FCPX Attacks Continue

Just responded to a very biased article over at NoFIlmSchool

Basically the writer is claiming that since the Cohen brothers who cut previous movies on Final Cut (Intolerable Cruelty, etc), & have supposedly recently switched to Adobe Premier, so this marks Hollywood's further departure from Apple. Personally, I found the article inaccurate & rather offensive & stated such.

Perhaps some of you might like to chime in...

FCP.co and NoFilmSchool.com are the two main sites I go to. They tend to lean towards adobe over there, but there are a decent amount of people that always defend FCPX (maybe it's all of us?).

I can see it slanted a little bit when they talk about FCPX falling out of demand in hollywood, but it's not that big of a stretch. Most of their articles lean in this direction because most of them use PP. If I had a site every article would be biased toward FCPX like Rush Limbaugh is toward the right. What's telling is all of the comments defending FCPX. But I understand where you are coming from, I'll defend FCPX like it's my own child.

Now that CC is the only option, a lot of young editors will have to chose between a monthly subscription or paying $299 once (or having their parents pay once or every month). During the Apple back to school sales in September, they usually offer a $100 App store gift card, so that makes FCPX $199 for students. Apple is in this for the long run, and young editors are the future.

Who really cares about hollywood anyway? I don't. The future is on the Internet and only the most successful will make it to the silver screen, and if I make it to the silver screen I'm going to use FCPX because if I've made it that far, I'll have enough power to use my NLE of choice.

FCPX is an Apple product and people love to hate on Apple for some reason.

I do know for a fact Apple FCP folks are deeply imbedded in Hollywood working on things at the moment. But that is all I know.

What about the Detective Dee movie switching from FCP 7 to FCP X mid production? To me that settles the issue. And if folks want to bash in FCO X, I don't give a rat's ass.

Adobe is actively encouraging FCPX bashing in the most ugliest forms. I personal witnessed at the official Adobe press briefing at NAB Show 2013 Adobe doing some very ugly FCPX bashing. They let the guys from The Annoying Orange do a bit that was pure, way out of bound, extremely ugly, super childish FCP X bashing. They literally bashed an Apple with a hammer. I left very early cause I was disgusted they couldn't just talk about PPro's attributes.

I wrote a post in my blog about it.
Shortly after I was contacted on Facebook by an Adobe exec about my blog. I told him the "facts" of my case, and he still denied it ever happened. I said, "I was there, I personally witnessed it." He called me a liar flat out. So, Adobe bashes Apple, and when someone points that out, they lie about it, and call you the liar. Great marketing Adobe!

I just use FCP X, teach it, help when I can, and I just ignore the haters. I've too much constructive stuff to do with my life to bother.

Hi Ben,

that is an ugly story. Wanted to check your blog but the link's not working for me.

Well, I mean we're all FCPX users here so we're preaching to the converted.

But the fact is that the FCPX launch left a sour taste in a lot of post houses, that they are not soon going to forget. And lets face reality here for a moment; FCPX is great editing software, but it doesn't carry the same weight of its predecessor. A few years back, in the indie film world it was all FCP7. Just about every job I saw advertised needed an FCP editor. I don't see that anymore.

And yes, we can all rattle off a few examples to say that isn't so; but we know its not the same.

Big production houses were burned by the lack of features in FCPX in the beginning, and even more burned by Apples refusal to engage them in dialogue.

Then there is Apples history; look at Shake, Color, Soundtrack pro; all EOL'd without warning and seemingly without reason. Perfect working tools that professionals loved. Why was Shake never integrated into something else?

At the end of the day Adobe is offering a whole suite of tools, and while FCPX is a match for Premiere, the same is not true of Motion/ After Effects, and Photoshop is pretty much untouchable.

The Mac Pro is a dinosaur compared to the PC towers you can buy these days at a fraction of a price - the delay in releasing a new model is really harming Apples reputation. Never mind the fact that Apple is one of the few Laptop companies now not making a 17" screen for designers (I mean increased resolution is great; but you need real estate space to work with too).

