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My thoughts on Adobe's new rental policy

You've most likely already heard about Adobe's move to get rid of Creative Suite and offer rental-only software from now on. When the announcement was made my Twitter feed exploded with both love and hate for the new policy.

While some of the negative points people made are purely hypothetical or FUD for its own sake, others are genuine concerns. There has also been a lot of misinformation flying around, in particular with regards to being connected to the internet. You do not need a constant connection - the software will connect once a month and you will have a grace period of 99 days (soon to be 180 - thanks Todd) if the connection is unsuccessful.

Another common misconception is that the apps will run off the cloud or that they will automatically update without your permission. The apps run locally on your system as they did before but the licensing is handled on the cloud, so instead of a product key you now use your email address. Software updates will not occur automatically without your permission and Adobe has said they will periodically create fixed archived copies of the applications so you can revert to a particular version if desired.

The cloud is cheaper for new users too, although it may end up being more expensive for some of Adobe's existing customers, especially if they often skip versions. Actually, that's not strictly accurate. It is cheaper at the currently announced prices, which brings me on to my own primary concern: cloud users are susceptible to future price rises and policy changes. What if the price rises? Tough luck, you have to pay it anyway. What if Adobe releases a new privacy policy that you don't want to agree to (see Facebook, Instagram)? If you ever want to access your projects again, you'll have to agree whether you like it or not. If you are planning on building your workflow around Adobe products, you have to be prepared to essentially pay Adobe every month for life, no matter the cost. Your project files are hostage to future Adobe pricing and policy changes.

I have no issues with the cloud or rental policies as concepts, my only objection is to being forced into them. It is difficult not to interpret this as a power grab.

Another thing Adobe may not have considered is that they have different traction in different markets. Photoshop is clearly the king of print and graphics, but Premiere has only started to gain traction since the demise of FCP 7. I know several people who were looking for FCP 8, thought they'd found it with Premiere CS Next and are now hesitating.

I have been fortunate to have access to pre-release versions of some of the new Adobe apps and the new Premiere is fantastic. The dev team has really listened and I try to use the new version over CS6 whenever I can. It's sad that instead of talking about the great new features, the whole Adobe MAX event was overshadowed by this decision from upper management.

The worst part is that in spite of all this I will still unhappily subscribe and so will many others. I am certain that this will end up being financially beneficial to Adobe, but it erases a certain amount of goodwill.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Tuesday May 7 2013 12:44 PM to Analysis, Adobe
3 comments Posted Permalink

2012 - Year in Review

2013 is now upon us so here's a look back at the past twelve months.

It was a big year for us with our customer base expanding by 50% and us welcoming many new corporate clients and broadcasters.

We launched six new products: Pro Versioner, Post Haste for Windows, Video Space Calculator for iOS, Video Space Calculator for Mac, Film Terms for iOS, Film Terms for Mac.

In addition, we released major updates for Editmote, Cut Notes and several other products. In total we released 7 major updates and 53 minor ones in 2012.

Our most popular free app was FCS Remover and our most popular paid app was Pro Maintenance Tools. Our most popular iOS app was Video Space Calculator.

Our site traffic was up significantly with over a million more pages viewed and over 6 million more hits compared to 2011.

Things you may have missed:

We're now focusing on cross-platform compatibility and this will continue in 2013
Cut Notes now syncs with Adobe Premiere Pro for Mac
We have a Windows version of Preference Manager currently in public beta
Post Haste now supports variables
Pro Maintenance Tools can be used to create installers for your plugins
Post Haste is now available for Windows

Looking forward, we predict 2013 will be our biggest year ever. We have several big releases planned and we'll be exhibiting at NAB in April for the first time. I can't say more than that but definitely watch this space.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Tuesday January 1 2013 9:26 AM to DR News, Front Page News, Analysis
0 comments Posted Permalink

Adobe announces Creative Suite 6

Today Adobe announced the full feature set of Creative Suite 6. Here are the features that stood out at me:

