What IS the big deal about FCP?

Edit Geek by Dylan Reeve

Recently a blog post from Neil Sadwelkar titled “What’s the big deal about FCP” made the rounds of the post people on Twitter. It’s an evaluation of Final Cut Pro, mainly comparing it to Avid Media Composer. This is obviously nothing new, there are probably hundreds of such blog posts around the net, but this one was a little special simply because of it’s massive wrongness…

Neil doesn’t seem to be approving comments on his blog post, so I thought I’d post my points in response here.

Comparing Avid and FCP will never end – there is no definitive answer. But if you’re going to try, you should at least try to have a good understanding of both. If you want to hear from people who really know how all these beasts work then you should take a look at the writings of Oliver Peters, Scott Simmons and Shane Ross.

To be fair, Neil does begin his post with this statements:

Some of these differences may not apply to the absolutely latest Avid ver 5.0. But for most Avid ABVB, Meridien, or even Adrenaline owners, ver 5 is a huge upgrade. So, for them, these still apply.

But I’m not entirely sure that is fair – we should probably compare, if you will, apples with apples. Many of his points are only relevant for the more recent versions of FCP – comparing it to a 8 year old system (Adrenaline) or even older (ABVB and Meridien) is somewhat unfair. Media Composer 5 is a significant upgrade, but not too massive. To be fair I will try and consider MC4 and MC5 in my responses.

So let’s get on with it then… read more...