First Impressions Of Final Cut Pro X

[Half Caf]

Hello all, I thought I would share some beginner's thoughts on Final Cut Pro X.
I recently installed and finished my first video done completely in final cut pro. If you didn't already know, the latest installment is a huge resource hog. I know my machine is not the best (20" Al. iMac, 2.66 Core 2 Duo, 4gb ram, Nvidia 256 Graphics), but it really struggled to keep the playback smooth -especially once you add any transitions. This definitely made it hard to work on precise clip placement and synchronise timings.
A little google-ing and I found that FCPX is notorious for bringing even high-end systems to their knees. I had background rendering turned off and will experiment with proxy editing in the future to see if there is any performance increase.
A lot of people complained about the new version of FCP being too different from previous versions -even "dumbed down" in many ways. Being that I have no prior experience with Final Cut, I can't speak to this. It was all pretty intuitive and I had no real difficulty diving in from iMovie. If I had to make a comparison, I would say that FCPX is the "Aperture" of Mac's video apps (a prosumer offering of it's iLife counterpart).
Just wanted to let you all know that you will need some pretty good hardware specs if you want to do involved editing in the new Final Cut.

Oh yeah, and here is the new vid Let me know what you think.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRWtfCG9jZU[/youtube]

 

[TriumfAnt]

Nice work. Looking forward to more.

 

[ariderslife]

I use FCPX aswell,

it is a bit of a resource hog,

i found having more Ram, changing the video to Proxy and also using a scratch disk helped heaps!

most of all was the ram, wow what a difference that makes.

 

[UnstableBoy]

I maxed out my macbook pro to 8 gigs and it seems to run ok. (I had a bad ram chip so when I replaced it I took the time to upgrade) I have yet to play around with proxy media and the like but I am still learning the program.

I did pick up the APTS book because I really don't know much about video editing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321774671 (about half way through)

and it is a powerful program.. but it seems alot of people that have been editing for a while do not like the changes from the old final cut. (they feel its iMovie "pro" and not a new FCP )

me, being a complete novice, I like it.

 

[Yarek]

It is hella-expensive though at £199...

 

[Romans5.8]

It's definitely dumbed down over previous versions, but it works well for most users. Think of it as "iMovie Pro". Works well for me. I've got 16GB of RAM in my 2012 MBP, dual SSD's in RAID 0. Still a resource hog and rendering takes a while, but it works!

 

[kryten]

First off get more RAM and use proxy media. The whole point of proxy media is to allow slower systems to work well or to keep really huge projects from slowing to a crawl.

As for being dumbed down, I've used both Final Cut Pro 7 and Final Cut Pro X. There's very little that 7 could do that X can't if anything. It looks more like iMovie and some things are moved around a bit so professionals want to compare it to iMovie and bitch about it so they don't have to learn it and use it. I work in IT and every time Adobe, Apple or Microsoft makes a minor change to an app everyone bitches and moans and a month or two later everyone loves it and loathes the rumors of the changes to the next coming version (kinda like everyone bitches every time they change the Youtube or Facebook interface) .

If Final Cut Pro X wont do what you need it to do then you're someone that shouldn't be wasting your time working on amateur video for YouTube.

 

[matth1138]

First off get more RAM and use proxy media. The whole point of proxy media is to allow slower systems to work well or to keep really huge projects from slowing to a crawl.

As for being dumbed down, I've used both Final Cut Pro 7 and Final Cut Pro X. There's very little that 7 could do that X can't if anything. It looks more like iMovie and some things are moved around a bit so professionals want to compare it to iMovie and bitch about it so they don't have to learn it and use it. I work in IT and every time Adobe, Apple or Microsoft makes a minor change to an app everyone bitches and moans and a month or two later everyone loves it and loathes the rumors of the changes to the next coming version (kinda like everyone bitches every time they change the Youtube or Facebook interface) .

If Final Cut Pro X wont do what you need it to do then you're someone that shouldn't be wasting your time working on amateur video for YouTube.

This.

I've been using FCPX since it came out. It's the a great piece of software.


Sent from mobile device, forgive the janky grammar and spelling.

 

[13DollarRefill]

I've started using Final Cut Pro X for my vlogs. previously used (FCP7, Avid Media Composer, Premiere)
At first I found it very difficult to use (I'm an intermediate user of final cut 7) in finding tools and simple fades and key framing of video/audio.
after using it for a while I still need to hit up Google for simple things but I'm only using it to broaden my experience in post production software.

I haven't tried using proxy media/ will have to give that a shoot in my next edit.