What Have You Been Smoking, Larry?

I was re-reading Larry Jordan's post from yesterday about the release of Final Cut Pro X [1]. Larry's someone to pay attention to, if only because he's had several weeks to actually play with the software, unlike the rest of us weighing in with our "I've had it for an hour and I hate it" opinions.

But Larry also makes his living doing training for Final Cut Pro, and he obviously has a relationship with Apple[2] that he has to protect: witness his back tracking on the comment that Final Cut Pro X would not be ready for Professional Use, even though I can think of at least 162 people [at 11:30am EDT] who would agree with him. And the article has a lot of honesty in there, particularly the THINGS I DON’T LIKE section.

But what really stuck out on re-reading was this line, about 1/4 of the way down:
FINAL CUT PRO 7 IS NOT DEAD
To me, this is one of the highlights!
Umm, talk about putting lipstick on a pig! That's a lot like selling electric cars and telling people they can solve the limited range problem by keeping their old gasoline powered car.

I'm sorry Larry, Final Cut Pro X lacking features in Final Cut Studio 3 might be a necessary evil, it may be the first step towards a brighter future, it might even be a little pain for a lot of gain, but being able to still run the previous version? No, that's not a highlight.

And even Apple doesn't recommend installing Final Cut Pro X in the same partition as Final Cut Studio, which sort of negates that highlight completely! [3]


Still, read Larry's article, particularly if you're interested in sound; his "The process of adding an audio cross-fade is dangerous, unintuitive and dumb" should be more than enough to give you pause. And that's not all, he also points out problems with:
  • No Multicam
  • No support for sending a project to audio editors
  • Problems Autosave may cause
  • Clips not remembering In and Out points
and more.


  1. LarryJordan: Ain’t Nothing Like It In the World
  2. I have a relationship with Apple too; iTunes pays a small percentage on sales linked from the site, but they - so far - don't seem phased by the content of the site. Unlike Sony, who rejected the site [odd, because most of the time, I think people would say I was a Sony fanboy.]
  3. Apple: Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, Compressor 4: Installation best practices


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