works. Not perfectly, but it’s gets better every time there’s an Apple or 3rd party update, which is fairly often. There are a handful of things I miss from FCP 7. But despite it’s imperfections, there are way more things about X that I discover on a day to day basis which are, to me, way better than 7, or Pr, or MC. It makes my job, editing, easier.

So I’m just working, and I’ll stay out of the arguments for a while. Though, to swing this back on topic… Seems like the SNL folks would have switched even if X hadn’t come out. The whole back and forth to AE shuffle had nothing to with FCP X. If you’re gonna spend all that time in AE, why not switch? Makes perfect sense for them to do so.

IMO, the part of the article that reads: “The turning point, says Epstein, came when Apple released Final Cut Pro X… this just isn’t going to work…” is kind of a red herring don’t you think? FCP X would have worked just like 7… at least as far as AE is concerned. The article could just as easily have read “The turning point, says Epstein, came when CS5.5 came along with Dynamic Linking” Would have been a little more accurate that way 😉

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~