[Gary Huff]

[Andrew Kimery] “Why do you think FCPX will be different?”

Because Bill is of the “join or die” level of fanboyism.

[Gary Huff]

[Kent Beeson] “again, touch screen, in conjunction with voice command if/as you want it is what would be more natural, faster, better”

If you’d actually think about this in a realistic sense, I think you’d realize how terrible this would be in practice.

[Gary Huff]

[Greg Jones] “That being said, if I had a client who was adamant about a project needing to be done in X, I would not hesitate to do it.”

I completely agree with this sentiment.

[Gary Huff]

[Paul Jay] “How long will this debate go on?”

I’m sorry if someone is forcing you to visit this forum. Perhaps you’d be better off just ignoring this one and spending all your time in FCPX Techniques instead?

[Gary Huff]

[Rob McGreevy] “Subject says it all… many old favorites are back like copy/paste attributes, freeze frame and get this a drop shadow! :-)”

Kudos to Apple…this is a very nice update.

[Gary Huff]

[Bret Williams] “Premiere may quit support Apple again tomorrow, and Avid might be out of business. Who knows”

I think a far more likely scenario is that, if anything, Apple drops OSX and moves over solely to iOS.

[Gary Huff]

[John Davidson] “On a positive note, we have production premium on one machine and two machines with the Creative Cloud set up. I was worried that by using my adobe ID on the production premium machine that it would get confused and think we had crossed the 3 machine limit, but CC seems to understand that we own one outright and are cloud renting the other two.”

I have Creative Cloud on my Windows 7 desktop and MacBook Pro laptop. No issues installing or setting up, though I was, at one point, constantly being bugged to fill out my profile when it was already filled out.

[Gary Huff]

[Jeremy Garchow] “What I find funny is that we have a story of FCPX being used in broadcast for a program airing on the BBC, yet Craig is being told how it won’t work for him because of what you read about how FCPX works, Gary.”

I never said it wouldn’t work for him (I actually never said anything about his post, I simply responded to Robin’s comments about: ‘its faster, more fun and just feels better than all the other NLE.’). Anyone who wants to make it work for them can do so. No skin off my back. My point was that for me personally, it seems like people who are enjoying using it, and posting their workflow methods, are going to great lengths to trick the program or make it conform to what they need, and, frankly, I’d rather wrangle with the content and the edit itself than fight the NLE to make it do what I want.

I don’t have anything against FCPX, on the contrary, I recommended it as a solution just a few months ago. But the fact remains that I find its touted “advantages” as dubious in nature, mixed in every now and then with something that comes across as a determined attitude to make it work in order to seemingly “vindicate” Apple in this new version.

Nor will I argue that Premiere is perfect, because no NLE is (just like there’s no one camera that can do it all). But that it works cross-platform is a big plus, that it works with Dynamic Linkage to AE is a big plus (and, frankly, if FCPX/Motion worked in similar fashion, that would be worth a more detailed look), and I love the fact that it works with native media (which FCPX does too, but I’m not sure if it has the same support for everything that Premiere does). I don’t have a massive RAID for all my projects, so I prefer the Premiere method of having self-contained projects that I can work with, instead of the database system that I have to use a 3rd party app to turn projects off and on in the list (thus making FCPX’s keyword organization system of no value). I think most of those who are blown away by FCPX are going from FCP7 to FCPX, not from Media Composer 6 or Premiere CS5 and up over to FCPX, though if someone is, I’d be interested in hearing their reasoning.

Finally, I don’t want Apple to muck it up with FCPX. I want them to make it useful, and as much of a viable alternative as the other NLEs. Competition is good, and I’ve always said that.

[Gary Huff]

[Bill Davis] “If, on the other hand, people increasingly come to understand that we’re rapidly moving toward a world where content is increasingly ephemeral and demand for it is increasingly short lived – and therefore the ability to create, keyword for search, deploy and revise dynamically – becomes a superior strategy to the “plop out and cut off a master and move on” process of the past forty years – then X will likely continue to evolve and succeed.”

A lot of my projects, in this new world you keep speaking of (which I am right in the middle of) are self contained. For your point to make sense to me, I would have to keep every project ever listed in FCPX and on a permanently attached, massive storage RAID system. Not only is this expensive, but having all my projects forever contained in the single interface of FCPX will undoubtedly slow it wayyyyyyyy down to the point where it’s unusable.

[Gary Huff]

[Bill Davis] “If all you’ve done is “played with it” then sorry, but I believe you simply don’t understand it well enough to make an informed decision.”

I’m sorry, how long is required for me to work on it to make an informed decision? I don’t feel like spending time wrangling with it to make an edit, only to decide I need to do it in some other NLE and have to recreate the project from scratch (I don’t feel like spending extra money just to get it to export properly where I can open it back up in a new NLE).

It’s a combination of playing with it and reading people tout what it does for them here. None of it is impressive to me.

I did this project (possibly NSFW depending on how uptight your place of employment is) all in Premiere CS6 with color correction, including masks and secondaries, with Colorista II. For the infinite white I had to mask out the sides and color correct the background, then did an overall pass in AE. I was able to import the comps and then setup a nest sequence so I could turn the AE import on and off with the original footage (two camera angles, all synced up via PluralEyes) so I could render out non-correct versions for edit approval without having to spend render time when it wasn’t needed.

I originally started this project in FCP7, but ported it back over to Premiere CS6 so I could save space on using the original camera files (no ProRes encodes). I’m sure FCPX could have edited this, but I don’t believe I could have fixed the infinite white shots in FCPX (plus there were some tracking mask shots as well), but I could be wrong. Have no idea how easy it would have been to toggle between the two camera angles, both corrected and original footage.

But Premiere worked just fine for me, and the integration with AE is hard to ignore.