Some FCPX Road Blocks and More

Studio Daily by Scott Simmons

We’ve all been following the Final Cut Pro X saga since its release back in June. And we’ve all read about those many big things that FCPX seems to be missing … like XML in and out, third-party hardware support and the inability to import old FCP7 projects. But one thing that I’ve found after using FCPX for around two months now is there are a lot of little things that I’ve come to enjoy as an FCP7 user that didn’t make their way into FCPX.

Oliver Peters recently posted a list of just such things (over at his excellent editing and post-production blog) called FCPX road blocks. That list has a lot of little things that have been on my list, including no copy-and-paste of attributes, no audio mixer and no timecode overlays, just to name a few. I think his list will hit home for many seasoned editors who have taken the FCPX plunge. I’ll add a few more to his list of FCPX road blocks.

Only nine keyword shortcut slots. One of FCPX’s strongest new features is keywording to organize and manage media. There are also keyword shortcuts where you can assign a keyword to a clip or clip range with a keystroke. You can see this in the Keyword Editor

Unfortunately, there are only nine slots to fill since the keyword manager doesn’t refresh with each new project opened. This decision was probably made since media is no longer associated with individual projects, but since most work will still be done like it always has been, via project (or timeline in FCPX), it would be nice to have more than nine assignable keyword shortcuts. read more...