[Daniel Rutledge]

Of course there are things missing. There are things that need to be added. There are bugs and glitches. I have had to send crash reports to Apple in the past and I sent one today. I am sure that some attention is being paid to the desires of the professional community. But ultimately the pro community just asks for more of the same, but faster and higher quality. There are smart people who’s job it is to develop UIs, hardware, and methods of working with technology. Saying that these companies should just give us what we ask for is like saying filmmakers should just make movies that the mass audience asks for.

I also don’t think that Avid will be unveiling a new touch screen application next year. But I think it is even less likely that in ten or fifteen years, people will be sitting in front of computers that look like the one you’re staring at right now and pushing a mouse around. That is what FCP X is about and I may not know what those future interfaces will be like, but I am positive that they will be different. If you think about it, a mouse is not the most natural tool to work with. Neither is a Wacom tablet. There are other ways of doing things. I’m not saying that we’ll all be editing on iPads in 2013, I am simply saying that those devices and the way consumers interact with them is an indicator of a possible direction. And honestly, I have always felt that Avid is way too tied to working on the principle of the UI being a graphical representation of working with film. I understand how that became the original analogy that the interface represented, but I started out working with Data (that’s a lie, started on Tape to Tape but not for very long) and I prefer to have data represented in a way that takes advantage of the environments flexibility. I’m not bashing Avid. I think it is great in a lot of ways. I started in FCP learned Avid after, and consequently customized my FCP keyboard shortcuts to resemble Avid more. I actually think that it some ways FCP X has a lot in common with Avid.

I can’t believe that avid is going to make that much money off of their consumer product, regardless of how good it is. It just seems likely that the consumer software is like a farm team for the main applications. It seems like that is what happened with iMovie and FCP X. Everyone kept calling it iMovie Pro so I decided to open iMovie for the first time in ten years. I laughed because I couldn’t believe how familiar it looked. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I personally am happy to find an easier way to work. If they can use a consumer app to find ways to perform complicated functions in a way that even a regular consumer can’t screw up, I’m all for that. A lot of what apple has done in FCP X (and more in Motion) is take complicated tasks, add an auto feature, but then provide a next level where you go in and tweak keyframes and parameters just as accurately as ever.

I don’t think I was generalizing in my dismissal of “most” critics. There are genuine hurdles to overcome. Despite their secretive nature, Apple has actually made promises for once (which they have kept), and through their actions, they have laid out a pattern of what to expect in the future; frequent updates. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has abandoned the higher end broadcast market for the time being. I still hold that “most” critics are either cranks or curmudgeons. I have legitimate criticism and desires for X as do many others. I’m just dismissing people who had their feelings hurt by Apple and now are exercising this weird vendetta on FCP X forums. If people are switching to Avid then they should head over to the Avid forums. A couple of years ago I was talking to the Post Supervisor at HBO in NY and he was telling me that they were phasing out all their FCP work stations. Then, just after this release Bunim/Murray jumped ship. The market has increased in size, so different companies are pursuing different corners. A good friend of mine is switching to Premier. We used to work at a production company together and we were both total FCP nerds, but he has a real After Effect centric workflow now, so it makes sense for him.

“they will never replace a keyboard/mouse/wacom combination.”

That sounds a lot like they will never replace the Moviola. Seriously, forget the next ten years; assuming that we haven’t blown up the earth by then, what about 100 years. That’s all your imagination will allow? 100 years from now there will be some guy sitting in front of an LCD screen clicking a mouse and arguing on Creative Cow that there will be an eternity of mouse clicking awaiting editors add infinitum. That is a scene straight out of Foucault.

I decided to make up my own mind. I’m not a fan boy. I was ready to jump ship if things turned out as badly as the picture being painted early on. I have used the program. It worked perfectly for what I needed. That’s good enough for me. I still have FCP 7, Premiere, and Avid MC on my computer just incase a freelance job comes along that calls for one of them, but my personal choice in the future is FCP X.

[Daniel Rutledge]

@ Chris and Dave. Hello. I have actually been stalking these forums for a while now, but I never had anything to add because I hadn’t actually taken the risk of using this with clients. Now that I have one foot in, I will contribute my two cents.

