Re: New blog post from Philip Hodgetts. Worth the read.

Two key quotes

"Let’s assume that it’s only twice as fast as Final Cut Pro 7. Some of that is simply because of a modern foundation that drops any requirement for transcoding or rendering effects, and that’s shared with other modern NLEs like Premiere Pro, Vegas, Media Composer and Edius. But some is because of the way the interface has been redesigned."

Much of this whole concept about faster compares FCPX to Legacy and that is a straw man analogy. The comparison needs to be to either something like Avid 6 or FCP8, the 64 bti version that could have, and in many opinions, should have been written.

Any time saving due to ability to natively edit with tapeless codecs is moot, since ALL modern NLE's can do that. By all accounts FCPX lags behind PPro in that capacity still.

What's up for discussion is how the new interface speeds editing, and on that I see no consensus. Since I have never touched FCPX I have no opinion in that area, but I have yet to see a compelling explanation as to how the FCPX timeline speeds up work in "most instances."

Statements like "it speeds up my work by half" is interesting, but not compelling without the how; and the work done needs to represent reasonably complex work or it won't apply to many here; obviously the theory being if it can do complex work, it can do simple work but the reverse is not necessarily true.

"The thing is, if we have one NLE that’s noticeably faster in use, that word will get out to producers and, guess what? Producers and executives like things done faster because that’s the direction they’ve been pushing. (Oh, and faster is usually cheaper.) If a two week job can be done in one, if a one week job can be done in three days, then whoever is doing it will adopt the tool that lets it be done in three days, or they’ll be looking for other work."

This of course will be the final evidence. If it's faster in complex workflows, then everyone here will shut up and use it.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin' attached to nothin'
"Deciding the spine is the process of editing" F. Bieberkopf