The Edit Blog at PVC has 100 Questions answered about FCPX

The Article has some good answers and also says some interesting things that I believe to be true.

In its current state I would not use FCPX in a professional, client heavy environment. At this time I don’t consider it an FCP7 replacement as it lacks so many features that I’ve come to rely on. It’s a brand new piece of software so it will take years to mature into the full featured application that FCP7 is … that is if Apple chooses to add back a lot of the features missing from FCP7. At this point in time I don’t know when / if it could replace FCP7 (or Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro).


and

23) Do you think Apple is moving away from the Pro Video market towards the wider prosumer market with FCPX.


Most definitely.


and

51) Does your knowledge of FC7 help or get in the way of learning FC10?


That’s a great question. I’d almost say it gets in the way as FCP7 uses long established editing paradigms that work very well. In some aspects FCPX is trying to reinvent the wheel. Where there are some great things in FCPX there’s other instances where, IMHO, the wheel doesn’t really need to be reinvented because it works so well.


and

63) how does the magnetic timeline handle a music video where the main audio should be locked permanently?


My music video testing has found that I would create a synchronized clip with the master audio to place in the primary storyline and then connect all my angles to it via Connect to Primary Storyline. In theory that should keep them all in sync. Truth be told the inability to really lock a clip in place and lack of multiclips / group clips would make me look elsewhere for music video editing.


and

77) Worthwhile building new edit suite around FCPX or still shrink-wrapped FCPStudio 7… etc?


Personally I would never build an edit suite around a single NLE so I certainly don’t feel the current release of FCPX is enough to build an entire edit suite around. As one tool in that suite yes but the only tool? Not in its current form and probably not for a long while. Plus, if Apple is going to rely on 3rd parties to supply many of the pro-workflow tools that we need for FCPX then the final cost is going to end up well above $299 to run FCPX in a professional / broadcast environment.


and

83) What’s your favorite new feature, and new disappointment?


Favorite new features are the many different background processes from rendering to transcoding to media management. Auditions is another strong new feature. Disappointment is the Magnetic Timeline and single Viewer that changes between source clips and the timeline.


The rest has some interesting points, and tells how to do may good things, but these are things that really stand out to me about what is wrong with the software.

Dylan Reeve says Apple has Abanonded Pros

And I have to agree. He has an excellent blog post on the subject, which talks about defining Pros, as people working working in Broadcast Television and Film and not just people making money editing.

This is how he ends the article:

Businesses in the film and TV industry, that have to deliver a product to a strict standard within a strict deadline, can’t pin their hopes on a future upgrades or the next version while relying on an increasingly ageing product that has been EOL’ed. They need certainty and at the moment the only certainty that exists with FCP is that the current version has no future hopes and the current version isn’t suitable for their work. They have no choice but to look elsewhere.


It simply makes no financial sense for Apple – selling a $300 product that appeals, as is, to millions of people – to pursue a small market with very specific and complicated demands.


In the end Final Cut Pro X will be a success, it is a powerful and innovative application. But it will no longer be a big part of the film and TV post-production industry.


FCP X will work for a lot of the smaller people, and will eventually, with a slew of plugs in (driving it’s price right back up to what it used to be) will do even more, but it will never be the the pro app that it once was. Apple has nixed that market, and it is just too bad they don’t have the decency to rename FCP X into iMovie Pro to show that they really are going a completely new direction and instantly saying to all pros that they need to find another home, instead of doing it in such a backhanded way.

Dylan Reeve and the FCP X Disconnect

Dylan Reeve has an excellent post on the FCP X Disconnect, which is about how FCP was used by professional users and how Apple sees FCP.

He has some excellent graphs that show what he thinks is the potential market for FCP and how Apple just doesn’t see it as an important segment of it’s market, because it is so incredibly small, and I completely agree.

Apple is going lowest common denominator, and it can even be seen in Lion. Making everything more iOS like, instead of making iOS more mac like, because iOS is great for portable devices, but too simple, but they want to make the mac more like iOS and that personally scares me.

Mathew Levie comments on the Magnetic Timeline

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.

Larry Jordan is sticking with FCP

Today Larry Jordan has a new article, where he talks about why he is sticking with FCP for now, and waiting for new features.

I personally disagree. Apple had a mature and powerful editing program that could have been updated and have had some of the great new features added to it, but instead they decided to make a new less powerful program geared at making editing ‘easier’. The thing is they are engineers and have no idea what editing is really about, and have instead made a program that I don’t think will ever be right for a professional editor. The magnetic timeline alone proves this to me, because they no longer think that organization is important, and it is one of the most important things!

Larry Jordan has a nice post on Accountability

Larry Jordan has a good blog post on how Apple is not accountable to anyone for the disaster of it’s Final Cut Pro X release.

And it really is true. No is accountable, and Apple would hold everyone accountable if things were revered. Nvidia made one mistake and look they have not been in a mac since, and we the users are punished by Apple for it (having to put our ATI cards back in for major upgrades and then re-install the NVIDIA drivers).

I am knee deep into learning Premier Pro (after trying, but giving up on FCP X) and am pretty impressed by many features (especially the XML export being able to do the whole project with all sequences), but can’t see why this was even necessary! I can see that Apple might have wanted to cement their lead in the future, but not at the expense of their entire installed user base who are going to bad mouth the hell out of their new product until they make something useful.

And why buy Color, just to kill it a few years later? Or why kill Shake? Why did they not spin off their entire pro-division like they did with FileMaker Pro? Make a business unit that is answerable to it’s base. and needs to make a product that it’s customers want!

I am left shaking my head.

ProVideoCoalition has a good article on FXP X

ProVideo Coalition has a good article on FCP X and what Apple is probably doing.

