Monthly Archives: August 2012

My little Final Cut Pro X Review

Recently I have been editing the material I caught in Jeju in my new favorite tool, FCPX.

I really love the workflow in Apple’s new version of Final Cut Pro. The simple workflow makes a lot of sense to me. It’s so easy to learn and use that there’s almost no need for a manual.

I have no intention of going back to Premiere.

And FCPX really flies. By default settings, FCP does effects rendering in background, which is really cool; take a cup of coffee and when you return, you see the video is ready for smooth playback. Exporting is GPU accelerated which is wonderful, wonderful thing.

As a nice touch you can now just quickly drop in cross-dissolves in both audio and video; the same thing works for audio as a crossfade. There are many nice little touches like that all over in the application which gives the impression that the people who created it have actually thought about the needs of the video editors.

And VST & AU audio effects work fully with this application which is excellent thing; with most used video scopes and audio metering this really is fully featured video editing application.

It’s really easy to make a watchable DVD straight from FCPX although the process doesn’t give you much options regarding letter-boxing or fine tuning of menus. It would be nice to see some kind of mini-DVD Studio Pro bundled with this application. So It’s still necessary to have Toast installed if you intend to do any serious DVD authoring.

And it’s real cheap. Costing less than 300 dollars it’s a bargain, and with App Store you can now legally install it in multiple machines. Makes a lot of sense for small editing studios with multiple workstations.

There are however couple of things that I’d like to see fixed. One is that often the UI doesn’t refresh always properly when working in timeline. And sharing to Vimeo or Youtube works unreliably despite my fast optical (internet) connection. And if you unlink audio it seems impossible to relink it (I might be wrong, if I am please teach me).

And broadcast monitoring doesn’t work unless you have Lion installed.

Overall, I find FCPX joy to use. I can recommend this to anyone who has upgrade plans in mind.