[Mark Dobson]

A good question. Why bother with PP CS6 or wait for CS7?

I think that Adobes Creative Cloud business model is preposterous. Do you really want to continue giving a company, however great, a monthly sum for the rest of your working life?

And if you stop paying have absolutely nothing to show for it, no means of reviewing, ammending or updating your work?

( a bit like trying to leave your iTunes library to your kids when you die! )

From all accounts the software is great but the business model for the consumer is not, it’s all slated in favour of the producer/ manufacturer.

With Final Cut Studio you paid a decent professional fee for the suite of software, received maintenance updates, and then if you chose paid for the next significant upgrade. With FCPX, I bought it 2 years ago for £200 and have received 8 upgrades since then. This seems like a great deal, OK so using the software ties me into using Apple computers, but I’d choose to use them anyway.

[Mark Dobson]

[Oliver Peters] “his argument has at least been a problem for the plug-in developers of FCP X. Lots of folks buying $10-$50 plug-ins for X. Not that many buying full versions of FxF Pro, BCC or Sapphire for X. Filmlight specifically told me X users have baulked at paying $1K when the host was only $300.”

The thing is – it all builds up, all these small bespoke plugins to do specific little jobs and I think that without buying any huge packages that I probably spent between $2K to $2.5K on plugins for FCPX.

One of the more expensive is Magic Bullet Looks which I used to use painfully in FCP7 because of its secondary correction capability but I’ve hardly used it at all since purchasing for FCPX, firstly because initially it was really buggy and secondly because it only deal with a setting for one frame for each clip, no key frames which is pretty limiting.

A lot of these also have versions for Premiere, but these NLEs are pretty self contained nowadays enabling basic FX to be done in App.

The time to have got Premiere was when FCPX came out – they were offering some excellent transition deals from FCP7. I’m not about to sign up for the cloud. I just researched getting the new photoshop and whilst initially attractive to pay $20 a month ( roughly ) at the end of 3 years I could lease purchased the product but am still committed to paying Ad infinitum, which is nice business model for adobe and not so great for it’s customers however they spin it.

I suppose, probably naively, anyone who bought plugins for Premiere would be able to transfer the licence over to FCPX should they want to jump ship.

[Mark Dobson]

It’s a bit like a game of ping-pong here sometimes.

Surely the reality is that different NLEs are more suitable for certain jobs than others. Having seen screen grabs of Walter Murch’s film editing work with FCP7 there is no easy way he could replicate that in FCPX whereas you could see him working with PP.

It’s still early days for FCPX and its far more suitable for Camera/Editors and small production houses than larger projects.

[Mark Dobson]

woof woof

[Mark Dobson]

Hi Julian,

I’ve been through the situation you describe so well, except my Mac Pro was a 2008 model but with a new 5770 graphics card and 22GBs Ram, and I’ve been waiting for the Mac-Pro upgrade since forever.

I almost lost clients because of the appalling performance of FCPX initially, but I’d committed myself to the change and wasn’t about to switch over to PP or any system. After an initial FTF period I really saw the potential of FCPX and that’s why I’ve stuck with it despite it’s flaws. Through this forum I’ve been able to share other editors experiences with both hardware and software issues and it’s because of the really positive feedback that I went against my instincts and invested in the new beefed up 27″ iMac.

I think it was a good decision, I’m still encountering a lot of issues but the lagging behaviour has disappeared. I use Preference Manager frequently, I repair disk permissions frequently and see both of these activities as part of the day job.

I do all my colour correction using FCPX but do use external plugins ( Sorry John but they are really useful ). The main external plugins I use are CoreMelt, Slice X and Lock and Load. I also use Several FxFactory based plugins and find mFlare really useful.

But as you pointed out in an earlier post it was quite an investment – with all the Thunderbolt connectors etc etc – and a new 8GB Gtech TB drive its added up to about £3.5K – But its a set up that I feel really confident with and one that I could easily swap out should a new MacPro actually be released this year.

You mention trying to find a tech to help sort your system out, and I’m sure there will be one in the Herfordshire area, we use a company called Purple Mac down here in Sussex and they’ve been really helpful but not at the detailed level of system optimisation for FCPX.

Might I suggest that you create a separate system drive to run FCPX from, the drive is not that expensive and you can just do a clean install of the bare essentials that you need. That will give you an accurate picture of how well you system is really doing. I did all these types of things and never found my performance improved dramatically but you have a much newer MacPro.

But whatever you do you will not get the benefit of the extremely high speed Thunderbolt connections and new processors that the iMac offers.

[Mark Dobson]

[Ned Miller] “I bought the new 27″ iMac and took the advice I received from helpful posters on this forum and bought the least amount of memory from Apple and got the 32GB set from Crucial. Now it’s time to put it in and I am very scared I will screw it up”

Well I managed it without a problem and I’m not that technically adept. It’s a very straightforward little job.

The OWC video that Craig Alan provided a link to is excellent.

With Thunderbolt you’ve just got to bite the bullet and invest in a few, not that expensive external devices. For me that was a Lacie TB Esata Hub, a Matrox Thundebolt adapter and a Gtech Thunderbolt external drive. Apart from the Matrox adapter both the other devices have two thunderbolt ports.

So my set up is that one of the iMac Thunderbolt ports drives an additional 27″ Samsung monitor and the other connects to the Lacie Esata Hub. From that I daisy chain onto the GTech Drive and from that I daisy chain onto the Matrox adapter for MX02 mini that drives a HDMI monitor.

[Jari Innanen] “And to put all that Ram to good use you really should get FCP X, since FCP7 can just use a small portion of it.”

That’s good advice.

[Mark Dobson]

Great edit Craig,

I’d forgotten how many great films Danny Boyle has made. And thanks for uploading the screenshot of the timeline, makes it all look quite easy!

What I like about the programme is that it allows a lot of space to take a look at the topic, quite unusual these days. With Newsnight Review being shoved over to BBC4 and just once a month I think that the the Culture Show will gain a larger audience.

[Mark Dobson]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “also it is not the programme or the BBC adopting FCPX – it is craig, he is a freelancer employed by the BBC for that show. “

Great show, great editing, a good pace with enough time to dig in to the subject matter and sure it could have been cut on Avid or Premier but the point is that it was cut beautifully on FCPX which many people still deride as an amateur app.

[Mark Dobson]

Downloading at the moment -even if it just fixes coremelt flashes and crashes it will be useful.

[Michael Sanders] “0.8 is the last version before 1.1 which will be previewed at NAB but will be a paid for upgrade.”

Well if it were a substantial update I’d be happy to pay. Probably better value than some of the plugins I’ve rashly bought over the last 2 years.

[Mark Dobson]

[Herb Sevush] “I’m sure the Vegas and Edius editors would make the same claim with “slowly” and “more” being both ambiguous and irrelevant.”

Yeah, you are right, ‘slowly’ and ‘more’ are not most precise word to use.

However, I think that recent news from Craig Slattery that the BBCs flagship arts programme ‘The Culture Show’ is edited with FCPX is a sign that the software is making inroads into a marketplace that would have been hard to imagine 2 years ago.