Reebok Fuel The Fire Video

I've been using FCPX stealthily for a year now. Where Premiere, Avid, and FCP 7 are like utility pick up trucks, FCPX is like a Tesla. Super modern and forward thinking.

My background was mainly as a freelance television editor until about a year ago when I switched over to the advertising world. (About 20 years total, just putting that out there to give you an idea of what a shock to the system FCPX was after many moons of Avid, FCP 7, and Media 100).

My assignment for the last year and a half has been to do short videos for Reebok about their trainers. I originally had been doing them in FCP 7, but I found myself being bored with the application. I started to wonder what it would be like to try out FCPX.

When I first opened FCPX I threw my hands up in disgust and went back to FCP 7 for another 2 months. But I couldn't shake my curiosity about it, so I decided to commit to finishing a project in it no matter how much it drove me crazy.

The more I edited with it, the less crazy it seemed and the more my face resembled OMG cat. It was like driving a futuristic car, where HUDS and panels reveal themselves only when you need them and then disappear so you could just enjoy the driving experience.

Like everyone says it makes editing fun again.

The main thing that blew my mind was the browser. It is so much easier to digest all my footage now. At first film strip view seemed gaudy and overwhelming, but I find it so useful now I no longer make select reels to process B Roll I just use specific keyword collections and then scrub the takes. I even made myself keyword templates to reuse.

I also love the media management, specifically the option to have FCPX dump everything into the folder of your choice. To me it's very Avidesque. In the traditional avid media management, avid imports media into it's mxf folder on your media drive, and you organize within the host application. I use FCPX the same way except it does it better because it leaves all the file’s names in plain english and not some crazy computer code. So I get the best of both Avid and FCPX*

I no longer have to worry about organizing things before I start importing or worrying that all my files are in the right folder structure when I had off a prioject. I don’t have an itchy save finger any more either. I trust FCPX to save my work, that was a big step for me.

I took my first full time job as director of post production at the ad agency I was freelancing with. Aside from editing and guiding other editors, I manage the edit rooms. Between FCPX and Arctic Whiteness one person can manage a huge amount of data and projects.

I also like to work remotely which means on my laptop, out of the office. FCPX is so fluid and easy to use with limited screen real estate. I use command + 0 all the time to hide the browser and library panel so I can focus on cutting.

Here is one of my remote offices:


This is the future, well my future anyway. It’s so exciting to be able to work on tv shows, ads, docs, etc. on a lap top anywhere I want to. It’s doubly exciting to be able to hire editors and work and collaborate with them remotely. These are exciting times we live in. I’m super grateful to still be passionate about what we do 20 years on.

So the love fest is over. There are plenty of things Apple needs to do to make FCPX more serviceable. I still find the magnetic timeline to be about 85% there for my tastes. I really miss persistent in and out points in the timeline. I hate that they disappear when you click off to go and do something else.

Love the way patching has been eliminated, but I miss tracks from a process standpoint. A FCPX timeline zoomed out doesn't’ give me the same visual feed back as an Avid timeline. I can’t easily tell where my graphics are, where my VO is, what area lacks SFX. It’s there I suppose.. it’s just not apparent to me. If they gave us pseudo tracks based on roles that would be cool. I.e. on the left hand side of the timeline you’d have icons with the role name imprinted on them. Then clips in the timeline would stack in the order the tag “icons” are arranged. I.e if the GFX tag was on the bottom all GFX would line up on the lowest layer. I haven’t fully though it out so maybe I’ll quit while I am ahead.

Anyway I figured I’d write a post because I get a lot of funny looks from other editors when I tell them I use FCPX.


*anyone else notice how Apple adopted Avid’s filler? They call them gap clips.

Love reading the experiences and perspectives of old timers (like myself) switching to FCPX. I get a lot of us in my classes who love it. They also seem to catch on faster than the young newbies. But then, they have the concepts down already, just need to know what the buttons are. Great write up, thank you very much for sharing.

Question about being able to view the timeline and see thing overall. Does going to the Timeline Index and being able to highlight specific roles help at all? And I assume being able to color code roles, would help? Just wondering what you see, from your perspective, would be the way to achieve what you're looking for. Without tracks, because that's just not going to happen at this point, IMHO.

I am glad you liked it even without any "how I did it" content.

I do use the timeline index to highlight clips by role but it still doesn't scratch the itch to get a neat big picture view of my project. Color coding roles would definitely help.

I agree that tracks will never come to pass as well. I guess to achieve what I propose would be a way to harness the power of roles to "knoll" a timeline. ( what is knolling )

A visual example of knolling:





It would be a feature you can invoke when needed to tidy things up. Maybe it would live in the Timeline Index in it's own sub panel. From there, I arrange "role tokens" for example: titles on top, then video, vo, sfx, music, etc. Click a button or keyboard command and everything organizes itself in accordance to that hierarchy. So there aren't any tracks per say, just a visual hierarchy that can be turned on or off. Does that make sense?

Always be knolling!