Hello interwebs!
It’s been awhile…I missed you all. Super excited to share and interact with everyone again! Today I’m talking about the most heated and controversial issue in not only the event filmmaking world, but the entire broadcast and film industry. If you haven’t heard, Apple released the newest edition of their editing software, Final Cut Pro X. Within hours of its release on the App Store, industry professionals berated the product and the company and made it extremely clear they it did not meet their high expectations.
Even weeks after the software’s release, the dust still has not settled and the mere mention of the term “FCPX” draws heated debates and furor on social media sites and blogs.
Below are comments from one of Epic’s shooters and editors, Stewart Smith. He and I are on the same page when it comes to Final Cut Pro X, and I wanted to share with all of you what he has to say.
By now obviously, we all know about FCP X and it’s flaws and the massive debate that it’s caused the pro video world. Everywhere you look it seems that people either absolutely hate it or absolutely love it. It doesn’t seem that there’s anyone that’s “on the fence” with the product. Well, I, like so many others, awoke last Tuesday with the pleasant surprise of seeing FCP X available to download in the Mac App Store. So, with my Apple Fan Boy membership card gripped tightly in hand, I too threw my hat into the ring and forked over the $300 to download the latest and greatest software. And upon my first launch of the software, I was completely impressed. I could natively edit raw h.264 files from my Canon EOS cameras, adding color correction, effects, and transitions, and then preview my timeline WITHOUT HAVING TO RENDER!? Coming from FCP7, that is completely phenomenal. What would have used to have been a 3-5 minute render bar that locked up my interface now sat humbly in the background chugging along as my timeline played back without a hitch. I was in love.
It wasn’t until later that day that I saw the tweets come rolling in, with users complaining about the lack of multicam, inability to import legacy FCP files, and importing and exporting XML, OMF ,and EDL files. I realized that maybe this release wasn’t quite what we all assumed it to be, but it certainly wasn’t a waste of a software. Now, I’ve read some pretty ridiculous blog posts and seen some die-hard Apple fans jump overboard only to be swooped up by Adobe’s CS5.5, but do we seriously have nothing better to do than to complain about the features lacking in FCP X? The last I checked, my copy of FCP7 still runs just as well as it did last month. I can still edit incredible footage from a ton of codecs, multicam, and export whatever I want as whatever codec I so desire.
I’m not saying FCP X is the perfect end-all beat-all solution for everyone, but I am saying it has some tremendous potential. It’s a complete rewrite of the entire framework of the NLE that we all know and love, and it packs some insane performance and features some really innovative ways to edit and organize media.
As a FCP user for the past 4 years, I’ve grown to love the interface of the legacy FCP, but the fact is, it was designed over a decade ago and simply expanded upon until it reached the previous FCP7 iteration. It was time for a new design, a new foundation, and a new architecture, and that is exactly what Apple has created with FCP X. No, it may not be where we would all have hoped that it would be on launch day, but I’m sure that given time, Apple will listen to us and will provide an answer to our prayers. I’m not opposed to learning to use Adobe Premiere Pro, and in fact, I’m training myself on it, as well as FCP X right now. I do believe however, that the best tool in any filmmaker’s arsenal is his or her ability to tell a story…whether they use FCP7, Adobe CS5, FCPX, Avid, or any other NLE is a secondary consideration. In time, I think that the new features that FCPX presents to us will allow us to tell stories more effectively and more efficiently, and for now I suggest that we embrace the new framework and learn how to use this new tool so that when the time is right to take our businesses into full blown post production using FCP X, we will already be efficient in our storytelling.
Some of the things I LOVE about FCP X:
-64 bit processing: Simply put, it lets us FLY when we’re editing.
-OpenCL support: Like Motion has for a while now, our GPUs will accelerate our editing speed
-Smart Collections: It’s really awesome to be able to find clips based on keywords, rather than by knowing in which bin you put them.
-ColorSync: To match the color of one shot to another with little effort is truly awesome.
Some things I HATE about FCP X:
-The new color correction interface- just from habit I really still prefer the wheels to manually CC footage.
-The lack of a straightforward way to media manage, save forms of projects, and hand off edits to clients.
-No support for Multicam, or exporting/importing XML, EDL, and OMF files.
Given time, I think Apple will address our qualms with FCP X, and we will all be happy and sleep well at night once again. I’d like to quote Larry Jordan in saying “…I think that within the next 18 months virtually all of us will be running FCPX and wondering how we lived without it.”
If you feel that Premiere Pro better suits your needs as a professional editor, yet you intend to still run Macintosh machines, then you should consider the following:
Adobe refuses to support OpenCL and instead they insist on using their proprietary CUDA architecture through NVidia in their Mercury Playback Engine. Basically that means that, if you are running a multicore machine like a quad core i7 or a Mac Pro, you will see performance gains from the 64 bit architecture. BUT if you are using a MacBook Pro or an iMac, you will not see GPU accelerated rendering because there are currently only 3 NVidia graphics cards that are compatible with the Mac Pros exclusively. Therefore, on a new MacBook Pro, you can import and edit native DSLR h.264 footage, but the moment that you add a color correction filter or any other effect, you must render the file in order to get full quality playback at the full frame rate. Contrast that to FCPX where you could add 5 or more effects to the clip and still get perfectly smooth playback without having to pre-render.
At this time, I do not think that there is a perfect software solution to our needs as editors. I do however think that it may be coming in an update to FCP X. We should use the software that best fits our needs as editors, and that helps us to tell the most compelling stories in as efficient of manner as possible.
It doesn’t matter if you’re using FCP X, Adobe, Avid, Edius, Vegas, FCP7, or iMovie. If it helps you to tell your story, it’s the right product for you.
My hope is that this post will serve as a central place for event filmmakers, and others to share their thoughts, frustrations, and ideas with the community. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
xoxo,
Eric Kmetz is the lead filmmaker for Epic Motion, based in Detroit, MI. Named one of the 2010 EventDV top 25 filmmakers, Eric has been a full-time wedding filmmaker since 2009. In his spare time he devotes himself to being as kmawesome as legally allowed. Furthermore, 83% of people agree…he's the bees knees. True story.
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