Open CL - Mac laptop users do not get a choice as to which brand of graphics card they use so it's great to see GPU acceleration extended for people with ATI graphics cards.
Full-screen playback - Premiere Pro can now play back your sequence in full screen on your primary monitor, which is great if you're on the move.
New trim mode - This one seems to be aimed at Avid users with dynamic trimming via JKL.
Adjustment layers - This is something I've wanted to see in an NLE for a long time. You can add a Photoshop-style adjustment layer and it will affect all clips beneath it. This is great for applying global effects to a sequence.
Combine mono, stereo and multitrack clips into a single audio track - One big point of confusion for Final Cut Pro switchers was the way Premiere Pro CS 5.5 dealt with audio tracks. Instead of having one audio track per channel, Premiere can create mono, stereo or surround tracks, which means that mono clips can only be added to a mono track and stereo clips have to be added to a stereo track. These limitations are now removed in CS 6.
Big thumbnails that can be "hover-scrubbed" - This looks to be almost identical to skimming in Final Cut Pro X. You can even set in and out points from the thumbnails.
Ability to toggle Work Area off - The Work Area was another point of confusion for FCP users. It allows you to set a certain area of the timeline for rendering and exporting which can also be achieved by setting in and out points. If you don't plan to use this feature, it can now be switched off in CS 6.
Markers can now be assigned a color and duration - I've always felt the marker implementation in Premiere was poor so this is great news. There is also a marker window that provides a summary of all markers in the sequence and you can quickly jump to them. No word yet on whether you can import and export marker lists.
Unlimited multiclip angles - I was disappointed with the four-angle multicam in CS 5.5 so this is a big improvement.
Uninterrupted playback - You can now adjust effects on-the-fly without pausing playback.
New apps - Prelude and SpeedGrade
Prelude has an SDK - Adobe's new tool for ingesting file-based media has an SDK to allow production houses to integrate it into their custom workflows.
Ray tracing, extruding and 3D tracker in After Effects - Adobe is really aiming at the higher end of the visual effects market with these features.
Variable mask feathering in AE - I've never been keen on AE's mask tools so this is a big improvement.
Automatic Duck integration - Pro Import AE is now bundled with After Effects and allows you to import Avid projects into AE.

What's clear from this release is that Adobe is aggressively targeting a broad range of users. There are features in the new release that will be familiar to Avid, FCP7 and FCPX users. Since the demise of Final Cut Studio, Creative Suite is the only suite in town and this release fixes many of my complaints with CS 5.5 (although no word on new developer features yet). I don't think it will change my plan to use Avid for long-form and Premiere for short-form but the wide-open nature of the NLE market right now is something that is clearly producing great results for editors.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Thursday April 12 2012 12:20 AM to Video Editing, Analysis, Adobe
0 comments Posted Permalink

Developer features I will miss from Final Cut Pro 7

I'm currently working on a feature film that will be my last Final Cut Pro 7 project. I'd just finished implementing a custom solution to automatically log and sort clips as they are brought in, when it suddenly occurred to me that a lot of what I was doing would not be possible in the future with a competing NLE (at least not on the Mac; Sony Vegas has great scripting capabilities).

Here is a summary of things we can do with FCP 7 that is impossible or less smooth with its replacements:

(Note: we don't develop effects plugins so this post does not delve into plugin-related differences between the apps. But it's a post I'd be glad to link to if someone else writes it.)

Controlling the NLE

Developers can use Apple Events to perform such tasks as programmatically saving and loading projects, highlighting items in a bin and searching. None of the competing apps are able to do this.

We can also communicate with Final Cut Pro over MIDI, which we put to good use in Cut Notes, but Premiere and FCPX unfortunately lack this feature.

XML Interchange

It is important to be able to easily get data in and out of the editing application. There is mixed support for this among competing apps. Avid has XML output via FilmScribe but this is not as fully-featured as FCP XML and I have found the FilmScribe app to be unreliable. FCPX XML exports do not include all of the information within the project or event. Premiere gets full marks for including FCP 7 XML interchange support.

Avid does get some bonus points for being able to import and export marker lists though, which none of the others can (it's even better than FCP 7 which was limited to export only). Some people would say this feature is unnecessary if you have XML input, however it's very useful for applications that don't need or cannot access the underlying project, such as our own Cut Notes app.

