After bitching about the obvious deficiencies of my FCP 7 for a while (getting even more buggy with time) I’ve been playing with FCPX for a few hours now as I need an NLE that works robustly and does not render for hours for ridiculously short clips with no fancy effects. From what I have seen and read, Premiere seemed the way to go but it is just a bit expensive for an editing hobbyist like me.

Since I have to get familiar with it anyway for my day-job (for making our software work well for FCPX workflows as well), I just bought and tried it. I had a lot of initial reservations as I did not like iMovie at all and do not like the philosophy of Apple consumer tools of taking control out of the hands of the power-user in many cases. There were some concrete questions that I had like how do you export your project with burnt-in english subtitles or music enabled or not if you no longer have the concept of tracks (answer: you can and I like how but will skip that for now).

I have to say WOW, AM I IMPRESSED! For a user like myself Apple has done a hell of a job to make the common editing tasks easy and fast. I read blog articles of people complaining about color correction no longer offering the good old color wheels but I just got my first color correction tasks done exactly as I wanted, just by watching two youtube tutorials and then playing around a bit and I think it is just much better and faster than before (and in this case, I am not talking about rendering time, which is in a different league than that of the dinosaur FCP 7, but how long it takes for me to achieve a certain look).

Timeline/Storyline functionality for adding/editing transitions, fades etc. are just extremely intuitive and fast as well.

The main thing I need to find out now is what the practical consequences/limitations of using the new event database versus the old file-based approach are. I would still like to be able to use an external tool to denoise a clip after I have already edited it in the NLE and stuff like that and at the moment I don’t know if that is possible at all.

Looking forward to discovering more.