As the software loaded up, I noticed that the process was much faster than it was on previous versions. At first glance, the interface looked suspiciously like iMovie. As I let my eyes guide me through this new terrain for something familiar, and looked up at the toolbar options, I soon realised that a lot of options were missing. I hit some keyboard shortcuts to get my bearings, and with nearly every shortcut command, something entirely new presented itself.
I went through the sequence settings, and to my amazement, found very few options. For instance, FCPX runs solely on Apple ProRes! Mind you, ProRes are a great set of codecs to work on and I myself use them quite frequently, especially for footage from DSLRs. But they are highly compressed for commercial/film work, and to have all of my footage just natively converted to ProRes, without even an option, is a nightmare. Then I got the ultimate shock, FCPX wasn’t supporting my AJA Kona 3 I/O board! I did a quick Web search for drivers, but no drivers were available. They took out I/O support from the software, temporarily leaving my expensive and very useful audio monitors, as well as my sanity monitor (broadcast monitor), as good as paper weights. And to ingest uncompressed footage I should connect the tape deck via FireWire? AJA has now released a beta driver for its boards to support FCPX, and they are available on their website, but do keep in mind that even they reiterate the fact that these are beta drivers.
Another shocker was the lack of media control over my projects (or events, as they now call them). FCPX just seemed to pick everything up and throw it in the default directory. Not one to be easily deterred, I imported my media and dropped two separate clips on the timeline, only for them to be snapped together. This was thanks to the dreaded magnetic timeline Apple was raving about at NAB. It’s a nightmare for any editor to not have an open timeline to make multiple optional cuts and have them spread out. There was no option to disable this.
Backend rendering was the first relief after a series of disappointments. The 64-bit engine allows you to continue making your cut while the software does all preview and codec rendering in the background, making use of that extra RAM that the 32-bit Final Cut Studio wasn’t able to tap into. The viewer really makes the footage look good when you preview it because it maximises your GPU, but I still preferred having my I/O board do that for me on my sanity monitor. And these nifty features were nothing new after the prior release of Adobe’s 64-bit CS5 and CS5.5 Mercury Engine.
Another notable feature is effect playback in real-time. Meaning one can go through the effect presets and preview them without having to apply them onto the shot first. Apple has also integrated their popular colour-grading and correction software “Color” into FCPX. Oh, and FCPX doesn’t run audio as default mono or stereo tracks, it reads it as 5.1. Who needs anything else when you have 5.1 to work with!
One of the crazy things Apple did with the original release of FCPX was that they didn’t allow it to be backward compatible with project files from previous versions. Surprisingly, they only allowed people to import iMovie projects, which gave birth to the name iMovie Pro for FCPX! Subsequent updates allow users to import old FCP project files as well as EDLs (edit decision list) files (XML) for proper workflows, but with magnetic timeline always being a factor, and knowing what most of my timelines looked like, I decided not to even bother with updating.
The unfortunate thing is that FCPX got a lot more wrong than it got right. Apple took everything that made FCP a weapon of choice for me and most editors, and threw it out of the window. They have vowed to bring FCP back to being the industry’s standard NLE, but I don’t expect that to happen any time soon. This is worrying not only for me but countless other editors, who had based their setups on the original FCP.
Players like Adobe and Avid have already started to move in on the opportunity, offering discounts to people switching over from FCP. Adobe’s CS5.5 has come a long way, especially since I worked on Premiere Pro 2 and hated it; but now, CS5.5 is a proper working module of how a 64-bit NLE should work. In fact, CS5.5 has been dubbed FCP8, and it’s what Apple should have done. Avid is one NLE that rules them all, but the supporting hardware’s price makes it inaccessible to most of us.
FCPX will definitely take some time before it can be the best again – if ever. Until then, Adobe and Avid have the window they needed to do the damage they’ve always wanted to do. Once a software package becomes an industry standard, it leads to dramatic innovation in its further development. All of this points to the possibility that Apple’s FCP may very well be left behind forever.
Curmally is an Apple certified Final Cut Pro editor.