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IT Enquirer reviews Apple’s Final Cut Pro X: Very much a professional’s tool

Friday, July 8, 2011 · 11:31 am · 21 Comments

“Final Cut Pro X is a clear break with the past,” Alphons Brookson writes for IT Enquirer. “The way you do things in FCPX is completely different, and even the terms used are different.”

“I’m sure Final Cut Pro X doesn’t appeal (yet) to professional video editors because Apple has done what Apple is best at: bring down the software and the way you use it to a level of a 7-year old — which is basically what we want from software, until it interferes with our position as experts,” Brookson writes. “You can feel frustrated about that, but it’s inevitable, and Apple has a leading role in this evolution.”

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Brookson writes, “However, after having edited three videos with Final Cut Pro X, which translates in an experience of about three weeks, I can safely say FCPX in my humble opinion is very much a professional’s tool — it makes video editing not that simple that anyone can do it. To accomplish that, Apple would have had to throw a lot more overboard.”

Much more in the full review here.

Categories: News

Tags: Final Cut Pro X

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Comment Feed

21 Comments

Peter Blood

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 11:40 am · Reply

Ultimately, after a year or two’s seasoning, FCPX will be back in favor and people will wonder how they ever got along without it. Always some pain with a major gain, mostly just anguish over learning a new way of doing things for which we all must be dragged kicking and screaming from our comfort zone, to the NEW comfort zone.
- Mark
  
  Friday, July 8, 2011 - 12:19 pm · Reply
  
  New learning curve, starting at the bottom, but hopefully with a faster climb and a higher ceiling.
  - Able Archer
    
    Friday, July 8, 2011 - 1:19 pm · Reply
    
    The learning curve won’t be that great because it’s a consumer app. Most of the stuff pros want to do is either buried or doesn’t exist yet. I don’t need my NLE to automatically do things like sync (poorly I might add), cookie cutter color correction and grading, removing pop, hiss, hum and other background noise, or pretending to sweeten my audio for me. I also need NATIVE file support. Not just everything transcoded in the background to ProRes 422 or ProRes proxy. How does losing your 444 data by compressing constitute pro? Just a rhetorical question there.
    
    When you can do these things without the handholding that Apple seems to want to do (great for consumers for whom control over these elements is not required) then it will again be a pro tool. Magnetic timeline and all.
Jo

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 12:52 pm · Reply

Thank goodness Apple will save the planet from Adobe and other content creation companies frozen in the 1980s.
Delicious

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 12:58 pm · Reply

“Blue Waffle”

You’ll thank me later.
Billrey

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 1:09 pm · Reply

I love editing on Final Cut X. It’s so fast, so smooth compared to the older versions. You don’t need to wait for import, you don’t need to wait for render, and you can skim through clips super fast.

Amazing software.
Dude McFarland

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 1:15 pm · Reply

All of these reviews are funny, its like a certain group of people mentally go into a coma when Video Pros state their issues with FCPX and they don’t hear a damn thing being said.

They resort to ridiculous assumptions like “Well it must threaten your status as an expert!” or “they made it easier to use and you can’t handle it”. There are also the usual ‘Well I used it and it worked great for me so its a pro app!” drivel in each one.

I think these reviewers need to pull their heads out of their @sses personally.

Professionals in the industry have already given a list of issues, and its not simply that apple ‘changed the way you do something’ or is ‘threatening your expert status”.

Very specific things are missing in this first release and its been stated over and over on this forum, on other forums, blogs and other reviews.

Yet there is this large group of twits who just do not get it and keep pulling ‘ideas’ on why video professionals are unhappy straight out of their asses.

NO amount of ‘reviews’ or plugging your ears is going to change the minds of the people who use the software to make a living!
- Able Archer
  
  Friday, July 8, 2011 - 1:28 pm · Reply
  
  Thank you! +1
  
  The people saying such thing don’t understand that pros don’t want to have everything done for them automatically. We know what we want to do and know how to do it. We don’t want pop, hiss, hum and other background noise removed automatically. It may be there for a reason. We don’t need Apple to hold our hands through the process. We don’t need the app to “sweeten” our audio or give us cookie cutter color correction and grading. These things are great for the ameteur, prosumer, or hobbyist but pros require (most times) much greater control over their work.
  
  Thanks again.
  - Doug
    
    Friday, July 8, 2011 - 1:46 pm · Reply
    
    Although I realize that Colour and Soundtrack have fewer features than before, I actually think you missed dudes main point.
    
    Several deal breaker features are missing.
    
    His point is that without those, the paradigm shift, automation, etc. is irrelevant regardless of hoe useful they may or may not be.
- GM
  
  Sunday, July 10, 2011 - 2:01 am · Reply
  
  They’re called fanboys. They do not live in the real world. They live in their mom’s basement and strike out at anything that doesn’t glorify AAPL. They’re idiots. They don’t understand editing they just know how to bitch about the people who do. Again, they are idiots.
Mark Triplett

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 3:40 pm · Reply

Ok, here’s an easy compairison. Microsoft comes out with a version of Word that cannot open documents from any previous version. It also cannot import text from the clipboard unless it is in MS’s special language. All text must be in this format! Now, MS states that this is a new paradigm and everything will be easier. No you can’t use documents that you spent years working on and you don’t need to either because our new way is better. That’s exactly what Apple has done to us supposedly whiney editors with FCPX.
- Doug
  
  Friday, July 8, 2011 - 8:11 pm · Reply
  
  I actually think the better Comparison is when M$ made office 2008 without visual basic. For a very small number of people, this was a deal breaker.
  
