Re: Steve Kanter: What FCPX CAN Do

Gary, it's clear that you've put a lot of thought and effort into trying to explain your point of view to me. Thank you for that.

I'll point you to David Lawrence's article, The Magnet Timeline -- Thoughts on Apple's New Paradigm [link] for some background on my perspective.


[Gary Huff] "Now HOW exactly would importing this timeline into FCPX mess up? I can understand clip connections and so forth and so on, but there should be absolutely NO reason why you couldn't import a project from FCP7 and it actually play "correctly" as per the basic edit itself. There won't be Video 3 clips playing underneath Video 2 clips in the like. The only possible problem would arise when you start to move things, and then you might possibly have to fix relationships, but I don't think that would be that big of a deal, especially if you switch to the position tool."

You've already written my answer in there. You can get the basic edit in, but once you start trying to move things, the fact that the edit doesn't conform to FCPX's editorial model will have you fighting the application all the way. In a complex edit, there will be hundreds of these relationships to sort out.

It will give a terrible user experience, and that's why I think Apple is dodging import. Not because I think it's literally impossible to import a timeline, but because FCPX's tools require information about clip relationships that doesn't exist in other NLEs to work as they were intended.

I should probably clarify my point of view on this a bit more, but this is what I've been trying to say from the beginning here: only knowing the placement of clips in time and not knowing the relationships between clips, FCPX won't work the same way as it would if the edit had been built from scratch.

It seems that Apple, who places such a high premium on the user experience, would rather not import legacy projects at all than import them poorly and offer a bad user experience with FCPX.

Walter Soyka
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