Manipulation of project data

Probably the most useful feature is the ability to change data within the project. You can add new clips, batch modify metadata and sort clips into bins. It's very powerful and you can specify various options when importing a clip or bin such as only adding clips that do not currently exist or making copies of existing clips.

More importantly, it can be done on the fly without needing to close the project or modify any files on disk. Quick Bins, FCP Versioner and several of our other apps make use of this feature.

Avid doesn't support this at all and Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere only support this via manual XML import / export.

Premiere wins extra marks for basing its project file format on XML but it then loses most of them by not documenting the project file format nor encouraging development of it.

These are all great features that we're putting to good use in our apps and it's a shame to lose them. We've developed workarounds for most of them but these often require additional manual work by the user, which we're keen to avoid.

Apple created third-party developer ecosystems with FCP 7 and FCPX that simply don't exist with other NLEs (and FCPX's developer features still need some more work, as noted above). We're putting this post out to encourage NLE manufacturers to increase their focus on third party developer-friendly features. Fostering third-party development helps end users, developers and the manufacturers themselves. Everyone wins.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Monday March 26 2012 11:57 AM to Analysis, Avid, Adobe
5 comments Posted Permalink

Thoughts on Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3

Today Apple released Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3 which offers several new features such as multicam and broadcast monitoring (beta) that were previously missing.

Looking through the details, it's hard to find anything that would appeal to consumers and it is clear that this is an attempt by Apple to appease at least some of the pros. My first reaction (and the reaction of a lot of people on Twitter) was that this was the version Apple should have released back in June.

Here are some of the features I found interesting:

Multicam - 64 angles are supported and lots of options for syncing, including PluralEyes-style analysis of the audio waveforms. In comparison, Adobe Premiere Pro supports 4 angles and Final Cut Pro 7 supports 128.
Media Relink - You can now reconnect to files, which is useful if you need to swap out VFX shots or FCPX for some reason loses the link. This really should have been a 1.0 feature.
XML 1.1 - As mentioned earlier on this blog, the previous version of FCPXML didn't support audio levels so you'd lose your levels if you transferred the project elsewhere. This is now supported in FCPXML 1.1, although it's worth noting that Apple's developer documentation still says XML is not a perfect copy and does not contain everything that a project file does.
Broadcast monitoring - Apple's description is vague about which devices are supported but today AJA released new drivers that support FCPX output from SDI. There is no word yet from Black Magic Design or Matrox but I would assume new drivers are coming soon. It's worth noting that broadcast monitoring is only supported on Lion.

That doesn't make it a perfect tool for the professional broadcast / film industries of course. I really can't see EDL support ever being added, nor support for broadcast tape capture. But over time I think this will matter less and less. Case in point: I'm working on a feature right now and was very surprised when the post house asked me to deliver the Final Cut Pro 7 project for grading / mixing instead of EDLs and OMF.

I think Apple is very much gambling on the future here and I am definitely considering looking into it for short form work.

Update: Larry Jordan offers more info on the differences between FCP7 and FCPX's multicam implementation. Thanks Larry!

FCP 7 would LINK up to 128 cameras in a multicam clip, however you could only view 16 of them. FCP X links and allows you to view up to 64 clips at once, by switching between up to four banks of 16 cameras each. Also, edits can be made in real-time or by positioning the playhead.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Tuesday January 31 2012 11:32 AM to Apple, Final Cut Studio, Analysis
3 comments Posted Permalink

18 features Adobe should borrow from Final Cut Pro 7

Apple's recent obsolescence of Final Cut Studio has forced a lot of us to reexamine which editing platform we want to use for future work. Ironically, Adobe Premiere Pro is a much easier transition for FCP 7 users than Final Cut Pro X due to its similar interface, support for old FCP projects and ability to use FCP's keyboard shortcuts.

The transition to Premiere is easier than any other NLE but there are lots of little things that I miss from Final Cut Pro. Here's a list of some of them, in no particular order.

1. Cutting on the fly

The Ctrl+V keyboard shortcut in Final Cut Pro can be used to make a cut on the timeline at the current playhead position. While Premiere also has a keyboard shortcut for cutting (Cmd+K), it pauses playback when it does so. There is no way to cut and continue playing.

