Final Cut Pro X out!

[ZeroHour]

Anyone considering it?

I am curious but I found the last version a bit of a pig to use but likewise I find iMovie too simple.

It does certainly look good in concept and the price is a lot better but its a pity there is no way to produce dvd's any more

 

Anyone had a play yet?

 

 

UK Appstore: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/final-cut-pro/id424389933?mt=12 (£179.99)

US Appstore: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/final-cut-pro/id424389933?mt=12 ($299.99)

Edited June 22, 2011 by ZeroHour

[Soulfish]

Going to be getting the volume license for this. We've been waiting for Lion and Final Cut Pro X to come out before placing all of our Apple orders! It does look interesting, but its a shame that they seem to have "unbundled" various bits and taken out the dvd authoring tools

[ZeroHour]

Going to be getting the volume license for this. We've been waiting for Lion and Final Cut Pro X to come out before placing all of our Apple orders! It does look interesting, but its a shame that they seem to have "unbundled" various bits and taken out the dvd authoring tools

 

Also reading some reviews a lot of pro's involved in tv/media are saying its basically imovie plus and is missing a fair few critical features although that wouldnt affect me.

[GrumbleDook]

It really isn't 'Pro' anymore ... a number of functions have been limited or removed and whilst that would not affect me, it would affect many pro-end studios who have to work with external sound studios, those who require an archive to tape function, limitations on the use of monitors ...

 

It is a reworked FCE to me ... and for the limited stuff I do requiring more than iMovie, I could not justify that cost when I have a version of FCP that already does what is needed, even if it is a bit slower and misses a few new tools / improvements.

[ZeroHour]

Yeh I half expect a *pro* pack to be released later adding stuff in for a much larger fee more in line with FCS 3 prices.

One thing is nice is its smaller at 1gb odd but I fear this is at the expense of all the extra content though.

It would also be nice is there was a trial, thats a lot of quid to spend without it.

Edited June 22, 2011 by ZeroHour

[Arthur]

It's a pity there is no way to produce DVDs any more

That's probably because it won't be long until Apple removes DVD drives from all of their computers. The Mac App Store, MacBook Air and no more DVD Studio Pro, show Apple is going in this direction very quickly. I bet the new Core i3/i5 Mac mini's will be the next Mac's not to have an optical drive, followed by the redesigned MacBook Pro early 2012 (when Intel releases their Ivy Bridge processors).

 

Yeh I half expect a *pro* pack to be released later adding stuff in for a much larger fee more in line with FCS 3 prices.

FCP X = what iMovie '08 did to iMovie.

 

Anyone had a play yet?

This lengthy first look by Steve Martin is well worth a read.

 

My Overall Impressions

I love the organizational intelligence of FCP X and frankly it's long overdue. If you think about what a computer was born to do, it excels at chugging through and making sense of huge amounts of raw data. This is something a machine should be doing, otherwise it's something I have to do myself or pay someone else to do. I also like the smart analysis, background rendering, the skimmer and the Precision Editor. These features make the editing experience feel fluid, organic and less mechanical then track based editing applications. Also, I don't mind the single monitor. The Viewer is simple and clean and the interface does not feel cluttered. Anyone should feel at home editing on it from an iMac to a MacBook Air (which is the point of the single window interface). Also, adding effects, titles and transitions and editing them is infinitely easier and more intuitive. The interface is not daunting like Final Cut Pro 7 and anyone coming from iMovie will immediately "get it". And speaking of iMovie, (I didn't mention before) you can open iMovie projects and even your entire iMovie library into FCP X. This feature alone makes upgrading to FCP from iMovie a no-brainer. While FCP X will no doubt be referred to as a souped up version of iMovie by some, this is not my impression at all. I have been cutting a documentary on it among other things, and I just finished a tutorial that is close to 5 hours long which speaks to it's depth. I was very surprised at how much iron the Apple engineers put into it.

 

While FCP X is very promising, it still lacks key features for professionals. (I'm cutting it some heavy slack because I'm taking into account this is essentially a version 1 product built on an entirely new foundation). But the fact remains that there is no professional audio editing capabilities. With many of the features of Soundtrack Pro now rolled into FCP X, I still long for a full featured waveform editor to perform bread-and-butter audio editing chores. This coupled with the fact that there is no built-in way to collaborate with sound editors using ProTools or other DAWs is problematic.

 

Also there is currently no support for 3rd party effects plug ins. This is something that most likely will be addressed in the future. That said, Motion 5 is now much more that a motion graphics application. It's now a motion graphics publishing application and you can easily "publish" your own titles, effects, generators and transitions for any Final Cut Pro X editor. This is such an important development, that Mark Spencer and I produced an entire Motion 5 tutorial called Rigging & Publishing in Motion 5 to teach people how to "roll their own" FCP X visual content.

