Early Final Cut Pro X Response Mixed, Updates Coming

[iBug2]

John Gruber talks about how its wrong of people to grade competitors to Apple "on a curve" here. Gruber was talking about the tablet market space specifically, but I feel strongly that if its a good enough standard to review one market space then its a good enough excuse to judge others.

Yeah but the problem is again, marketing. Gruber is saying those are bad tablets because they are marketed as competitors to iPad 2. If Apple didn't market this as a direct follow up to FCP 7, then everything would be ok. (That doesn't mean they have to change the name, an explanation would suffice) So again, the product is not at fault because FCP X is not a bad product for people who has a use for it right now.

The marketing is at fault to market it incorrectly as a total replacement of FCP 7.

 

[Digital Skunk]

Agreed, I'm just saying, I doubt apple is worried about the sales of FCP in the grand scheme of things, it can't account for a very high margin of revenue.

Good point, especially given that FCP was never really a solely Apple product. They purchased that app like they did Shake years ago and turned it into what it was today. Apple killed Shake because they just couldn't put in enough R&D to make it compete with Nuke and other compositors.

I doubt Apple will kill FCP and I doubt the user base will (myself included) will completely jump ship. I was going to pull the trigger, but my senses came back and the hype died off. I'll wait for the second or third release.

Sorry but people always had pretty good alternatives. Avid existed on Mac before Final Cut was born, same with Premiere, although Premiere wasn't worth anything back then. The only great thing about Final Cut was the low price point compared to Avid, that's how Apple lured people in. It wasn't that it was a better product, but it was cheaper and didn't require extra hardware (which is again about the price)

True true. Those are the reasons I cut with it, and I am glad to see that Apple is keeping with that trend and keeping up with the innovation. Just can't wait until version 3.

 

[samcraig]

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Those arguing that Apple had to do a ground up rewrite and that's the reason iMovie import works (because it was easier) and that FCP 7 import is harder are neglecting the simple fact that Apple is building the app from the ground up they shpuld have been able to map their files appropriately before launching the software. They wrote the code. The fact that a professional app launches and immediately asks if you want to import iMovie projects (note it LAUNCHES asking to import) it's not just relegated to a menu item - screams that the initial/target market at launch was for iMovie upgrades not FCP upgrades.

 

[bartzilla]

No it wouldn't. If two days ago Apple announced that they are discontinuing Final Cut Pro and releasing a new app called iMovie Pro, the anger and hatred you see on these boards would be ten times worse.

Well yes, you're quite right. I was talking about it being iMovie pro as an extension to iMovie family, not in place of FCP.

Thought if they'd announced it as the latter at least they'd have been honest

What does it matter if this is iMovie Pro? If Apple actually released an amazing FCP X which was far more better than FCP 7 in every context, and named it iMovie Pro, do you think if anyone would care about the name?

Well no, but I was talking about functionality and how the product was positioned in the market. This has been positioned as caviare, and it turns out to be last weeks' fishsticks.

The application does deserve some slack, because it's quite a time and money investment to do this kind of rewrite.

I have to disagree. If someone announced themselves as a competitor to Apple's FCP line of products and released FCPX as their competing product they would be laughed out of the place, and rightly so.

 

[iBug2]

I have to disagree. If someone announced themselves as a competitor to Apple's FCP line of products and released FCPX as their competing product they would be laughed out of the place, and rightly so.

That doesn't really disagree with what I say. What you are talking about is how they market the product. Not the product itself.

Well yes, you're quite right. I was talking about it being iMovie pro as an extension to iMovie family, not in place of FCP.

Thought if they'd announced it as the latter at least they'd have been honest

No that wouldn't be honest. Because like it or not, this product is not iMovie Pro, as much as it is not a direct competitor to FCP 7. That would be as dishonest as right now.

If they named this iMovie Pro, that meant that this product was now being aimed at consumer market (not even prosumer like FCP Express) so professionals would immediately jump ship. And after couple years when this product evolved into a total replacement of FCP 7, those professionals who jumped ship would rightfully blame Apple for mislabeling the product as iMovie Pro.