2. Sixteen angles in a multiclip

Premiere Pro is limited only to four multicam angles.

3. Audio mixer affecting clip levels

Unlike Final Cut Pro, the audio mixer in Premiere doesn't work on a clip-by-clip basis. Every adjustment affects the entire track.

4. Multi-colored markers and marker lists

It took such a long time for colored markers to be introduced in Final Cut Pro 7 that I was sad to see them disappear in FCPX. Premiere needs this too.

Final Cut Pro can also export text-based marker lists, which is a great way of sending markers to another application. If Adobe were to implement this, I would also recommend they include a way of importing markers from a list, which Final Cut Pro unfortunately lacks.

5. Choosing attributes to paste

Like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere has a useful Paste Attributes command. However, unlike FCP, this function does not allow you to specify which attributes you would like to paste - it just pastes everything. This is often not what you want.

6. Close Gap command

Ctrl-G in FCP can be used to easily close a gap in your timeline. There is no equivalent keyboard shortcut in Premiere to do this in one step.

Update: This one seems to have been misunderstood by a lot of people so I'll repeat it with additional emphasis: there is no way to do this in one step. There are many ways to do this in more than one step.

7. Multiple open projects

Only one project can be open at a time in Premiere. There is no way to refer back to another project without closing the first one.

8. Partial renders

When you cancel a render halfway through, Premiere discards the entire render file, unlike Final Cut Pro where the portion you rendered remains valid.

9. Pitch correction when using JKL keys

Using the JKL keys to navigate through media in Premiere can sometimes be tricky because the audio becomes high-pitched and difficult to understand.

10. No way to scroll tracks vertically with the scroll wheel

Scrolling your mouse vertically scrolls the Premiere Pro timeline horizontally. This is useful if your mouse is only capable of vertical scrolling, but if you have a trackpad or a mouse with a scroll ball, there is no way to scroll vertically to see extra tracks. There should at least be a preference for this behavior.

(FCP tip: if you have a mouse with a vertical scroll wheel only, hold down Cmd when scrolling and it will scroll horizontally.)

11. No through edits

There is no indicator icon to show a through edit. A through edit is a cut within a clip where the frames on either side of the cut are adjacent to each other. It appears to the viewer as if there is no cut at all, and in most cases it is unnecessary and should be removed.

12. No ability to search for clips to reconnect

When media goes offline, you can browse to the location of the file if you know where it is but there is no way to search your entire hard drive.

13. Tracks have to be selected when cutting clips onto the timeline

When inserting or overwriting a clip to the timeline in Final Cut Pro, the tracks that the video and audio will end up on are controlled by the buttons in the patch panel that are normally marked v1, a1 and a2. If you don't want to insert a track, click the button in the patch panel to disconnect it.

In Premiere things work differently. The patch panels AND the tracks need to be selected in order for this to work. If you want to insert video on video track 2 without any audio and have disconnected the A1 patch button, having an audio track selected will insert a blank space into that track. It seems redundant for patch buttons and audio tracks to need to be selected in order for this to work as expected when only patch buttons are needed in other NLEs.

Walter Biscardi gives a video overview of this problem here.

14. No timecode overlay

Final Cut Pro 7 finally brought us a long-requested timecode overlay window. While Premiere does show timecode in the Info window, this is not a direct equivalent.

15. No temporary snapping toggle

In Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 and higher, if you drag a clip and press the N key to toggle snapping, snapping will be switched on or off only for the duration of the drag. Once you let go of the clip, snapping reverts to its previous value. I found this feature very useful.

16. No function to mark audio peaks

Final Cut Pro can place markers on a clip whenever an audio peak occurs. There is no such function in Premiere.

17. No dupe detection

While you can view how many times an entire clip has been used, there is no way to see if a particular frame has been used more than once. This is crucial for film projects that will be having a negative cut.

18. Fewer options for clip markers than sequence markers

Sequence markers in Premiere Pro allow you to set a name, description, duration and various other options. Clip markers cannot be customized at all.

