Re: Apple Posts New Videos Comparing FCPX to Adobe & Avid

I'm actually with Peter on this. Apple should have released these videos on Day One. They do a much better job of communicating their vision for editing than anything that's come before. (and you have to give them some credit for lumping their own FCP 7 in with Avid and Premiere)

I've been a full-time filmmaker who's been using FCP for years. I'll be the first to admit that when FCP X was released I immediately got busy learning Premiere CS5.5. Adobe's really gotten it's act together with Premiere, and at this point I'm not sure I'd go back to FCP 7 even if it was re-released today. Premiere is just so much faster and more powerful.

Having said that, after spending a couple of days with FCP X I'm starting to get what Apple is thinking with this. A fellow filmmaker and I spent most of today messing around with it and we had a blast! We even purposely shot some "problem footage" with a DSLR just to see how FCP X would handle it. Again, we were impressed.

I'll agree that it might not be ready for the big leagues (we crashed it once just doing a color correction). The idea of editing a 90-minute project with FCP X makes me nervous, and while I dig the color tools the absence of Colorista II is definitely a bummer. Probably me biggest hang-up with it is they way they completely abandoned standard terminology. It's going to be hard to communicate with other filmmakers if "project" doesn't mean "project".

So I'm going to keep kicking the tires some more. I have a number of short-form projects coming up that this might be perfect for. The problem is that I don't have tons of spare time to keep learning new editors. At some point I'm going to need to start developing some muscle memory with one weapon-of-choice editor...