[Mark Morache]

Hmmmm…

Do I feel like I have a lack of control with Final Cut Pro X? Not a lot. There are many clunky things that I need to do now to make my edits happen, but I expect these are things that will go away as new versions come out.

I have 7 and X on my computer, and I keep coming back to X.

Art: Having FCPX on your resume is not getting you into any post house, network TV, or feature film set anytime soon.

I don’t believe this. What will get you a job is a great reel. If a post house sees a well edited reel from an applicant their first question may be “what did you edit this on” and when they say FCPX, I think the answer will be “You did THIS on THAT? You’re a better editor than I thought.” It’s not about the interface, it’s about the talent in orchestrating pictures, sound and emotion in a real time experience. If you can do that in iMovie, who really cares.

And if your only experience has been on FCX, then you’ve only been editing since June 23, 2011. That more than anything will keep you from getting hired.

Apple has a history of making the interaction between the user and the instrument a magically intuitive one. Remember the first time you picked up an iPod? That’s what FCX feels like for me. I can very easily sort and label and find things. I can edit nearly as fast as I think, and that’s a wonderful thing.

For me, that’s why I keep going back to it, even when the little details to finish the edits are taking me longer. Even though there are bugs in it. Even though it crashes more frequently than FCP7.

I trust they will keep working on it.

Yes, I have difficulty trusting Apple. They can fix that any time they want to, by simply communicating with us openly about where they are going. Are they silent because they are hiding the truth from us or because it’s just their way of doing things and they aren’t about to change that now. I don’t know, but I’m going to stay on the ride, because I’m excited about the future.

I hope they can change the universe with their $299 application, by giving me an awesome application that lets me have my creative way with my project, with as much finishing and polish as I care to put into it.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

It’s curious that it’s working in Avid, but not FCX.

I used to have problems with a particualar sony deck, and the answer was to NOT daisy chain the camera and the external drive, but purchase a second firewire card for the mac so the deck would be on its own bus. This may not be your issue.

You can also import footage using quicktime 7. Select “New Movie Recording” and in the preferences under “recording” select the hdv as your video source, and select “device native” for the quality. I’d say if you can import the footage in Avid and quicktime but not FCX, it might just be an issue with X.

I’ve never used imovie, but I believe that should also be able to ingest camera footage.

Good luck.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

I ditto Tom. Don’t break apart your tracks.

In addition to turning audio channels on and off in the audio inspector, once you’ve placed a clip in the timeline, you can “open in timeline” and see your 4 audio channels of the clip. Then you can manipulate the channels separately. You can enable or disable audio channels with the V key, which is exactly like turning channels on and off in the inspector.

While looking at a clip in “timeline” mode, you can also apply different audio levels to each channel, or even create keyframes for each audio channel to “ride” the audio levels.

The controls are all there, just a different way to do things. And not always easier.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

ahhh, the convergence of many things that I love…

Ben Folds, Pomplamoose, Nick Hornby, and editing.

Coulda done this on FCPX? I think so.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

I just tried this, and it works great….

Open up your timeline index. It will list every clip you have in your timeline.

Click the first clip in the index, hit shift-f, and that clip will be range-selected in the event browser. Now hit the delete key to “reject” it.

Repeat this and you’ll have the entire timeline done pretty quick: select, shift-f, delete, select, shift-f, delete.

Now the trick is to keep everything updated as you go. If you remove a clip from your timeline, you will need to manually “unreject” it to add it back to your unused list.

ANOTHER TRICK: If you don’t want to use the “rejected” option, because you use that as part of another workflow for yourself, you can create a keyword “used”, then assign it to one of the keyboard shortcuts (control-1 for example). Now go through the shift-f procedure as above, except instead of hitting delete, hit control-1 to assign that range the keyword “used”

Now you can create a smart collection with the option of Keyword, “does not contain”, and “Used”, and you will have a bin with everything except the used portions.

You can further modify the smart collection to only show you certain kinds of clips. You can select the smart collection bin and press cmd-d to duplicate the smart collection and create as many specially modified “unused” bins as you need.

All of this will be unneccesary with the addition of the “show unused” option which will no doubt be included in a future version.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

Marsha… that tape should work just fine for you, but you need a deck or camera that can record in minidv. It’s basically the same ones and zeros that are coming through the firewire, it’s just the deck.

Like Greg said, if the deck is set to record dvcam, you’ll only get 40 minutes.

What are you recording on?

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

The shift-f brings up the clip, with the in/out range selected in the event browser.

I’ve found that I can easily run through my timeline, hit shift-f then hit the delete key to “reject” the range. Now it’s a simple matter of hitting ctl-h to hide the rejected clips.

You might be using the clip rejection another way, but I like this. The ability to leave not just the unused clips in my event browser, but the unused portions of the clips is fairly astounding.

Of course, how freaking easy would it be for Apple to let me just select “hide used” in the drop down menu?

Hopefully that will come early 2012, along with our multicam and the external monitor.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

Mark… I’m with Steve. Why limit yourself to the quick edits?

Now I’m generally editing 4-6 minute tv stories, with up to 2 hours of raw tape, but I’d be anxious to try X for longer, more ambitious projects.

I was recently given a hard drive with 16 hours of P2 footage. I used FCP7 to create timecode files for the producer, but I took all of the footage and created my FCX event, keywording and identifying like crazy, and it’s brilliant. It is so easy to find specific clips, and I’m loving the filmstrip viewing more and more.

I’m still afraid of something becoming corrupted or going offline, and I’m creating frequent backups so I don’t lose all of my editing.

There are a buttload of improvements they need to make, and I’m still dealing with it’s buggy issues, but overall, I’m enjoying using it for everything, and when people watch me edit with it, their it’s so much fun to watch their eyes get big!

I’d love to change over our entire shop to X, and enjoy the ride as they add back much of what has been lost with the switch away from FCP7.

I’m gunshy about Apple however. Their unwillingness to “come clean” with their intentions keeps me very leary of their plans for the future. I believe they intended this to be a pro app, but they clearly let things get out of hand.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

It doesn’t exist yet. I export a QuickTime movie from X and drop it onto a timeline in FCP7 to put video out to tape.

It’s an extra step, but next year they promised output to a broadcast monitor which should also let us output to tape.

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com

[Mark Morache]

So in fairly simple terms, what does this mean?

And is there ever any hope to see GPU acceleration in my MBP with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M?

———
FCX. She tempts me, abuses me, beats me up, makes me feel worthless, then in the end she comes around, helps me get my work done, gives me hope and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Mark Morache
Avid/Xpri/FCP7/FCX
Evening Magazine,Seattle, WA
https://fcpx.wordpress.com