New FCP coming soon~ ??

[David Dixon]

FCPX can have scads of audio layers, and due to the magnetic timeline, in places where you don't need more than 1 or 2, those will snug up to the primary "timeline" so they're easy to see. But if you want a certain audio track to "always" be three layers down from the bottom video track - it might be possible but that's not the way FCPX goes at it.

Bill, thanks for the info about doing network TV with a laptop. Sorry, it makes me think of that line from Kevin Smith in Transformers 1 - "this is a guy who shut down freakin' NORAD with a laptop!"

It is true that recent Macs are much snappier with FCPX. Something to do with system busses for RAM and hard drive access (AVX or something). My 2008 8-core MacPro (can't believe it will soon be 6 years old) will still render pretty fast, but actual snappiness of the interface - selecting clips, changing tools, dragging, etc. is sluggish and is actually faster on my wife's mid-2011 i5 iMac.

So after hearing the details on the new MacPro I've decided its power/price ratio is overkill for my needs, and I ordered the fastest 27" iMac just this morning! :-)

[Chip Gallo]

Kevin, I have been doing several audio sources for the ice skating videos I work on with FCPX. I have CD music, announcer and audience sounds and occasionally other sweetening. I migrated from Sony Vegas Pro 10 which was a track paradigm. Since I tend to edit a couple of times over the year in bursts of activity, it took about a year to feel comfortable. I guess a full time production editor would be wary of the down time (or reduced output time), but now I feel like I get more done with less confusion.

I had no prior Final Cut Pro experience so no "unlearning" to do.

[Bill Davis]

Kevin,

There are two schools of thought about audio in X.

The first is people who have established workflows and habits and who feel the need to keep working largely the same way they have in the past - just on newer software. They will be disappointed in X because that's NOT how it works.

The second group is editors who are comfortable with tossing out some of their old habit in order to build new ones that are potentially more effective. Those are the people who will come to X and in a year or so, wonder why they didn't change MUCH sooner.

Audio (and timeline editing in general) has traditionally been a track based thing. It's comforting. Video up there, audio down there, nothing to think about.

But in X, that rigid system has been re-invented. Audio tracks are still possible - and I have them in 95% of my story lines. I have storylines that "appear" to be quite traditional, video on top, green audio tracks on the bottom. But the point is you are not constrained to that form. Tracks are now no longer "rigid" in X. Clips jump and move tracks in order to solve other problems. (such as clip collisions - where dragging an audio or video clip down a track would knock out anything on that same track via overwrite)

If that was all it did in that case (avoid clip collisions) it would be a poor system - because potentially, you'd be un-certain where your audio clips would land after multiple moves.

But that's the cohesive genius of X. You have new tools such as the timeline index and Roles which are database driven links into ALL the assets on your timeline. So locating assets in a project storyline is trivial. Search for the clip via the index - and it highlights on the storyline and the skimmer bar moves to it.

Suddenly, the "need" for structured tracks becomes much less important. You don't need to remember where a thing is in virtual physical space if you have a computerized system that can wisk it to your fingertips with a keystroke or two.

And with Roles, you can suddenly output things like stems and alt mixes using sort rules and keywords.

This is the nature of X compared to other NLEs. The entire system is built on metadata, range tagging and database concepts, so lots and lots of things simply don't need to work the way they used to.

And as everyone knows from operating even simple databases such as phone lists - the more work you do putting things INTO the system - the more powerful it becomes for the user.

So the power of X will GROW as you learn to build out your editing database. You end up with common assets that live in your Event Browser, opens, audio snippets, prior whole projects, editable graphics, etc, etc - that become available as building blocks for your new work.

Honestly, it's transformed the way I edit. I'm getting a lot more work done more easily than ever in my career. Now to be fair, this is partly because I have the luxury of being able to focus my practice on the kind of work I enjoy doing - which is primarily informational. I don't do feature work, so I'll leave that for others to discuss.

But I can tell you that having just edited the Rocky Mountain Emmy Awards shows - and having just viewed more than 150 of the finest news stories from the top video producers in the southwest - theres' not a single one of the winning pieces that X would have had the slightest problem cutting - and I suspect an experienced user would have gotten done faster. It's just the nature of the rapid assembly and rapid revision that's part of the DNA of FCP-X.

[William Hohauser]

I recently used a rather simple workaround (found it in a web search) for the lack of discreet audio tracks for a project where the audio designer needed the different voice tracks separated by speaker. All you do is create slug for each track and place them below the primary storyline. Label each slug for the track and then place the audio files below that slug, later you can select the track and assign it a role. When exporting just be sure to select the option to split the tracks by roles and you get separate audio tracks the length of the project to send out. This works great when the audio is not with on-screen video. For that I use an add-on called Final Cat Pro (yes, really) which can find all clips on a timeline that are from the same file. Once those are all selected I add a role.