This is a list of things I think FCP does better than Premiere. In some cases, Premiere has no equivalent feature. In others, the feature exists but I feel it is lacking. None of these problems have prevented me from editing successfully with Premiere, but things would be smoother and certain workflows much easier if these features were present. I'm sure Adobe has been getting a lot of feedback from former FCP users and I have high hopes for CS6.

Sound off in the comments if you can think of any more things Adobe should borrow from Final Cut Pro.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Friday September 2 2011 4:24 PM to Final Cut Studio, Analysis, Adobe
21 comments Posted Permalink

5 great Lion features for editors

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion was released earlier today. I've heard a couple of people say they're not enthusiastic about it and, with features like Autosave and Launchpad, it's mainly geared at consumers. I completely disagree and here's my list of five features that are great for editors and video professionals (in no particular order).

AirDrop

Even in the 21st century, many people I know still use good old Sneakernet to distribute files between computers. People still use such a low-tech method of transferring files because the machines don't need to be networked to each other, there's no setup process and you're not opening yourself up to potential security issues (assuming the files and the drive are virus-free, of course).

AirDrop allows you to send files to people physically located nearby who are not necessarily on the same Wi-Fi network. When you want to send a file to someone, both of you click the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar and you then drag the file onto the person's name. If they accept the file, it is encrypted and sent directly to their Downloads folder.

You only appear to other users on the network if you have the AirDrop folder open. This provides greater privacy and security than having regular file sharing running constantly.

Lion Server and Xsan

Every Mac now has the potential to be a server for just $50, giving you a great deal of control over your system and the users that access it.

Lion now includes Xsan, a network file system popular with video editors. This used to cost $999 so it's a huge saving for large installations.

AV Foundation

Love it or loathe it, you can't deny that Final Cut Pro X is built on a great technical foundation. AV Foundation ships with Lion and allows developers to utilize the same technology in their applications. It's something we plan to explore to improve future versions of Pro Media Tools.

It's also worth noting that the QuickTime 7 API is still there so existing QuickTime applications will continue to work. Final Cut Pro 7 runs just fine in Lion.

Merging folders

This feature has been part of Windows for decades and I'm surprised it's taken this long to make it to the Mac. If you drag a folder onto another folder with the same name, it now gives you the option to merge the two together. This is a huge timesaver.

Versions

We're big fans of incremental backups, which is why we created FCP Versioner. It's great to see something similar included in the OS for applications that support it.

Other nice features include the ability to encrypt an entire drive without a perceptible performance drop (according to Apple's marketing), OpenGL 3.2, Resume and Time Machine local snapshots, for recovering files when you're on the road without your Time Capsule or backup drive.

Lion seems faster too - I've seen noticeable performance improvements in all of our applications when run under Lion.

Of course, there are downsides too. Firstly, it's only available from the Mac App Store. If you are running OS X 10.5 Leopard, you will need to first upgrade to 10.6 Snow Leopard in order to access the store and download Lion. Apple will be selling Lion USB keys for $69 in August for users on Leopard or without broadband internet access.

Secondly, Rosetta is dead. This means that applications built for PowerPC computers will not work on Lion, including the Final Cut Studio 2 installer.

Thirdly, for some reason Apple decided to invert scrolling in Lion, meaning that dragging two fingers down scrolls up and vice versa. This would work well on a touchscreen but feels unnatural with a scroll mouse or trackpad. Fortunately it can be disabled in System Preferences but I don't know why Apple decided to make this the default.

Fourthly, features that some professionals have been demanding for a while, such as OpenGL 4.1, 10-bit monitor support and Blu-ray playback via third party drives still haven't materialized.

Overall, I think Lion is a step forward for professionals that provides much-needed additions to OS X. Driver and application support will likely take a while to catch up, despite the beta period, so as a rule I wouldn't recommend using it for professional use until the .3 or .4 update ships, even though I've actually found it to be quite stable in my testing.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Wednesday July 20 2011 7:13 AM to Apple, Software, Analysis
0 comments Posted Permalink

Final Cut Pro X from a Developer Perspective

I've already mentioned The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Final Cut Pro X but when it comes to developer features, there's a lot more to like.

