[Chris Kenny]

[David Lawrence] “The speed benefits of dynamic trimming have nothing to do with measured performance. Dynamic/rock ‘n roll trimming allows the editor to make decisions in realtime, during playback, without ever touching the mouse.

Advanced editors don’t cut by looking, they cut entirely by feel, looping playback and trimming until the cut feels right without ever lifting their fingers from the keyboard.”

Look, I’m not a professional full-time creative editor, but I’m not a rube. You’re seriously overselling this. The idea that most edits are made during live playback — and apparently Apple is as ignorant as I am about this fact — is a little implausible. You’re also pushing this feature as a critical advantage when classic FCP — which captured more than 50% of the ‘pro’ market, as measured by SCRI’s survey — never really had this either. Trimming in FCP X is pretty unambiguously better than it was in FCP 7.

Plus, the demo video of Premiere that started this subthread does not actually appear to show the Avid behavior you’re describing.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Neil Goodman] “I cant imagine its any faster with a mouse and it takesyou longer to click and drag to be exact. Having admitted your not familiar with Dynamic trimming your not really in a position to.comapre the two. Its almost night and day..”

It’s entirely possible that you’re right, but unless you’ve measured it, you really don’t know. You literally cannot determine which of two (small) UI interactions is faster via your own subjective experience. Your brain lies to you. This is not really a controversial opinion in the UX world.

For a very clear illustration of this, back when desktop computing platforms were still a big part of what people debated in platform wars, it was very common for Windows fans — who had presumably used Macs as well — to argue that in-window menu bars were superior because you didn’t have to move the mouse as far. In reality the Mac’s backstopped menu bar is, in testing dramatically faster. This is invisible in subjective experience — people’s reasoning about what should be faster combines with the brain’s inability to accurately measure small timespans, to cause people to experience what they expect, rather than what the clock shows.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Shawn Miller] “I think you may be overestimating the proportion of Mac users in the larger creative community (senior and aspiring). If there weren’t millions of folks doing creative work on Windows, there would be a lot less cross platform software.”

FCP is still, according to the SCRI survey over 50% of the NLE market, despite being Mac-only. And most of the Avid deployments I come into contact with are Mac-based as well. It doesn’t seem that implausible that the Mac is 75% or more of the video editing market.

[Shawn Miller] “Although, FCPX seems to have encouraged a number of editors to seriously explore other OS, software and hardware vendors.”

People constantly make statements like this here, but there is, as far as I’m aware, absolutely zero systematic data to show anything of the kind. Nor does it particularly make sense — there’s no reason for an NLE switch (evidence for which is also pretty thin on the ground) to entail a platform switch.

[Shawn Miller] “I guess this is a case of YMMV, I have multiple installations of the Creative Suite across a half dozen machines, and I’ve never had installation issues. All of my machines are also rock solid with very rare instances of crashing or instability (and I push these machines hard). “

Meh. There are entire web sites dedicated to gripes about Creative Suite. It’s very, very common to hear such complaints in venues where there isn’t active advocacy of Adobe’s products going on.

[Shawn Miller] “What if you actually NEED a truck? “

Then you use a truck. But in any given market, a majority of people don’t need that. And the analogy doesn’t entirely map, because higher end video workflows often involve the use of multiple tools, so you don’t necessarily need a ‘heavy’ tool that does everything. There’s a slightly more accurate if less accessible analogy — FCP X adopts the traditional Unix philosophy of building small, focused tools that do one thing well, and performing more complicated tasks by combining them.

[Shawn Miller] “I think this is subjective, plenty of people seem to be moving away from FCPX because of usability issues. “

Again, there’s no evidence for widespread switching at all. In the year or so after FCP X was released, Apple’s feature/broadcast NLE market share was down all of three percentage points. And we know that as of April of last year, there were more FCP X installs than FCP installs. It is not at all impossible that Apple has actually gained share in the overall NLE market. People can’t just keep using the assumption that Apple is losing users to justify their opinions about FCP X.

