Matthew Levie in his fifth and final article on using FCP X to cut has some things to say on the Magnetic Timeline that mirror my thoughts, and are the main reason I am in the process of moving to Premiere to edit.
Which brings me back to where I was on day two: the “magnetic timeline” is cute, but it keeps me from making the sequence I want and therefore it really has to go.
It reminds me a little bit of when Apple was introducing FCP 1.0 and Steve Jobs showed us how we could take a clip from the Viewer and drop it on this beautiful transparent overlay in the Canvas to choose insert/overwrite/replace/etc. and the crowd went, “oooooooh.” But who edits that way?
Maybe you’ll say I didn’t give it enough of a chance. That might be fair. I just played around with it for a few days. But the truth is that we have an editing paradigm that works for us in FCP 7. It’s not enough to show us that if we completely rethink our workflow then we can do the same things in FCP X as we can in FCP 7 with a couple of extra steps. What can we do that’s more efficient, faster, better? Yes, the infrastructure is improved; yes, the 64-bit implementation and background rendering mean things will be much faster… if we can still figure out a way to tell the stories we want to tell.
In conclusion, I think if Apple’s FCP X team really is serious about wanting professionals to use this program — and maybe they’re not, and that’s okay — we will need to see it go back to a track-based editing metaphor, at least as an option. If that happens, I can’t see why I wouldn’t use it eventually. I don’t really care about the feature set: they can always add multicam and OMF export and whatever else, and I’m sure they will. But if they add those features while retaining the current editing paradigm, it will still be very difficult to use professionally.
My biggest complaint about FXP X is that I think the basic editing paradigm is broken and much too simplistic for a professional editing program. The magnetic timeline is what the program is built around and for me it makes things harder and not easier, as Matthew points out, it actually makes many things take more steps than they did in Final Cut Pro 7.
Sure there are some cool new features, but we would have been better off having those added to a 64 bit upgrade to Final Cut Pro 7 and not this monstrosity that is Final Cut Pro X.
Apple has obviously given up on the professional editing market and done it in the most insulting way possible, and I don’t think they realized the bad press and loss of sales they will get for not taking their professional market seriously.