So yeah, people continue to bash FCPX. I just wish Apple would hit back with something.

Great comments, guys.

Did any of you see the next article that guy wrote? The one about vine? I liked NoFilmSchool before they added all these extra writers. Way too much content coming out each day and more and more of it is this kind of junk. I read less of their articles now because I can't keep up with it all and there is too much junk like this vine article.

I think the other thing to keep in mind is that the site is called " no film school", so there are going to be a lot of people there that can only talk about technology in the comments. I'd guess that a good amount of these people don't even know enough theory to discuss anything more than tech specs. There have been a few articles I've read that go over very very basic first month of the first semester stuff I learned in school. So in general, it doesn't really matter what these people think.

At that point it just becomes a battle like android vs iPhone. In general it seems like most of the writers know what they are talking about, but that vine article is kind of proving otherwise. Seems like they are just going for page hits a lot of the time.

"... and even more burned by Apples refusal to engage them in dialogue."

Actually, Apple has been, and currently is. Just FYI. But its another one of their big secret project thingies.

What goes around comes around. Adobe's Cloud announcement is creating a lot of Adobe haters at the moment. Apple offered Adobe the keys to the NLE kingdom. Looks like Adobe just handed them back.

I don't think they handed them back. There's still features and functionality that people are looking for in FCPX that are at the very least months away...

But I am gratified that this has made people a bit more realistic about Adobe, and that they're not some sacred cow. I think it's balanced the conversation, because things were VERY anti-Apple/pro-Adobe for a while there...

It would be nice to see Adobe do more targeted packages. Though the truth is that if they came out with a video package, it would still include things I didn't need as well as omit thing I did, which would ultimately end up pushing people to the full CC subscription.

Look there's no doubt that Apple screwed the pooch with the launch of FCP X. But they were backed into a corner. It was still a 32 bit program that need a change. All the other pro apps were already 64 bit, they would be able to stand the test of time until Apple's big paradigm shift for pro apps coming this fall. (Fingers crossed)

So he's they gave us a sneak peak, a beta as it were, but now a fully functioning and dare I say it "beautiful" program.

This is where editing is going. There is no doubt. The program is far from perfect but it is like the invention of the car when everyone else was using horse and cart.

The best thing about this is that we are the ones at the cutting edge. (Pun intended) we are the ones getting the jump on everyone else. So the more people attacking the program just means more work for us when the tide turns.
Let them keep their heads in the sand I say.

Seanus wrote:

The best thing about this is that we are the ones at the cutting edge. (Pun intended) we are the ones getting the jump on everyone else. more work for us when the tide turns.
Let them keep their heads in the sand I say.

For some reason when I try to edit quoted text down to the sentence I want, it deletes everything... Anyway.

Speaking of the cutting edge, have any of you seen "The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing"? It's really great, not available anywhere legally so you gotta use the power of the Internet to find it.

Julian wrote: Speaking of the cutting edge, have any of you seen "The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing"? It's really great, not available anywhere legally so you gotta use the power of the Internet to find it.

Dude. It really is available legally:

www.amazon.com/The-Cutting-Edge-Magic-Editing/dp/B0009PVZEG

Anyway, this is not the time or place to go into your penchant for using media through questionable means...

Its a great documentary though, that and 'Visions of Light' make a good set.

A good book on editing, with images, is this:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932907629/ref...127BWXDQBVN5455C7QN0

Not a technical book by any means, it just deals with the art of the craft though examples. I don't think I learned anything from it, but it helped to 'articulate' techniques we mostly know about, and maybe explain why they work in certain contexts.

it is on Netflix.

One of the comments under that article cuts through it all pretty nicely:

"As an older filmmaker, I remember the heated debates regarding cutting on a moviola versus using a computer. The computer won. I use both FCPX and Premiere. They’re both good. FCPX is faster. I prefer fast."