Tell me what is GOOD about FCP X

[Ben Fullerton]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

Video Retime advantage. In Retiming (Command R), select a range and change the speed of the selected range. It will ramp into and out of the range. Select Optical Flow generally for best quality. Simply grab the in or out of the range and move to change the speed of the range. The one downside is there's no keyframe control over the ramp in/out.

Agree. I would love to have control over the length of the ramp in/out.

[Brett Sherman]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

Make connected clip a Secondary Storyline and add a dissolve at the end.

So, dissolves are the only effects you can use to get between secondary and primary storyline? That's pretty lame. The whole secondary, primary thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems like with the magnetic timeline they were trying to free us from track-based editing - which is great. However, it's all the more puzzling since by freeing us, they made a structure which is actually more limiting.

Personally, I think they should ditch the whole storyline business as I don't think it helps anyone. Why can't you just put an effect on the outgoing clip and it just transitions to the clip that is shown next regardless of position. Just like fade-out works now, but with the ability to use two-sided transitions too.

[Craig Seeman]

Originally Posted by Brett Sherman

So, dissolves are the only effects you can use to get between secondary and primary storyline? That's pretty lame. The whole secondary, primary thing doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It seems like with the magnetic timeline they were trying to free us from track-based editing - which is great. However, it's all the more puzzling since by freeing us, they made a structure which is actually more limiting.

Personally, I think they should ditch the whole storyline business as I don't think it helps anyone. Why can't you just put an effect on the outgoing clip and it just transitions to the clip that is shown next regardless of position. Just like fade-out works now, but with the ability to use two-sided transitions too.

Use any transition you'd like. Generally I avoid cheese though.

Connected Clips and Storylines are more flexible than tracks. Both serve different purposes though. They both maintain a relationship to what they're connected to. When I create a vertical relationship I want to maintain that relationship without having to do complex clip selection to move something. Connected clips are exclusively vertical. Storylines are both horizontal and vertical. It's extremely easy to make Connected Clips into a Storyline if desired. Select clips and Command G or hold down G and brink two Connected Clips in contact with each other (so that one can then add a transition).

[Brett Sherman]

Right, I agree with you about cheese. But even fairly simple two-sided transitions are useful, like iris wipe or push. So are you saying if you put a push transition on a clip in the secondary storyline, it will be smart enough to push out the secondary storyline clip and push on the primary storyline clip it's transitioning to? Or is it only going to affect the secondary storyline clip?

[Craig Seeman]

Not that I've tried every transitions but wipes work as well.

I think Apple's use of the term "trackless" was another marketing faux pax.
Rather than adding tracks and fill them with clips, you add the clips and convert them to track mode if you need it. It's hard to make that an attractive marketing bite though.

BTW another thing to like about this kind of track creation as that the audio and video can be seen/used together.

In legacy FCP and other NLEs if you're putting video on Video Track 5, your complimentary audio may be on Audio Tracks 9 and 10 with many intervening tracks. That would actually be one of the problem situations where you don't notice that they're connected in old NLEs and you move video and nasty things might happen. Now you can see they're together. If you don't want them to travel, select detach audio and it immediately goes below the Primary Storyline almost like "old" audio track.

I can still see some potential issues and confusion with the new was as well but as you play with it, you can come up with some feature requests.

[James Campbell]

Craig, your perspective is very helpful, thanks. Rather than taking the perspective of either "the sky fell" or "things are perfect," you're helping to take the worry off by explaining solutions rather than ideology. I'm in the midst of the Ripple training videos for FCP X, so I'm not yet on the lessons of what you're describing, but I've bookmarked this webpage for when I get there.

[Brett Sherman]

Originally Posted by Craig Seeman

I think Apple's use of the term "trackless" was another marketing faux pax.Rather than adding tracks and fill them with clips, you add the clips and convert them to track mode if you need it. It's hard to make that an attractive marketing bite though. BTW another thing to like about this kind of track creation as that the audio and video can be seen/used together.

This is one of the things I find most exciting about FCP X. I spend an awful lot of time dealing with track collisions in FCP 7. That being said, FCP X, I think works well with simple editing. However, once you add in complications I think it becomes more cumbersome. Let's say for example you have an interview where in between sentences someone slams a door. In FCP 7 it was easy to just insert ambient audio in the audio track. It took like 3 keystrokes - bing bang boom - done. Now it's much more cumbersome you have to detach the audio, split it, delete the middle section, insert the new audio, reconnect everything together.

