Small production footprint: Final Cut Pro X

The present and future of post production business and technology by Philip Hodgetts

Final Cut Pro X

I made the deliberate decision to use Final Cut Pro X to experience it on a bigger project. While there are some things that bug me in the interface – see my Disclosure Triangle rant for a start – there are many things I really enjoy and I’m mostly still finding it faster, particularly now that I’m into editing. Faster for my editing style at least. It performed well with FW800 and USB2 interfaces into the mid-2011 MacBook Pro I was working with in the field. It performs even better with that USB drive connected via USB3 on the MacBook Pro Retina. (My welcome home gift to myself, originally intended to be used as part of the production.)

I’ve found some good logging workflows in FCP X that definitely work for me. As time went on I settled on a fairly consistent taxonomy – largely influenced by the concurrent design of the logging entry interface for our system, which by nature is very consistent. It made sense to keep the Keywords the same over multiple Events. It also set me thinking about Context metadata vs Content metadata.

When logging, I felt compelled to give clips useful names: who’s in the shot, dominant action, other action. That is now derived directly from the real-time logged metadata. Shot type we can’t see from the logging position and, as it turns out, we don’t need to. In FCP X, using the “Analyze and Fix” function and choosing “Find People”. FCP X tells you how many people it detects in the type of shot. read more...