Sooo … IF Apple loses 10% of the 200,000 high-end editors (and I think this is generous … the real number is probably near 50,000) but gains these markets, will it be an even trade? No, not at all—each of these markets is 10 times the size of the current high-end editing market. If only a small percentage buy FCPX,  Apple’s installed base will double, and quickly. Almost every person I’ve talked to in these areas are excited about the new release. They don’t want or need EDLs or multicam edits, they just want to cut their story together quickly.


In the long term, the future is more fuzzy. Apple stands to gain and hold the bottom 90% of the pyramid—if they are able to develop the application effectively. This 90% will begin to put pressure on the top 10%. We’ll just have to see how committed Apple is to the future. For the many that will be entering the market with Final Cut Pro X… getting in now means that they can learn a simple application and grow with it… like many of us did with Photoshop over 20 years. It was simple when in started, really.

And I think they will lose a lot more of 10% of the provideo market, more like 90%, but yes I admit it is a small portion of the market that Apple probably could care less about. They are shooting for the other 90% and FCP X does have some great features for them, but at the cost of making a program that will not work fro the pro-editors.

And honestly they have lost our trust completely! I mean just killing Color, an Amazing HIgh End color correction program is so arrogant it is ridiculous. And sure we could move to DaVinci from Black Magic, but that is $1000 with another $1600 for the control board, and Color was included in the FCP Studio Suite!

Studio Daily has an excellent review of Final Cut Pro X

I have to say I am starting to get burnout on FCP X disaster, but Studio Daily has a good review that covers some of my problems.

iMovie on Steroids? MaybeAfter using FCPX for a few weeks I still believe what many initially thought upon first seeing FCPX back in April: This is just the first version of a new application and in this form is essentially iMovie on steroids. There are just too many things that Final Cut Pro 7 users will be missing when they really dig into FCPX. It’s not that we won’t be able to make cool effects and pretty video, it’s just that we’ll do it in a much different way without some tools that we now take for granted. Word from people who are smarter than I am say that FCPX isn’t built off of current iMovie code. I still find that hard to believe, as the similarities are striking. If they aren’t based on the same code then Apple made a very conscious, very clear and very targeted decision to copy an awful lot of what’s in iMovie now. Some of it is actually for the better but a lot of it is for the worse.

And

•No More Dual-Monitors: Also gone is the more traditional FCP7-like Viewer/Canvas two-monitor layout. The viewing window changes to the timeline or the clip events depending on what you’re doing. In my time with the new software, I have come to really, really miss that two window layout.

And

There is the option of importing from tape, but that’s only from a tape-based camera and only via FireWire. Why Apple included only FireWire camera support is perplexing. It seems downright silly to rewrite FireWire tape support for FCPX and not include something like multi-clipping, especially when it feels like you approach something close to multi-clips when you use the new Synchronize Clips feature and have it sync multiple camera angles. Sure, the resources for FireWire support might be vastly different than support for third-party I/O hardware (which isn’t supported out of the box) but FireWire support for DV and HDV? Really? When Apple, and an entire industry, is moving away from FireWire?

And

When media comes into FCPX it must be associated with an Event or dropped into a new Event created upon import. Forget about project-based media; everything here is based on Events. In fact, all the media you’ve ever imported is available all the time. This feature alone can be totally amazing and/or insanely frustrating; I experienced both feelings when using FCPX. There are definitely times I don’t want media from other projects available, especially in a professional environment, where you can have hundreds of hours of media from different clients on your media drive. Conceptually, it’s an interesting idea for the right environment but in practice FCPX desperately needs some type of “Event Media Mounting Manager” to keep unrelated media from intruding on an unrelated project. You can physically move the media in the Mac Finder to hide it from FCPX but isn’t this an application for the future? That seems really antiquated.

And

This type of project setup, and the more structured way FCPX stores and tracks media, reminds me very much of Avid Media Composer. Media Composer has always been great at both media management and mixing formats. Avid’s often been chastised by FCP users for it’s structured, less free-flowing way of working, but Apple is doing something very similar now in FCPX.

And

The timeline has done away with video and audio tracks as we know them and therefore, it’s a very free form way of working. The magnetic timeline means clips move out of the way where clip collisions might have happened in FCP7. This new, freer way of editing will suit some; others it will not. I like quite a lot of what Apple is trying to do to make editing faster and better, but there are other things in FCPX that really don’t make the overall editing experience any faster or better. You really have to try it yourself, which makes it rather frustrating that there isn’t a free demo available.

and

My fear is this free-form timeline will lead to some real sloppy jobs coming in the door if FCPX catches on.

And summing up

The new Media management in FCPX may seem to offer more options to editors, but it actually uses a very rigid, specific way to store clips, renders and projects. If you were a sloppy editor in FCP7, then you’ll be fine in FCPX, at first. But if you don’t really understand how FCPX organizes your media you might be in for some trouble if files get moved and drives get shuffled.


I hate how there’s no real dedicated Viewer window when I skim those source clips.I hate how imprecise much of the actual editing process has become in the magnetic timeline.

And finally

How much real-world editor feedback did Apple really get before this came to market? Even though some very high profile editors got a chance to evaluate it before the release, I’m more inclined to think it was designed by a bunch of engineers who don’t actually edit for a living. Either way, it just feels unfinished. I won’t be implementing it with my paying clients as of this version, and probably not for a few versions to come. But I’ll happily bang out home movies with it.

And yes he also does have good stuff to say, but it is the negative to me that is the most telling. This is not a pro app, and the way it is built I don’t think it will ever be. Sure kids who have never edited might love it, but forcing editors to work in one way that is not proven to be better is not necessarily a better way, just different, and for this different, I am not sure I agree.