TOPIC:

With the another thread already prompting some interesting discussion, I thought- "What the heck!"

• Bold indicates "Feature" release.

10.0.0 - 2011.06.21 Tuesday
10.0.1 - 2011.09.20 91 DAYS Tuesday
10.0.2 - 2011.11.16 57 DAYS Wednesday
10.0.3 - 2012.01.31 76 DAYS Tuesday
10.0.4 - 2012.04.10 70 DAYS Tuesday
10.0.5 - 2012.06.11 62 DAYS Monday
10.0.6 - 2012.10.23 134 DAYS Tuesday
10.0.7 - 2012.12.06 44 DAYS Thursday
10.0.8 - 2013.03.28 112 DAYS Thursday
10.0.9 - 2013.07.30 124 DAYS Tuesday

And here we are. A new MacPro awaiting release, and along with it, supposedly the first major revision to Final Cut Pro X since it's launch in June 2011.

Apple's iPhone Event on September 10th is not likely to see anything of merit for us. More likely, a second late-October iPad Event, will bring the OSX, Mac, and Final Cut releases we're all waiting for. Based on that, and the fact that all "FEATURE" releases of FCPX have come on Tuesdays, I'm betting we'll see FCPX 10.1.0 released on either

Tuesday, October 22nd or 29th.

As the people say, "This is the big one!"

Quite expecting the new integration. Obviously Apple is integrating the iOS 7 and Maverick so they work well just like what's happening in Logic Pro X with iPad.

I'm hoping that Mavericks has some new undisclosed features. Things like "Project Sharing" Event Management" built right in to the OS.

Thus being the reason why we haven't seen these features in FCP X yet. .

…..

We need a praying emoticon…

I've heard that there are some features of Mavericks still under NDA, but whether they relate directly to 10.1 I have no idea.

I know that any web-based sharing of projects and events will have to relate in some way to iCloud and CoreData syncing- which was the cause of much angst for developers but is apparently seeing some improvements this year.

As for any Mavericks related functionality- if 10.1 REQUIRES Mavericks- that would be a bold move. I do keep up to date on OSX and have never had any issues, but I know there are others on this forum who up until recently were still working on 10.6.8 for stability issues.

I would say that given the year between 10.0.6 and the proposed October release of 10.1, I'm hoping that changes won't be just "bolted-on" functionality; but changes to UI, and key underlaying structure of the app. For performance. For stability. For cross-app communication.

In honor of the 2 month pre-anniversary of my imagined late October launch date- here's my top 5 feature requests for FCPX.

1. Timeline organization- a new vertical hierarchy based on Roles information. Not entirely unlike Logic X's Stack Tracks.

2. iChat Theatre- as a member of several virtual offices, in many ways my most requested feature. Really miss it for working collaboratively with my clients.

3. Improved Audio Mixing- would likely be tied into Roles as well.

4. Improved Colour Correction Tools- enhancing the already powerful toolset by including curves, levels, an alternate colour wheels for those that prefer it, and a simple single point tracker for shape masks.

5. Improved Collaborative Workflows- allowing for multiple users to touch Event files (adding user specific metadata) and exchanging cuts. In my dream world, this stuff would sync over iCloud; allowing me to collaborate seamlessly with the other editors in my virtual workflows.

EDITED TO ADD

and, of course, tighter integration with Motion and Logic.

My only concern is that they're going to spend all their time tweaking things underneath to work with the new MacPro. They've mentioned the focus on 4K which makes me wonder if they'll do a similar thing that they did when the Retina Display macs came out and release a version with little overhaul for the rest of us.

Alex Gollner did a great writeup today on his (and a few contributors) hopes for the fall update:

blog.alex4d.com/2013/08/28/final-cut-pro...pdate/#comment-21594

One big mis for tcp that most oversee is how incapable of collaborating with Inews and Avid shared storage FCP x is? By just enabling Inews Integration, broadcasting will have no excuse to integrate FCP into their workflow….

Your line "In honor of the 2 month pre-anniversary of my imagined late October launch date..." made me laugh out loud. Thanks!

What about Snow Leopard? Do you guys think Apple will drop support in FCPX 10.1.0?

I've heard that a lot of people still uses OS 10.6...

Since the just-released Logic Pro X requires 10.8.4 (Mountain Lion), you should expect something similar.

robertdee wrote:

My only concern is that they're going to spend all their time tweaking things underneath to work with the new MacPro. They've mentioned the focus on 4K which makes me wonder if they'll do a similar thing that they did when the Retina Display macs came out and release a version with little overhaul for the rest of us.

