[Jeremy Whaley]

Uh yea… crap is the word. After struggling through getting a video done yesterday and last night, I finally got everything working the way I want. We’re not talking hard stuff here. 3 clips, a couple cross fades. NOT HARD. I went to bounce the video down and encoded it at 264. For some reason, it keeps panning my audio about 70% to the left. But only when I do the bounce/export. In FCPX it plays fine. I’ve tried it three times and finally gave up. There’s just not a single export option I can find that would cause this change. I’m telling you, Apple F’d this one up in a major way.

I can not for the life of me figure out how real people are saying nice things about. I think they are paid plants from Apple. Most of the nice reviews I’ve seen come from educators and people who have a lot to lose if they say anything negative. Too bad Apple can’t see it.

Here’s a solution – just offer FCP Studio 3 again and sell them side by side. Buy yourselves another year for continued development to prove X is a bigger disaster than Windows ME, and then you can invest another 2 years in fixing FCP studio. I think I’m going to go back to Final Cut Express. I had better success there then I am having with FCPX.

I will say, the one thing I do like about it. The background rendering is very nice, and it bounces down the files relatively quickly. I was able to bounce our 2 hour class in about an hour, so about 2x faster than real time. That part I like.

[Jeremy Whaley]

[Jeremy Whaley] “The truth about FCPx, as I see it, is probably that this is a great software that will help a lot of wanna be video producers have a lot of fun doing videos and take their videos to the next level. Eventually it may even be an amazing pro application. BUT IT’S NOT FINAL CUT! Where Apple went wrong here, and why the outrage is so intense, is they promised “an amazing new Final Cut Pro”. And like some many have said, what they delivered is the end of their actual FCP application that could do something powerful, and replaced it with imovie deluxe. ”

They did not. They replaced it with an application that is, in broad strokes, a very worthy successor to FCP 7… but that is, in its first iteration, missing a handful of features film/broadcast folks need. Some of those folks, as a consequence of those missing features, some superficial similarities with the iMovie interface, and a whole lot of preexisting paranoia, have completely freaked out.

What people need to understand is that developers have different priorities at different stages in an app’s lifecycle. Apple’s priority with the initial release of FCP X was to get a solid foundation in place, and deliver a feature set sufficient to make the app useful to the median FCP user (who is not a film/broadcast editor). They have done this. This required a huge amount of work: creating a new media framework and rendering engine, working through all the details of the new metadata-based footage organization system and connection-oritend timeline, etc.

Now they can turn their attention to adding features for the film/broadcast market (what everyone keeps calling the “pro” market, though it’s only a small fraction of the people who get paid to edit video). And the FAQ, while light on details, indicates that they’re doing precisely this.

YES – Maybe you are correct that they have a new foundation, but my point is it’s a NEW SOFTWARE. Change the name, continue support for FCP7 and Apple would have been seen as a genius. Instead they’re trying to stop a social media outcry!