FCPX at the London FCPUG
The London Final Cut Pro Usergroup was held earlier today. As someone who was, shall we say, "somewhat disappointed" by the latest release, I was eager to hear what others thought, and whether or not there would be any word from Apple as to the future of Final Cut Pro.
During the second half, Larry Jordan took the stage. One of the first things he asked was how many people were pleased about the direction Final Cut Pro had taken with the new release (I'm paraphrasing here). Out of about 300 people, maybe a dozen raised their hand. He then went on to give a bit of a tour of the new version, in an effort to dispel some of the misinformation circulating about the release. He also explained that while he isn't directly affiliated with Apple, he had been in contact with the development team (if I have some time tomorrow I will try to post a transcript of the email he read out from them).
I will try to summarise the main points below:
- Audio cross-fades can be done, but the process is ugly. Probably will be fixed soon.
- Media does not have to be copied to the local drive.
- Plugins will work, but the developers need to recode them.
- Keyboard shortcuts are same as FCP7
- It will be down to blackmagic et al. to get SDI out monitoring
- Apple Color is dead
- Audio mixing is not very good at the moment
- The magnetic timeline will grow on people, as will the skimmer
- You can do versioning by duplicating projects, otherwise everything is saved as you go along (my own guess is that this will tie in to OS 10.7's autosave and versioning functionality in the future anyway)
- Markers are still supported, with a new type of marker (a "to-do" marker)
- There's no way to have a separate viewer and sequence window like in FCP 7
- Dual screens can be used, in a limited sense
- There should be a major update within 4 months
- There's no way to work collaboratively right now
- It's mad that it doesn't import FCP7 projects
- It will be down to third-parties to create support for EDLs, XML, and decks (Apple is not interested in any of these).
For me personally, it's the last point that kills it for me. Everything I do in post revolves around interchange. EDLs are 30 years old, but they work because they are incredibly simple. It should be so trivial to code EDL export for Final Cut Pro that I'm actually looking into doing it myself. But to "outsource" FCPXML -a specification created by Apple, no less - to third-parties, will just not work in the long term. Who will decide how the format grows (and unlike EDLs, it must grow)? Autodesk, Adobe, and others actively support the FCPXML format. That Apple are effectively abandoning it is bad news for the post industry.
Anyway, I hope that's food for thought for some of you. I'll update this post tomorrow if I think of anything else I've missed.
