Final Cut Pro X, how I so wanted to love thee. From the moment I got off the phone with your product manager, I thought you would be special. I thought you would be different. Not like all the rest. Turns out, you were just as petulant as I should have expected you to be.
There was so much promise. The “magnetic timeline”. How could you not like that idea? Move items around and they snap to each other and hold fast. Attach an audio clip to a video clip and mate the two permanently, or until you decide otherwise. Is this not genius?
Clip syncing: choose a video clip with on-camera audio, choose the off-camera audio clip, sync the two. Prepare to be amazed as FCP X matches the audio waveforms. DSLR shooters, rejoice!
Then there's 64-bit operation. The benefits are numerous. Real-time effects previews with background rendering is just the start.
Clip identification? Wow! FCP X can detect scenes with single actors and groups and automagically sort them for you into bins.
However, the excitement over FCP X's bag of tricks soon wanes. No doubt, you've heard by now from many corners of the web what a disappointment FCP X is. I won't try to convince you otherwise. I did, however, try to convince myself otherwise, and more than a month down the track I've decided to stop deluding myself.
FCP X may have held plenty of promise. It could have been the first step as part of a bold new way to edit video. It coulda been a contender, I tell ya. But it's none of these things. It's a disaster.
Let me be positive for a moment. The absolute best thing about this release of FCP is the ease with which exposure and colour adjustments are made. In earlier versions, you needed some old school knowledge to adjust levels and fix colour casts. Kind of a dark art, really.
Now, it's dead easy. Opening the Colour Board provides three sets of adjustments: Exposure, Saturation and Colour. What Apple has done with this set of tools is bring the ease of still image editing to video editing. The Exposure adjustment is a good example. It's much like using the Levels adjustment in Photoshop, with three sliders handling shadows, midtones and highlights.
A recent assignment that comprised about 80 clips of about five seconds each was shot ad hoc and in a rushed manner at the location of the shoot (that's the way things go sometimes, folks) and I actually looked forward to fixing the exposures and colour balance in FCP X. In previous FCP versions, it would have been a dreary post-production chore.
Just once, I looked forward to using FCP X instead of 7. On the other hand, a more recent job with more tedious editing, the sort of thing FCP 7's multicam editing is good for, had to be abandoned and sent to FCP 7.
Thing is, and as many of you will already have heard, much of what else is likeable in FCP X is much like the good bits of iMovie. And that's just not right. We don't want a better iMovie. We want a version of FCP that offers a compelling alternative to its competitors. Perhaps even one that's better than its competitors.
There are some things about FCP X that really get up my nose. These are points that I was quiet about at first because I was willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt for such a major overhaul of FCP and some leeway to get a bug fix update out. But it hasn't happened. In fact, there seems to have been very little happening on the FCP X front since its release.
Examples? If you have FCP versions 7 and X in the same Applications folder, any action that had previously been associated with FCP 7 is commandeered by X. For instance, an Aperture plug-in that creates a movie sequence comprised of still frames and exports it to FCP can't be opened by FCP X because X can't import XML files, one of which is created by the Aperture plug-in so FCP knows what to do with the files it's being sent.
Second example. If you are working in FCP 7 and you send a sequence to Compressor for output, both the version of Compressor installed with Final Cut Studio and the version installed along with FCP X launch. This is more annoying than it is problematic, though.
Selecting clips from FCP X's event gallery is usually no big deal. Select, drag and drop into the timeline. But FCP 7 users accustomed to selecting in and out points and dragging the defined segment of a clip from the viewer into the timeline will occasionally find FCP X very annoying, specifically when wanting a small segment of the clip.
What happens is the selection frame (handles?) surrounding a small segment — say, two seconds or less — are so close together that FCP can't distinguish between the user wanting to adjust the clip or grab the clip and drag it to the timeline. The solution is to hit the W key, the shortcut for Insert, which places the selection with the insertion point defined by the playhead.
But what if you want to lay the selection into a track of its own? Can't do it with a shortcut. So you have to select a larger segment of the clip, drag it to a new track and then adjust its length. There is only one expression for this: Aaaaaaaargh!
But on top of all of this, FCP X is just plain buggy.
Which brings us back to the sorry state of affairs that surrounds FCP X's release.
First indictment: There is no trial version. The only way to use FCP X is to buy it from the App Store. If you don't like it, good luck getting your money back. This is just wrong. Forcing users to pay to discover the new version of a well-established and trusted software suite is actually inferior? Does that sound right to you?
Second indictment: It's a beta release. That you pay for.
Let's hear that again. It's a beta release. That you pay for.
Apple's FCP X product manager explained to me that Apple is aware that FCP X as it stands was missing some features but this would be remedied in the future.
Really? In my world, that makes it an unfinished product. A beta release. That you pay for.
Third indictment: As it's only available as a 1GB+ download from the Apple Store, installing it is a pain. Re-installing it — as you might do in the hope of quashing some bugs — doubly so.
I wanted to like FCP X. I gave it a really good shot. I persisted with its foibles on the basis that it had some nifty features and Apple would add the missing ones sooner than it has. It hasn't, bar the 10.0.1 update that addressed some minor bugs.
Ask me a month ago how I'd rate FCP X and I'd give it a three out of five, with about half a star awarded based on some trust that Apple was on the case. But the disappointment factor and sheer frustration of using FCP X, along with the fact I can achieve much of what is possible in FCP X by using the more stable iMovie, and I'm giving FCP X a two-star rating, but only because it manages to be a terrific editor for handling simple jobs with footage captured from a DSLR.
But this is a bit like putting Tim Cook in charge of accounts receivable because you hear he's good with numbers. FCP is, and has been, capable of so much more.
I'll be keeping an eye on FCP X updates to see if they bring this venerable software title back on track, but I'm not holding my breath.
