Discovering FCPX Part II

wpadmin 0

OK, here’s a checklist I will update, so this is a rather compact resource to follow.

Media import	Import from SD Cards works OK and is rather efficient. Not so good: Thumbnails etc. don’t seem to be cached when I insert the same SD card again. So this delays me when I am a lazy person that leaves stuff on cards for ages MTS files still only work when they are in their original folder structure, which is plain braindead. Why? All information is in the file. This requires at least rewrapping the file into a different container to use it (that worked at least). Get your act together, Apple! Import from a directory doesn’t allow me to “flatten” the view, i.e. browse content of a folder structure by time
Basic video editing	Everything is fast, seems well-designed and most stuff is intuitive/obvious and there are little but important things which make your life easier (e.g. instead of simply not letting you drop a transition onto an edit, it tells you when there is not enough media for a transition and offers to adjust the edit accordingly, which is what I want in 90% of the cases, nice!). The new timeline and editing UI feels like a big step in the right direction.
Color correction	For what I have been doing it’s a perfect match. I hate having to use different programs to achieve a certain look and the kind of grading I usually apply is supported perfectly by the UI and it is done in realtime. A typical case: Correction 1: Adjust exposure and maybe color-balance a little Correction 2: Introduce some color shifts like giving your shadows a blue or green tint Correction 3: Isolate skin tones and make them a little more pronounced. I really like the new super-simple color mask UI. I never fully understood the color masking controls in FCP7, I must admit. Correction 4: Add a custom vignette by using the shape mask (simple to use, powerful enough for me) and pulling the global exposure down outside of it I am sold. Love it, period.
Sound editing	Only tried volume adjustment, fade-in/out and cross-fades. Very happy about it. Fast and intuitive.
Stabilization, rolling shutter removal	I stabilized a few handheld shots from my GH2 and GH1 and the results were not really usable, because it did stabilize it quite a bit but introduced artificial effects that did not look good (hard to describe, a bit like projecting the film on a 3d surface with ripples). Need to compare this to Premiere’s warp stabilizer with the exact same shots. So far, not impressive. Rolling shutter removal also did not work particularly well. i have a sample shot from a rolling train, that is a perfect lab sample for rolling shutter and the results looked a bit random (it did correct some frames well and others not at all, no idea why).
Metadata and clip organization, clip browsing	A very new approach but a quantum leap from FCP 7 (which admittedly sucks at that). I could not find anything I have seen in my workflows or those of others I know that would not work well with the keyword/keyword collection approach. The possibility of assigning keywords to parts of a clip (range-based keywords) and then finding these exact parts seems really nice and more powerful than subclips. Lets see how useful it turns out to be in real life.
Export	Just tried exporting the master file (e.g. the sequence as it was rendered) and that just worked and was fast. So at least the process from raw material to a finished master appears to be as fast as it can be. To me this is the most important thing.
Effects & Transitions	Haven’t really tried much but the effect preview by simply moving the mouse over the effect in the effects browser is a really useful thing. Apart from that, no special observations or complaints.
File handling	This is a big one: I want to be able to process a clip in a separate application, which has no integration with FCPX, even after I have used it (e.g. denoise it, using a command line or other tool). If I import the media without copying, this works. I even tested this with a file whose codec I changed in the process and it just worked. FCPX noticed the change and started the required background processes for stuff like rendering and analysis tasks and I could not see any problem in the edited clip. So, AFAICS, not the feared lock-in into “get a plugin for the job or don’t do it”. This is how it should be. Let’s see how well this works in a real-world project.

Preliminary summary: If nothing unexpected happens now and the impression described above remains after a real-world project, I would say it definitely seems like a perfect tool for fast news or event work and (most important for myself) fast and easy low-budget filmmaking, where you concentrate on telling your story and composing your illusions, rather than working around weird technical obstacles that don’t seem to make sense but must be known by the editor to not shoot themselves in the foot. So far all (I repeat: all) initial reservations have gone up in smoke. I have yet to find something important that I do not like. So far I haven’t! That has totally surprised me as I was one of those “ah, they are just gonna extend their iMovie consumer shit into the pro world and miss the point completely” doom mongers. Looks like I was so wrong on this one. I apologize. Apple, it seems like this rewrite was well-worth a bit of bitching and the wait after a rather screwed-up product launch. Your FCPX team seems to have produced a tool that truly deserves the label “next generation NLE”.

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