I here what your saying Romeo, but the ability to work freelance is very seriously hampered by the fact that you cannot hand off your work to a professional company (no EDL, no OMF). If you do work in a pro studio you will work within a pipeline, you get the footage, you do your bit, you hand it on. FCP X cannot fit into a professional production pipeline, not just because it's incapable of exporting or importing via the standard file formats, but because it insists on storing everything you do on the physical Mac you are using. This includes any metadata you create on any of your clips or work, this is lost when you move the contents of the project to anywhere else. Also, although you can install your copy on any Mac thanks to the app store this is also geographically limited, as in you can only do this in the country you bought it in. This may not be a problem, but it could be if you end up with a gig somewhere outside your country. FCP X is built for solo workers working on individual projects from start to finish themselves, there is nothing in it anymore that allows you to work collaboratively. Fair enough, it is a valid market, but if you do want to work in a professional capacity with studios and/or production companies (TV, advertising etc) you will have to use AVID or Premiere (or Lightowrks once its matured a lot) as you can no longer pass your work to or from an AVID setup (which is what most pro houses are going to switch back to if they use FCP or FCS at the moment). Also as a freelancer in the current market you'll find that not being able to work with RED footage will also limit you, not many production companies are going to want to transcode 2K footage just for you. RED shot footage is becoming increasingly common, though it's obviously not everywhere.

But yeah, if you shoot, edit and then sell directly to a client yourself, and all the clients want is the final work, then FCP X is great. That kind of work is definitely out there, and it is a market that's growing. If you consider the small number of features that Apple have to put back into FCP X in order to make it fit into a professional production companies pipeline the decision to leave them out is.. well.. quite amazing. They've decided to not just give up on the custom of the production companies but also on the freelancers that work for them.

I expect that apple will either change it and put back in the essential features required for it to fit into a proper pipeline, or they'll sell the old source code on to the larger production houses that use FCP or FCS like they did with Shake.

Ooohhh Vitaliy, how good it is to hear someone who has a strong and forward thinking as you do!
This is the first topic on FC X that doesn't go along with the "Final Cut Gate" bash of complains!
-FC X is a editing software for the future, so backwards compatibility shouldn't even be mentioned by the so-called "pros". It's new foundations are what is gonna make possible to develop features that we are gonna need from here on...
- A production company as far as I'm aware of is not the public that upgrades first anyway. For my experience, it takes awhile for production cias to upgrade and they usually wait until the new version is more stable. That said, the new FC X is aimed to individuals and as it's a new paradigm, these are the people who will get used to the new (and awesome) interface/features. That's why the features available now focus on what one can do within the program and not to provide compatibility with other programs.
- Video is far more than "broadcast" these days and that's gonna be the case from here on... That's the future. And thanks God for that!! Can anyone explain why we still have "interlaced" as a must on a "official" VIDEO camcorder?? That works great for TV (and that is a technology from the 1930's!!) but it's just not good if your video is going to be played on a computer... The same goes for non-square pixel aspect ratios...
- "Pro", therefore is more than cinema and TV productions as more and more people will be working with video for web delivery. That said, has anyone noticed that if you are an editor and own the FC X that makes you a legit pro? How?? If you own it you can sell jobs made on it and more, if you are going to freelance for a production company you can even work with you FC X on their top notch Mac Pro, even if they don't own the software or use AVID or something- you are granted that you can install and use your Mac App Store software on any machine you own or "control", so these kinda of freelancers extra editors are gonna be a great deal/big savings for companies as they will come providing their own licenses on the software they will run to do their jobs!
- Has anyone forgotten how difficult it was to learn Final cut (traditional) in the first place??? Today I know it backwards but it DID TOOK A LONG TIME. Compared to that, the new FC X is a piece of cake to learn even tough it's totally different. Really it's very easy! Move tool for "overwrite" and positioning clips anywhere you want, select tool to build a story with solid connections, timelines and compound clips to do composites and more intricate editing, etc. Select a storyline and your edit shortcuts will work on that.
- Time remapping!!!! Finally done the right way!! My favorite overhaul! If anyone has ever shot on DSLR 60p to do slow motions, you know you had to transcode first, then duplicate footage to have working clips on both regular speed and the other duplicate conformed (in cinema tools) to be slow mo), then you had to send your extremely dramatic slow motion portion of the edit to Motion just to process it with "optical flow", render it, re-import (as it wouldn't render properly in the motion project created on your timeline in FC) and then you had your retiming effect good to go... Now you import from your DSLR and on the timeline you can do all that in a single place- ITS AWESOME!!!!!