 

The other thing that needs improvement is color correction. While the simplicity of the Color Board will be great for the YouTube set, professional colorists will find the color grading tools wanting. With no way to export EDL's or XML files, there is no way to hand off your project to a Colorist - so again, you're stuck in your own sandbox until the next upgrade or someone really smart is able to write hooks into FCP X.

 

Another challenge I see with all the terminology changes is that old school editors may be put off by it. I hear them asking: "Did we really need a new editing metaphor called a "Storyline?" And while a legitimate case can be made as to why legacy FCP projects cannot be opened in FCP X, some editors will not be understanding. Also, it's yet to be seen how professional editors will react to the "magnetic timeline." Let me explain. The whole purpose of this new feature is to keep things in sync and prevent clip collisions. The magnetic timeline solves problems for the beginner who cannot fathom why a clip won't move from point a to point b. But knowing pro editors as I do, they may get frustrated wondering why an editing program is making these decisions for them. They will then turn to the Position tool (a tool I did not have time to cover in this article) to work around this "problem" and soon discover that this tool creates a different set of "problems". Most of the frustration will therefore result in not understanding the thinking behind a given tool or feature. But this is to be expected. I remember all the detractors when FCP 1 was released. Few broadcast professionals is 1999 took it seriously and many outright labeled it a toy.

 

I also believe many editors will be willing to give FCP X a shot for the price point alone. If not for that reason, they will buy it for the curiosity and novelty factor. If the features I mentioned above are eventually addressed, then yes, they will be invested in future versions. However, my Spidey-sense tells me they will keep using FCP 7 on a "wait and see" basis while watching how the market reacts to it over time. On the other extreme, they might, based on their initial experiences with this product, decide to abandon it altogether because it's just too foreign to them and it lacks the aforementioned "pro" features. Finally, only a company as big and successful as Apple would have resources and temerity to try to reinvent the wheel. From my perspective, FCP X is not so much revolutionary, but rather, evolutionary - because at the end of the day, your reasons for using Final Cut Pro have not changed - you're still using it to make movies. A re-invented wheel is still a wheel. (Source)

Edited June 22, 2011 by Arthur

[Guest simples12345]

you should of got a windows compuuter

[john]

Sounds like Premier Pro is the better tool then must admit iMovie is a quick neat little tool though

[ZeroHour]

Thanks Arthur, I have been looking at some videos showing effects etc and I have to say it looks impressive as I found iMovie just a bit too basic, it could do nice effects but its more limited by the tweaking of the effects.

 

[Arthur]

David Pogue has posted an update on his New York Times blog which clears up almost all of the misconceptions and half-truths regarding Final Cut Pro X.

 

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/professional-video-editors-weigh-in-on-final-cut-pro-x/

 

In Thursday’s paper, I reviewed Apple’s Final Cut Pro X, a professional video-editing program. It’s not an update of the existing Final Cut, which is by far the most popular such program; it’s completely new and radically redesigned. It looks different, its strengths are different — and after one day of using it, many professional video editors are running through the streets with pitchforks. [...]

 

I wrote my review from the perspective of an advanced amateur; I’m not a professional editor. I made four movies with Final Cut Pro X, including helping my son with a 20-minute final eighth-grade project. I found FCP X infinitely more powerful than iMovie, yet infinitely less intimidating than the old Final Cut.

 

But in this post, I’m going to address the concerns of professional video editors, one by one. The information here comes from consultation with Final Cut Pro X's product managers at Apple.

 

The “missing features” generally fall into three categories: features that are actually there and have just been moved around, features that Apple intends to restore and features that require a third-party (non-Apple) add-on or plug-in.

 

I’m not trying to be an Apple apologist; FCP X offers legions of amazing features that the old version didn’t have, but it doesn’t have all the features of the old one, either. It’s only fair, however, to separate what’s really missing from knee-jerk "It’s so different!" hysteria.

[Roberto]

I can't say I'd want to get this. I mean £300 for imovie plus a few extras? no, thanks.

[jha]

FCP X has certainly taken a bashing for its lack of pro features.

 

People in the youtube community like it because it's more advanced than iMovie, but the Pro users aren't happy. As ZeroHour said I think they'll release some sort of update.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXepNCs_iZo

[mac_shinobi]

David Pogue has posted an update on his New York Times blog which clears up almost all of the misconceptions and half-truths regarding Final Cut Pro X.

 

Professional Video Editors Weigh In on Final Cut Pro X - NYTimes.com

 

Was reading about David Pogues reaction on tuaw ref final cut pro X and think there was a sentance in there somewhere that suggested if people had both an old and a newer version that they would need to partition there HDD and have one version installed on one installation of OS X and the other version of final cut pro X on the other OS X installation which would require a reboot everytime you wanted to swap between versions of final cut

[Arthur]

According to the Apple website you don't have to install FCPX/FCS to a separate partition to use both at the same time (although that is the preferred method): http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4722

 

Wouldn't a professional video editor have more than one Mac? If so, couldn't they install FCPX on just one of them? Obviously no one is forcing them to buy the latest version of Final Cut either so they could stick with what they have.

