We were talking about this over on the soopa-seekrit moderators' forum on the LAFCPUG message board.
My take on it is that it's some real design flaws multiplied horrifically by operator error. Final Cut, for all its virtues and vices, will happily let you do things that are monumentally stupid. Want to intercut 1080p24 material with stuff you got off a webcam? Knock yourself out! Wanna load a bunch of CMYK JPEGs in one of your bins? Go nuts! Want to store your render cache on a network drive mounted over a T1 line that a squirrel's chewed on? You're the boss!
It's not always easy to say who's to blame when an editor does something not-obviously-stupid. If it's covered in the manual, the manual is three thousand pages long. And if it's not covered in the manual, then you can hardly blame the editor for not having the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
It's just a little unfair to assert that Final Cut must necessarily be unreliable and crashy. If you do things the right way, it's rock-solid stable and very fast. But the "right way" is often something you have to figure out through extensive trial and error.
As for the guy's specific points, saying that Final Cut doesn't interoperate is just bullshit. Of course you can come out via EDL, which a great many people do; my best friend runs a post house that's getting more and more Final Cut work, and they send EDLs off to transfer houses all the time. But increasingly, XML is their transport of choice.
It's true that project management in Final Cut is a pain, but that falls into the category of the program letting you do things that won't work well. If you load up a project file to the point where it's a gigabyte and a half in size, Final Cut will never stop you and say "Yo, doofus, you're overdoing it here. Cut it out." It'll just let you keep going until it breaks. But long before Final Cut breaks, you've created for yourself a project file that's totally unusable anyway, so it's not unreasonable to assert that you never should have gotten to that point in the first place.
But some of the stuff the guy says is just … well, wrong. Like:
When you import media with a different frame rate or format from your project, you have to render it to make it run smoothly.
True enough … depending on your definition of "smoothly." Most of the time I never bother rendering stuff like this until pretty late in the process. I know I'm seeing a real-time preview, and I'm fine with that.
When you move these shots around they lose their render
Generally untrue. While Final Cut absolutely can lose render files (most notoriously if you disable a track), and while those are the ones you remember, most of the time you don't lose render files. The only exception I know of is if your timeline is set to a GOP format. In that case, yeah, Final Cut has to dump whole render files, because it can't just dump individual frames.
and it makes FCP prone to crash.
That's simply bogus. There's zero link between rendering off-speed or off-format material and Final Cut crashing. It sounds like Final Cut is crashing on this guy for totally unrelated reasons — maybe he's got an out of date I/O board driver, or maybe he's not running the most recent version or something — and he's blaming it on his editing habits.
The guy goes on and on like that. He starts with a valid point — you have to render off-format shots — and ends at "and Final Cut crashes." It's not always obvious where along the way he went off the rails, but it's in there somewhere. I mean, five crashes a day? I've probably had two Final Cut crashes in the past two years. He's got a problem with his system of some kind, I promise you. It could be anything from a software problem to bad RAM. It's dumb to blame the application when there's obviously an underlying system problem causing his problem.
The best part, though, is this:
Editor Note: you can copy clips, then hit Shift+V to ripple insert those clips in another sequence, but this is not obvious or well known
"Not obvious or well known?" Not only is it in the manual, it's in the goddamn menu. Edit menu, "paste insert," with the shift-V shortcut and everything. The feature literally cannot be any more obvious than that. Unless the software came with a free tee-shirt in the box that says "Shift-V to paste insert!" on it, and I think we can all agree that the goddamn Final Cut Studio box is goddamn heavy enough already.
(Oh, and if we're doing creds, I learned on the Fire beta. I know from crashy systems.)
