30-minutes with Final Cut Pro X
30-minutes is not a lot of time with software. I edited a few things in FCP X to get a hang of it, and here are my findings:
- It’s the big question on ppl’s mind. Yes, it feels like a glorified iMovie. I wish it weren’t so, but a lot of it has that feel. When I started using it, it was the exact same feeling I had going from After Effects to Motion. Yes, technically Motion has a lot of features of AE, but there’s the subtle cues that what you’re using doesn’t have a pro edge to it and that is what FCP X exhibits.
- The interface is clean, though I don’t consider it intuitive. Apple really believes in showing you what you need to see, so often things are hidden away. Hiding the Project window is awkward. Do not think going from FCP7 to X will not have a learning curve. Actually, it’s a pretty dramatic shift in things, especially in media management.
- It feels very slow. Primarily due to the background render management. When I first heard of it, BG rendering sounded nice. K, I admit, I was getting jealous. Now, I don’t want it. It’s too slow, and hinders the zippiness that I need. As a reference point, I have a 17″ MBP 2.66Ghz Core i7, 7200RPM HD, 8GB RAM. Everything feels sluggish. I tried it on a 16-core Mac Pro and it was better. But it was still gonna take hours to transcode all my H264 to ProRes. Sorta like Motion if you’ve experienced that before. If you look what’s going on in the background, FCP X is doing ingest, analysis, and rendering simultaneously via the new multiprocessing Grand Dispatch tech. That’s way too much imho and my laptop was on the verge of setting aflame. Maybe it would be smooth on the 16-core Mac Pro, but not on my teeny quad-core MBP.
- No Media Manager .. so Im not sure how we’ll archive projects. Project consolidation feature wasn’t very helpful here.
- Can’t open previous FCP projects. Rumor is they’re working on a utility of sorts, but I don’t expect it to be perfect. How can it be? If it was easy to do, they would have done it. But because it’s not in FCP X, it’s therefore hard to do. Therefore when they do release it, it won’t be perfect. Things that are hard to make never produce perfect results; they’re not supposed to.
- Media Metadata Management is kinda nice. Auto balancing is good, as is the face detection. But the Events thing is horrendous. Forces you to use iPhoto-like thinking when managing assets. I know it’s a good way to think, but in all honesty, the way we work on projects at church doesn’t really fit this model.
- Bad! importing footage is copied to your local drive! I don’t know how FCP X can work effectively in a networked, shared environment. I was watching how it was doing all the symlinking of footage in the background, and honestly, it felt very brittle. You can disable this, but having a local copy of FCP handle organization-wide digital asset management is kinda scary. Until I look into this more, this is the major deal breaker for us as we need a very seamless, reliable integration to our server assets. The same above goes for organizing Projects (it’s all inherently local, like an iMovie project). I know you can disable the copy, but now the project/events/assets are beginning to look quite dispersed. I think the major mistake of FCP X is insisting on using their own folder structure akin to iPhoto. They should have taken tips from Adobe Lightroom in this regarad, which does a great job of handling metadata without touching your folders.
- Effects handling was clunky. Keyframing is not easy to use, and hard to edit (they use the timeline itself to show you the keyframes, which I like, but it’s tiny!) A lot of the effects like ken burns and stabilization is very nice. A lot of good out of the box effects are available. In the past, I did a lot of hackery to get some decent motion graphic effects in FCP7 without having to go to After Effects. I think you’ll have a much harder job doing that now in FCPX. There are a lot of nice effect in FCP X, period. However, using them felt like iMovie, rather than the power of After Effects. It’s as I feared. They reduced options to make it look easy, but in the end, it takes control away from the editor.
- Titling is pretty nice. Nothing to call home about; it was about time.
- Magnetic Timeline was annoying. I think it’s good for the person who doesn’t understand clip handles and blank space, but one move, and the whole thing starts moving. Like trying to create some blank space between clips to insert a new clip is quite a challenge. There are no slugs also :( Requires me to insert a gap? Really?
- It couldn’t import my AF100 AVCHD footage that I copied on my HD. FCP 7 was able to. The directory structure was intact. Dunno why … boo!
- Color Correction… I really thought FCP X would shine here. They have masking tools and grade saving, just like in Color. But the color board UI is just hard to use and is confusing. No control of numerical values either, so it’s all done by hand. I think ppl will have trouble using this… and as much as I hated the 3-way color corrector, I’m hating this FCP X’s color table more. Match Color is pretty amazing btw.
- No 3rd party plugin support. Sorry, seems like we’ll have to re-buy some of our plugins…argh!
- No multi-cam support. Let’s hope they add this in before our next big show.
- Tape support is bad. I know we’re past tape, but capturing a lot of clips of an old DV tape is gonna be very tedious. No more log and capture folks… it’s all “Capture Now” button, ala FCP Express. Sigh.
- When exporting there are no options to resize your video, etc. Suppose your project is 1080p, there’s no way to set your own data rates or down res it, without sending to Compressor (which is another issue altogether imho). When considering price, expect to spend $350, not $299. You have to buy Compressor to finish your footage out of FCP X. To be honest, I’m fine in a way (as this was the old Export via Quicktime Conversion). But I wish they didn’t force you to buy Compressor to get any decent settings. Compressor just isn’t easy to use. Workaround: export as 1080p ProRes (the default) and bring into QuickTime 7 to convert it. Ah, old school!
- Final Cut Pro X crashed a few times on me. Launching FCP X made all the videos in Keynote go black, so be sure to install the Pro Apps update. Just feels a little finicky. As expected in a 1.0 of course
- Motion still sucks. They just don’t understand compositing and motion graphics. Only benefits seems they are moving to become a motion graphic publishing platform, where ppl can share their work. If community contributions start to pop up, this can be interesting!
- Compressor still looks buggy, and now it’s gonna try to do auto-qmaster.. uh oh. I’m looking to move into Adobe Media Encoder, now as they added watch folders to it. If nothing fundamentally changed about compressor, it’s time to look for something else imho.
- No DVD Studio Pro. Bye bye, DVD mastering. All digital distribution is the new way (not sure how subtitling would fit into this).
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