Despite the negative reviews, I decided to stick with Apple and know they can only improve their products from hereon. I clicked the “BUY” button in the Mac App Store and spent $299.99 on Final Cut Pro X, heralded by Apple as the next generation of video editing.
Within a day, I discovered it’s tough to make the transition if you’re well-versed with the older suites. The timeline is vastly different, and audio+video seem to be linked very tightly. It’ll take me awhile before I get used to delinking audio, etc.
In terms of speed, my 3 year old MacBook Pro is not doing a good job. FCP X needs juice, and lots of it, before you can enjoy its full potential. I can see it attacking the Canon 5D Mk2 files that I threw at it, but the time taken to crunch them would have been days! According to a friend of mine who recently acquired an i7-based MacBook Pro, it works fine. Canon files can be edited natively without having to transcode them.
Audio/Video scrubbing is another area I’m not familiar with. It doesn’t seem to work well for me, perhaps because my machine is a tad laggy.
Oh, to end off… I realise the keystrokes are different for some functions too. In FCP 6/7, I’m used to Ctrl-V to use the blade cut tool on the timeline where the playhead is, but in FCP X, it’s now Cmd-B. Why on earth it has to change, I have yet to uncover, but it sure adds speedbumps to my editing process now.
All in all, FCP X does seem rather raw, but I am certain the next update will address many of the issues video editors face. Don’t let me down, Apple!
Heya, I'm Alex TheBackpackr & here's my lovely wife with whom I go on all adventures. I'm an entrepreneur and a Communications Consultant for a large church at the same time. More about me
UPDATE: Final Cut Pro has since improved somewhat, and newer subversions have emerged, with the current one as of today being 10.0.3 which has included multicamera functionality, amongst others. I guess it’s still being developed.