Lost In Transition: Key Differences Between 7 and X - Part 2

Media Management

In FCP7, media could be located anywhere on your computer or external hard drive. Your desktop, your documents folder, anywhere. An editor could keep media very organized on an external disk... or could ignore organization and import media from any number of locations.

Don't forget where you set your scratch disk

When capturing or transcoding, an editor would have to set a scratch disk in which to place the media that was coming in. They have the freedom to save the scratch disk anywhere on a drive. The scratch disk is a global setting and not tied to a specific project. So if multiple editors are accessing the same machine but for different projects, you could easily end up saving the footage of one project into the scratch disk of another project. (This is an area that Adobe Premiere has a leg up on FCP7. The scratch disk is set when you create a new project. The scratch disk settings remain project specific no matter how many users are launching Adobe Premiere.)

Sometimes when a project becomes large and complex, media might get saved several folders deep on a drive. If any of this media gets thrown offline, sometimes FCP7 has a difficult time reconnecting back to it automatically.

Lost In Transition: Key Differences Between 7 and X - Part 1

Editors expected a Final Cut Pro 8. There had been little reason to expect that Apple would radically and fundamentally change its flagship professional editing program. Editors expected the same software, only better.

Then Apple decided to re-write the code from scratch. In doing so, it decided to take its NLE in a vastly new direction.

What follows is what I think are some of the key differences between Final Cut Pro X and Final Cut Pro 7. These aren't the only differences between the programs that one could list. Also, there are lots of features that were not a part of X when it was first released that have since been added back or updated.  The differences I'm going to cover are more fundamental and will always be what separates X from its forebear.

Why make a compare/contrast list two and a half years after X's release? Because not every FCP7 editor has decided whether to add X to their utility belt, let alone try X at all. There may be some who are still curious about how different X is, and there may even be more who sat down for five minutes with it who don't know what the F is going on.