Here is part of Final Cut X tutorial



Watch full free tutorial consisting from 26 parts at - http://www.izzyvideo.com/final-cut-pro-x-tutorial/

I guess what I'm wondering is why would I bother wasting money? FCP 7/studio works great for me as it is... no need to toss money in the toilet.

Interesting read:
http://digitalcomposting.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/x-vs-pro/

Like Vinny the Puh said - "This are the wrong bees and they are making wrong honey"

I'll add more soon.

@stonebat I haven't tried FCPX yet but their previous transcoding method was no good. I couldn't get m2ts files to work with FCP without the original camera file structure and all those sorts of issues. Besides, rewrapping is so much faster than transcoding and guarantied no quality loss since you're basically putting the original h264 video file and audio file into a different container.

@harry7 Have you tried ClipWrap? I'm still waiting on my GH1 & GH2 so I'm completely clueless about the workflow but I have good experience with the application when I used Sony Vegas to capture HDV tapes, which it put into m2t containers yet I needed them in mov container for FCP. ClipWrap rewrapped them into a mov container, meaning no re-encoding. ClipWrap is supposed to support m2t, mts and m2ts files.

It's a nice app but I kind of dislike the auto clip merge option which is on by default but you can turn that off in the top somewhere and make all files rewrap separately. Also make sure to double check if all files were rewrapped correctly because it gives errors on big files sometimes (I would rewrap the failed clips again until they succeeded), although that's supposed to be fixed with the new version.

Rewrapping is so much faster and no loss in quality. I hope it works for you.

So finally it's here! I just installed the NEW Final Cut Pro X.
For at least one of it's features, native AVCHD support, I've been waiting for years!

Try to import my MTS-files. Nope ... they can only be imported from a camera :-(
A little change in my workflow: ok, I can live with that.

Connect my GH1 (17). Mounts fine in the finder. Does not mount in FCP X.
A little research shows: GH1 is not supported :-(
http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/cameras/en/index.html

Connect my old Canon HG10. Works in FCP X.
Nice clip preview: that's what I've always been missing in Premiere.
Importing some clips. Very slow, stalls the application completely for minutes (Background task? Nope!). At least, file size is approximately the same as for the original MTS.

So, I'll have to re-encode my clips to ProRes as before, but cannot import previous projects?!

No way. Goodbye Final Cut, hello Premiere!

I hope so. I begin to like how fcpx works.

Final Cut Pro X is infinitely more "professional" than FCP 7, IF for a moment you:

1) assume that "professional" means "high degree of control" by the user over every functionality of the software

2) carefully compare the functionalities that the two software shares....


I could give many examples, which I learn in these first days using Final Cut Pro X, but everyone can see by himself using it and reading the help, which by the way is short and clear; just one I saw five minutes ago: the flexibility it has in using and manipulating shapes, nothing to with the old version! Same for color correcting, editing on the time line and everything else: using compound clips is a much more powerful tool the the old sequences, brilliant idea and flexible tool.

This is not professional??? Final Cut Pro 7 maybe! You have here a Ferrari compared to a coach...

Surely, the impact with the software is shocking, it seems you can't do millions things you could do, but it is not true. You can do everything you did in a much better way. It is a wonderful piece of new technology. I can understand all the complaints, I myself was desperate at the beginning, I thought I had not an editing software anymore, FCP 7 being too old and FCP7 being only a toy... during a night of desperation I even downloaded the demo of Premiere and started using it for couple hours...! But now, the more I use Final Cut Pro X, the more I love it. And its price is absolutely reasonable.


This being said, the new version ABSOLUTELY needs support for multicam and import/export capabilities. On EVERY other aspect Apple got it right and did a cheap product which is worlds ahead than the older version.

Two corrections:

- My first project is all from a 7D. I just assumed the file structures would be similar from GH cameras. That may have been an incorrect assumption. I'll check that later this week on an upcoming GH2/G13 shot project. However, if this is consistent, I will not have enough room on this computer's G-RAID storage to edit that project. I'll have to use a different application that doesn't transcode all the media files twice.

- The proxy media on this 1080 project is actually 960x540 lines. (I said it was 720 lines above. That was a mistake.)

nothing but proxy media, because I work with proxy and I check the box.