Until last year, my main tool for my edit & postproduction work for the LIA - Lab Inter Arts (www.labinterarts.com) and Murdock Event & Media was done in Final Cut Pro (7).
Then Final Cut Pro X came out and changed it all. In an instance, FCP7 became a legacy product.
Ouch!
Especially for the LIA part of my work, it is of major importance to go back to projects that have been finished a while ago for re-editions and changes. And I am talking about severe changes that require me to actually access the project, not just going back to the PRORES masters and snipping out a few parts. Some producers are more demanding than others - and the Lab Inter Arts work is in "constant flow" and thus not comparable to "standard" projects that would be definitely finished at some point.
Knowing that FCP7 would be still around for a while but also realizing that basing my future workflow on a product that will definitely become extinct sooner or later, I gave Final Cut Pro X a try.
And like many others, I was shocked:
First off, "legacy" projects could not be imported. A major showstopper. But: iMovie projects could be imported ... and I went (like many others): "What's that now, iMovie Pro?!?" Don't get me wrong, but the obvious connections to a consumer app is not really a hot reference for a "pro" tool, isn't it?
Secondly, there was no easy way to export an AAF or OMF of the project for audio postproduction use. Working on my projects in Pro Tools is my workflow, and even though FCPX offers some of Logic's audio functionality, the built-in functions are just too limiting for me.
Yes, there was Automatic Duck (which has been discontinued by now), but somehow it just didn't work reliably for me.
I really tried to understand what Apple had in mind with FCPX, and despite it's limitations I worked as much as I could with it. Until some projects got corrupted (out of any obvious reason) that I had been working on for weeks. I got angry. I didn't trust the software no more. Like many others, I switched back to Avid Media Composer (6) when it came out.
Ever since of that, I didn't touch FCPX any more. Actually until MC6 stopped the show, mostly because of AMA - Quicktime related problems. Long GOP errors on playback, exports that sometimes worked and sometimes not. Things were not easy for me on a *native* Media Composer platform without DNxHD transcoding.
I started to check on Final Cut Pro X again a couple of weeks ago, and nowadays it's a different piece of software than it was last year. Thanks to X2Pro Audio Convert, interfacing with Pro Tools is easy, EDL-X provides source / destination Timecode lists for me and the producer. Projects get backed up automatically every 15 minutes just in case, so it's not possible to loose days of work in case a project gets shot. It is also possible to convert legacy FCP XMLs to FCPX. Wonderful!
A week ago, I started to edit my next feature length documentary film on FCPX, and so far, I am very happy with it. It finally became the application it should've been in the first place!
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