Why Final Cut Pro X Is Sending Me Back to Avid

Gizmodo by Matt Toder

Matt Toder has been editing video professionally for eight years, and currently works at Gawker.TV. These are his thoughts on Apple's latest Final Cut Pro release.

I landed my first job in post-production in 2003 at a small house which used Avid exclusively. It had plenty of problems; we struggled with the Dragon error for a few months, converted to Xpress Pro when it came out, and then wrestled with that. There just weren't any other options. And then Apple's Final Cut Pro was released, although it too had some problems. But when Avid stopped listening to their customers and became more and more inflexible, Final Cut Pro became an increasingly attractive option. By 2009, significant portions of the editing community were using it.

And now we've been given a glimpse of FCPX, a massive, from-the-ground-up revision of Final Cut Pro which proves one thing definitively: that Apple understood many of the problems that were inherent to Final Cut Pro. But, instead of fixing them, they just decided to change everything.

At the preview event, Peter Steinauer, FCP Architect, assured the audience that FCPX was just as much for professional editors as FCP7 was. It really doesn't seem that way, though. After getting through some of technical aspects of what makes FCPX than its predecessor better in terms of processing power and such—which does seem awesome—Steinauer moved on immediately to color sync. He boasted that FCPX would make sure that pixels looked exactly the same throughout the editing process, noting "you can trust that the pixels coming off a pro file device track all the way through your workflow to display on the screen and ultimately out to output." This all seems well and good, except it's completely unimportant for professional editors who aren't finishing in Final Cut. Some of us color correct in a da Vinci with a professional colorist and then conform in a Flame. Steinauer's point proves the underlying key of FCPX: that it really isn't for professional editors. read more...