Yes I upgraded to Mavericks and ran Final Cut Pro 7 last night, and yes it runs and plays back. Haven’t done extensive testing, but it does seem to work. And it has to have been on purpose as even After Effects CC had an update to make it work right in Mavericks, but Final Cut Pro 7 without an update still seems to work.
Personally I see it as indictment of FCP X. As a program is pretty broken if you have to use an older EOL version of itself to support many high end features, especially when said program could not work on the next OS X Mavericks!
This post at Creative Cow has a possible fix for importing an FCP 7 Project into Premiere Pro. And it is to import the media first and let Premier build the Cache and then import the XML! Smart.
According to a new PDF case study from Adobe, USC is giving up on FCP and teaching Premiere Pro. And not Final Cut Pro X. Nice. While Adobe is a full suite of apps, I think this kind kicks sand in the face of all those saying how FCP X is ready for professional usage.
No film school is covering this.
Seems inevitable since they edit their own stuff, and FCP 7 is dead and and I would not want to edit a feature on the FCP X timeline.
Now I did try and use FCP X right from the start with lessons, and I don’t think it is a professional program at all. Yes it might be faster to teach to someone with no previous editing knowledge as Larry says, but that is because it forces you to edit in a very specific way, and for me not a way that I find faster or better at all. And yes I am biased by all the horridness of Apple’s launch of FCP X and killing of the Final Cut Pro 7 suite, and that may bias me, but I also think that Larry making his living doing Final Cut Pro lessons may bias him.
And I hate how no one ever talks about the things that Final Cut Pro 7 is not setup to do, like working in a multi-user environment on an X-Serve or Edit Share. He does mention it is not that good at going to Pro Tools, which is a deal breaker, but also the inability to organize tracks makes for a mess of a timeline when I often use 15-20 tracks on a commercial, all for different elements or graphics to keep it organized, and to have that all haphazardly put randomly into the timeline is insane and a mess, and not at all professional!
Now I do love the ability to mark clips by keywords and make it all easily searchable, but that could have easily been ported into a Final Cut Pro 8 and made it a really powerful 64 bit editing system instead of a mixture of 64 bit tech with iMovie conventions.
Even with all the additions I still see Final Cut Pro X as a mess and not-professional. It has too much wrong with it, and has so many weird bugs (see previous posts on Red Giant software and FCP X), and I just don’t see the magnetic timeline as being professional in a commercial environment or any graphics heavy environment where timeline organization is more important that clip organization, which I am perfectly capable of organizing myself.