[Sebastian Alvarez]

For all the things I like about FCPX, one thing that drives me nuts is the poor support for formats that are not Quicktime based. You can throw almost anything at Premiere, and that has been the case for many years. FCPX is very picky. I have these five year old files that were 1080i 29.97 fps in MPEG2 with ac3 audio, with .mpg extension. The import window will not let you import something as simple as that. The mpg files are grayed out, you can’t even select them. Dragging and dropping onto the browser window doesn’t work. Obviously I threw the same files into Premiere, After Effects (Mac & PC), Edius and Vegas, all of which took them without a problem and scroll through them happily.

It also doesn’t take .ts (transport stream) files, which all the other NLEs do without a hitch. And while it takes m2ts files, you almost hear it complaining about, like “Why are you throwing this at me? I want Quicktime, man!”, and of course it’s a day at the beach judging by the amount of time the beach ball is spinning, which depending on the length or amount of the footage, it can be between one and several minutes. When it finally imports, working with m2ts video in FCPX is far from easy, the beach ball shows up very often. Obviously I threw the same file into Premiere and I was editing fast as I could be with no problems.

What makes this irritating is that it leaves place to crooked companies to post these “blogs” and do a very good SEO so that when you Google something like “How to load mpg files in FCPX”, you will get all these fake blogs near the top of the results which show you how to convert an mpeg file to Prores using their software. Try it yourself, and you’ll see, EasyFab, Brorsoft, and many more, all pretending to be some helpful guy writing a tutorial when it’s the companies trying to cash on people gullible enough to buy that software when you can find many free ways to re-wrap a video to a format that FCPX will take. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have a beef with these companies if they would just straight up advertise their software, everybody has a right to make money even if there’s another software that does the same thing for free, what I can’t stand is the dishonesty of trying to pass themselves as colleagues helping colleagues that irritates me.

Rant aside, Apple has to start catching up on format support. Gone are the days of transcoding to an I frame only codec to be able to edit, today’s computers, Macs or PCs, are fast enough to ingest most of the footage as it comes out of the camera and start editing, even on codecs with lots of B frames, and they have been for years (unless we’re talking about those uncompressed 4k formats used in Hollywood movies, of which I have no experience with, but I’m sure they are probably much more demanding). Interestingly enough, FCPX can’t import something as simple as MPEG2/ac3 with mpg extension, but it handles my UHD GoPro footage just fine, in its original mp4 60 Mbps as it comes out of the camera, without using GoPro Studio to transcode to Cineform. So why can’t it take much simpler wrappers like mpg, m2ts, which require far less CPU cycles to decode?

[Sebastian Alvarez]

[Sebastian Alvarez] “Apple dug themselves their own grave with these new MacPros.”

I’ll pull back a little from “dug their own grave,” but when we talk about various debates, I don’t think we give this one nearly enough wait.

Well, yes, maybe the term “dug their own grave” is a little exaggerate, but they certainly alienated a lot of companies that needed a tower format with a lot of expandability and compatibility with some of their existing equipment. For example, for a small company that I worked for, which had about ten users each with their own MacPro tower, each with a $1,000 Fibre Channel card, to go to the new MacPros where they can’t use those PCIe FC cards and have to spend tens of thousands not only on the new machines but also on the accessories needed to connect their fiber optic network to the new Macs (and just by doing a fast Google search I can tell an FC to Thunderbolt adapter is almost as expensive as the old card), I know they won’t do it. They were very happy with dual Xeon CPU Mac towers that they were getting on eBay for $2,000 each. And I’m guessing most companies, unless they have a non-stopping flow of cash and the will to spend it, are on the same boat.

[Sebastian Alvarez]

I see that this is still a heated topic. And I’m glad I started using it now rather than since the beginning. Despite my wishes, I don’t see it making great strides in the broadcasting world, even though it has some features that would make it a great addition. The TV station I work at they have plans to switch to Premiere next year, and I was asking one of the engineers that is there to show us how to use a new system if he thought there was any chance we might use MacPros with FCPX, and he didn’t think it was very likely. He also told me that most of the stations he went to were PC based.

Besides FCPX’s poor beginnings (for what you guys tell me and what I remember reading over the years), Apple dug themselves their own grave with these new MacPros. There’s no doubt that they are state of the art machines, beautiful design and powerful, but when you force the pro user to use USB and Thunderbolt for absolutely everything, and can’t choose an Nvidia card over an AMD if they want to, a lot of people are going to be on their way to Windows based solutions, no matter how much more advanced OS X is. You can expect to have to deal with USB and Thunderbolt when you have a MacBook Pro, but when you have a workstation, you want the ability to connect PCIe cards and change the graphics card if you want to.

If they would have come up with a MacPro design similar to the new one but maybe a little larger with space for PCIe cards and being able to switch graphics cards, I’m sure they would have sold a lot more of those. After spending $3,000 for the base model or $4,000 for the six core (most likely way more than that when you customize it) I’m guessing most people or companies don’t want to spend thousands more in Thunderbolt peripherals and accessories. Unfortunately, when designing the MacPro, Apple wanted something that would be too revolutionary and with amazing looks, but they forgot about pro functionality.

But hey, I’m happy to spend all the money I have if my eyes don’t have to see that eyesore Windows 10 GUI (or 8.1, or 7), plus the great design of OS X on functionality.