"Are any Broadcast TV shows using FCPX?"

Well by golly Apple is now finally marketing FCPX. Here's an answer to that oft asked question, "Are any Broadcast TV shows using FCPX?" "Leverage" is. [www.apple.com]

Michael Horton
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Wish they would have interviewed some of the editors, Sound Designers and Colorists in addition to the Director. Would be nice to hear their thoughts on the transition from the FCP 7 workflow to X.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

and more generally the "In Action" link
[www.apple.com]

BTW The ones featured there aren't the only ones I know of.
There are facilities I know of claiming to do broadcast work in London (apparently just moving to) and the Netherlands (has been) using FCPX as well.

Has anyone seen detail on how these shows work with audio in their timelines? (theres one screen shot on the apple In Action site that looks suspiciously like "tracks" for the audio)....but even with now 3 improvement upgrades, audio is still the deal breaker for us.

Double clicking to open each audio is a rediculous extra step
No real time keyframe audio recording mixer
no assignable tracks without Roles as an after thought
Rubber banding every single audio mix in the editor


Even drop shadow is third party filter ad on (or roll your own)

How on earth is this progress?

And how does a network TV show work around these limitation.

Most of us aren't exporting to colorists and sound mixers - we're one man band DYI operations.


on the plus side -

Premiere Pro CS6 appears to be much of what we'd hoped FCP 8 would be - will see if the reality lives up to Conan's editor's promotion.

and now talk that SMOKE may offer new editing goodness.

Quite honestly everyone should be lining up to purchase Avid Symphony and Adobe CS6. Awesome one-two punch in the edit suites. We based our decision on moving all our broadcast work to Avid based on our testing of CS6, but it's still a great tool and we will be using it for editing work in our shop outside of broadcast.

As for Leverage, we're already reaching out to get either the Director or the Editors or both to a future Atlanta Cutters meeting to discuss their workflow and see it in action. Should clear up a lot of things, particularly the workflow to / from ProTools and Resolve of which we'll have workstations set up for both when we do the presentation. We're fortunate to have a Turner Studios connection in our group that can get the discussions started since it's a TNT show. We'll let you know if / when we get that scheduled.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

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Even drop shadow is third party filter ad on (or roll your own)

Not difficult once you have such filter. Awkward that it's not there to begin with but obviously not a deal breaker.
They're sending to ProTools with X2Pro. Probably internal rough mixes real time is not a deal breaker either. For some, doing a quick Sub Frame "trim" with the fader handle is important.
Roles aren't an afterthought. It's metadata and that's the direction FCPX is going in.
Using the Range tool makes rubber banding easy. It doesn't replace a real time rough mix but obviously that's not critical to them.

These facilites are NOT one man bands. They're using Resolve to color, Smoke to finish, ProTools to mix. I know of a couple of others who have moved or are moving to FCPX as well. FCPX is fast and that's important for deadline work.

Ironically many of the "one man band" folks must be OK with it because, until people saw these "In Action" case studies, that was the presumed user base. FCPX still needs a bit of work but this "one man band" who used to work in big facilities, some of them broadcast, is happy with the direction Apple is taking it. Resolve Lite is Free and is certainly a competent replacement for Color. I suspect Logic Pro X will have FCPX integration when the time comes.

Sorry Craig, couldn't disagree more.

We've gone from an application that did EVERYTHING we needed - audio mix, solid in application color correction - undertandable easily mixable tracks ... to one that needs more add ons than the International Space Station to stay in orbit

and when folks talk about fast...i'm not seeing it -- I've given X a workout on a latest model macbook pro with plenty of ram....and feel like i'm at the ocean with all the spinning beachballs. Just being able to export a small segment is impossible without duplicating a timeline (sorry...project) and deleting everything else and exporting. How is this better?

And Roles not an afterthought? It was a response to the outcry of not being able to export defineable tracks to other audio finishers.

Even the folks at one of the most popular plugins - FXFactory - are frustrated with the crashes and instability

Great - metadata - native formats etc....but that's organization - not editing - i can't think of anything as critical in delivery than getting an audio mix right..and it's just clunky and slow in FCP X -- if they fixed that and the beach ball convention, they'd have another convert.

