Final Cut Pro X has been [controversial](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/professional-video-editors-weigh-in-on-final-cut-pro-x/?pagewanted=all) because it greatly alters the traditional workflow and eliminates features many editors find essential.
Some of those missing pieces — like multi-cam editing — are apparently coming soon. But most of the big changes are simply The Way Things Are Done Now. They go beyond keyboard shortcuts and helper apps to fundamentally different ways of working.
It’s fair to call this a brand-app that happens to be named Final Cut Pro.
I’ve used several incarnations of Final Cut Pro over the years. I don’t cut things that often, so each time I started editing something new, I had to spend a few minutes reminding myself how everything worked. In 2006, I finally took a FCP class at UCLA.
Here’s a very juvenile video I cut using the sample footage that comes with one of the tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS6mrp7Sbu4
My assistant Stuart actually used to teach FCP in college. It’s fair to say he’s more experienced with how the old app worked.
Over the past four weeks, each of us has had the opportunity to cut a few projects in the new FCP X and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. I think the differences in our reactions are largely based on how familiar we were with the old version.
I’ll go first.
Runner
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I wrote, shot and edited this spot for FDX Reader myself.
Everything was shot on the Canon 7D. Rather than import directly from the camera, I used Image Capture to transfer the movie files to the hard drive, then created a New Event in FCP X and imported the files.
I find the Event metaphor to be one of the most annoying choices in FCP X. Events make sense for iMovie — here’s Katie’s birthday! — but not for Final Cut Pro. Functionally, you want a container for all the footage related to what you’re cutting. Events aren’t exactly analogous to Bins in the old FCP, but Bins would be a better name than Events.
Regardless, once I put the footage into an Event, and began a new Project, I found the process surprisingly enjoyable. FCP X churns away in the background, analyzing footage and transcoding proxies. But at no point did I notice, even on my 2006 Mac Pro. I could start going through footage right away, versus waiting an hour or more for FCP 7 to transcode to something editable. Big win for the new guy.
In FCP 7, I would often drag little bits of footage to the timeline and start picking favorites. FCP X strongly encourages you to make some choices right in the Bin (err, the All Clips window).
Using the standard J-K-L keys, you play through your clips. When you find something that you might want, mark ins and outs (I and O). Then F to mark that section as a favorite. Yes, the handles that mark ins and outs look a lot like those in iMovie, but the functionality remains pretty traditional. You can do a lot more from the keyboard in FCP X than I’d expected.
Once you’ve looked at everything, Control-F switches you to Favorite Clips. These are basically your selects. Everything you’re going to want will probably be here.
From there, you drag clips to the storyline and start assembling your cut.
Unlike FCP 7, you can’t just throw clips anywhere. In FCP X, everything is magnetic and wants to stick together. To leave blank space between clips you have to deliberately Insert Gap to get a chunk of dark nothingness. It’s neither better or worse than before, but it’s certainly different.
Also different:
* You have one Viewer, rather than two.
* The Inspector handles almost any variable that needs to be adjusted, from video to image to metadata.
* Recorded audio stays attached to its video unless you very deliberately detach it. Things don’t get randomly out of sync.
* In addition to the normal playhead, you can scrub across footage to play it. I found the scrubber mostly benign, but occasionally turned it off when it got annoying.
I found Compound Clips to be incredibly useful.
Often when editing, you have a section that’s working nicely and want to make sure you don’t mess it up while working on other things. In FCP X, just select the relevant pieces of audio and video and make it a Compound Clip. Everything sucks down into one filmstrip. It’s logical and works. ((One exception: If you pin something to the outside of a compound clip — a sound effect, for example — it’s likely to slide around if you change something inside the clip. The sound effect only knows its position relative to the entire clip, not any component inside.))
In the Runner video, all the opening stuff with Amy typing lived as a compound clip.
I did all the titles and graphics in FCP X. I found one bug: the final tagline “Now on iPhone and iPad” wouldn’t animate properly unless I added spaces to the end.
On the whole, I like FCP X. Most of what’s missing I honestly don’t miss, because I never used it.
It takes a while to get used to the new interface, but I can’t imagine needing to take a class to understand how to use basic features. And while I still have FCP 7 on my hard drive, I doubt I’ll need to open it again.
Stuart’s impression of FCP X is far less favorable.
A few weeks ago, I [expressed exasperation](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/imovie-09-almost-certainly-maddening) upon seeing demos of iMovie 09, which seemed to be working hard to fix exactly the wrong problems. Now that I have it installed, I’ve been able to spend a few days playing around with it. And you know what?