So, as every hour in the last 3 weeks, I looked over the RSS feeds, ’till I saw the words I was hoping for. “Apple releases Final Cut Pro X”. Great! Since may 30th I’ve been sitting on footage that needed to be edited, and my poor old mac couldn’t handle the 1080p HDSLR footage.
I got a new mac, and reinstalled Final Cut Pro 7, until I realized the problem wasn’t solely my mac, it was FCP. It couldn’t handle more than 1 processor and 4 gig RAM.
So yeah. Of course I’m one of those usual early adapters, but in this case I had no choice. I needed a more powerful HD Editing system.
Enter Final Cut Pro X.
So the second I read Apple released it, and I got out of the meeting, I had 25 minutes to get to the bus stop for my next destination, and pass a store for iTunes credit. Worst part of that is, the walk to the bus stop was 18 minutes. If I waited, I had to spent all evening lusting over screenshots, and wait till the stores re-opened tomorrow morning. No F-in way.
So some running and 240 euro later, I had in my hands 6 iTunes Cards. A lot of money, but it’s an investment of course.
After some code redeeming on my iPad, I sent the buy order through VLC on my iPad.
When I finally got home, I booted the software, and got welcomed by this shiny screen:
So enough backstory, here is what you all came for. How I experienced Final Cut Pro X.
First thoughts: iMovie XL.
Second thoughts: Oh, THERE is that button. And that button, and that slider.
See, FCP isn’t that different. It still does the same things, still uses the same shortcuts. In fact, when you know the shortcuts it’s very fast to work with.
One of the weirdest things is pressing Cmd+S as you used to do every 5 minutes, and have nothing happen. It has autosave, and the one time that it hung completely, and I had to force quit (I was searching for iTunes songs), it opened right where I left, no harm done. I can’t wait till Lion’s versioning.
I must say, It works very smooth, yet sometimes I feel it still isn’t completely fool proof. A small random hang at times, making it a bit less smooth. But that might just be me doing something wrong, because as you see, my system is great:
(yes, 12 Gig Ram. No more problems having Aperture, FCP, Photoshop, Illustrator, iTunes and Firefox open at the same time and do some work). :P
Anyhow!
Let Downs:
- Doesn’t import FCP 7 projects yet. It does import iMovie. Riiiiight. (to be added in next update)
- No copy of light and effects to other clips.
- No Multicam yet (to be added in next update)
- Confusing way of color matching.
- Not preview friendly versions of having effects, or a simple way to remove effects.
- All FCP Events are listed in the project. So if you want private edits, you need to have those on removable media. + I wonder how fast that’ll work at a terra of footage in there.
- Can’t no longer have a ‘whitespace’ and edit bit by bit.
- Don’t see a way for easy multiple timelines. Or include full timelines in other projects.
- Magnetic playhead isn’t always handy to select and go to the inspector.
Happy feelings:
- Grand Central Dispatch. Works great with all 4 cores and available RAM.
- Background Rendering. Also for export!
- No more active 2nd screen. It now is an independent screen.
- SPEED!
- Magnetic Timeline
- Lots of presets in color and audio editing
- Free audio samples!
- Rolling Shutter!
- Quick video stabilization in the background!
- Auto converting to prorez
- All render files in 1 folder. Great for archiving. No more thousand folders of files.
- Keywords. But that one’s a bitch if you need to go all over that for smaller projects. The auto analyzer is amazing though, but you better give it some time to do it’s job.
- Quick uploading to YouTube!
That’s about it I can come up with in the first moments. All by all, I can’t wait for 10.1, which will surely come from Apple. I suggest that you’ll take the plunge, and get to know it, and build it in a new workflow, while finishing older projects, or re-starting them. (The restarting might not be the worst for small edits. I mean, I recreated a project from scratch that’s even better in about an hour.)
For now, it’ll rate it a B+, but I’m sure it’ll upgrade to A+++ soon enough, once Apple adds Multicam and importing older projects.