Most of the criticisms I see of FCP X on these forums seems to be based on half truths and entirely false rumors. Most of the rest seem to come from people who think that things will never change. They are the brothers of the people who said that digital cameras would never be as good as film, that NLEs were okay for TV work, but not features, that sound was just a fad. And all those opinions I just listed were all supported by legitimate concerns at the time they were made. The point is, that nobody is doing R & D work on those old systems, and I suspect that neither are Adobe and Digidesign. Some jokers on a forum may not have the foresight to realize that the technology that they have grown comfortable with is changing doesnt mean that the designers of Premier and Avid werent staring at the new FCP X with a sense of admiration. I’d be willing to bet that they could see its value. Just because we’ve all been trapped in the unchanging box of our NLEs for the last 15 years, it doesn’t mean that the much larger foundation beneath us hasn’t been evolving into a completely unrecognizable new thing. As I look down at the smartphone into which I am typing this post, I am reminded that I don’t need to use my imagination to envision what the future holds. Something that struck me as funny was that Avid released their iPad app at about the same time as the last major FCP X upgrade. Maybe the timing was a coincidence, but the meaning was clear. Just as the FCP X UI is designed for a touch interface, so will be all future NLEs. Avid didn’t sink money into developing that up just so they could compete with iMovie on iMovie’s home field (or vimeo’s free app). It’s a preview, a warning to the Avid faithful, and an attempt to cash in early on the research that has been going into Avid X or whatever they are going to call it. Maybe they’ll implement more slowly or differently than apple did, but the outcome will be the same.

My stops coming up, so that’s my opinion anyway.

[Daniel Rutledge]

I’ll go along with “I don’t understand” but for different reasons. The way that I see it is that if you can publish all the parameters of various effects and behaviors, or add them to rigs, and these can all be controlled in Fcp X, then I don’t understand why the two programs aren’t completely integrated. In the months leading up to the release of Fcp x I had guessed that they would do what they did; strip elements of the suite and add them directly to the Fcp UI. But I assumed that Motion would be at the top of the list. It had failed as a competitor to After Effects, but as FCP user I used it a lot just for convenience. I figured that they would capitalize on that convenience. I guess I was expecting something like Smoke. I still don’t know why the Motion UI can’t open in FCP. Motion projects could be sort of like compound clips or Multicam clips. When you open a Multicam clip in the Angle Editor, it’s like being back in a track based environment. It would be great to do the same with motion. I still hope this is where things are headed down the road.

[Daniel Rutledge]

My two cents is that in FCP 7 I have personally done side by side tests to see the difference in color correcting h.264 vs ProRes 422(HQ) and the results were absolutely better with ProRes. This was not a minor difference that was possibly subjective in nature. I shot well lit footage with a 7D using the Cinestyle picture style. The test I was conducting was really to see the results of color correcting cinestyle. I was in such a hurry to get started that I didn’t log and transfer to Prores like I normally do. I just dragged the native file directly into final cut. As I performed my corrections, I couldn’t believe the level of banding it introduced. Also, I could see large picture blocks getting outrageously different values as I increased contrast. Then it hit me; I needed to transcode my source footage. I then performed my grade, and it produced the most beautiful footage I had ever seen come out of a DSLR. I copied my grade to the identical native clip and it produced the same blockiness and banding.

Its not a matter of making the footage better. When you transcode, I think it does smooth some of the sub pixel problems visible in h.264 (but I’d be willing to admit I may be wrong about that). What ProRes provides is a platform that has the color space to allow grading. Is it as accurat or flexible as if you shot in a raw codec or even a native codec that uses intra frame compression? No. Does it improve effects and color correction? Absolutely yes.

Haha… I just came to this thread because I’m switching over my company’s edit suite to FCP X and I wanted find out if I needed to create optimized media to get the same results in CC. I basically want to know if I will get the same result if I work natively, apply my grade, and then it gets rendered as prores as I would if I transcoded at the beginning. We work with huge amounts of media and background rendering will create more data than I would like to deal with. I’m hoping to end up creating net less data by working natively. Anyone?