Re: FCPX or Not...

[Craig Seeman] "But for each of us we weigh what is great vs what is not great differently. That's why some find it an improvement compared to other professional NLEs in some areas that are important to us and, others not."

Completely.

The Event side of the program, in my opinion, is awesome and represents true innovation.

It has taken those bunches of clips or media that we get, that really have no tangible asset, and allow us to to assign tangible elements to them, completely abstracted from where they are on some huge hard drive, in a meaningful way that is important to us as the content creator. It also allows instantaneous rearranging or reordering without destroying anything that we have already done. Lately, our projects have been changing very fast. We go in and shoot with one idea, and over the course if the project, that idea will change, and in my opinion, X is really suited for that with the Event structures in an easier and more powerful way than other NLEs. Again, it's not perfect, but it does present a level of control and power that other NLEs don't have.

I also like some of the media management side of things. The ability to create high resolution and proxy copies of footage with a click of a button is great, and it allows you to keep working while the process is happening. Also, the media is stored in a tidy little folder, something that third party apps have created to FCP7 (putting capture scratch/media folders in one place on a per project basis). Yes, the render files can get unruly pretty quick, but FCPX allows quick deletion of those if necessary. I would also like to see some better native format support without having to rewrap everything to .mov. There are times when this is great, there are times when this is unnecessary. We should have the choice. We also need a few more, or perhaps enhanced, consolidation tools.

The Project side needs some help, as well as performance/stability. That's A#1. Without reliability, you have nothing in a professional workspace.

I am not worried about interchange so much. It has been proven that it can be done. Is it perfect yet? No. It still needs enhancement and hard work. I know David L said that X's timelines are incompatible with any other NLE, I would beg to differ. No offense, David, just pointing it out. Yes, sometimes it requires 3rd party support, sometimes it doesn't, but that doesn't bother me. I use a lot of third party materials in FCP7 so it's not a new venture, personally, and I don't mind paying for something that help me get the job done.

I know we were talking about Pro vs High End. With the release of RCX Pro beta 11, it now supports FCPX round trip, so if you consider Red to be "high-end" then it's obvious there are people that think FCPX might be worth their time in "high-end" workflows. It would also allow conforming of Red material to almost any other NLE from FCPX, and conforming FROM other NLEs to FCPX. It's not impossible, and it's not incompatible.

The biggest thing that will stall FCPX completely (in my opinion) is not the Project or timeline or native format interfaces, but rather performance and reliability. People will find ways to work around any quirks, but if the program is crashing or in the one case we've heard about, corrupting beyond easy repair, then it will never get picked up by the late swath of professional editors, and I mean that in whatever pro space you work in. It needs more time in the oven.

Jeremy