The Debate
In the editing world, professionally, and non professionally, this has been the discussion of much debate over the last year. Which editing program do I use to tell my stories? I’ve done much researching online and use both programs frequently. This blog is just my thoughts on the matter, and I in no way intend to make a statement that says one is superior to the other. But which do I prefer overall? Well, that is a very tough question for me to answer.
Let’s start with Final Cut Pro X. Most proficient editors like myself were less than ecstatic when Apple released this software. While we were excited by the price of $299 from the App store, the more we learned about what we were getting inside the program and what was being taken away from legacy worried us. It worried me. I’ve been using FCP legacy for more than 10 years. The lost support for DVD studio pro, and Color was flabbergasting to me. But still, I watched to demo of FCPX and was blown away by what they showed. It was different. I’ve never seen NLE like that. Everything seemed to work effortlessly. There was a new overall feature “Magnetic Timeline” that would prevent me from ever making a stupid drag and drop mistake, the new simpler way of making L and J cuts. Even the integration of a brand new Color corrector, while still not Legacy’s Color, was very intriguing.
Then a few months later, FCPX was released. All hell broke loose from editors everywhere. To say FCPX wasn’t excepted in its infancy is an understatement. The program was a mess. Buggy, insufficient to my needs and completely unstable and unusable. The moment I realized what a bad situation Apple was in was when I started FCPX and immediately saw “Import from iMovie”. Um. Huh? What the hell is this? The Impression that faithful legacy editors had about FCPX was bashed in their faces when they saw that text. Crap. It’s not really a wonder why so many people thought of it as iMovie on steroids. It even had the overall look of iMovie. We are professional editors, Apple. What is this pile?
Final Cut Pro X was shunned the moment of its release. People demanded refunds. The demand was so great that Apple, actually succumbed to a few which was completely against the contract in the App store. To make an increasingly long story short, (to late.) Apple screwed the pooch with the release of FCPX, and It seemed FCP was dead.
But I stuck with the program, dabbling in it every now and again while still using Legacy. Then, the upgrades started coming from Apple, who seemed to realize they made a mistake with how soon they released it. Not at first, mind you, because they made a ton of money. Which is something that makes me believe what people say about Apple. They are forgetting their professional market and focusing on their consumers. But that’s another blog entry. Regardless, the updates came, and Final Cut Pro X started to become more than just iMovie on steroids in my eyes. I started using it more, becoming proficient with the shortcut keys and magnetic timeline. Editing became much faster and more enjoyable than I have ever experienced. There were still major bugs of course (the keyword organization still baffles me.) but overall, editing became spectacular again. Then, with the Multi-cam update in version 10.0.3, a feature I using exclusively for weddings, I switched from Legacy to X for good. Even now, when I return to Legacy, the program feels ancient, slow, and unusable to me. Now with the release of version 10.0.6 it feels like we are returning to the new and improved FCP that Apple was talking about a year ago.
However, regardless of how I felt and still feel about editing with Final Cut Pro X, there were still a few problems with the program. One of the biggest was roundtrip editing. It’s not integrated the way I want it to be with Motion. Sure you can create effects in motion and have them automatically show up in X. But why can’t you send a clip directly to motion from X and do more advanced editing effects? These are the types of things I use Motion for. And where was the roundtrip to Adobe After Effects we had in Legacy? This is were Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 comes in.
Continued in part 2
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
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