Is Final Cut Pro X Becoming a True Player

Dare Dreamer by Ron Dawson

Last year when Final Cut Pro X was released, the professional film and video world cried a barbaric YAWLP at their dismay. It was more like iMovie and steroids and clearly showed Apple’s plan to move away from the high-end, sophisticated video professional, and more towards a prosumer audience. My film and video colleagues started jumping the FCP ship and heading for Adobe’s Premier Pro or Avid. Many people were pissed.

There were two key changes that made FCPX a problem:

1. Removing high-end features (like XML or XSAN support)
2. Changing the post-production paradigm (e.g. what names features had, how sequences worked, etc.)

A lot has happened in a year. Apple has added a lot of key functionality that higher end pros needed (e.g. the ability to support XML files) and they continue to work out the bugs. But there’s something else I’m seeing. Veteran and high-end corporate video producers and companies starting to adopt it. Apple now has on its site a few of case study articles from such prestigious commercial film companies and producers as @radical.media and Dean Devlin. And more recently, 25+ year editing veteran Chris Fenwick claimed a recent major project he did for Mini Cooper couldn’t have been done without the power of FCPX. (In case you missed it, part 1 of my interview with him aired last week on my show. Tomorrow, part 2 hits iTunes and it’s a whole show dedicated to his take on FCPX. It’ll be on the blog Friday). Film effects plugin developer Crumple Pop wrote a whole blog post why they were putting everything into FCPX. read more...