I had the immense pleasure of chatting with Chris Fenwick last night on his FCPX Grill podcast. We talk about lots of FCP tips and tricks. But most importantly, we discuss my humble roots with the Videonics DirectED Plus!
You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fcpx-grill/id757640927?mt=2
Here’s a tip on how to cut down music in the magnetic timeline while maintaining sync. In addition, there’s a bonus tip on syncing SFX to the music and keeping it in sync. Understanding the latter what what made FCP X click for me.
Steve Martin & Mark Spencer of Ripple Training will be presenting. Neil Smith will be speaking about working with a SAN on 10.1 .
Here’s the schedule for tonight. Sign up here. Hope you can make it!
This past Saturday, I had the privilege of both attending and demoing FCP at the FCPWORKS L.A. launch event. It was a great day that harkened back to the early years of Final Cut when Apple would demo and do one-on-ones with prospective and upgrading users.
What was great about yesterday’s event was not only that channel partners like AJA and Quantum were there showing full support for the new FCP ecosystem, but that Apple was there as well, demoing all the new features. The fact that there were about 10 Mac Pros chugging away was pretty impressive, too. I got to work on an 8-core all day and… holy shmoly I want one.
This is really 3 blog posts in one. I’m getting ready to hit Sundance this weekend, so just wanted to talk about all the updates and a new/slightly used piece of tech I just received. Be sure to hit the more button below (that’s new!) if you want to read the rest of the article.
Yesterday, Apple released FCP X 10.1.1. It’s a most welcome update as it fixes the timeline responsiveness issue. I’m extremely happy that Apple got on this issue so quickly after the initial release. It shows a real dedication to the app and that the team is listening to the bug reports.
Final Cut Pro X version 10.1.1 Updates Include:
I got to mess with it last night and a bit this morning. All reports are good so far. The timeline is much more responsive and doesn’t seem to slow down. My one grievance, however, is that the timeline still isn’t responsive enough. I still don’t like the playhead jumping animation when you move from clip to clip. The audio waveforms go away if you zoom in during playback. Fast forwarding and rewinding footage at high speeds can also be a problem on slower drives.
This is a pretty basic command and not exactly earth-shattering, but I had no idea that it existed until today. I found it when I was reading through some of the commands in the command editor. This could be helpful after a long day of editing a radio cut and dealing with expanded audio and b-roll.
In the vein of my shortest Premiere CC December Update Review Ever, here we go.
I see 10.1 as a very solid groundwork for moving forward with FCP X. No crashing, so far. Speed and responsiveness are better than 10 dot naught. The new library workflow is a most welcome addition. My favorite new feature is the clip indicator as I can see that little dot becoming something very important in the way we edit.
I look forward to testing the heck out of it over the next few weeks and months. More later, of course.
And to whet your whistle on things to come… check out Peter Wiggins’s video at the bottom of the page:
Ok, exciting night here at the Garbershop homestead. The boards are lighting up like crazy. And I forgot my power supply for my laptop at the freakin’ office!
I’ll update this post with updates. But here’s what I know for now.
Event Manager X now free. Read this article about using it to move your old FCP file structure over to the new Library structure. It’s very easy and straightforward. I’ve already done it with a client project.
Philip’s review of 10.1:
As you all may know, I’ve chosen FCP X as my NLE for the foreseeable future. However, I can’t always guarantee that I’ll be able to use FCP on jobs that I don’t run through my shop.
Many people I speak to in post casually mention that they are planning on moving over to Premiere. Being keenly aware of this possibility, I’ve been keeping my eye on Premiere since CS6.
Every time the software has a big update, I give it a run-through to see what’s been fixed and added. But, I never end up really using it for anything. It always ends up like this weird science project that gets stuffed in the attic, only to be dusted off every 15 years so that your child can re-use it for their science project. Immoral? Yes. Time saving? Absolutely.
I finally got a chance to get my edit on this weekend with the Premiere CC December update. This will be the shortest review of Premiere on the blogosphere:
Premiere needs Find in Timeline. Without that, I ain’t a-usin’ it. I’ve been saying that since CS6. FIT is the key to smart editing and I’m having a “fit” without it.
And that was my review.
My pal Mike Nichols over at TheEditDoctor has written the most extensive list of requests for Premiere HERE. What do you think his number one request is? Yup, Find in Timeline. It really seems like the most basic of features. Think of Microsoft Word without Find and Replace? You’d have to scan your document every time you want to edit something. Seems very old fashioned to me. Like pre-1990s old-fashioned.
Here is my list of missing features in order of importance:
1. Find in Timeline
2. Scrub audio at normal pitch
3. Audio that goes to 12db. Why only +6.02 in the timeline? So, like, weird.
4. Make the wireframes work just like FCP 7. Can’t currently move more than 1 object at a time. They need to be able to be turned on and off. Currently, it’s cray cray. Yeah, I said it. Cray cray.
5. Fix the 3-way color correction filter. Having to always change the spread of where the blacks, mids, and whites overlap is insane. Right now, it’s barely usable in my book. Too much twirling down of tools that I need every time. And, no, I don’t plan on moving over to SpeedGrade every time I want to do some quick CCing.
6. Why is there no way to set a Marker out-point other than 2x-clicking on the marker and setting a duration? And nope, I don’t want to always use Prelude to log my stuff. If I’m mid-edit and need to log something quickly there’s simply no need to go out of Premiere.
7. There’s no keyboard command to switch between tabs in the selected panel. I really really (did I mention really?) want this. The key command was CMD-SHIFT-] and [ in FCP 7. It worked just like Safari or Chrome. It’s a necessity to keyboard-only editing.
8. Update the render engine. FCP X renders downconverts and upconverts much better than Premiere.
9. Just pony up and make ProRes presets. Just do it. You’ll make me happy. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what you really want, Adobe?
10. The multicam engine is ok. But FCP X’s is way better. Unless it’s buried deep, there’s no way to set a camera angle and tell Premiere to automatically order the clips by angle.
Adobe, get on it!