As an early adopter I felt it was my duty to rush and purchase Final Cut Pro X when it was released on Tuesday even though I hadn't heard anything about how it worked. Luckily it isn't technically an upgrade. It is a whole new program that can run instead of Final Cut Pro 7 (they cannot be run concurrently). Apple was not secretive in saying that this is a brand new app that was written from the ground up to be innovative and the future of it's Final Cut line. That being said, it is a baby app that cannot be taken seriously yet. It may be the future, but at present it cannot function as a serious editor.
Gripes
First off, you cannot open existing Final Cut Pro projects. There is some talk that they may introduce a conversion utility at some point but currently you cannot open an existing FCP file. So you have to build everything from scratch. Great for learning, but not great for making tweaks to an old project.
Second, none of my purchased filters or transitions work with the app. When you spend hundreds of dollars on 3rd party filters and transitions, you want them to work with your application. FXFactory Pro released an update that works with Final Cut Pro X and that is much appreciated. I am sure all those kinks will be worked out, but it is frustrating.
There are tons of other things that are missing that are supposed to come in updates. Things like multi-cam support (an essential tool when I was working on TRS), output to tape, marker export, and EDL import export make it pretty much unusable for professional editors. But even semi-pros like me will have a tough time with the first release.
Good Stuff
OK, gripes out of the way, it is a pretty damn cool app. The look and feel of it is great. The responsiveness is fantastic. The magnetic timeline idea is interesting, although I will have to put it through its paces to see if it will really be a game changer.
My first impression was it is a total mind bend. I have been using FCP since version 1 and this is completely different. It may be close to iMove, but I never use iMove so I am not sure about that. First, you have events and projects. Events are where you store all your media (which FCPX will now copy to s single location) and Projects are the timeline (what used to be sequences). Projects and events can be stored in different locations on your computer. And each one creates it's own database of information. I am still wrapping my head around this one. I think I like it though.
The background rendering is AWESOME. I love it. I love that when you are idle, it just starts rendering your sequence. But on top f that, there is not much rendering it needs to do. I haven't tried too many footage types, but so far everything just plays. And the timeline scrubbing takes a little getting used to, but I think I am going to like it.
The only thing that I am a little mixed about is their concept of the main storyline. Instead of having any numer of video and audio tracks, you have the main storyline and everything surrounds that. In theory, this makes sense. You can't see more than one thing at a time so why should there be more than one main track? Well just in terms of assembling your footage, sometimes you don't want everything on the main track right away. But with FCPX you have to put the first item on the main track then the next item can go after it or attach above or below it. For example, it you have some title footage that you want to superimpose and you just want to drag it into the timeline. If you do that before your actual footage, it will be the main storyline and the footage can only be dragged above it. So then you have to spend a few seconds rearranging the order to make it work properly.
So this forces you to rethink HOW you assemble your movie. You have to assemble the main story first, otherwise it will take time to re-organize it later. So far I find this annoying because it is forcing me to do it their way instead of my way. But over time I may get used to it, and it may be a non-issue.
Motion Integration
The way Motion integrates is a little weird. I was used to the round-tripping they used to do where you could embed a Motion project right in the timeline. Now you have to export out your Motion project as footage and import it into FCPX. You can save out your Motion projects as FCPX effects, titles, or generators and they can be used in FCP X. You could sort of do that before, but now it is much tighter with that part of the integration. I think in the long run this will be better but I have to play with it and get used to it.
Wrap Up
This whole transition reminds me of the transition from OS 9 to OS X. Even though there had been years of OS development up until then, since it was a complete rewrite the first version (OS 10.0.0) was severely lacking in features. USB didn't even work at first. But by version 10.1, a lot had been addressed. Then 10.2 was fantastic and it just kept getting better from there. So I am confident that the same will transpire with FCPX. It may take a couple versions for it to surpass the functionality that it had before, but the groundwork has been laid for a paradigm shift in editing. I am hopping on board so that when it is ready, I will be ready with it. Plus....I don't really know any other editing software so I don't have a choice.
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