Final Cut Pro X complaints fly between editors and developers (Updated)

Am I the only one who is struggling to understand the market for this program. It's not for professionals (too much control gone and negative change to be useful), and its too complicated for regular people.

I don't believe that the market has THAT many prosumers that are willing to spend 200 dollars for this Piece of Crap.

The "tired" complaints against FCPX are really a small number. The ones you hear about are lack of multi-cam and lack of loading legacy projects. There are many other things about this program that are deficient. Some are mere bugs. Some are built-in at the all-new architecture level.

You cannot, for instance, see and manipulate keyframes. You can put them into an effect, but once there, you can only change one if the playhead is sitting on one.

It won't open Photoshop layered images any more and keep them as layers.

Opening a video scope of any kind consumes half the picture area.

The interface, seen above, is dark and often hard to read.

Many interface items are repetitiously non-ergonomic.

Control functions such as angle adjustments are down-graded from FCP7.

It takes FOREVER to open the program, even with just a few items in the current project.

It hogs memory and takes up vast amounts of disk space.

It eschews the billion plus hours of experience accumulated by the FCP community over the years and substitutes a number of operational and work-habit related features, keystrokes and procedures with no respect for the community that made FCP a success.

Randy Ubilos should be ashamed of himself.

Typical Apple, fixing something that isn't broken. After they "upgraded" iMovie a few years ago, I gave up making videos. Just didn't feel like learning it all over again.

Of course, Microsoft also did it going from PPT03 to 07 and 10.

What's really disconcerting is you know you're really good at something, but after the "upgrade" you may as well be a novice.

You'd think a company as savvy as Apple would take this as a PR disaster ... and therefore, mobilize an all out effort to really discuss these issues with a variety of stakeholders for the sake of the long-term business.

Of course as stated in several places, it could be an effort to consolidate the product AND just say that "we think editing video is now a commodity thing" and our software effort here is saying that ... we've figured out that what helps Apple is to now help consumers do video versus the market share of pro's." They could be right.

But why not be smart enough to tackle the issue head on and create a day where you make that market-driven case and show the software for what it is and isn't in advance.

That would have be sensitive, smart and best of all, kind.

It's really hard to not say ... Apple, you acted dumb.

Harvey
http://macintoshia.com
the land of mac learning

just rename the god damm application like ti final cut pro X and u can access both application at once,

I've created a serious user petition for Final Cut Pro X demanding the addition of 10 features necessary for it to be used in TV Stations, Feature Film Editing, Production and Post Production Houses. I've also demanded a free download of Final Cut Pro 7 for all users of Final Cut Pro X while these features are not in place.

Please help us take the message to Apple!

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/fcbetter/petition.html

Well, I haven't used the new program, or the old one... but why let that stop me from adding absolutely nothing to the discussion?

I can say that changes are always interesting... when I switched from a PC to a Mac... I was initially amused by the newness, but quickly frustrated by the UI changes... it wasn't necessarily harder to use... it was just _different_. Having come from a PC background in UI design... I was quite anal about the 'dumbness' of the iCal and Address Book interfaces... but, I adapted.

Something like FCP is a tool people use to make money... kind of like when MS came out with the whole .NET thing. We didn't jump on that right away... like lots of businesses, we maintained legacy code and waited until there was a compelling advantage to move to a new architecture. I would suggest that if you are an FCP user, and it is doing what you want it to do... and the FCX doesn't offer enough bonus to make the switch right away... just go with what is working and decide later if you need to change at all. When the time comes, look at all the competitors and decide if upgrading is the way to go or not...

Being an medium sized agency owner, I see that my older employees tend to be "stuck in their ways", and sometimes, not all, but sometimes, these ways are not the most productive, time efficient methods. My younger editors embrace new technologies and quickly adopt and create new methods and creative expressions. When I saw people complaining about the new FCP X, i immediately thought of a few of my elder employees that I had recently terminated for being "stuck".

We use Arri cameras, RED cameras, and Sony cameras, and really enjoy the new interface and update/s. Granted it's new and largely untested, but we haven't had any problems at all. We really appreciated that it took advantage of our new hardware as well. Some of my competitors are complaining that they didn't want to have to upgrade hardware. If your not upgrading hardware every two years your doing your company and your clients a major disservice. The cost of upgrades is easily mitigated by any company going enough quality work.

Some of the big shops are also saying "Well I'm not going to retrain my employees for a whole new software suite", well that's ok with me, I will and I'll slowly garner your business as we create creative pieces of work, in much quicker turn around times. Saying you don't want to re-train your employees isn't such a simple statement, your essentially stating that you don't do much training *at all* for your employees. Training employees especially when it comes to editing, is essential, otherwise you won't push them to utilize new methods...sometimes faster (project wise) and better looking methods. If James Cameron shared the same mediocracy ideology we would have never seen Avatar created. It means that when you hire an employee you will only indefinitely pull tricks from his existing "bag of tricks", I'll just terminate the dinosaurs and continue hiring fresh minds that are willing to push the boundaries and learn new methods, that's how we create positive momentum.

I have a living FCP7 project that uses a year's worth of custom Motion files that I am updating and creating weekly. If I am going to have to rebuild this entire library from scratch anyway (since apparently FCPX isn't backward compatible) AND on top of that, learn a completely new interface to boot, why not just switch to Adobe products where I know that they are not going to bend me over in the future (and they would be cross platform compatible).... Because even if Apple can recover from this debacle, who's to say they wouldn't pull a stunt like this again in the future.

The argument of just continuing to use FCP7 is valid, but my machine is 3 years old and I have been waiting for the new MacPros to be released. Now the chatter is that FCP7 might not run on Lion, which will surely be loaded on a new MacPro, which then makes me wonder, why am I paying the "Apple tax" at that point for the hardware. A PC will run the Adobe software!!

Apple's toys are fun (iPhone, iPad, etc...) but this is my livelihood.