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Final Cut Pro 5

Some one asked me what I though of FCP 5 in light of my articles (here and here) on Xsan and FCP 4.5. So here is a five minute answer.

I think FCP 5 is a huge improvement. Specifically I'm a big fan of the multicam support (blows Avid away), improved realtime effect, and the button bars (finally). I like Soundtrack Pro too.

But it still lacks a few major things needed to be used in a facility like ours. There's still no way to share bins and projects easily. Exporting sequences and bins to the FCP XML format is a pain, and takes too long. If you have two editors each working on an act, it's a real pain to get them strung-out for an output.

Media management, while significantly improved, still needs work. There needs to be a way to set storage options per project so editors don't have to worry about changing settings and / or digitizing to the wrong drive. In our area, a different project could be in each bay each day.

I may be wrong about this, but there still isn't an easy way to manage user settings like the Avid has. Yes you can save your button config, and your window config, etc. But they get saved separately and have to be loaded in separately. Avid's Users is a much better way.

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