Re: After a year has perception of FCPX changed?

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[Chris Harlan] "Sounds like you found your thing, man. That's cool. Me, I like tracks. I like the organization. I also like multiple timelines.

I hear ya, And really, the only reason I posted here was because my experience actually using X has been much different from much of the crap a lot of folks seem to believe based on version 1 or a day or two of playing with it.

As a former audio guy, I like organizing my timeline too, and I see Roles as being able to actually do it for you. All they need is a button that groups clips by Role in the timeline... and I can't see any reason they won't do that. Everything would just get automatically organized. How cool would (will) that be?

Roles are really fricking cool even now... I have an FX project in 7 with well over a thousand clips, all organized nicely in bins. They're just loose in one folder in the Finder, so using the media browser in X kinda sucked. I got the project into X (7toX), all the bins became KW collections so it's exactly the same as it was. I spent about a half hour assigning roles (mono fx, stereo fx, etc) to everything... EZ. Now if I want to mute or solo my gazillion tracks of fx in the timeline... click one button. If I want to slide a couple fx in relation to one another I don't have to scrub around to see what's what in my timeline, just highlight the fx. I go back to 7 and curse it now lol :-)

I also think the multiple timeline thing will be improved. X does do it it's just sort of weird how it works now. I never really use timelines as bins, but I can see your point. I just make lots of markers in my source clips, do you cut selects into different timelines? If so, the smart collection feature might actually be able to do that for you too, Tag something as "explosion" or "good line", whatever, and it just sticks it in a "bin" (keyword collection) for you. I'll have to mess around with it... the metadata stuff in X is pretty crazy. I also like being able to play or skim through sequences without actually opening them in the timeline, makes looking for something I want to grab from an earlier cut of something much simpler than opening a bunch of sequences to look through them... to me anyway...

[Chris Harlan] But, you're right. With the latest version (.03/.04), its a matter of taste now, and not Toy v. Tool... its nice to have some NLE diversity out there...

Yep... again, I'm not some wide eyed evangelist, I just forced myself to work through the "WTF is this?!" moments that I treated as show stoppers when messing with it earlier. I'm at a point where I can just cut without thinking about how the app works, and I've been pleasantly surprised. Also, having worked with early, buggy, sluggish, feature incomplete versions of FCP, I'm probably a little more forgiving than a lot of folks. ;-)

[Chris Harlan] Hey, I'm curious--when you cut that Duece Bigalow spot on ancient FCP--was it offline, or did you have one of those early Cineflex cards?"

It was offline... I remember having discussions about those cards though. Ah, the good old days... :-) Actually, the only thing about X that I may be jumping the gun on is getting elements out for finishing. X2Pro will make AAF's for protools... it works, but still needs a little fine tuning. And there's an app coming out soon that'll generate EDL's... it works too but it's still in beta. Worst case is I have to suck the spots back into 7 and export from there, not the end of the world...

Anyway, as you said... it's nice to have options and, despite the "it's a toy" FUD and "bad apple abandoned me" crowd, X *is* an option. in my worthless opinion of course ;-)