Working Your Way Around

So I've had a little time to work in Final Cut Pro X – just a couple of days. But first we really do have to modify the name. It's now "officially" FInal Cut X, no Pro in the name please. Now I'm not mad about it, not crazed like some have been, but let's be honest it's not a pro app based on what's still in our heads from past experiences. Sure it still has some bugs if you go by the discussions, but it is a good application for editing video in an easy, yet powerful way. I want to use it and I think a lot of students will also. It's what iMovie should have been.

If you remember, my biggest complaint was that it wants to give you access to all the footage and projects all the time. For a home computer that's OK, but not in a multi-user environment, nor particularly in a business environment, no, not at all. Is there a way around that – yes.

In the old days the Avid Media Composer had the same problem. All we did was add our name to the name of the folder and it disappeared. The software could only see the 5.xMedia folder and nothing else.

Well, same thing here. Final Cut X makes two folders. One is the Final Cut Events folder for the footage and the other is the Final Cut Projects folder for the sequence (see even the application doesn't call it Pro). All you have to do is rename or better yet move them into a new folder with your name on it and the application can no longer see your project and footage. Easy.

OK, it's not going to be easy, people are going to get it wrong and lose track of their footage and project, but in the end it'll be OK. Does it bother me that I can't output to tape? No, in my world tape is dead, no loss there. Do I think the color correction is a little clunky - umm, yes, but I"m far from being a perfectionist. In fact I may be the perfect customer for Final Cut X – lots of in-house projects, mostly short form and working in a lot of differing formats.

So, will I toss out the old Final Cut Pro Studio? No way. People are still working on projects with that and I suspect people will also start projects with that. Will I switch over to Adobe Premier to edit? No, probably not, but I am interested in their DVD authoring application to make interactive Blu-ray disks and once I've got the whole package of applications maybe I'll use Premiere a bit.

In the end it's been useful to see that a monolithic approach to our problems isn't such a good idea after all and that we should have a broader range of options for doing work. It's also important to notice that, for a lot of us, the work has changed and the concept of the monolith video editor is no longer true either. It's a new day for all of us in all respects.

It's also been amusing to see how vocal everyone has been. We don't usually get as rilled up as this. That has made us feel like a community of users, but also with differing opinions and different needs. Let's keep talking to each other and help all of us get through this transition into the future. As we say at Hampshire we're driving fast into the fog. Good luck.

gunther