I decided not to do the big Avid crossgrade when it was offered and take my chances with FCPx. Annnd, here we are.

Aside from FCP7 still being around for a little while, I'm thinking maybe it's time to stop turning my nose up at Premiere. We cut RVD on Premiere, but then switched to Final Cut and never really looked back. Premiere was cute and all but it wouldn't really behave properly (couldn't make it not interlace on export, no matter what we did, for one example). But now that there's dynamic linking between the Production Premium apps (i.e. easy AE roundtripping) and Premiere seems to actually be pretty decked out with pro features, I think I'm gonna finally go ahead and bother to install it on my machine.

I posted this on Eddie's Facebook, but here we go:

The way I see it, FCPX is an upgrade for iMovie/FCPE users, and FCP7 will continue to be used by professionals until the missing features are added/redesigned. It's odd to me that they're not continuing to offer FCP7, but it wouldn't shock me to see Apple include a way to get it with the purchase of FCPE, just as they did when they redesigned iMovie.

Also, according to this guy, there IS tape capture in FCPX: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fc … artin.html

Last edited by Gregory Harbin (2011-06-23 02:29:32)

You guys think Premiere will grab any of FCP's lost professional market share or that it will all go back to Avid?

Makes sense, these days Premiere is basically FCP's step-sibling and that knee jerk reaction comes from before that was the case. Do they make Premiere for the Mac platform these days? So much of the industry runs on Macs and I doubt many people would migrate to Premiere if it meant switching out their hardware as well.

How about that, a company actually adjusting its products to meet the needs and desires of its customer base. Huh.

We have a lab of 4 video editors that are pissed. They are all using Macs and Final cut. I'm the one PC in the lab and happily using Premiere. I'm not a fan of Apple or their highfalutin attitude.

While it's a fair point that FCP7 didn't stop working yesterday, the problem is that it will stop working eventually. What happens when Apple releases an OS that will only run 64-bit software (FCP7 is 32-bit)? Do they stick with the last OS that ran it? What happens when Apple eventually releases new hardware that they can't install that old OS on anymore? Are professionals really to be expected to work on 10-year-old computers with 15-year-old software that's no longer supported or developed for? How could they possibly deliver or remain competitive?

That's why many FCP professionals are pissed. Not because their software stopped working yesterday, but because as far as it seems -- at least at first blush -- their software stopped advancing yesterday. And when you're running a company, you have to think in terms of what your roadmap is going to be in 5, 10, 15 years, and if you're going to invest in a particular vendor's software you need to be able to trust that the software is going to be there for you and keep pace.

Apple just violated that trust with a lot of post houses, and given the way they EOL'd Shake -- after years of halfhearted development, and despite the fact that Shake was legitimately the industry standard in professional compositing at the time -- I'm not surprised a lot of pros are scrambling for the lifeboats at the first sign of trouble.

have you guys seen the app score lately? 235 5-star reviews vs. 407 1-star reviews...  that pretty much says it all. 

I've heard a lot of negative things through the grapevine about this since April, but all the reviews and commentary pretty much confirms my biggest fears. 

I'll be learning Premiere Pro and Avid.  I've put it off for too long, but a tool is a tool.  The more tools you have in your box, the more flexible/valuable you will be.  Still, the tool isn't a substitute for the skill of editing a good story.

I work at a 2-man A/V department at a University, We still use tape and share projects over a server.  We still run FCS2.  I hope we switch to Premiere Pro soon since we do roundtrip to AE and PS a lot.

I'm late to y'all's party, but what the hell.

First things first: Editors are the most irritable, unpleasable people in the world. This is a fact. How do I know it's a fact? Because I am one.

Second thing: We are whining our asses off about some really stupid shit here. Oh, it says "Import iMovie events" when you first fire up the app, that means it's a toy for children. Come the fuck on. That's just petty and stupid.

But there's a third thing, and it's important: Lost in all our whining about stupid shit and just being generally disagreeable people is the fact that Final Cut Pro X has a number of crippling design flaws that cannot be worked around, handwaved away as "innovations," or fixed in a dot release.

I'm talking about things like project management. Final Cut Pro X doesn't have any. At all. Period. It has no bins. You want to organize your footage by putting shots in bins? Tough. You can't. You have to use annotations and canned searches. That's fine if you're cutting the video of little Timmy's third birthday party to post on Facebook for the grandparents, or if you're editing out the part of the gang-bang where your hot young wife got the shakes and had to lock herself in the bathroom for half an hour before she was ready to pull the rest of the train. But if you're doing a TVC — screw the really big jobs, the hourlong scripteds or the docos or the features, just a simple thirty-second spot — you're going to end up completely lost in a sea of 200 shots that you simply cannot organize because the program won't let you.

And that trackless "magnetic timeline" Apple thinks is such hot shit? It's a calamity. See, timelines have tracks for a reason. It's not just a thing that makes editing easier. It's necessary for collaborating with others. When you're done cutting that commercial you nearly killed yourself over because you couldn't get your shit organized, the first thing you have to do after picture lock is send an EDL to the transfer house so they can grade and transfer your selects. FCP X can't do that. It's not that the feature isn't there. It's that the program can't, because Apple in their infinite wisdom decided a magical trackless timeline was more important than being able to fit into existing and established post workflows.

"Oh, well, EDLs are obsolete, you should stop using them." Thanks, Apple. That really means a lot. I'm glad you think the most basic tool editors have is obsolete and should be forgotten. But screw that because it's not about EDLs. You also have to send an OMF or an AAF to your audio guys for mixing and VO recording, and you have to send an AAF or an XML to the online guys for finishing. Guess what? Can't do any of those things because fucking Apple doesn't think fucking tracks on the timeline are fucking important.

Yes, we're whining. Yes, we're unpleasable. But underneath all that, we've also got legitimate reasons why FCP X is not now and will never be usable for post-production.

"Everything changed in post," they said on Tuesday when they shipped it. Yeah, Apple. It sure did. Only not in the way you were expecting.

I've had a few other choice words to say on this subject. Anybody who gives a shit (which you shouldn't) can read them here.

One of my major gripes is the fact that there is no tracks to manage.  I routinely export OMF's and won't be able to.  Also, when we are working with several hundreds of hours of footage on a standard show, and have to downres our offline cut, then how am I supposed to upres and reconnect media?  For every thingI mentioned there's several more that I didn't.

Apple's reaction, and that of appologist bloggers, has been either "FCPx DOES do that thing you're talking about, only in a different and ore convoluted way," or "You can get a third party patch/device to do that thing."  Neither of those answers is acceptable.

You seriously don't think that within 'a few years', I mean we're talking about when they're going to require 64-bit apps for a new version of the OS, which seriously is 10.9 at the very earliest, you really don't think that by that time, Apple will have added in the few features that are keeping this from being a full-featured pro app? It's obvious that they rushed this out the door to start selling to consumers.

If all you're worried about is that EVENTUALLY it MIGHT become KINDA HARD to run FCP7 on your NEWEST Mac, then I understand the griping even less.

No, let me take that back. I perfectly understand why people are griping. This is a new, fantastic version of the software, and it seriously sucks that most of the pros I know aren't able to use it. Feel free to keep pestering Apple about the features they need to add.

But don't like it's the end of the world. If FCP7 was working for you the day before FCPX was released, it'll still be working for you the year after. And for all likelihood for the next ten years. There's no guarantee that Premiere (or even less Avid) will even be around in ten years.