I’ve just started editing Megachrist.com footage from script table reading and I’ve installed the 30 day trail version of FCP X 10.0.1 to see how it works. I used FInal Cut Pro 7 for editing Pub Crawl movie. I’ve archived the footage and saved the project files from Pub Crawl. Which means I now have enough hard drive space, about 500 GB, to edit the new footage.
I saw a demo of Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premier and Avid Media Composer, put on by BECTU. My gut feeling is actually Apple FCP X seems to do most of what I want and there are no real problems for me to move from FCP 7 to FCP X. Apple FCP X Film Editor was he cheapest at £199, out of the three I saw in the Demo.
Premier does look like a very good program and I can see that quite a few professional Film Editors, not happy with FCP X will move to it. I liked the demo and could see that I could use it and would be happy enough. Except for the price, I found it a bit hard from the website to workout what price is, as you get a 50% discount if you put in code “switch”, So I think it’s about $900. A demo of Adobe Premiere is available on Adobe’s website.
Personally I didn’t get any reason for why I would want to use Avid Media Composer. It seems Avid is really liked by Film Editors who already use and know Avid. Fair enough, but I haven’t and don’t, so see no reason to get Avid. It costs about £1,900 compared to £199 for Apple FCP X. By all means check it out for yourself on Avid’s website
OK you may like Premiere or Avid, but I think I’m either sticking with FCP 7 until till it breaks or upgrading FCP X if I like it enough to make me shell out 200 quid. For me that’s a lot just now.
So back to what I’m doing at this moment. I think I’ve uploaded my files into FCP X. Why am I unsure? Well I uploaded a tape that was one long clip and I can’t see it in the Event Library. When I try and quit program, FCP X informs me that it is busy rendering something, even though I have nothing in my project timeline. So if I quit, am I going to lose something?
As I wasn’t sure where my imported tape had gone too. I imported it a second time. I can’t see either of the file imports. I mean it should be 60 minutes long, so I should be able to spot it. I found where I think FCP X has parked the files on my Hard Disk. It is in my user account under movies / Final Cut Events / New Event / Original Media.
The first thing I notice is that the files I dragged in from iPhoto where not actually in this directory, but alias’s pointed to the source files in iPhoto library. there may well be a way to get FCP X not to do that, because it seems like it will be messy when I want to archive project in the future.
The reason the movie files where in iPhoto is because when I plugged Canon 550D into my Mac, iPhoto popped up and downloaded the files from the camera. I did try using a USB SD card reader, but it didn’t recognise one of my SD cards. Plugging camera in with USB lead worked best.
On location it would be useful to have something, either a PCMIA SD card Reader or a USB SD card reader. That would allow off loading what’s on the SD card, while camera is still be used to shoot more video footage. The PCMIA seems a better fit for my Apple laptop, but USB SD card reader is cheaper.
On the Megachrist shoot it was the first time I’ve used DSLR camera. I don’t have a “RIG” or any add-ons, so I used the camera hand held or on a tripod. At first I thought that the camera would auto focus, which meant early shoots where... out of focus. I didn’t really get what I wanted which was close-ups. I didn’t have the other Camcorder set up for the right wide shoots. The sound I got seems useable. Some of the video footage is OK, but I really want to re-shoot it again.
I know I need to get more batteries and SD cards for Canon 550D before next shoot. The batteries seem cheapest on Ebay or Amazon. Prices for SD cards seem to be average of £1 a GB. I forgot to bring USB SD card reader, so I couldn’t re-use SD cards by uploading them to laptop. I had 2 SD cards, but one was too slow being a class 4 card. I only realised this when I looked at footage from card. Really should use class 6 or better still class 10 cards.
Some of the movie files have a yellow exclamation mark on them. I have no idea why. FCP X seems to be telling me that something is wrong, but not what is wrong. I know I really should read the manual, but I’ve got out of the habit, as most things seem to work mot of the time and I can figure out how to make them go. Even if I actually figure out how to use them wrongly and in a way that takes more time to use.
The manual for FCP X is on Apple’s website. My first impressions of FCP X is that I like it, even though I don’t know how to “make it go” yet.
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