Apple Showcases Final Cut Pro X Usage in Production of Hollywood Film 'Focus'

nobody uses FCP X professionally, with the exception of this movie and one tv show. zero commercial houses. period. professional commercial/film/tv video editor here, freelancing in LA for the past 14 years. avid was the reigning beast for years, and slowly FCP crept in. as an early adopter, but user of both, I applauded as they encroached a 50% market share in post facilities. it was easy to use, and made timeline editing a snap. it just couldn't ever keep up with avid for projects that you had to share across servers with multiple editors simultaneously thanks to the bin structure. but for everything short form (commercials mainly) it was the best of the best. then X came out. and we limped along with 7, waiting for the day apple would wise up and bring along a 64bit version. that day, we are coming to accept, is never coming. all post houses are starting to finally dump 7 thanks to the lack of support and inability to keep up with modern cameras. it is still used, but backslid dramatically. the 50-60% of fcp houses reverted back to avid, and maybe 15% still use 7, while 25% now use premiere. i hated premiere, but in the stark void FCP left behind and Avid can't touch thanks to it's limited editing abilities and archaic design and functionality, premiere has leaped and bounded with significant improvements version after version. i have cried myself to sleep many a night over the inevitable death of fcp 7 thanks to X and i can finally stop, because there is finally a new future ready version of final cut out, and it is premiere CC2014. i have never seen anyone professional use X and i never will. congratulations apple, on killing the product that made me and many like me switch to using apple computers in the first place. enjoy your prosumers, because no professional editor will ever use you again.

A very heart-felt rant, but not a lot of talk about why FCPX isn't a professional tool. Maybe that's because it actually is a professional tool. Have you checked it out lately, or has bitterness completely consumed you?

can it support multiple sequences? the idea that they started ANY editing program marketed as a professional tool where you can't have multiple sequences is insanity.

Which is why FCPX can do that.

I don't love this program across the board, but I do find that the people who hate it the most know the least about it.

nobody uses FCP X professionally, with the exception of this movie and one tv show. zero commercial houses. period. professional commercial/film/tv video editor here, freelancing in LA for the past 14 years. avid was the reigning beast for years, and slowly FCP crept in. as an early adopter, but user of both, I applauded as they encroached a 50% market share in post facilities. it was easy to use, and made timeline editing a snap. it just couldn't ever keep up with avid for projects that you had to share across servers with multiple editors simultaneously thanks to the bin structure. but for everything short form (commercials mainly) it was the best of the best. then X came out. and we limped along with 7, waiting for the day apple would wise up and bring along a 64bit version. that day, we are coming to accept, is never coming. all post houses are starting to finally dump 7 thanks to the lack of support and inability to keep up with modern cameras. it is still used, but backslid dramatically. the 50-60% of fcp houses reverted back to avid, and maybe 15% still use 7, while 25% now use premiere. i hated premiere, but in the stark void FCP left behind and Avid can't touch thanks to it's limited editing abilities and archaic design and functionality, premiere has leaped and bounded with significant improvements version after version. i have cried myself to sleep many a night over the inevitable death of fcp 7 thanks to X and i can finally stop, because there is finally a new future ready version of final cut out, and it is premiere CC2014. i have never seen anyone professional use X and i never will. congratulations apple, on killing the product that made me and many like me switch to using apple computers in the first place. enjoy your prosumers, because no professional editor will ever use you again.

nobody uses FCP X professionally

Do you mean commercially? Because most of the professionals I know, including myself, use FCPX for all of our work. Or are we not "professionals" because we don't work for major companies?

nobody uses FCP X professionally, with the exception of this movie and one tv show. zero commercial houses. period.

My nobody friend just used it to produce the 2015 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner for world documentary. So there's that.

Phew, they finally were able to pay someone to use their software for a movie! Final Cut X isn't used by nearly anyone. It used to be but they ruined it.

Well...er...hrumphfff. 3..2...1 "This movie was obviously NOT made by "professionals"."

Ad nauseum....:rolleyes:

I also work in the post-production industry. When I first saw FCPX, I was thoroughly impressed with its well-rethought interface and AMAZING power under-the-hood. It's ability to edit H.264 video WHILE also re-encoding into ProRes 422 on a Core 2 Duo processor blew my mind. Amazing performance. I loved that Apple was trying to rethink HOW we work on a edit with the use of tags and metadata, rather than just constantly clipping things.

But once I delved past the interface, I realized how problematic it would be to use it at our boutique production company. We have lots of shared fibre-channel RAID space where we store media (and access as read-only the vast majority of the time), but then pass around small project files as we're making selects. But the way FCPX handles this data is bad for collaborative environments like ours. Everything is stored in one folder. In that folder there's a separate file for the meta-data you've labelled on clips. A different file that actually contains your sequence. And then also all of the transcoded clips are kept there, too. Meaning if you want to pass selects and a sequence around, you're either passing around multi-gigabyte folders all the time, or carefully replacing sequence and meta-data files behind FCPX's back, constantly. In addition, because it uses iMovie's "events" structure, you are constantly staring at unrelated items in your bin unless you move those files out of the working folder. It's a lot of unnecessary file shuffling.

Couple this with the fact that it uses iMove lingo like "events" and "projects" instead of "projects" and "sequences," and one could see why my company is not using FCPX.

Which is a shame, because under-the-hood, it is absolutely amazing. I will probably use it at home for future personal projects (where I don't need to worry about shuffling project files and selects), but it is not appropriate for collaboration.

Also: The people who rejected FCPX before even trying it because it merely looked like iMovie are jerks. And there are a lot of them.

Adobe Premiere has MANY MANY MANY severe stability problems (especially when coupled with our AJA video-preview equipment). The only reason we (and most post houses are using it) is that it keeps the same project file paradigm that FCP7 used.

Side Note: On "Pro" vs. Consumer— I am also of the mind that you are a "professional" if you're getting paid to do something. Crayons are a professional tool if you use them to make something you get paid for. So pick the right tool and shut up.

Today they showcase it tomorrow they kill it. I do not trust Apple that they are any serious about pro software anymore.

Oh boy, I can see where this thread is going...
Should've put this in the political thread. (Gets popcorn to watch this discussion unfold)