I wouldn't worry about that. While I think that Retina support did push back the 10.0.6 update by a couple months- that the MacPro support isn't to my mind nearly as big a job as rebuilding the entire UI at twice the resolution. FCPX already supports 4K resolutions, and the interface is already ready for Retina Mac displays (should those come to pass). So MacPro integration is likely limited to a couple of instances where the dual-GPUs can be used, either for true background rendering, or multiple scopes, and of course general speed and performance.

The other thing to consider is that when the Retina update was released in June of 2012, it had only been 4 months since the last feature release at the end of January [10.0.3]. Apple has been working on whatever updates are coming this fall since at least last October. There's no way that prepping FCPX for the MacPro has taken a year.

Macworld article on hopes for 10.1.

www.macworld.co.uk/macsoftware/news/?newsid=3466448

• edited to add-

After being excited to read this, having done so it's largely a hack-job. Someone at Macworld basically trolled Facebook, Alex, and Richard's site and compiled it into something long, rambling, and scattershot.

And the calls for it's to "not look like iMovie", "look like Premier Pro", or "be Final Cut Pro 8" at this point make me plain sad and angry. Move the f*ck on, people.

Disproportionate wrote:

And the calls for it's to "not look like iMovie", "look like Premier Pro", or "be Final Cut Pro 8" at this point make me plain sad and angry. Move the f*ck on, people.

Agreed. Fortunately, at least as far as my limited conversations with the FCP team have led me to believe, none of that is going to happen.

That was pretty much expected, since the author only asked the question on a FB group, that consists mostly of FCP users still hanging on to the legacy version.

Yeah, talk about stacking the deck...

After re-reading Alex's Logic X post from last month- I sought out a Stack Track demo on youtube



Man, there's so much here I can see translating so well to FCPX.

First off, the color coding of elements, which would be grand.

Next, the grouping of multi-track elements into a StackTrack is the visualization of what I was imagining that grouped Role elements in the timeline might look like. Allowing you to expand/collapse Roles into single "layer" elements to keep things streamlined in a complicated timeline. Ideally, these grouped collections could maintain the audio elements individual clip connections; unlike when you group elements into a compound clip.

This grouping of elements would also (like in LogicX) allow for bus-based mixing.

Obviously, FCPX shouldn't be expected to have the same depth of audio tools as a DAW, but these interface ideas are very exciting if they enigmatic of anything going on in the upcoming 10.1 update.

I don't wan to wish the year away, but man I'm looking forward to this release...

Although it seems like Friday's MacWorld article copied much from my blog post, that's not what happened.

The author, Karen Haslam, asked me to email her some comments which I sent her the previous week - before my blog post. Guessing that she wouldn't use a majority of them, I also sent them to Andy Mees and Richard Taylor and asked them for input.

Haslam said that she hoped that article would come out on Wednesday, so I waited until Wednesday to update my blog (as I had plans for Free Effect Friday).

To get back on topic, I'd like

105. Multiple viewers each with optional associated Inspector panels (as many as editors want, so that when I skim or double-click a clip while holding a modifier key [Control-Option-1, -2 etc.]) the clip is skimmed or loaded in the viewer of my choice.

106. An event list view mode which shows 'Events associated with selected project' and vice versa: A project list view mode which shows 'Projects that use the selected event'

107. A single command to leave an even on one (possible sparse image) disk by modify all its event references to copies of events on a different disk.



@Alex4D

It's good to hear that the article wasn't blatant plagiarism. Though my biggest problem with it is that is gives a continued voice to some pretty tired tropes about the software from sectors that already made up their mind a long time ago about what the software is. And while I guess that's kind of useful as a bellweather for where popular opinion for FCPX is at- I guess I just find it entirely unuseful to give equal weight in this discussion to those who at this point are still saying "it looks like iMovie" or "give us FCP8".

Good suggestions. Alex. If integrated, we're definitely going to need that better multi-display support promised in Mavericks.

Disproportionate Pictures - I am seriously hoping Apple incorporates some FCPX abilities into Logic X. The key wording, tagging and even selecting and editing audio into a song would be awesome. I hope both programs can share things. The marking and editing in FCPX is so much more intuitive now than Logic. I find myself accidentally using FCPX commands in Logic all the time. Logic could really use a "Shift+Z" command and many more. Psyched.