This product not losing the name is the right move, because Apple still intends this to be a replacement of FCP 7, just not today. Keeping the name means that professionals shouldn't be afraid about Apple abandoning them. They don't have to buy this product but at least they'd know that features will be coming. And this is, as has been rumored by many who talked to Apple about this, Apple's intention.

 

[Reach]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

Those arguing that Apple had to do a ground up rewrite and that's the reason iMovie import works (because it was easier) and that FCP 7 import is harder are neglecting the simple fact that Apple is building the app from the ground up they shpuld have been able to map their files appropriately before launching the software. They wrote the code. The fact that a professional app launches and immediately asks if you want to import iMovie projects (note it LAUNCHES asking to import) it's not just relegated to a menu item - screams that the initial/target market at launch was for iMovie upgrades not FCP upgrades.

I may be way off, but may not this simply be due to the fact that both apps (iMovie and the new FCPX) use Events, while FCP uses some antiquated "project"-system that is quite a way from the new way of organizing things.

If so, you people are whining about the fact that FCPX has gotten a more modern, and maybe better, way of handling files and projects. It may have nothing to do with being able to import iMovie files being a higher priority for Apple.

 

[iBug2]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

Those arguing that Apple had to do a ground up rewrite and that's the reason iMovie import works (because it was easier) and that FCP 7 import is harder are neglecting the simple fact that Apple is building the app from the ground up they shpuld have been able to map their files appropriately before launching the software. They wrote the code. The fact that a professional app launches and immediately asks if you want to import iMovie projects (note it LAUNCHES asking to import) it's not just relegated to a menu item - screams that the initial/target market at launch was for iMovie upgrades not FCP upgrades.

There's no way that the initial market for this product is iMovie users. They demoed this at NAB to professionals, and nothing in their webpage indicates that this is aimed at iMovie userbase. If their intention is indeed so, they are doing a terrible job at that because I don't see any iMovie user buying this for 400$.

Now, if you replace iMovie with Final Cut Express, that has some grounds to defend, due to price points being similar.

That it asks you to import iMovie files simply says that this app has been designed in a way to ask the user if he/she wants to import another project at launch. If it could import FCP 7 projects as well, that import menu would still pop up, but instead you'd get two choices. So I don't think the import menu popping up says anything on its own.

 

[samcraig]

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A rewrite allows the programmers to do what they want in the order they want. Just because there's a new event feature doesn't mean internally apple could have written code to accommodate this in the background. Even if it meant prompting users to assign it to an event or other new features. While perhaps clunky to have an import need assistance - I think people would be ok with it for a dot zero release. I work in IT. Our company does a ton of intergration projects and also creates adapters to bridge software that doesn't speak well with others. It's nothing new. I'm sure apple will make this possible. But to launch without it was a fatal flaw

 

[Reach]

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A rewrite allows the programmers to do what they want in the order they want. Just because there's a new event feature doesn't mean internally apple could have written code to accommodate this in the background. Even if it meant prompting users to assign it to an event or other new features. While perhaps clunky to have an import need assistance - I think people would be ok with it for a dot zero release. I work in IT. Our company does a ton of intergration projects and also creates adapters to bridge software that doesn't speak well with others. It's nothing new. I'm sure apple will make this possible. But to launch without it was a fatal flaw

Yes, fatal indeed, a true catastrophe! I hope the number of deaths don't rise much higher. Shame on you, Apple.

 

[SpinThis!]

both apps (iMovie and the new FCPX) use Events, while FCP uses some antiquated "project"-system that is quite a way from the new way of organizing things.

So someone wants to organize a different way that's antiquated? It's not modern, it's stupid. I'm all for letting the computer organize a lot of stuff for me but FCPX doesn't even let you take that organization anywhere else. Unless you're the only one who's going to be working on the project, on that particular computer, FCPX is not going to cut it for any kind of collaborative workflow. Say you want a friend to add her input on your movie. Well, unless she's physically sitting at your machine, she's not going to see all your organization. And unlike Aperture you can't create multiple libraries so if you have different clients, company A sees all company B's assets in events too. In the old FCP, it let you have the assets travel with the project file; in this version, all your stuff seems to be in one "vault", accessible only to the person physically on the system. Share things between Macs? Forget it.