Apple's approach is modular.
Give the low cost of entry I suspect it's doing fairly well as a new NLE.
10.0.4 has been extremely responsive compared to 10.0.3. This on MBP 15" 2011 and a rickety old MacPro 2008 with ATI 5770 upgrade.

Obviously a "few" broadcast facilities find it fast. It's the one thing they all have in common in their comments and, except for 10.0.3, that's been what I hear.

Anyone can pick at a score of features it doesn't have. It's only been out 9 months or so. Apple is moving VERY QUICKLY.
10.0.4 "introduced" a whole bunch of plugin issues but that's because they're still improving the foundation. The issues are a result of some workaround the plugin developers had to do in the first place. It's hard to develop for a moving target but it's going to have to be a moving target if Apple is going to make rapid progress. The rest of this year is probably going to be catchup with features (but coming back better than they were in FCP7).

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"10.0.4 has been extremely responsive compared to 10.0.3."

OK...after, what, a year now? I am still not quite getting the drips and drabs of FCPX praise (more like wishful thinking / dreaming). The 10.0.x release, which people touted as "NOW Apple is listening to the Pros!" broke a lot of the plug-ins - so this is a benefit...how? Another "set-back". More of Apple's FCP team not communicating with anyone especially 3rd party developers = another nail in the FCPX coffin. So...they release an article about a TV show using FCPX. I see a few of these articles...but it is a very small number and I don't hear many EDITORS singing praises (can count on one hand).

I still don't see any single teensy bit of the benefit of working in FCPX. As a matter of fact, the news seems to get worse every day. I am tired of the question "...why haven't you gone to FCPX yet?"... Because it does not work for me. I wish they would simply admit failure, pull it, and get back to business with Final Cut Studio 4 / FCP8 (in a perfect world...but I digress...).

I agree Walter...MC6 / CS6 on my rig. No "Final Cut Workaround" for me...yet. I've got tons of work to do and I need something that works. You have got to see what Premiere CS6 looks like now. I would still be interested in that discussion, Walter, if you can get the Leverage Editor to speak at your User Group Meeting (maybe record & post it up somewhere?)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

My point is a totally different one.

As I said quite often I am not a story teller the way most of you are. The stories I tell are boring and are for R&D only.
But because of that experience I was able to help a lot of story tellers to organize their workflows cause my workflows which often had been way more complicated compared to those which are used in standard shows or theatrical releases -- I helped to make make custom workflows simple and to work like automatically.
FCP gave a lot of "hooks" to do something like that, more than other apps/NLEs did.

FCPX does another maybe more "modern" approach which is in my opinion not "Thought to the End". Take the example Andy gave about "Drop Shadow" it's not there -- sure you can build it by you're own like in Abode's Illustrator version 0.9 for graphics/stills. But we are in 2012, NLEs are around since more then a decade.

Some people I'm working with do a lot of daily soaps (beside other movies) they have a high rank by viewer numbers; and I/we tried a lot to make FCPX work for them -- no success up to now.

The example given by Apple of the German show is a good example: one man doing the rough cut, no words about how dual system sound really works, all stuff is "adjusted" or "sweetened" with other apps and other gear and then edited again. Also in my opinion it's a big difference to make one show per week or one per day.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

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I am still not quite getting the drips and drabs of FCPX praise (more like wishful thinking / dreaming).

Some people are using it and liking it despite the work in progress nature of the beast. In some very few cases it's even being used in broadcast.

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broke a lot of the plug-ins - so this is a benefit...how? Another "set-back". More of Apple's FCP team not communicating with anyone especially 3rd party developers = another nail in the FCPX coffin.

Actually plugin developers were working around issues that Apple fixed. So the plugin developers have made updates to drop the workarounds. I suspect other plugin developers may still be waiting for more fixes.

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I still don't see any single teensy bit of the benefit of working in FCPX

At least a few of us do. For us, it's fast. That's the one bit of praise that seems ubiquitous amongst those who like it. I can list the reasons why it's fast for us. You'll probably knock the down. The thing is that doesn't change the fact (or perception) that it's fast for us.