8 thoughts on “Final Cut Pro X success stories”

1. These success stories are no doubt few and far between. The overall reaction from the professional editing community has been a giant WTF. There will always be exceptions, but that’s hardly anything worth touting over.

   I tried really hard to like FCP X. Gave it the full 30 days of messing around, asking questions in the forums and figuring things out, I even used it to cut together a fairly elaborate five minute demo video for a TV series in development, but in the end I found myself yearning for the simplicity and freedom of FCP 7.

   That magnetic timeline thing is way too high-concept. Far too often I found myself trying to think of how the timeline was going to react if I added, removed or changed something. The simplicity of FCP 7’s track based timeline made editing – and experimenting – a breeze. Apple really seems to be playing up this whole notion of no longer going out of sync with the magnetic timeline, but I’ve never had sync issues with FCP 7 so I’m not really sure what that’s all about. Overall I just felt like I was having to click way more often to do way less in the magnetic timeline. I made due, but that’s hardly how I want to go about my work as an editor.

   I also can’t understand why they had to do away with the separate source monitor. It makes no sense. Often you need to be able to compare your source material to where you are in your sequence. Not having separate monitors for this is like editing half blind.

   There were some cool new features in FCP X that I grew really fond of. It’s just such a shame those couldn’t have been implemented into the setup that already worked so well. Even if they did have to rebuild FCP from the ground up for the 64-bit goodness. They threw out the baby with the bathwater. Such a shame.

2. Final Cut Pro X paid testimony stories.

3. Really stuck up old sticks in the mud editors – I was always afraid of picking up Final Cut Pro 7 because it looked like it was from the 90s and looking back at its intro video it hasn’t changed since day one (in any significant way) – I’m not an old fart that grew up with that crappy interface – instead I refused to use it because I didn’t want a headache using an ugly app.

   The new Final Cut Pro X is an amazing piece of software – I’m doing multi cam with around 10 cameras and the software finds exactly where the cams match up (even with crappy crappy audio sources) – I’m editing in 3D with Dashwood’s amazing plugin that from the videos looks even better than what was around for the limited interface of Final Cut Pro 7. And you know what I’m getting paid to video edit – get off your soap box of Apple messed up – no they didn’t – the new app is great and much more powerful than the original app that hide its features under a terrible interface. 

   Your ego/value is the only thing that is hurt – because you spent the time to learn how to use a terribly designed app that takes work to learn your so called value is less. An app should not be hard to use or ugly to look at – this is Apple after all – it was time to start from scratch and this is a fantastic start.

4. I love all these conflicting opinions. It’s like listening to old QuarkXpress users argue with InDesign CS2 adopters just a few years ago.

5. So if I have issues with something you like and I voice those issuse, I’m on a soap box with a hurt ego?

   Like I said, I thought FCP X had some great new features, but the actual process of editing in the magnetic timeline, which has too much “behaviour” for my liking, and the lack of a source monitor were what stood in the way of my being able to work comfortably and efficiently with it.

   I started editing on Premiere 5.1c, then moved onto Premiere Pro and in the last few year only came to Final Cut Pro 6 and then 7. I’m not afraid of change or beholden to any one piece of software. I just want an editing interface that makes sense to me. FCP X wasn’t that interface. Happy it works for you, but try not to assume that this is the bar by which all other editors must adhere to lest they be stuck in the mud as you say.

6. Yeah cause there’s no way anyone could like something you think is crap. So they must be paid to claim it is good. 

   I wonder how much Google is paying folks to claim how awesome Android is. Oh wait, you’ll say that it is great and it’s the iPhone etc that are crap and Apple is paying for those stories also

7. Android is an awesome operating system, and that’s great because it bolsters the competition with the iPhone and iOS and encourages Apple to be more cutting edge.

   The point I am trying to make in my sarcastic comment is that it’s really surprising to see that there are this many people that find Final Cut Pro X useful. Ever since its release, the media has been pegging it as a horrible upgrade and has had a high amount of negative criticism towards the software.

8. The media makes a negative story out of the sun shinning 🙂 – thats what they do to drive traffic – in the tech press they blow everything out of proportion with various gates – glass gate, antenna gate, heat gate, battery gate and 20x more of those – users don’t have the problem its the media