Kicking the tires on Final Cut Pro X 10.0.6

The Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

An update is made, many new features are added, the Internet rejoices

Apple has dropped a new release of Final Cut Pro X. 10.0.6 came down from the cloud on Tuesday, October 23 and delivered on the new features that Apple discussed back in April at NAB 2012. Dual viewers, RED camera support, better audio tools and MXF support are all now a reality in some form or another. This update also saw a lot of feature improvements as well including the often requested return of paste attributes. There’s been a lot of what’s new and first looks all over the web since release. I wanted to take a more honest look at some of the features as opposed to just listing out bullet points.

Dual Viewers

One of Final Cut Pro X’s most controversial design elements was its single viewer that had the viewer reflecting either the timeline or the Event Library, depending on where you were working. With 10.0.6 we now have the Event Viewer which reflects playback from the Event Library. If not playing back it’s a still frame of wherever you left the Event Library skimmer.

One thing that Apple told me during the NAB 2012 briefings, when discussing the “dual viewers” as they were being called, was that Apple wasn’t going to just duplicate functionality from other NLEs in FCPX but rather improve upon features as they were introduced into FCPX. The single viewer design was one of my bigger hang ups with FCPX but while it’s great to have a source-style viewer of any kind they certainly didn’t improve up what we have in other NLEs with the new Event Viewer.

The problem with the Event Viewer comes when you’ve got your Event Library set to a filmstrip view. Since there’s no dedicated “mini timeline” under the Event Viewer you can lose track of both which clip you’re viewing in the Event Viewer as well as where in that clip your playhead is parked. While you can see the clip name at the top of the Event Viewer the cryptic camera name often means nothing. The Event Viewer will probably be most useful with clips in list view. What would have been really cool is if you could place the list view timeline/thumbnail under the Event Viewer. That would have freed up some screen for the list view and made the reference point for the current clip be right in the Event Viewer, not in both the Event Viewer and the Event Library. It would have left focus on one part of the interface instead of two when dealing with a single clip. read more...