June 21, 2011. Apple released Final Cut Pro X and our industry changed overnight.
It’s been a year since that release, and I’m interested in your comments on the impact, if any, that Final Cut Pro X has had on your life – personally or professionally.
For me, Final Cut X has caused a lot of upheaval. Some good, some bad, though, overall, its been mostly good. Long-term, I’m optimistic for the software. Short-term, well, short-term has been rocky.
But I’ve written about my experience a lot over the last year. In this blog, I’d like to hear your stories. I get 200 – 400 emails a day (and, yes, I try to answer every one of them) from editors sharing their stories with me.
Now, I’d like to give you a chance to share them with all of us: “Has Final Cut Pro X made your life better, worse, or about the same and why?”
GROUND RULES
I’m interested in stories from a personal perspective — both good and bad. I’m not interested in, nor will I post, stories that attack the opinions of others, nor stories that attack Apple.
I want this particular blog to be less of a dialog, and more a sharing of personal experience. I want to hear about FCP X from your perspective. Don’t talk about the industry, talk about yourself.
TO MAKE OR VIEW COMMENTS
To make or view comments attached to this blog, click the Leave a Comment text button at the bottom of this post.
As always – and especially now – I’m interested in your opinions.
Larry
42 Responses to Final Cut Pro X – One Year Later…
Newer Comments →-
Ian Stubbs says:
June 22, 2012 at 4:12 am
-
bradbell.tv says:
June 22, 2012 at 6:45 am
-
Dave Heinzel says:
June 22, 2012 at 9:43 am
-
Allynn says:
June 22, 2012 at 9:47 am
-
Elvis Ripley says:
June 22, 2012 at 11:28 am
-
Mathieu Gibeault says:
June 22, 2012 at 2:41 pm
-
Shane Ross says:
June 22, 2012 at 2:53 pm
-
Deke says:
June 22, 2012 at 3:04 pm
-
Brian says:
June 22, 2012 at 3:29 pm
-
Gregg says:
June 22, 2012 at 4:29 pm
Newer Comments →FCPX has improved my organisation and increased my edit speed. Skimming is a great accelerator but you need to work out when to turn it off. Trimming to the skimmer when you intended to trim to the playhead can be irritating! Marking up sections of clips with I,O and F is a very fast way to, for example, take all of the questions out of an interview. Select all of the ‘favourites’ (UK spelling :)) and make a compound clip and you have a new clip without the questions. As Larry would say, very cool.
I’ve stopped using Projects for the most part and create new Compound Clips (Sequences) in the Event (Browser) as I used to do with FCP7. The benefit of this for me is that the edits are stored in the event and easy to share or archive. If I need to use clips from multiple events it’s easy to create a project with my edit in it and add the clips from there. Mostly I don’t use projects at all though.
By far the most beneficial thing for me is the integration with Motion 5. This is a jewell! Provided that you are familiar with it. I now have the ability to quickly craft virtually any bespoke caption, transition, filter, generator that I need. Smokin’
Overall I don’t like going back to FCP7 and my view of Premiere is that it’s FCP8. It has some great stuff but I now can’t live without some of the new thinking in FCPX. I’ll be sticking with Apple provided Mr. Cook makes good on his promise of a new Mac Pro next year – and I’m sure he will.
Ian.
Ian.
I feel like FCPX was designed for me. I feel lucky to call myself a filmmaker, both shooting and editing the projects I work on. I shoot on an HDSLR, so FCPX is a godsend: I can start editing off the card; I don’t have to transcode; and I’m using a 3 year old iMac to do it. I started with FCP 1.2.
I’m also a technological progressive: I love learning and I’m happy to throw away old tools for new. I’d be happy to get rid of QUERTY! I want my kids’ piano keyboard to not have black keys, so they can play music instead of noise. I am infuriated that kids cameras are more complicated than adult cameras. I was glad to see Apple drop the desktop metaphor – for an infinite number of kids sake – and sad to see it return, for the sake of a limited number of adults. So I’m glad to see the Moviola metaphor go, as it’s meaningless to me. (You need to be about 60-70 years old!)
I’ve also been a musician all my life, so I appreciate FCPX’s integrated approach. I’ve noticed I’ve started using it like an all-in-one app. Once the edit is nailed down, and you start adding effects, it’s rather impressive to see virtually every clip or ‘track’ of audio will have EQ and compression and other audio effects on it. Each video clip will have about a dozen layers of colour adjustments, plus stabilisation and speed changes. And with Neat Video noise reduction, I no longer have to leave FCPX at all. And it works! It’s organised. It saves disk space. Nothing is baked in.
Having said that, I used to use Color and I miss tracking. And 8 point curves adjustment. I will undoubtedly use Resolve in the future – BMD cinema camera! – but the Lite version doesn’t have noise reduction and FCPX’s all-in-one approach is making me really happy now.
I just fully finished this video in FCPX. An impromptu vox pop from a village in Tanzania. I was pleased I didn’t have to transcode H.264 even for the processor intensive noise reduction. All done all-in-one. Joy!