 

[iBug2]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

A rewrite allows the programmers to do what they want in the order they want. Just because there's a new event feature doesn't mean internally apple could have written code to accommodate this in the background. Even if it meant prompting users to assign it to an event or other new features. While perhaps clunky to have an import need assistance - I think people would be ok with it for a dot zero release. I work in IT. Our company does a ton of intergration projects and also creates adapters to bridge software that doesn't speak well with others. It's nothing new. I'm sure apple will make this possible. But to launch without it was a fatal flaw

A clunky and incomplete import can be worse and more time consuming than recreating the whole project again.

This is not a text edit app where all the information you need to carry over is font, size, heading and style. There are a gazillion things you can do with an edit and unless all of those things make sense in the new app one way or another, the import will look alien when you do it.

A rewrite allows programmers to do what they want with the new app only. If you force people that the new app must be 100% compatible with the documents of the old app, that's already a big breach of that freedom.

Again, I think that not being able to open FCP 7 files is less of a priority for most people here. There are much bigger missing features in FCP X. Anyone can keep a copy of FCP 7 for reworking old projects in the future, but not being able to start a new project on FCP X and finish it on FCP X is the bigger problem here.

 

[iBug2]

So someone wants to organize a different way that's antiquated? It's not modern, it's stupid. I'm all for letting the computer organize a lot of stuff for me but FCP doesn't even let you take that organization anywhere else. Unless you're the only one who's going to be working on the project, on that particular computer, FCPX is not going to cut it for any kind of collaborative workflow. Say you want a friend to add her input on your movie. Well, unless she's physically sitting at your machine, she's not going to see all your organization. And unlike Aperture you can't create multiple libraries so if you have different clients, company A sees all company B's assets in events too. In the old FCP, it let you have the assets travel with the project file; in this version, all your stuff seems to be in one "vault", accessible only to the person physically on the system. Share things between Macs? Forget it.

Assets travel with the project file on FCP X.

 

[SpinThis!]

Assets travel with the project file on FCP X.

Have you even used the program? I trust Walter Biscardi knows what he's talking about:

Cannot collaborate with other editors. You can't simply hand off a project file to another editor who has the same media like you could with previous versions of FCP. All of your project organization is now globally contained in the application rather than in your project file. You would literally have to give that other editor your computer to open your project with all of your organization.

 

[iBug2]

So someone wants to organize a different way that's antiquated? It's not modern, it's stupid.

No, antiquated means antiquated, meaning from older times, which is true, because FCP's organization has been the same since the app launched in late 90's. That doesn't mean everything old fashioned is bad. It just means they are old fashioned, and if that suits you, then it suits you.

 

[iBug2]

Have you even used the program? I trust Walter Biscardi knows what he's talking about:

Larry Jordan said that the assets travel with the project, so we are both quoting different industry pro's who say different things.

Then we'd need some confirmation on this one way or another.

Edit: Oh, apologies. Jordan said the metadata moves with the project, not assets. Sorry my mistake.

 

[Reach]

So someone wants to organize a different way that's antiquated? It's not modern, it's stupid. I'm all for letting the computer organize a lot of stuff for me but FCPX doesn't even let you take that organization anywhere else. Unless you're the only one who's going to be working on the project, on that particular computer, FCPX is not going to cut it for any kind of collaborative workflow. Say you want a friend to add her input on your movie. Well, unless she's physically sitting at your machine, she's not going to see all your organization. And unlike Aperture you can't create multiple libraries so if you have different clients, company A sees all company B's assets in events too. In the old FCP, it let you have the assets travel with the project file; in this version, all your stuff seems to be in one "vault", accessible only to the person physically on the system. Share things between Macs? Forget it.

I thought I read about FCPX probably being able to run via NAS with Lion. Making FCP Server obsolete in some way. Of course, we don't know, as Apple won't tell.

I'm not saying Events is the future, it was just a perspective. To me it seems to be pretty interesting though, but I'll hold my judgement until I have actually tried it.

 

[samcraig]

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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

A rewrite allows the programmers to do what they want in the order they want. Just because there's a new event feature doesn't mean internally apple could have written code to accommodate this in the background. Even if it meant prompting users to assign it to an event or other new features. While perhaps clunky to have an import need assistance - I think people would be ok with it for a dot zero release. I work in IT. Our company does a ton of intergration projects and also creates adapters to bridge software that doesn't speak well with others. It's nothing new. I'm sure apple will make this possible. But to launch without it was a fatal flaw

A clunky and incomplete import can be worse and more time consuming than recreating the whole project again.

