Oliver Peters has an interesting article on how he uses Final Cut pro 7 as a companion to Final Cut Pro X to make up for it's missing features.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!
I have not been quiet about my disdain for the new MacPro. Having Thunderbolt instead of PCI is not a solution.A single PCI slot at 1x is 8 Gbps, while Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps, and Thunderbolt 2 is 20 Gbps. So Thunderbolt 2 is slower than 3x PCI (24 Gbps vs 20 Gbps). Every MacPro since 2009 has had 2 x 4x PCI slots which are 32 Gbps and 2 x 16x which 128 Gbps (or so much faster than even the next gen 50 Gbps Thunderbolt). So Thunderbolt will never be fast enough for a 16x Graphics card!And my bigger worry is that without PCI expansion why will anyone write drivers for PCI cards for Macs now that there will be no Macs with PCI cards!I have been thinking my next Mac will be a custom built PC, as NVIDIA and CUDA are important to me and my work, but I want a Mac! So I was hoping to build a Hackintosh, a custom built PC hacked to run Mac software. You can make a Hackintosh more powerful than the new MacPro (not cheaply as Decent 6x Xeons run around $1400 each, so almost $3000 for 2) and have huge amounts of expansion, but without future PCI drivers it won't last! Maybe drivers will still work, as they will need to write Thunderbolt drivers which should still go through the PCI bus, but who knows. And why will NVIDIA keep writing universal graphics drivers like they have been doing?So does that mean a PC is in my future? Maybe. Maybe a Mac laptop and a PC for editing and graphics work? That seems expensive! Of course so does giving up a Mac with all the software I have bought over the years.Honest I just don't know! No solution seems cheap, or to really fulfill my needs like a new MacPro with expansion like the current MacPro would have been.If I had unlimited funds I would probably just move to PC and get a Wacom Tablet to replace my iPad. And replace all my software, and maybe a Retina MacPro laptop, or maybe a Razer gaming laptop. I just don't know!
I always post negative things on FCP X, so here is an article that is positive on why someone has made the switch and is happy with it, by Bill Dafvis at Rev Up Transmedia.
Here is the link for the video from reTooled.net at Vimeo. And here is the link at retooled.net. 10 Things Final Cut 7 Switchers Should Know about Premiere Pro CC from reTooled.net on Vimeo.
Ryan E. Walters has a good article on why he has moved to Premiere Pro from Final Cut Pro 7 and not FCP X, even though he gave it a good try.
HD Warrior has an article on having major problems with FCP X's timelines, especially very complex ones, that in fact may be show stopping. I already hate the unorganizable timeline of FCP X, though I only used version 10.0, and this is problems with the latest and greatest 10.0.8. Too me an unorganizable timeline is next to useless, but one that has problems like this even more so.
Apple has updated it's pro audio app Logic Pro to Logic Pro X and lowered the price to only $199. I am not an Audio so I can't speak to if they pulled a Final Cut Pro X and nuetered their pro software with a crappy new interface, but at least one review from The Loop doesn't seem to think so.
Arstechnica is reporting that Acer one of the leaders in Thunderbolt is dropping it for at least the next year. The entire new MacPro is dependent on Thunderbolt to act as it's expansion, since it has no user addable PCI slots. So you must use expensive Thunderbolt expansion to add accessories to your new Cylinder MacPro. The thing is that so far Thunderbolt support is pretty underwelming. There are some good raid enclosures, but almost nothing for just hard drive housings for your old drives, and everything else is very expensive. In fact there are very few PC motherboards with Thunderbolt, and none with support for Dual Xeons, so it is very very niche!Everyone is betting on USB 3, which is almost as fast (and plans on getting even faster, and has backwards compatibility), which every PC has, and yes the MacPro has a few ports, but not enough.And Thunderbolt is not really a PCI replacement. It is fast, but not nearly as fast as PCI, so you can't say put an external NVIDIA video card for CUDA support. It would just be too slow.And without PC support it will always be a very Niche product.Makes me think if I want to stay with Mac I will have to do a Hackintosh, which are notoriously unstable, but could at least run windows easily, and have everything I want internally instead of in a spiderweb of external expensive thunderbolt peripherals!I don't want to have to move fully to windows, but even now I am running bootcamp. And Windows 8 boots faster on my Mac than Mac OS X, and I can build a PC with almost all the expansion I want within a single case with a single power cord. I mean I already have such a serious snake of power cable is am surprised it doesn't trip the fuse more often!
Been having some serious OS X issues of late.First quicklook died in my finder. Couldn't see any quicktime movies, and I realized also could not open then in Quicktime, quicktime was basically dead. I tried booting as Root and the issue persisted so I realized it was not my user file, and was something with my system. The problem also persisted in Safe Mode, so it had to be a system issue.Since my last major issue was a major system fault, I currently have a spare 2 GB hard drive, so I installed OS X on it and moved my user over to it using migration assistant to see if the problem persisted. Twice when I did it the computer froze. It was on, but all USB devices were unpowered, and pulling them and plugging them back in didn't help, and the monitor was black. So I re-installed OS X a second time, and then started it before migrating my old user, and turned off sleep and it migrated fine. And that system worked fine, quicktime was good and everything was there. Since everything had moved over OK, and I now had a backup (beyond my Time Machine), I decided to try re-installing OS X over the old one using my new 10.8.4 recovery partition, and after that OS X booted fine (well a few things are weird, like Sugar Sync, X-marks and it seems Java is now gone for CrashPlan).After the install my computer boot much faster. I have a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 for my graphics card, so it doesn't show the mac startup screens until it goes gray and the desktop appears, and it was taking a good minute to boot, but now it boots in under 30 seconds, so that is great. And Quicktime now works fine, as does quicklook. No idea what happened to cause it, it just happened.And I have already run Diskwarrior and TechTool as well as ClamXav, so I have no issues with drives or viruses. No idea what tanked my quicktime.The one issue I have been having that persists is a slow finder. For the last 6 months or so my finder has been very slow and gets the beachball of slowness all the time. I mean all the time, and I have not been able to fix the issue, no matter what I do.I have been trying to clean out my user to see if that is it, and have been using CleanMyMac 2, and manually cleaning as well. Nothing has helped the finder issue so far.I even found this Apple Support forum thread, where they tell you to try this terminal command to see what is installed as finder extension. "kextstat -kl | awk ' !/apple/ { print $6 } '"For results I get:com.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboardcom.microsoft.driver.MicrosoftKeyboardUSB For my Microsoft Ergo Keyboard jp.plentycom.driver.SteerMouse For my Trackball com.razer.common.razerhid For my Razer gaming keyboard com.sonnettech.driver.SonnetSATA for my Sonnet Tempo SATA E4P PCIe via which I run my SATA drives for editing com.SafeNet.driver.Sentinel How I run Lightwave 3D com.makemkv.kext.daspi For makemkv com.AmbrosiaSW.AudioSupport I am removing this WireTap Studio…
Premiumbeat.com blog has a great post on the 10 new Premiere Pro CC features that a Final Cut Pro 7 Editor will Love. This is a must read!