A Video Editing and Photography Blog

It seems that all I keep hearing on Twitter and Facebook is that Final Cut Pro X sucks.  It’s iMovie Pro.  It’s not letting me work like a “pro”.  It won’t let me work accurately or fast.  Bahhumbug Scrooges.  FCPX is here, it’s big, and it’s going to be much bigger.  It’s time to stop whining and LEARN what it CAN DO for you.

Here are my top 5 reasons why I think Final Cut Pro X is already awesome in its’ infant state.

1. You can edit video without touching a mouse.  By simply using command + 1 or 2 you jump between the footage and timeline.  You can press up and down arrows to navigate and load footage into the viewer/canvas.  Then using the insert, overwrite, append, and connect commands you can build your rough story very fast.
   
2. You can EASILY offline to online your projects for working on the road with an older laptop.  7 years ago I remember doing DV offlines and going back to online the show with uncompressed 10 bit SD from the DigiBeta source.  This sucked!  It was a technical challenge that made for less time making a great video and more time focussing on technical patching (and finding source tapes).
3. The inline precision editor and the collapse of the rip, roll, slip, slide tools into 1 – T.  This one you can’t explain, just use it and you will see why it’s so great.  Finally a great way to visually trim with an Apple editing tool.
4. The audio effects and plugins taken from Soundtrack Pro make it easy to make quick fixes on the fly.  The most important of these for me is the limiter.  For projects with voice over, which is 99% of the programs I edit, the limiter is my savior for my primitive mixing skills.  Sample by sample, it allows me to even out the vo talent read so I have a consistent level to work with against the music and nat sounds in the video.  I have recorded using a cheap snowball microphone and used this limiter.  Many people can’t tell the difference in this and a sound booth when mixed.
5. Forcing a clean timeline with it being “magnetic” by default.  I can’t count how many times I have inherited a “dirty” project.  While there are some editing sins that should never be committed (like linking media from a desktop), others are more vague to younger editors.  For me, this is timeline organization.  Final Cut Pro X collapses down all of those would be empty tracks and uses them only as needed.  I don’t need to see 8 tracks with different clip options stacked on top anymore because they invented auditioning.  This is a huge leap forward for collaborative editing.  It forces organization.

Best of all is that you can try all of this out for yourself for 30 days for free.  After that if you like it enough you can buy it for only $300, instead of over a grand on competitors software.  Now, all this being said, am I going to purchase Final Cut Pro X after the trial is up?  No.  There are still a few shortcomings that I want in there and will be fixed soon.  Though overall I think it is a great start and only going to get better.  Why not try it?  You might like a new way of thinking and working.