Chris Kenny has been doing some delving and discovered that there are references to Python and AppleScript in the Final Cut Pro X app. This would be a big step up from the current method of sending commands via Apple Events.

There are also references to XML import and Final Cut Pro XML import, which implies that they will be two different formats. This makes sense, as the structure of FCPX projects has changed significantly (no more bins and no concept of tracks for instance) and there is a greater focus on metadata.

Neither of these are publicly accessible right now but they show that Apple has at least experimented with these functions and it is likely that they will be enabled in a future release. There has been speculation that import of FCP7 projects or XML may never come as the project formats are too different, but I think it's likely that we will at least see an FCPX-specific exchange format at some point in the future.

Final Cut Pro X now uses the Motion engine to render effects, which means that plugin output is now consistent between Final Cut Pro and Motion - something that was not the case in previous versions. Developers need to wrap their Motion plugins as Final Cut Effects in order for them to show up in Final Cut Pro X.

Other notable changes include more control over plugin user interfaces, support for multi-threading, keyframing, undo and bezier paths. These have been requested for a long time so it's great that they're now here. Thanks to Darrin Cardani and Paul Schneider at Apple for listening to the needs of developers.

Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5 require plugins to be compiled as 64-bit so most users' plugins won't be compatible. This is only a temporary problem until plugin developers catch up and the benefits of a 64-bit environment and FxPlug 2.0 will make it worthwhile. (There are, of course, some bugs in the implementation as would be expected in a 1.0 release.)

Just before Final Cut Pro X was unveiled at NAB earlier this year, I wrote a post about my Top 5 Developer Requests for the Next Final Cut Pro.

Storing settings in preference lists was number one and, as expected, this was implemented. While the reasons for wanting it so badly (mainly for programmatically changing scratch disk locations) are less important in Final Cut Pro X, we can still do a lot of things with it.

Making the Final Cut Pro project format more open was second on the list. This one is a little more complex because on the one hand, it's in SQLite format which makes it readable by the sqlite3 Terminal command but on the other, Core Data assumes that no-one other than the owning application will ever touch those files and so it's very easy to corrupt it if you're not careful. Also, while the SQLite format offers some predictability, Apple are free to structure the database any way they see fit and change it without notice in future versions. I've written a basic filename parser but I'm going to wait for official documentation or an API before doing anything more substantial.

Third, fourth and fifth on the list were requests for more API control. This is not in the initial release of Final Cut Pro X and remains to be seen if it will be in future versions.

Of course, I wrote this on the assumption that FCPX wouldn't remove any developer features that were in the previous version. While the developer features are sparse in the current version, the future looks bright, especially as it appears that Apple is expecting third-party developers to fill in many of the gaps in FCPX's feature set.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Friday June 24 2011 1:07 PM to Apple, Final Cut Studio, Analysis
2 comments Posted Permalink

Final Cut Pro X Bug List

This list will document the bugs in Final Cut Pro X as they become apparent.

1. Projects not saving

This one is scary. There are several reports of people losing work due to FCPX's autosave function (which is the only way to save) not working.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15469208
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15460282

2. Clips going offline

When you add media from another drive and choose not to copy the files to your Final Cut Events folder, FCPX adds symbolic links to the Final Cut Events folder that point back to these files.

Some people have been reporting that they relaunched FCPX to find all of their media offline. When they looked in the Final Cut Events folder, FCPX had either deleted the symbolic links or failed to save them in the first place.

You can reconnect them by going to File > Import > Files but this causes another bug to surface: the files will always be copied to your Final Cut Events folder even if you deselect the option to do so.

3. Undo disabled

Some people are reporting that Undo is disabled for them. What makes this an especially big problem is that FCPX saves automatically and so any mistakes they make are immortalized forever if they can't undo them.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15467240
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3136611

4. Projects disappearing

There are reports of projects disappearing from the project library.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15497434

If you experience problems with media, I would recommend updating to OS X 10.6.8 which "Fixes an issue when importing certain media files into Final Cut Pro." I don't yet know if it solves these particular issues though.