[John Nantz]

Hi Kevin - just read your post and after reading it I thought this article on Apples site might be of interest.

The article is about a newspaper, the "Globe and Mail", Canada's largest. Yes, I know, it is a newspaper ... but, they also have a video section and that section uses FCPX. If you're in the news business then the comments in the section "News Travels Fast" (in the article) would probably be of interest.

Apple - Final Cut Pro X - In Action - The Globe and Mail

There are other articles at Apple - Final Cut Pro X - In Action

[Kevin Langdon]

Thanks guys. Some interesting views and material to investigate and look through.

[Dave Partington]

Interesting posts.

I'd been a professional user of FCP for a very long time, up to FCP7. I bought FCPX on day one and played with it. I didn't run with the pack of condemning it. I read the manual (who else does that?), I even watched all of Larry Jordan's initial tutorial videos. FCPX was good, but as Larry himself said at the time, it wasn't ready for prime time. Well, not my kind of prime time anyway.

There were big holes, everyone knew that. But I had waited and waited (hanging on with FCP7) for better native media support and when FCPX launched I had paid my money, done the 3-4 weeks of testing and then jumped ship to Adobe Premiere Pro. We used Pr for a couple of years as the main editing app but I kept my eye on FCPX until eventually 10.0.6 came. Then we started using it for corporate jobs but kept most of of the multi cam jobs within Premiere Pro.

Recently (perhaps the last 6 months) we've gradually migrated over to 100% FCPX. Why? It's faster. Faster to ingest (Premiere Pro takes forever to conform audio!), faster to edit, much better built in colour grading (colour in Premier Pro is a joke and needs Colorista or other plugins for much of the work), faster to export etc etc (comparisons we did on the same timeline had FCPX exporting in 35 mins and Premiere Pro taking 6 hours).

The one weak link for me is still audio. I'm not talking about tracks, but audio in general. I'm hoping Apple has some improvements in the pipeline.

The biggest problem I have with audio is not the day to day cutting of corporate video, that's fine. It's in the long form multicam productions with multiple audio channels (think 10-12 tracks of audio). Cutting multi cam audio is awkward at best. When ever you cut the video it also cuts the audio. PITA! So, you end up disabling audio from all but one clip and stretching it out so you can cross fade between different mics as needed. Then you realise you need to make a video cut due to audio and boom! It's all gone. So you have to make other changes to the way audio it dropped in to the sequence and try again. It's a pain. It's much easier to do multi cam audio in Premier Pro, but the rest of FCPX workflow is (IMHO) worth the effort of doing it in FCPX.

I'm not one to jump on the bandwagon of expectations of up coming releases. I will wait until it's released and see what happens. It looks like being December now. I can live with that. I just hope they have found some way to bring better audio mixing and (per track/role) metering. I really miss being able to see what clip/track is causing the spikes in audio. While you can look at wave forms it doesn't always tell the whole story in real time.

So, Apple, better audio metering please. Stereo meters is for final output, not editing.

[Mark Ahrens]

If you're curious as to the direction the new update will go, take a look at the fcpx.tv's "100+ Requests for Final Cut Pro X 10.1" Final Cut Pro X Request list
I think a lot of the evolution of the features can be found on that list.

I'm loving it after only 2-3 weeks, excited about editing again! The integrated Motion engine is big for me, too.

[Bill Davis]

This is just me and I know nothing special...

But that said, I have a sneaking suspicion that the December release won't have a ton of new features.

(BTW, I'd LOVE to be wrong about this!)

My reasoning is that the new MacPro is all about new internal plumbing built to deliver blazing speed. I think optimizing stuff like Grand Central Dispatch and access to the new dual GPU architecture will deliver more boost to the FCP-X ecosystem than adding a bunch of new features.

I think that there are lots of roadmaps and plans inside the X team for revising/adding capabilities and handing production tasks such as more flexible audio handling for the small but important top tier classes of editors who need those advanced capabilities.

But being able to load up 16 tracks of modestly compressed 4k footage and have it transcode them wickedly fast - will do a whole lot more good for more users than re-working how to handle 32 tracks of film soundtrack audio - a thing that only affects perhaps one our of a thousand editors.

My speculation only. I could be totally wrong here.

[Caleb Reynolds]

I want to chime in and say Apple BETTER not go back to the old FCP7 style.

I knew most of the complainers had little to actually complain about. I love it, have motion, compressor, 7tox, and aftereffects (for things I can't do in motion).

I'm Apple Certified in FCP 7 & FCP X. I use FCP X now almost exclusively, if I have to temporarily go back to FCP 7 for a client, it seems too old school to me. Looking forward to 10.1.