[Mark Dobson]

Hi Michael,

just watched your Tomato piece – great programme, well balanced, informative.

The fact you cut it in X is of interest within the context of this forum but it is the skill and judgement of an editor that creates a good piece.

And I’m sure that anyone watched that film will have learned a lot in a short space of time and possibly had their opinions challenged.

[Mark Dobson]

I’ve been using FCPX since June 22nd last year and the difference between the first version and 10.0.4 is profound.

Crashes are now rare occurrences, now maybe that’s also due to me learning what causes crashes, but on the whole it’s much more stable and responsive.

I both shoot and edit the films my company makes, working with a producer / journalist, and for me FCPX and Motion do everything I need. the only part of Final Cut Studio I still use is DVD Studio Pro, and that is very infrequent because as Apple have correctly predicted nearly all end delivery is now file based.

https://vimeo.com/alembic

The first 3 items on my vimeo link were produced in FCPX and one thing I am particularly impressed with is the ability to create fairly complex composite graphic sequences with comparative ease. I also find the color correction very easy to use although I’m still missing the ability to re white balance an image as we could do in FCP7 and if I’m honest would prefer color wheels. However plenty of 3rd party plugins have color wheels.

We recently completed 16 short films for a conference within a 2 month period and I had every confidence in FCPX and really think it helped us complete the work before the deadline.

I’m really looking forward to the next update as I believe that there will be substantial improvements on the audio side.

[Mark Dobson]

A very simple work around to this feature omission is to place a copy of the shot you want to refer to above the shot you are correcting and use the crop tool to partition the frame.

You can then see half of each frame. Sure it’s not ideal but it temporarily gets around the problem.

Another method is, with show detailed trimming information turned on in the preferences window, temporarily park the clip you want to compare to next to the clip you are correcting and click on the end of the clip as if you were going to carry out a trimming operation, you will then see both clips displayed in 2 monitors above the timeline.

Again not ideal but . . . .

[Mark Dobson]

[Andreas Kiel] “Transporting the event gives either the metadata of user 1 or user 2. There is no control like “create metadata”, “add metadata”, “replace metadata”, “replace or add metadata” etc.
So it is always a one way transport – never work on the same event on two locations.”

Sure you are right there Andreas.

However it is possible it is possible for 2 people to work on the same files in different locations( one set duplicated), and then subsequently to merge their events together.

Well thats the way we are working.

Relink event files which was introduced 10.0.4 is a great asset. Sure it was there in FCP7 and now we have got it in FCPX.

[Mark Dobson]

We are constantly working collaboratively on shared material.

Our work involves a lot of interview material which needs analysing, with each section selected as a favourite and renamed ( that doesn’t change the core file metadata )

After returning from filming all the files are placed on a nominated external drive. Files containing interview material are copied onto a mac pro laptop which also has FCPX installed. Events for the interviews are created. Once all the analysis and selection is completed we drag the event from the event folder onto a usb stick and place in the event folder on the core drive and use ‘relink event files’ to complete the process.

As long as you don’t duplicate event names this method works well.

[Mark Dobson]

Hi James,

That’s a really informative article. I loved the picture of your home work set-up with the very neat set of post-it notes on the wall.

I’m a big fan of the DSLR News Shooter site and attended a training session with Dan Chung in London a few years back. For me FCPX is great for short form films and like you I really appreciate the new approach to working with file based work flows.

The fact that despite a difficult start you continued and persevered with FCPX is probably an experience that many editors had.

Thanks.

[Mark Dobson]

[Greg Andonian] “Then I found a flaw in the new approach. I wondered what would happen if two favorite segments overlapped. Would they both still be accessible? How would X handle this? So I set a new in point in the middle of one of them, and a new out point a bit beyond the end of it.

When I hit F, the new favorite merged with the one it was overlapping, and they became one single favorite. I was really disappointed by this. What if you DID want to have two overlapping sections of a clip saved as individual favorites for some reason? or you wanted to save two versions of the same section of footage, but have one be longer than the other? “

Hi Greg,

It is possible to duplicate the clip in the event folder and apply 2 totally different sets of Favourites to the ‘same’ clip. Or to duplicate it twice etc etc.

This enables you to overlap your selections or favourites.

As I do not use FCPX to import files, but reference media on my drives, this workaround does not result in data being replicated.

I hope you are able to spend more time with FCPX, it took me a long time to reorient myself from FCP7, but I’m now really enjoying the time I spend editing with this program.

[Mark Dobson]

[Bill Davis] “I think they released a killer ‘personal editing tool” based around wildly new thinking that took most of us half a year or more of constant use to really begin to come to grips with – and are now growing it very rapidly into an amazing modern content creation app that can handle most tasks tossed at it right now by people outside of “large facility” workflows.”

I’m with you on this Bill.

Despite some really irksome missing functions like not being able to selectively copy attributes, or do a one click audio dissolve etc etc FCPX has become the replacement editing solution from FCP7 for me.

A big point you make in the quote above is the fact that it does take a long period to reorient oneself to working with FCPX. It is not the same as other non-linear edit packages and I think a lot of people will have immediately run into problems by trying to edit in the same manner as they had in FCP7, and failing or getting into a muddle immediately.

I adopted FCPX from the start ( very nearly 12months ago! ) and apart from DVD Studio Pro haven’t used
Final Cut Studio at all in the last year.

I went through a disorienting 3 month period where either through the buggy early versions of the software or my own ineptitude I ran into huge difficulties with content crashes and force quits – it felt like the central kernel at the heart of the software just couldn’t cope with more than one thing at a time.

But nowadays crashes are a rare occurrence and since version 10.0.4 every thing that should happen, does happen.

I actually think that FCPX offers a really flexible approach to editing. And I have every confidence that the next update will address even more of the ‘missing features’ that people gripe about.

But in terms of addressing the topic of this thread ‘After a year has perception of FCPX changed?’ I would say yes and no.

I think a lot of people made up their minds almost immediately that FCPX use didn’t look right for them and some of those will have tried it again following the updates and introduction of Broadcast Monitoring and the ability to export XML, to communicate with other systems.

I don’t know whether we will ever discover the real reason why Apple chose to EOL Final Cut Studio, licensing issues? A clean slate?, but the fact that it was knocked on the head had a huge impact on the perceptions towards FCPX at its launch.

I think there was a real disappointment that such a robust system had been discarded in favour for a, on initial investigation, substantially cut-back version.

And Apple must have been profoundly shocked by the initial, very fierce, negative response to the launch and they now seem to be a lot more open about future developments for this software to the extent of publishing a roadmap, a hint that there will be a return to having a dedicated source monitor and enhanced audio capability.

So I think that FCPX will slowly regain any ground it has lost as a result of the miss handled launch.

But choice of NLE seems to similar to choice of religion and we know firmly entrenched peoples views are towards that, nothing will change those types of perceptions.

[Mark Dobson]

I’ve been using FCPX for 11 months now and not lost one project or had any corruption issues.

I’ve had other problems which through perseverance and the wisdom of the Creative Cow community have
largely been resolved.

I’ve learnt over the years that it makes good sense to keep up with the Apple operating systems, maybe with a bit of a lag to let 3rd party suppliers catch up.

I’ve lost a bit of hair though.

[Mark Dobson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “The trial version of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and later includes all sequence presets, editing modes, and encoders and decoders (codecs) included in the full, activated version of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and later.”

Thank’s for translating that Jeremy. It was the list below that threw me off the scent.