[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Nate Weaver] “Surprisingly, this seems to be the most legit source of info so far, and what they say is encouraging.”

Why Apple can’t just come out and say these things directly is what baffles me… They could put a stop to half the hysteria on this forum by just issuing a small press release or a FAQ detailing what they intend to restore in the coming updates. For a company that’s frequently praised for it’s marketing and PR work, this is a complete shambles.

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Mike Jeffs] “I can’t believe that you can only add transitions to clips that on on the Storyline track. why in the world can’t i add a transition to 2 clips on a uper layer. theres a lot of little things that seem so silly.
“

You *can* still add transitions to clips on the upper layers, but you have to convert them to storylines first (CMD+G). It’s still silly, but it can be done.

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Anybody got any better ideas?”

Select the text clip, create a storyline (CMD+G), then apply crossfades (CMD+T)…

Bit ridiculous to have to go through that extra step, but it seems to apply to anything that’s placed on the upper layers that isn’t a storyline.

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Annoying that you have to select a text template anyway though – you should just be able to select the text go and go right away. Another iMovie legacy, I’m afraid.”

Anything, and I mean ANYTHING, has to be better than the text generator in FCP 7. Premiere is still miles ahead though…

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Simon Ubsdell] “I’d have to disagree – in FCP7 I have my audio dissolves mapped to a single key – instant result. Surely that was a quicker way of doing it?”

I guess I’m speaking relatively – it’s more intuitive than any of the multitude of unintuitive features they’ve added. I tend to always adjust the lengths of my fades anyway, so it’s not really much of an extra burden – my mouse/pen would have been going there anyway…

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Simon Ubsdell] “I don’t see any way of inputting text in the Inspector tab – it’s not referred to in the manual – I did look in the Inspector tab first off just out of habit and couldn’t find anything there.”

Select the text, hit CMD+4 to bring up the inspector window, then there should be four tabs up top saying Tile, Text, Video, Info; select “Text” and you should get controls for editing the text content, font, sizing, kerning, etc…

I’m doing this using the “Custom” title preset…

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Geoff Dills] “Would like to be able to apply a dissolve to the audio on the main storyline without having the picture dissolve. Only way I’ve been able to do it is expand the two clips and drag the audio to overlap then apply fades.”

Yep. That’s how you do it. I actually don’t mind it too much. It’s pretty simple – double click on the clip and adjust timing and fades. It’s one of the more intuitive and functional changes IMHO…

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Simon Ubsdell] “Anybody else got anything to add?
“

Not being able to apply transitions to an “upper” layer without converting it to a “storyline” first. It’s an annoying two step process, and I’m not to sure of the reasoning for it.

I was a little annoyed with how the magnetic timeline behaved, but once I discovered the “Position” tool, things worked a bit more familiar.

With regards to not being able to access text under another layer, you just need to go to the “Inspector” window and click on the “Text” tab and you should be able to edit the text there.

Also, you can turn the “Ripple Transitions” off in the program properties. Can’t understand why they would have this as a default.

Apple really needed to provide some decent basic training videos with this release.

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Simon Ubsdell] “But I should have read the manual before posting … 🙁
“

Nah dude, it’s ok. We’re all a bit frazzled by this release. I too was tearing my hair out trying to solve this – I was at the point of deleting FCPX and tossing my MacBook in the bin, but thankfully I checked here first…

Going to spend the weekend with Ripple and see how I feel on Monday.

[Stephen Bakopanos]

[Matt Callac] “Honestly, i hear a lot of what they are saying, but they clearly didn’t spend enough time poking around. They seemed super quick to write it off entirely once they ran into a snare.”

Agreed. For instance, they were condemning FCPX the loss of clip blending… I was like: WTF? It’s there. It took me all of 20 seconds to find it… How about spending some time with the application to learn what it can and can’t do, before condemning it?

Lo and behold, a few minutes later they actually realised it was there (although, I must agree with them, it’s not as easy accessed as before).