To address your point more directly, some people don’t like the magnetic timeline. This is a matter of personal preference; it’s not, strictly speaking, a ‘usability’ issue. There’s no general usability principle that prefers tracks over clips relationships or bins over metadata, and it’s not at all clear that the magnetic time e.g. makes editing tasks slower. The reverse may well be true.

[Shawn Miller] “Let me ask you this then. Do you think that FCPX alone can meet the needs of an aspiring motion graphics or VFX artist? “

No. Why should it?

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[Chris Kenny]

[Shawn Miller] “Sure, Macs are more popular than they were before… that doesn’t change my point. Adobe is interested in creative professionals, PC and Mac users alike. You said that it was important to capture folks just entering the field… I agree. I think Adobe’s platform agnosticism and diverse product/capability offerings puts them in a better position to do that. “

I simply think that if you’re sitting there with a new Mac (and most folks in this industry, including those who are still just aspiring, do seem to use Macs), clicking a button in the Mac App Store and installing a slick self-contained app that performs the task you’re interested in learning how to do is a lot less daunting than signing up for an Adobe subscription plan, running what is, let’s face it, not one of the world’s better executed installation procedures, and ending up with half a dozen complicated and (and I mean this in the nicest possible terms, as a regular user of Adobe products) often fairly buggy products that sometimes make very questionable UI decisions.

It’s not perfect, but the car/truck analogy Jobs used to explain the relationship between the iPad and traditional PCs seems relevant. It’s honestly not easy to put into words, but FCP X feels to me like it’s part of the future of ‘lighter’, more focused computing, that emphasizes things like responsiveness and usability. As in other areas where such shifts are happening, some existing ‘power users’ are highly skeptical of the whole prospect. But I think it resonates with a lot of people. Sometimes less really is more, especially when you want your tools to stay out of the way of a creative process.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Neil Goodman] “Trimming in X is one of its worst features, not like it was any good really in FCP 7 but thats one area they didnt improve on at all with X and i believe theyve backed themselves into a corner with the trackless timeline. I havent gotten a chance to get into PPRO 6 yet but if they copied Avids trim mode than all the better because it really is an elegant solution and you cant really argue its value. You can get in, make complicated trims across different tracks, slip, slide, and extend on stacks of video/audio and never have to touch the mouse.”

I find trimming X to be a fair bit better than in 7, and I think statements to the effect that it’s objectively worse than these other schemes are a little hard to buy. Keyboard control is not necessarily faster even if it feels that way — you have to actually measure to draw such conclusions. And the fact that FCP X’s trim tool lets you easily scrub the clips (including the presently unused segments of them) on both sides of an edit point before making an edit is a rather powerful feature.

I’m also really not quite sure why people keep insisting more keyboard-oriented trim features are somehow prevented by the magnetic timeline. There appears to be no real connection. Some details might have to be tweaked, of course.

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[Chris Kenny]

[David Powell] “I can’t believe that anyone who would compare dynamic/rock n roll trimming to trimming in X has actually used either of the former.”

I’m not an Avid editor, really. My experience with it is more with workflow than creative editing. If I understand what you’re describing, you’re saying there’s a command that lets you move an edit point to the playhead location without selecting which edit point to move? And it just… what, moves the closest one? I guess that’s handy. But it doesn’t sound like the Premiere feature in question, and I’m not sure why it wouldn’t in principle work, with a bit of tweaking, on a magnetic timeline.

It’s also worth noting you don’t have to click anything to select one side or the other of an edit point in FCP X. Park the playhead on the edit point, and hit [ or ]. Once one or the other is selected, you can switch between them with these keys without returning the playhead to the edit point.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Shawn Miller] “$19.99 a month seems very attractive.”

If you qualify. Still ends up being more money in the long run. And while FCP X doesn’t have an individual educational discount, it is $150 with volume purchasing.

[Shawn Miller] “Let’s not overlook the fact that Adobe has 30 day free trials of it’s software and all of their creative applications are cross platform. For many of the people you’re describing, FCPX isn’t even an option because it’s only available on Apple hardware.”