This is not a text edit app where all the information you need to carry over is font, size, heading and style. There are a gazillion things you can do with an edit and unless all of those things make sense in the new app one way or another, the import will look alien when you do it.

A rewrite allows programmers to do what they want with the new app only. If you force people that the new app must be 100% compatible with the documents of the old app, that's already a big breach of that freedom.

Again, I think that not being able to open FCP 7 files is less of a priority for most people here. There are much bigger missing features in FCP X. Anyone can keep a copy of FCP 7 for reworking old projects in the future, but not being able to start a new project on FCP X and finish it on FCP X is the bigger problem here.

I think you're wrong on many points.

 

[MrNomNoms]

Lets also keep a few things in perspective; FCX relies on AV Foundation which in Snow Leopard is a Private Framework and in Lion will be a more feature complete/rich meaning that many of the loose ends right now will be tied up post Lion release. Add on top of that it is a ground up re-write of FCX the only thing Apple didn't explain well was the nature of their future direction (communication by Apple has never been strong suit due to this fetish with keeping things secret to the last minute) - had Apple explained at FCX launch that releases would be every 6 months or so, updates will be quicker, features lacking now will appear in the future then I think the hysteria wouldn't be as bad.

Lets take one thing into consideration - it is the top grossing application at the AppStore so obviously there are end users who are quite happy with FCX in its current form. I'm over at Arstechnica and for every one complainer there are 4-5 people praising how Apple built it from the ground up for speed and without compromising for the sake of backwards compatibility.

 

[iBug2]

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I think you're wrong on many points.

I believe you. Let me give you an example. Pages has .doc import. When I make an import, the page doesn't look like anything it looks like in Word. Trying to make it look like as it does look in Word is actually longer than simply copy pasting the text and doing the rest yourself. And that's almost as same as text edit, obviously .doc carries a lot more attributes than a basic textedit does but it's still much less than an edit.

That's why I don't think Apple will actually support a full import even in the future. That's probably why they said that Multicam is coming later, but they never said anything certain about FCP 7 import because it just might not be possible to do it in an acceptable way.

 

[thunderclap]

Lets take one thing into consideration - it is the top grossing application at the AppStore so obviously there are end users who are quite happy with FCX in its current form.

Just because it's the top grossing app doesn't mean people are "quite happy with FCPX in its current form." It could mean that they are thinking the reviewers are wrong, aren't reading the reviews, or don't read forums with people's experiences.

 

[iBug2]

Lets also keep a few things in perspective; FCX relies on AV Foundation which in Snow Leopard is a Private Framework and in Lion will be a more feature complete/rich meaning that many of the loose ends right now will be tied up post Lion release.

Nothing listed as a crucial missing feature will reappear in Lion. It may add some functionality but that's not what people have been whining about right now.

Lets take one thing into consideration - it is the top grossing application at the AppStore so obviously there are end users who are quite happy with FCX in its current form. I'm over at Arstechnica and for every one complainer there are 4-5 people praising how Apple built it from the ground up for speed and without compromising for the sake of backwards compatibility.

Nobody cares about what the application means to the general userbase. Everyone only cares how it effects their own workflow, for obvious reasons. It wouldn't matter if FCP X is amazing for 80% of the users, average for 19% and unacceptable for the remaining 1%. And since nobody has any idea how this release effects every single FCP 7 user (not even Apple), time will tell how things turn out.

Just because it's the top grossing app doesn't mean people are "quite happy with [it]". It could mean that they are thinking the reviewers are wrong, aren't reading the reviews, or don't read forums with people's experiences.

Yes it could, but that actually tells you that the "pro" userbase isn't that "pro" to begin with. Professionals are known to read reviews and listen to others before making a switch because they make a living out of these tools.

 

[Reach]

Nothing listed as a crucial missing feature will reappear in Lion.

I'm curious: How do you know?

The link stating which functions will and will not come with Lion will be greatly appreciated.

 

[iBug2]

I'm curious: How do you know?

