FCPX is still working and we get deeper and deeper into the features

Hey again…..after 450kms and 11.000 altitudemeters on a Yamaha or shooting out of a the open backdoor of a car, at 100km/h downhills and edits throughout 4 nights we are pretty tired already.

But it is fun, at least as long as the weather is dry. And FCPX does treat us well so far. After the little merge problem everything went fine. 

This is our modern TV studio packed into one petrol bag: 2 MacBooks, 8 TB of harddrive space on 3 devices (more on our backup system later in the blog), IPads as secondary monitors (via AirPlay app).

We know you want to see a shootout between the F3 and the DSLRs....but at the moment all you get is the allmighty GoPro:

A screenshot from one of the downhills today between Austria and Italy

Great stuff in the new FCPX

- it is just great the way Final Cut X allows an editor to edit away while the ingest/re-wrap/transcode runs in the background. No more waiting for files to be ready, just edit away. 

- the option to share events and then move and (if you are lucky) merge them is saving a lot of time.

- Trim-Start/Trim-End are now on my keyboard as "1" and "2" and it is my favorite editing and trimming tool. 

- This is how I make a Roughcut with Trim-Start and Trim-End commands: 

1. Point FCPX at folder where new dailies are. Tell FCPX to import/copy and create optimized media.
2. Start editing immediately; throw all clips into a new Project called DayXroughcut; FCPX will automatically switch to the ProRes files once they are ready.
3. JKL through timeline/project and hit "1" and"2" when I want a file to start/end; clips I don´t want are selected and thrown out with backspace; FCPX will always close the gaps for me.
4. DONE. 300 dailies are done in 20 - 40 minutes 
5. yes, if I now needed to output to tape i´d be busted with the current audiotools, but I don´t have to, so leave me alone.......

- the new colour is maybe more powerful, than we thought at first glance. I don´t like the colourboard, but as an option for people who use it little, because all they do is newsstuff or colourmatched cameras, it is fast. And it is very deep once you start digging into it. But no replacement for colour really. Just a MUCH better Colourcorrector within an NLE. 

- Background Render is GREAT, but we turned it up to 20 seconds delay, so it waits 20 seconds before starting. Background render causes spinning beachballs on my MacBook (late 2008; 4GB RAM), but didn´t so in my test on my MacPro (early 2009; 16GB RAM)

- when you crop and press ALT, you crop centered - nice…at least that is consistent

- when you add a STILL to your timeline, you can then adjust it to any length; in FCP7 it stuck to a certain length. So defaulting an imported STILL to 4 seconds doesn´t stop you from making it 1 minute long in the timeline; 

- 64-bit: FCP and Compressor are maxing out the machine constantly, using all RAM and CPU…..finally the investments in the hardware paid off in time-saving

Not great at all

- when I have a disk that contains FCP events plugged in, I cannot eject it from my Mac without quitting FCPX first

- in some dialogues you can apply setting numerical, in some not. We are missing the option to change settings with the mousewheel. All this is not consistent throughout the UI at all.

- VERY BAD is the screenlayout. It is not made for a laptop, which seems weird, since everyone says FCPX is made for MacBooks. It is not workable. When you do a colorcorrection you have 4 windows open and we wonder why they chose a one-viewer layout when you cant use the gained space by clicking away the libraries and put the colortools (waveform, vectorscope etc) there. We want a two-screen layout and the option to click away parts of the screens to put others there. Same goes for Motion BTW, which is one-screen program now and that is just so wrong.

Look at this photo....the Event library on the left is not needed during colourcorrection or audioediting. But I can´t make it smaller or click it away. WASTED SPACE!

- at the moment FCPX is quite unstable. It crashes more frequently than FCP7; but that crashed often on me also; twice a day I´d say; now it´s 5 times a day)

- Curves and Levels would be nice in the colorcorrector….and pleaseplease Apple, we know you read this :D…please make the colourboard a colourwheel again (optional is fine with us)

- all the automatic stuff is useless: match-color? we tried on different clips and it shifts the Hue to weird colours. Why stabilize all your imported clips? Audio enhance the same…it is much better to do these tasks on the few clips that need fixing instead of wasting the time and rendertime. These bells and whistles are really not for us pros. 

- MOTION: make a text layer. Open the inspector and there are lots of attributes to be adjusted. Sometimes you need some space in the inspector so you hide various attributes. Now go to another layer and get back to your text-layer....there are all the attributes tabs open again....so Motion doesn´t remeber your settings......annoying....

Clip follows soon......