Those Burning Final Cut Pro X Questions Answered

The Editblog on PVC by Scott Simmons

The answers aren’t all good but based on rumors they were expected.

Well here we are into the first official evening of Final Cut Pro X’s release out into the world. It’s been a busy day and a Twitter search will show a good bunch of love, a whole lot of hate and a little bit in-between. There were a blessed few who got advance copies and they’ve written some FCPX must read articles. If you want to try it yourself then $299 and the Mac Apps Store will get you a copy. I first want to answer the Burning Questions that I had just the other day.

As I mentioned in the Burning Questions article I defined professionals and these questions are ones that pros wanted addressed. We may be a small overall percentage of the video editing market but we are vocal and we push our tools to the limit. One pattern you’ll see below is that FCPX may be adding a lot of these features in the future. One argument you’ll read is that Final Cut Pro X is really a version 1.0 product and features haven’t been left out they just haven’t been written yet.

I don’t buy that argument as Apple chose to market this as Final Cut Pro TEN and be it a new app or not that number comes after SEVEN so it’s not unreasonable to expect things that were in 7 should be in 10. Add to that the fact that Final Cut Pro 7 and Final Cut Studio 3 were removed from the Apple Store today so from this point on it’s FCPX or stay with FCP7 (unless of course you want to move to Avid or Adobe). To completely start from scratch and build a new, modern application is commendable but when it lacks many, many features that its predecessor had and you’re still calling it pro and a newer version then you can expect a lot of negative feedback from current users who rely on those features. FCPX currently sits at two and a half stars in the App Store.

Sure we can choose to stay on FCP7 but we’ve come to believe that FCPX was to be “awesome” and it would be ready for professional use. By my definition here on Pro Video Coalition for these articles it is not ready for professional use. Maybe in a few years after it’s had a lot of features added back but not right now. read more...