Well, if you read the list of crucial features people have been wondering about, none of them are OS specific. They are all about FCP X itself like Multicam, XML import/export etc, more tape support etc.

 

[Sweetmate]

Larry Jordan said that the assets travel with the project, so we are both quoting different industry pro's who say different things.

Then we'd need some confirmation on this one way or another.

Projects in FCPX are not the same as Projects in FCP7.

A project in FCP7 is a file that can be saved on a file system and contains a bunch of sequences/bins and links to media (which can be files on any hard drive or if you have used log and transfer/log and capture, will be files generated by that process and located in a Capture Scratch folder, the location of which you choose).

In FCPX the event library is where all media is "imported" to (i put this in quotes because you can either have FCPX copy the media to the local hard drive (Users/Yourname/Movies/Final Cut Events) or it can be referenced.

In FCPX a project is what FCP7 called a sequence. These are timelines with your edits and are auto-saved in Users/Yourname/Movies/Final Cut Projects and cannot be saved anywhere else. There is no SAVE or SAVE AS option anywhere in FCPX.

So if you work in a collaborative environment (as most people working with Final Cut do) on a project, import footage into your event library on you workstation, and create your project, you cannot then close FCPX on your workstation and then have another editor open that work on his workstation. Even if you manually store all your media on a SAN that multiple workstations can see and tell FCPX not to copy media to the local drive when importing, all the importing and tagging etc happens in your local event library.

I haven't tested it yet (as we only have 1 copy of FCPX at our facility) but in theory the only way to share that with other editors, would be to close FCPX when you have finished your work, and then manually copy out the Events folder AND the Projects folder from your workstation to a SAN, then when your colleague wishes to work on that edit, or you want to change to a different workstation, you have to copy the events and projects folders from the SAN and overwrite locally on that machine. Absolute madness and not a workable solution at all. (as it would not allow more than 1 person editing at a time in the whole facility)

This is a massive flaw that when coupled with the complete lack of xml import/export and many others issues (stability is surprisingly low for an app with so much modern engineering), makes FCPX completely unusable in almost any situation. I think Apple will have to acknowledge this and in 12-18 months on the release of FCP11 make it a free upgrade from X.

 

[iBug2]

Projects in FCPX are not the same as Projects in FCP7.

A project in FCP7 is a file that can be saved on a file system and contains a bunch of sequences/bins and links to media (which can be files on any hard drive or if you have used log and transfer/log and capture, will be files generated by that process and located in a Capture Scratch folder, the location of which you choose).

In FCPX the event library is where all media is "imported" to (i put this in quotes because you can either have FCPX copy the media to the local hard drive (Users/Yourname/Movies/Final Cut Events) or it can be referenced.

In FCPX a project is what FCP7 called a sequence. These are timelines with your edits and are auto-saved in Users/Yourname/Movies/Final Cut Projects and cannot be saved anywhere else. There is no SAVE or SAVE AS option anywhere in FCPX.

So if you work in a collaborative environment (as most people working with Final Cut do) on a project, import footage into your event library on you workstation, and create your project, you cannot then close FCPX on your workstation and then have another editor open that work on his workstation. Even if you manually store all your media on a SAN that multiple workstations can see and tell FCPX not to copy media to the local drive when importing, all the importing and tagging etc happens in your local event library.

I haven't tested it yet (as we only have 1 copy of FCPX at our facility) but in theory the only way to share that with other editors, would be to close FCPX when you have finished your work, and then manually copy out the Events folder AND the Projects folder from your workstation to a SAN, then when your colleague wishes to work on that edit, or you want to change to a different workstation, you have to copy the events and projects folders from the SAN and overwrite locally on that machine. Absolute madness and not a workable solution at all. (as it would not allow more than 1 person editing at a time in the whole facility)

This is a massive flaw that when coupled with the complete lack of xml import/export and many others issues (stability is surprisingly low for an app with so much modern engineering), makes FCPX completely unusable in almost any situation. I think Apple will have to acknowledge this and in 12-18 months on the release of FCP11 make it a free upgrade from X.

I edited my post 20 minutes ago or so, and apologized because Jordan said metadata travels with the project, not assets.

About what you said, it's terrible if that's really the only way.

I disagree with only one point that FCP X is completely unusable in almost any situation. In your profession maybe.