[Roberto]

Wouldn't a professional video editor have more than one Mac? If so, couldn't they install FCPX on just one of them? Obviously no one is forcing them to buy the latest version of Final Cut either so they could stick with what they have.

 

I'm not sure that follows... I was going to make a somewhat flippant comment that a self employed "professional" driving instructor probably owns only the one car (or at least only one they can teach in) but even without looking at people like that, professional doesn't mean "£$£ big business £$£" - there are plenty of people out there working for themselves in a professional capacity who can't afford to carry a lot of spare kit.

[ZeroHour]

One thing I know is that both *seem* to run fine together according to a friend with both although there may be circumstances where a feature may not work but he has not found an issue yet and that both on the same partition.

[jha]

It's a start...

 

Import of previous Final Cut Pro XML coming soon to Final Cut Pro X | 9 to 5 Mac | Apple Intelligence

[Arthur]

I'm not sure that follows...

What do professional video editors do when their only Mac is tied up rendering video for 6+ hours and they have other projects they need to work on? If buying another computer meant you could earn even more money, wouldn't you do that?

[GrumbleDook]

What do professional video editors do when their only Mac is tied up rendering video for 6+ hours and they have other projects they need to work on? If buying another computer meant you could earn even more money, wouldn't you do that?

 

But if you are using FCPX on one machine, then you have to have it on the other one to do the rendering too. And why would you work on one product one day, and then swap to a different product the next day ... there is enough of a feature set change (or omission) for it to be a pain to swap all the time.

 

There is also a lot of planning done for using dead hours for that side of things if you are only on one machine.

[Arthur]

But if you are using FCPX on one machine, then you have to have it on the other one to do the rendering too.

Couldn't you use Compressor / QMaster?

 

    Mac One                 Mac Two
+--------------+        +--------------+
| FCP 7        | +----> | Compressor   |
|--------------|        |--------------|
| Compressor   | <----+ | FCP X        |
+--------------+        +--------------+

 

 

And why would you work on one product one day, and then swap to a different product the next day...

Obviously you wouldn't attempt to learn something completely new mid-project, but you would need to do it at some point in the future.

 

Since you can no longer purchase additional licenses for FCP/FCS, if you did buy a second Mac tomorrow, you would have to buy Final Cut Pro X anyway.

 

there is enough of a feature set change (or omission) for it to be a pain to swap all the time.

The same could be said about people recommending switching from Final Cut Pro to Premiere Pro.

 

There is also a lot of planning done for using dead hours for that side of things if you are only on one machine.

True, but there only so many dead hours in a day. Maybe it's just me, but I would be worried if I relied on a single computer (just in case it stops working).

[jha]

Apple have answered a few questions...

 

Apple - Final Cut Pro X - Answers to common questions.

[Arthur]

First major update to Final Cut Pro X is out!

 

Apple releases major update to Final Cut Pro X, release demo version

 

Apple on Tuesday released a major new version of Final Cut Pro X, the first update to the company’s professional video application since it was released in late June.

 

Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1 focuses on implementing the top user requested features into the application to help professionals get their work done more efficiently.

 

“We got a lot of feedback from our professional users,” Richard Townhill, Apple’s senior director applications marketing, told The Loop. “We listened to the pros and have taken their top feature requests and put them in this update.” (Source)

[Arthur]

FCP X trial can be downloaded from here... FCPX_Trial_10.0.1.dmg

[mac_shinobi]

If you had a good enough spec machine and OS X Lion

 

OS X Lion Allows Running Multiple Copies on the Same Machine (Virtualization) - Mac Rumors

 

You could run virtual machines of OS X on OS X Lion - not sure if that would give you enough oommmppphh / power to do what you do in FCP or FC X ??

[Arthur]

You could run virtual machines of OS X on OS X Lion - not sure if that would give you enough oommmppphh / power to do what you do in FCP or FCP X?

I don't think using FCP/X would be much fun in a VM with Lion.

 

Apple recently changed its policy regarding virtualization of OS X non-server versions, so booting Lion in a VM is now legal and supported by both Parallels Desktop 7 and VMware Fusion 4. This is obviously of limited appeal to end users and meant to be something tech support types would want to use for sandboxing testing environments. Both VMware and Parallels have support for sharing, but no 3D acceleration for Lion VMs.

 

I later realized the lack of 3D support means no acceleration for any GPU functions at all, video included. Trying to play back a video in QuickTime was fruitless since it had no hardware acceleration—it just stuttered. I get that Lion VMs aren't going to see the same level of support as Windows clients since the market is so small, but if it's ostensibly meant to be used as a testbed for OS X support, a lack of hardware-accelerated video is definitely setting the bar too low. (Source)

 

http://i.imgur.com/xPrcG.jpg