And back to my transition between storylines. I would wager a significant amount that transitions between two storylines are not two-sided. In otherwords, wipes would only work if you are wiping out the secondary storyline. If you want to wipe on the primary storyline I think you are SOL. There just isn't an easy way to accomplish this. With FCP 7 it was relatively easy, you just move the clips on the same track - done.

It could be that I just don't know the workarounds, since I haven't fully evaluated FCP X. But I do think there are still critical missing features that wouldn't have taken Apple a lot of time to implement had they had their head in the game. I think half the griping about FCP X would be gone if it had been able to open FCP 7 projects and export audio and video for post-processing.

[Steve Kalle]

Hey Craig,

Man, you are fighting an uphill battle on an 80 degree incline on an iceberg during the middle of winter in a blizzard near Antarctica :)

Even though I don't totally agree with you on FCPX, I respect your effort.

[Shufiyan Shukur]

It looks good, but it ain't no good to me if it doesn't support my Canon's XF mxf files ... :-(

[Ray Sigmond]

Shufiyan:

Take a look at this thread and it might give you a temporary work around until FCP X supports the Canon XF Series

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/canon-xf...nal-cut-x.html

[Ben Fullerton]

Originally Posted by Shufiyan Shukur

It looks good, but it ain't no good to me if it doesn't support my Canon's XF mxf files ... :-(

Won't the ProRes conversion on Import take care of that? Or does it not even read them enough to do that...?

[David Edwards]

Im starting to love this program, been using FCP6 for years and never upgraded to 7 dur to rumours of a revolutionary new version. First impression not being able to import old projects to it, hmm, yes there are some downfalls, no multicam, no idea of duplicate frames being used etc etc. But the benefits far outweigh the faults. Big learning curve, yes but the more I use it, the less I want to revert back to old projects (not completed) to finish them off.

[Shufiyan Shukur]

Originally Posted by Ben Fullerton

Won't the ProRes conversion on Import take care of that? Or does it not even read them enough to do that...?

I haven't gotten X to even 'see' the mxf either from the card or from the camera.

Also, my FCP 7 which once upon a time had no problems to log and transfer the mxf footage, now doesn't. It could be that I didn't manually archive FCP 7 on a separate partition - an advice I read somewhere, but was too late to follow.

I am hoping for some divine intervention for someone (Canon or Apple or an angel) to write the plugin for X to recognise mxf.

[Ben Fullerton]

That sucks. Hope they fix it soon!

In the meantime would converting first in something like MPEG Streamclip be a viable workaround? I think that program can convert just about anything into just about anything else. I would think maybe you could turn all you mxf in prores and then ingest into X.

[Dave Burckhard]

The following is just a story. Doesn't prove anything inherently "good" about FCPX but shows it ain't a hack.

I had downloaded a copy of FCPX to a Mac I normally use for business administration work rather than operational work (editing and such) only two hours before getting a call. It was a client who needed me to rework a .wmv movie he was using for years. He wanted to add some new clips and photos and change the copyrighted music to something that would pass copyright sensitive prospects to which he was pitching the following day. I was hours away from my edit machine and initially told my client so and couldn't do the job in the next hour or two. He was desperate and I realized I did have a means to edit if not the ultimate in confidence.

IHaving never use the program and only seeing demos from the NAB supermeet and a few minutes of a Larry Jordon FCPX demo, I launched FCPX. First thing, of course, I discovered what I suspected of course that I would need to transcode the .wmv into something I could work. Which I did. After a few minutes of figuring stuff out, I was realizing I was making progress. Muscle memory had me pointing the cursor to empty spaces but once I figured out basic trims and transition applications, I was happily realizing that some new ways to do common tasks were intuitively better than previous FCP versions. In a matter of less than an hour I had made the cuts, transitions, did some color work, inserted some royalty-free music and posted a copy to YouTube for client review who was delighted at the results. Unfortunately, FCPX doesn't output in .wmv so I used another resource to do that.

I'm sure most of us could have done all that but I will say FCPX is far more intuitive and isn't cloaked in what I still think are curiously difficult ways of doing things in previous versions. I still have an old copy of FCP in my back pocket but will start all new jobs in FCPX. I hate not having some capabilities but every time I've faced one, I've found a suitable workaround. No, I haven't had to import .xml but so far so lucky.

Dave Burckhard
PicturePoint On-line