  The key difference in my mind is that M$ announced VBs absence well in advance.
G4Dualie

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 4:24 pm · Reply

FCPX is what FCP would have been had Apple designed it from the ground up.

The core of FCP was played out and the stack was beginning to resemble Frankenstein. What Apple has delivered in FCPX is an ultra-modern, non-linear editing powerhouse, whose future looks bright.

The “pros” will have to adjust or go elsewhere. Those who feel bitter towards Apple have yet to grasp what it is Apple has given them. Sure they could have continued to develop FCP, but to what end? A dead one, that’s what end. The advancements of Apple hardware, now and into the future, have already eclipsed FCP’s core services and has long been overdue for a complete makeover.

Apple is willing to risk alienating hundreds of independents because what they’re offering in return is time and productivity. To independents like Able Archer, time is not as big a value as it is to the large houses. Me thinks Able Archer sacrifices his time to ensure he delivers a top drawer product. But when you’re already so good at what it is you do, time is the biggest resource hog.

Enter Apple and FCPX, the team that will deliver you from your own idiosyncrocies, the workarounds, and the third-party band-aids and stop-gap measures. Apple has taken the best FCP has to offer and did exactly what Able Archer didn’t want Apple to do; reduce the signal-to-noise, the very properties many so called “pros” have been using as a crutch all these years.

“Sloppy” people are accustomed to hiding in the noise. It has become a means to deploy their fudge factors, giving them an excuse for less than stellar work.

To use a skating analogy, imagine your first experience on a pro ice rink, compared to the flooded winter field you’ve skated on your whole life? The ice pond is rife with indentations, pimples and dips, cracks and crevices but you’ve made it work for you. Even with all its many imperfections, year after year, you honed your skills and bested your opponents.

The first time on pro glass, you’d probably fall on your ass! Suddenly, you don’t have the stubble of the ice to gain traction. No cracks to push off of, or slow you down. What’s more, the ice is so eerily quiet you can actually hear just how dull your pond skates are for the first time in your life.

Apple and FCPX have just handed you Pro Ice and sharp skates! Good luck trying to keep up with the real pros.
- Jack Greene
  
  Friday, July 8, 2011 - 4:42 pm · Reply
  
  You have no idea.
  
  How is FCP X an ultra-modern editing powerhouse? Everything is still being transcoded, just in the background. Good luck trying to export your finished edit when your files are still transcoding – but I guess it’s fine for people like you who upload to YouTube and that’s it.
  
  Speaking of “Enter Apple and FCPX, the team that will deliver you from your own idiosyncrocies, the workarounds, and the third-party band-aids and stop-gap measures” – this is so wrong it’s laughable.
  
  With FCP X, third-party bandaids are very much needed to do the most basic things. eg. Automatic Duck to Export an OMF and even then track assignments are a thing of the past. How is that better than: Export … Audio as OMF?!
  
  You can’t even view work on a broadcast monitor without a kludge.
  
  Enjoy making your home movies, but don’t tell people about what’s best for them when you are clearly ignorant of the issues involved.
  - G4Dualie
    
    Friday, July 8, 2011 - 5:03 pm · Reply
    
    Transcoding? ha ha ha
    - Jack Greene
      
      Friday, July 8, 2011 - 5:37 pm · Reply
      
      Like I said, you clearly have no idea.
Keith

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 5:16 pm · Reply

I was an Avid user starting in 1991 and made the move to FCP with version 5. I’ve purchased FCPX and the editing interface is terrific. The sequence window is much like that in the Jaleo software which ran on SGI Irix. I have a film project with 100 hours of performance footage and the footage will be broken down into approx. 200 sequences. I have not yet been able to see a way to manage the footage in FCPX. As of now I will proceed with FCP 7. Since the footage is an archive. It will have a long life in the chosen software for organization and editing. I’d like to get lucky and have options making it possible to use FCPX before the film transfers are completed 7 weeks from now. Any suggestions are appreciated.
- Keith
  
  Sunday, July 10, 2011 - 2:51 am · Reply
  
  I am replying to myself a day after my post. I bet that after Lion comes out and the server add on to Lion is available for $50.-, we will see the introduction of a new Final Cut media server to compliment FCPX. I would also bet that a slew of add ons to FCPX will be introduced following the availability of Lion. It all makes sense time wise. I hope I’m right.
PC Apologist

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 8:26 pm · Reply

How come people keep using quotation marks around the word pros, as if people who make a living editing pictures and sounds are somehow NOT professional?
John

Friday, July 8, 2011 - 10:40 pm · Reply

Fcp x is simply not usable in a broadcast setting. Pros have no time or money for games… So We are probably gone. Here is the irony… The novice or student or wiz kid Fcp X user aspiring to do a real film or broadcast release will actually be the ones that feel ripped off when they are fully invested in Fcp X, and have to switch to another program to really finish their project. And feel burnt. And they can sniff out a toy fast. And they want to be taken seriously. So they’ll want avid… Just for name sake.
Miles

Saturday, July 9, 2011 - 12:17 pm · Reply

The beginning of this guy’s review: “First of all: I am not a professional video editor and have never had to experience the stress of working against a deadline in a workgroup.” Nuff said.