8. Systems with two graphics card exporting QT movies with green artifacts

Apple recommends only running FCPX on machines with one graphics card.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3842

9. Templates, generators and titles appearing blue

This can be caused by templates from previous versions of Motion residing in the ~/Library/Application Support/Motion folder. To get around this, move the templates from this folder. More info here.

10. Video in the preview monitor is missing the green channel

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15582977#15582977

11. Drives don't appear in the list

This can happen if certain folders exist on the drive. The poster in this forum thread says folders called "private" and possibly "backup" can cause this issue:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/15794411#15794411

I'd be interested to hear if anyone finds any other folders that can cause the drive to disappear in FCPX.

More bugs will be listed as they surface.

Update: There are more bugs listed in the comments of this post, on LAFCPUG and at FCPX Quirks.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Thursday June 23 2011 2:57 PM to Apple, Final Cut Studio, Analysis
5 comments Posted Permalink

Final Cut Pro X - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Final Cut Pro X is finally here and I've been playing around with it this morning. I haven't used it for any projects yet, so don't consider this a formal review, but here are my first impressions.

As a software developer, I understand that a 1.0 release is difficult and not every feature can be added. However, I feel that Apple made some glaring omissions with FCPX that I will cover in the "ugly" section.

Good

FCPX is FAST. I tried to break it with lots of stacked clips and effects but it played them all seamlessly.
FCPX uses AVFoundation instead of QuickTime. The QuickTime API is clunky, antiquated and the modern features Apple tacked on don't work as well as the older stuff. Breaking free of the shackles of 1990s-era technology is the best thing that ever happened to Final Cut Pro.
Everyone's been complaining about FCP's media management since version 1.0 and the new database file format and keyword-based metadata tagging are huge improvements.
FCPX will import a memory card in the background, allowing you to edit the footage directly from the card and then replace it seamlessly with the media on the hard disk once the transfer is complete. I think this is a great idea.
Effects and titles were never FCP's strong point and these have been greatly improved.
I'm also enjoying the little touches I've spotted here and there, like the way an edit point turns red when you select it if the in and out points are at the outer limits of the clip. These features are tiny but they make a big difference.

Bad

It took a long time for multiple marker colors to be added to Final Cut Pro. Now we're back to one marker color again. There are no chapter markers either.
You need an OpenCL-compatible graphics card. This has left some Mac Pro owners out in the cold.
The QuickTime movie output options in FCPX are poor, which means you're obligated to pay an extra $49 for Compressor 4 because you can't send to Compressor 3.

Ugly

Compressor 4 is still 32-bit and doesn't look like it's received an overhaul, meaning that the problems many of us have suffered are likely to continue. I have already had several issues with Qmaster.
No multicam. This is a massive oversight in my opinion.
No XML import / output. Another huge oversight.
A lot of plugin developers have been left out in the cold with no answers from Apple.
No support for old FCP 7 projects.
No credible broadcast monitor output. The current solution is to mirror your desktop through a capture card, which does not result in a broadcast-quality output.
Final Cut Pro, Motion and Compressor are $400 combined. This is a great price, however if you need features that are not in FCPX, you're going to end up paying more. If you need OMF output, you need to pay $500 for Automatic Duck. You will also most likely need to pay to upgrade any plugins once support for FCPX has been added. Rumors have suggested that Apple may be offering these missing features as additional applications for a fee, which also contributes to the overall cost. When you consider all of these potential costs, FCPX doesn't seem as cheap as it does on the surface.

As you can see, there are some serious issues with FCPX. However, the biggest problem is that Final Cut Pro 7 support ends today. All of the above issues could be forgiven if Apple had allowed the two to co-exist until FCPX had matured enough to be a viable replacement. This is especially important considering the lack of support for importing Final Cut Pro 7 projects.

Unless you're using DSLRs to create content solely for the web, I would recommend having a more fully-featured NLE on your system in addition to Final Cut Pro X. Apple has made this difficult by discontinuing Final Cut Studio 3, so I would recommend Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro. (Premiere Pro is probably easier for Final Cut Pro users to pick up.)

Posted by Jon Chappell on Tuesday June 21 2011 1:04 PM to Apple, Final Cut Studio, Analysis
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