Macs are more popular now, particularly with e.g. college students, than they were when classic FCP was on the way up, so I don’t really see this as a major barrier.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “no. It’s an idiotic keyframing system. It is hard to take you seriously.”

You’re writing topic sentences and not supporting them. It is hard to take you seriously.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “you add in the plug-ins required to restore functionality, (and some of them have sticker shock), and that argument goes away fast. “

It doesn’t particularly seem to me that the median user requires any plug-ins.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Also, given it sits currently in the production suite – PPro is, in very many cases, free at the point of delivery.”

True for people who are already in the industry and already own $1500+ software packages (or already paying $50/month, I suppose). Not so much for folks just entering the field, and capturing those folks is critical for long-term success.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Isn’t that immensely useful? – of course the skimming behaviour in X, indeed the entire timeline model itself kills this kind of functionality.

This is not quite as unambiguously better as you seem to think it is. You can achieve something not too different in FCP X’s trim tool using the ‘extend edit’ (shift-x) command, plus you also have the option of skimming the clips on both sides of the edit (and just clicking to trim). The trim tool, like that tool, can also be quickly advanced from one edit point to the next using up/down arrows.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Also – aren’t native curves nice? Proper keyframing tools? “

FCP X just prefers keyframing on the canvas for things like transforming. I’m not sure this is ‘improper’ so much as merely different — and a lot more sensible, objectively. Why adjust one-dimmentional keyframes to control 2D movement? Or were you talking about some other issue?

If by curves you mean for color adjustment, sure, those would be nice, but FCP X has pretty decent built-in color tools, and for added bonus points primary grades automatically transfer into Resolve — it embeds CDL information in XML files. This is handy for projects where you might want to do some grading in the NLE so you can spit out decent looking rough cuts, but you plan to finish through a DI workflow and you don’t want to throw out your existing work.

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[Chris Kenny]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “there is no way that Premiere is not getting a much more serious industry look than FCPX. It absolutely definitely is in London. There is concerted road testing going on. The bottom line is that there is a gigantic FCP7 shaped hole in the market – Avid can’t really fill it, something needs to – and there really is damn all visible short to mid term likelihood of X doing so. The transition to PPro is reasonably painless. Even X’s biggest boosters speak candidly about long periods of transition, and some odd workflows.”

FCP X now meets the fundamental technical requirements for broadcast/feature work. A ‘Cold Mountain’ moment for FCP X could change the narrative in a hurry — though as I keep emphasizing, this industry moves slowly, so changing the narrative wouldn’t have a very immediate effect on adoption.

The other thing to keep in mind about FCP X is the price/accessibility thing. Before FCP started gaining mainstream adoption, it was used by outsiders, mostly young people, doing cool things at the edges of the market. Some of those people subsequently moved into more established organizations, or graduated to more ‘serious’ projects, and took their tools with them. The key question with respect to FCP X’s long-term success is whether a similar dynamic is playing out there. The fact that FCP X installs had passed FCP installs by March of last year, the fact that it has sat near the stop of the App Store charts since its introduction, suggests perhaps it is. There are apparently a very large number of FCP X seats out there. And they’re not soccer moms — contrary to the narrative some people attempted to push in the wake of FCP X’s announcement, actual ‘consumers’ don’t buy $300 content creation software.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “Let’s just see what happens when PPro 7 is released. One way or another something has to give. I say the industry breaks decisively for PPro as the broad based FCP7 style second to Avid. With collapsing disciplines – The AE PS asset integration alone is hard to ignore.”

It completely depends on what kinds of projects you’re working on. For a lot of narrative work it’s pretty easy to ignore, honestly. For the indie features we work on, for instance, you might spend a day on title elements, you might drop in half a dozen VFX shots done by an outside contractor… and meanwhile you’ll probably spend six months just cutting, cutting, cutting. You’re going to pick an NLE based on what makes it easiest to organize lots of footage and try out lots of different things on a timeline, not based on some workflow conveniences that might come into play for a couple of days at the end of the project.

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