karavite
Registered
Apple - take note, I am the spitting image of one of your target customers regarding digital hubs and desktop video and I took the bait in a big way ($3700 and counting in the past month).
I have spent more money the last two months than my wife would ever believe - camcorder, awesome tripod and fluid head, G4 DP 1 GHz, external firewire drive and FCP 3. Even on the brand new super hot Mac running OS X 10.2.1 FCP 3.0 crashes so often, I feel forced to do a save every two minutes. Now with the upgrade it seems to crash just as much, most often when rendering a simple dissolve or a still image. I know I have a lot to learn about FCP, but I am not happy - MS Office crashes less than this ie. - pun intended - almost never.
Also, I have to say that although FCP is a product for professionals, its UI and usability is often a little too silly. Sure iMovie and Premiere are not "pro" products, but they let you do simple things simply. If Apple wants us all making home movies, they need something in between iMovie and FCP - price, features and performance - gee, how about Premiere? Probably not - you have to own a suite of $400 Adobe prodcuts to do anything these days.
Another thing I do not understand is real time effects - I often have clips pop up in the canvas saying "Unrendered." I'm sure I will find the reason for this somewhere in one of the ten $60 books at Borders on FCP, but it seems a little shaky to me - I watched all the Apple site movies where various pros were just gushing over the real time effects and here I am with the second fastest Mac there is and it seems to be a well hidden feature. Rendering time is pretty amazing on this machine, so I can live with this.
I tell you, for an intense home user like me I really don't see the advantage to FCP over Premiere or even iMovie! I'm just doing a lot of simple things, capturing, editing and titles (isn't that about 99% of what I am supposed to be doing?) - I know exactly what I want to do, but FCP doesn't make it easy to find out how to do it.
FCP reminds me of Adobe and Macromedia products way more than an Apple product - over complication of simple things all in the name of being a professional. Then again, this isn't a surprise, FCP came from Macromedia (I think), makers of Nightmare Weaver.
I'd like to see Apple do what it does best and create a really fantastic UI for FCP or something new for the video "rest of us." Something that allows novice users to work without a manual and let more sophisticated users find all they need as well. Perhaps if they make it too easy, people will not think it is professional? After all, being a pro means making everything 10x as complicated as it needs to be!
I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning and/or if FCP did not crash so often, but I bought the hype with my wallet, but I am not buying it with my satisfaction or again any time soon. I gave up my alt.mac.application newsgroup ways some time ago, but now I'm wishing I would have tried it one more time for FCP.
I have spent more money the last two months than my wife would ever believe - camcorder, awesome tripod and fluid head, G4 DP 1 GHz, external firewire drive and FCP 3. Even on the brand new super hot Mac running OS X 10.2.1 FCP 3.0 crashes so often, I feel forced to do a save every two minutes. Now with the upgrade it seems to crash just as much, most often when rendering a simple dissolve or a still image. I know I have a lot to learn about FCP, but I am not happy - MS Office crashes less than this ie. - pun intended - almost never.
Also, I have to say that although FCP is a product for professionals, its UI and usability is often a little too silly. Sure iMovie and Premiere are not "pro" products, but they let you do simple things simply. If Apple wants us all making home movies, they need something in between iMovie and FCP - price, features and performance - gee, how about Premiere? Probably not - you have to own a suite of $400 Adobe prodcuts to do anything these days.
Another thing I do not understand is real time effects - I often have clips pop up in the canvas saying "Unrendered." I'm sure I will find the reason for this somewhere in one of the ten $60 books at Borders on FCP, but it seems a little shaky to me - I watched all the Apple site movies where various pros were just gushing over the real time effects and here I am with the second fastest Mac there is and it seems to be a well hidden feature. Rendering time is pretty amazing on this machine, so I can live with this.
I tell you, for an intense home user like me I really don't see the advantage to FCP over Premiere or even iMovie! I'm just doing a lot of simple things, capturing, editing and titles (isn't that about 99% of what I am supposed to be doing?) - I know exactly what I want to do, but FCP doesn't make it easy to find out how to do it.
FCP reminds me of Adobe and Macromedia products way more than an Apple product - over complication of simple things all in the name of being a professional. Then again, this isn't a surprise, FCP came from Macromedia (I think), makers of Nightmare Weaver.
I'd like to see Apple do what it does best and create a really fantastic UI for FCP or something new for the video "rest of us." Something that allows novice users to work without a manual and let more sophisticated users find all they need as well. Perhaps if they make it too easy, people will not think it is professional? After all, being a pro means making everything 10x as complicated as it needs to be!
I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning and/or if FCP did not crash so often, but I bought the hype with my wallet, but I am not buying it with my satisfaction or again any time soon. I gave up my alt.mac.application newsgroup ways some time ago, but now I'm wishing I would have tried it one more time for FCP.