My Name is Athmani
https://vimeo.com/44321859
(Sorry, not quite done yet – PASSWORD: solaraid)
I had been using FCP6 for several years when FCPX was announced. I badly needed an upgrade (or so I thought). I’m a one-man-band for a public school district shooting mainly Canon DSLR footage with some HVX200 video and separately-recorded audio. My editing computer is a 17″ MacBook Pro early 2009 with an SSD and 8GB RAM.
I jumped on FCPX early, also purchasing Motion and Compressor. I was as happy as a kid on Christmas morning – until I started using the software. There were several “details” that seemed missing. No custom movie dimensions (I edit frequently in 2.39:1). No way to apply color correction to multiple clips at once. No audio crossfades. When you retime a clip in the timeline, the “New Duration” popup was gone. Media management was not intuitive. No multiple sequences per project. Pressing ‘N’ when retiming a clip changed snap to ON but it stayed ON after I was done resizing the clip. And the worst part – the UI was incredibly unresponsive.
I was torn. Do I move forward with the new software or keep using the old? I did a little of both over the next several months. When I used FCPX, editing was excruciating. When I went back to FCP6, I was at home. It was lovely. Everything was fast, project management was intuitive, and I felt like the software stayed out of my way and just let me work.
But I knew my time with FCP6 was limited. I had lost some functionality unexpectedly when installing FCPX on the same drive (small things, like the SmoothCam plugin, stopped working), and the installers for FCP6 no longer worked on my new OS. And a new computer was in my near future.
In complete honesty — and I’m not proud of this — I actually avoided some potentially rewarding video projects this past year simply because my editing workflow was so awkward. I found myself doing more of other projects that fall under my responsibility – photography and web programming. It was a frustrating time.
But I kept trudging with FCPX. I’ve now edited several projects with it, and with the updates over the past year, I now consider it to be an “OK” piece of software. It’s still horribly slow for me (which is my computer – but to be fair, FCP6 on the same machine is very fast). It still doesn’t retain your original snap settings when retiming a clip and pressing N. The color correction presets are not an effective replacement for dragging a correction to multiple clips. Still no audio crossfades that I can find. When I use a fade to color transition, the audio gets crossfaded though (explain that one?).
These might be details, but they’re important to me. And I came to appreciate them with FCP6.
I’ll end on a positive note. I have a MacBook Pro retina on order, and I’m looking forward to a much-improved experience with that machine. My favorite videos I made this year were done with FCPX. Titles and text are much improved (but have a way to go). The magnetic timeline is actually nice. Most importantly, I no longer avoid video work due to my fear of editing. And all new projects? I take them straight to FCPX without a second thought.
Final Cut Pro X has made my life complicated.
I run a Lab at a University and we make around 150 videos a year (both long and short format). I supervise a half dozen or so undergraduate editors and we shoot on mini-dv, P2 and SD cards (both high-def and standard). I am also an Apple certified trainer.
When X first came out term was over and I figured I had the whole summer to learn it, get rectified and decide if we were going to switch to it in the Fall, wait another year or switch to something else (probably Premiere).
After a couple months, lots of reading and watching Larry’s videos and playing with the program I came to really love some of the things X does. I particularly love the keywords and favorites and the color matching and audio enhancement options. Still… we do a lot of multicam work so when Fall term started, we stuck with FCP 7. I opted against changing to Premiere because there was no real benefit, I had high hopes for X in the future and 7 was working just fine.
Over the past academic year (especially after multicam was added) I started editing a lot of short projects on X and also helping my students with some of their personal projects. A couple of them are really excited about editing in X and I always love showing them how to do things faster and better.
The more I worked with X, the more I realized it was problematic for our workflow. If there were more than a dozen projects in the Projects Library it was very slow to start. It took a long time to finish background processing and slowed the machines down to a crawl. I had thought about leaving X on 24/7 so it would never have to re-start and always be able to render over night. This wasn’t possible, however, because X would “hijack” any volume that was mounted on the machine and offer it as a place to store Events and Projects. You couldn’t dismount the drive while X was open (and we mount and dismount volumes constantly).
Note that none of these problems have anything to do with actual editing; they are all about workflow. Faster machines with more RAM would certainly help (but we aren’t getting those any time soon). I could probably devise a workflow that would get around the drive hijacking issue. If I really felt committed to FCPX I would probably do that.
But I’m not. A year on and after talking to a lot of colleagues and former students about what they are doing, my Lab is switching to Premiere 6. And I am very, very sad about it. It’s not that I’m sad about Premiere; it looks to be a great program and the testing I’ve done shows it is fast enough on our old machines. I’m not sad because I’m abandoning FCPX. I’m not. I still plan to use it for my personal projects and I still plan to help my students. I’m sad because I’ve put 12 years of my life into Final Cut. I switched to the Mac platform *because* of Final Cut. I can still say I **like** Final Cut. I just can’t use Final Cut in my day-to-day job anymore. If things change will I come back? Hard to say. I started editing video on Premiere back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth (and Windows 95 was really cool). I left it for greener fields as a new century dawned. But I’m going back to it now. So, yes, I could go back to FCP in the future; it just doesn’t work for me now
I knew that FCP X would get better but in the year of waiting for plug-ins to work and a color grading workflow to appear with Resolve I used it for small jobs I could finish with what Apple gave me. It was a good way to work to learn the software and limits. After 10.0.4 I started using it for larger projects and doing an edit then finishing in Resolve. It was made 90% of my work faster but there is still 10% that is slower or impossible. I go back to FCP 7 and Premiere too often to do simple things like assemble reels and for some clean up tasks. FCP X is so easy to use but still doesn’t do everything I need. I am about to start a movie and trying to decide how it will be organized and edited. I want to jump in to FCP X and see how it goes but am a little nervous.
