[Craig Seeman]

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.

[Craig Seeman]

[Michael Paul] “1) Where is rate stretch for clips?”
Retiming tool. I actually use this a lot when I have to import live stream recordings which have variable frame rates. I stretch the video to match the audio. Once you add the tool you can stretch the video.

Select Clip, Shift N, grab the green bar above it and stretch

[Michael Paul] “2) How do I move the content of a clip around while the clip remains its length and position?”
Trim Tool, Place it on the clip and it moves the content but keeps length and position. You’d also get a two up (not shown here) to see the in and out frame.

[Craig Seeman]

I generally do my tutorials in Telestream ScreenFlow
It has basic export capabilities built in. For additional post work I export ProRes, for web it uses a built in x264 encoder in which you can control data rate (which controls file size) profile, frame rate, etc. and, has animated gif export if you need to post to something that only accepts pic files.

[Craig Seeman]

I can’t recommend Ripple Training strongly enough.

FCPX does involve a rethink on how to organize and execute some functions and, once you grasp that, you’ll understand why many experienced FCPX editors feel that it’s “fast.”

If you want to dive and just to get a basic grasp of things IzzyVideo has a very good free tutorial series. It’s not deep though but it’ll give enough a brain tease to grasp the Ripple Training stuff faster.
https://training.izzyvideo.com/courses/final-cut-pro-x-tutorial

Denver Riddle of Color Grading Central also has a very good free FCPX series to help you get a grasp of the color board.
See the free FCPX Tutorial on this page
https://www.colorgradingcentral.com/tutorials/

If you’re not going to go to Resolve at some point you may want to consider his Color Finale plugin for more traditional color wheels and curves. There are free tutorials for that as well if you eventually go that route.

After the above two freebees dive into Ripple Training either FCPX Core Training or just get the FCPX Essential which adds lots of additional specific function tutorials.
https://www.rippletraining.com/categories/final-cut-pro/

[Craig Seeman]

[Lance Bachelder] “But now we 6, 8 and 10 core i7’s which are much faster and cheaper than the Xeon’s of yesteryear.”

Unless Apple goes back to multiprocessor CPUs it may actually make sense to use the higher end i7’s in any new Mac Pros. This would also mean they can use Intel Quick Sync for encoding. This is why a recent Quad i7 iMac may encode faster than a Xeon Mac Pro. Even when they came out in late 2013 (early 2014 actually) people noted the i7 advantage when encoding.

Is there a reason for Apple to stick with Xeons?

[Craig Seeman]

Sorenson Squeeze Server possibly? Although I don’t have any personal experience with it.

I don’t doubt that one of the motives behind the push to Cloud encoding (including Telestream Cloud) is that you can leverage computer resources on the backend (cloud side) rather than potential local limitations.

[Craig Seeman]

Apple Compressor supports Clustering. Would there be a viable solution there?

[Craig Seeman]

Perhaps if you were to make a live screen recording it would make it a bit clearer than screenshots and text explanations.
Although it might seem obvious I think it would break any conceptual barriers. Maybe skip the tedious part of naming the favorites but have a bunch of them across a few clips and then do a search so it will be obvious you can find specific favorites.

[Craig Seeman]

There’s no emoji for video editor. There you go, proof they’re abandoning professionals 😉

[Craig Seeman]

Episode has some very deep controls such as, depending on the codec, control of GOP structure but most people don’t need that level of control. Episode’s strength is tweaking some problematic encodes but, these days, many of those problems are solved with simply throwing more bits (higher data rate) at it.