I bought FCPx the day it was released. I’d say I’ve opened it about 10 times(in about 6 months) before doing anything with it. I went to some Apple presentations and I still wasn’t convinced. One day in march, I had a music video to edit and I decided it was the right time to force myself to edit with fcpx. I had 9 takes that I cut in a multiclip without a single drop frame on my 2 yrs old iMac. From that moment I was sold on the power of the software. 2 weeks later I was going to Morocco to cover the “Rallye des gazelles” for a major french canadian broadcaster. I had to shoot, edit and deliver in the same day. Shooting with a 7d, FCPx saved me some very precious hours of sleep. I would come back from a day of shooting and start editing right away. If I would have used fcp7, I simply would have never slept for a straight week in the desert! And that’s what really sealed the deal for me. Now, all my personal editing projects start in fcpx! However, I’m in charge of a 20 seats post-production company in Montreal and I can’t say that fcpx is mature enough to start working in a place where you have series of up to 130 episodes, plus the fact that a lot of fcp7 editors aren’t ready to make the jump. Even if I believe in it, I don’t see it being professionally used in bigger facilities in the near future, we will have to wait for a few more updates!
FCX has caused a lot of turmoil, because it caused the end of the most useful NLE I have ever used, FCP 7. That still remains my favorite tool, and one that does everything I need done. Better than Avid and Adobe.
FCX changed the editing paradigm and language, and for no reason that I can see other than to do what they want. I do see how it helps a lot of people out…people who constantly paint themselves into horrible corners using FCP, because FCP was “too open,” allowing people to do too many wrong things. FCX fixed that. But in doing so, also changed the editing language and many key things that make it really unsuable to me. (Sorry Apple, non-firewire tape sources still exist and are still seeing heavy use today).
While the Multicam option is top notch, and above anything the other NLEs have to offer, the magnetic timeline is a pain, Roles is a poor band aid, changing the names of things to things like “events” makes it harder to communicate with other editors who don’t use FCX, tape support is non-existent (except for firewire!)…and the lack of many things I need make this unsuable to me.
I can see how this fulfills the needs of many many people. And I’m glad they enjoy it and are making good use of it. I just wish that Apple made this a separate product…Final Cut Express or some other name as to not be considered less than professional…and wish that they continued with the original FCP but updating many things to make it 64 bit and fit with the times. It was the perfect tool for the high end professional.
But the high end professional is a small market. And Apple is aiming at the widest market base.
FCX has left me high and dry. Trying to make other NLEs suit my needs when they really are lacking in many areas that FCP 7 excelled in.
First off, thanks for the great FCP guidance over the years. FCPX did change the way I edit…because I jumped ship for Premiere Pro. I tried FCPX and could not fathom the fundamental changes in the program. Given that my next project involves a lot of Photoshop and After Effects work, and that learning FCPX would be like learning a whole new program, I decided to go with the Adobe Suite.
A year later, and I’m using it everyday now… it took awhile, but after 10.0.3, my major complaints had been addressed, and I’m really liking the new interface. It’s a much more intuitive editing workflow once you get your head around it. There are too many people afraid to jump into something completely different, and it’s too bad because FCPX is definitely a very good professional editor, if not the best. Yes, it’s a professional editor. A lot of pros use it.
I thought I was going to jump to Premiere CS6 like a lot of people have, but I still had so many issues with it, such as monitoring video with DeckLink, conforming slowing me down too much, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I really like Ppro’s interface, and I will use it from time to time depending on the project, but FCPX is faster, and I don’t have to spend so much time educating producers on the technical aspects of it, so it saves me time there as well.
I think in the coming years, when the FCPX team is able to add more features to it, we will see a gradual migration back to the platform (assuming Apple doesn’t botch the Mac Pro release when/if that happens.)
I started out on FCP 6 being trained by Aron Ranen in San Francisco. When I saw Aron switch over to FCP X for his classes, I thought it was worth a look. I do mostly short “marketing” videos and was quite comfortable in FCP 6. The new interface threw me for awhile but I replicated a project using both tools and started to see some of the logic in the redesign. I have now switched over completely on FCP X on my iMac but have left FCP 6 on my old MacBook Pro which is too old to update to Lion or Mountain Lion. I really like some of the new features others have mentioned, such as Favorites and gap-less editing.
Overall, I am happy with FCP X but as I said, I do short projects, not full-length features. It is great for cutting interviews. I suspect it would be good for news editing. I think Apple will continue to enhance the software to make it more robust and better-adapted to high-end use. I hope to evolve along with them.