FCPX The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

[Christian Schmitt]

Unless I misunderstand your question, the color picker is still there. Click on the color box of the parameter you want to effect in the inspector. This will open an OS X color wheel, and you can then pick your color from there. However, you can also click on the “search” icon to select the Color Picker tool. Now you can click on the color you want in the frame of the video to pick your desired color.

Just to follow up: That's a 3rd party PlugIn you're using, not something build into FCX. This seems to be a freebie though, so thanks for that hint!
Anyways, I was used to shooting a small white/gray/black card, with that in FCP7 it was fairly easy to correct levels and tint.

 

[Scot Yount]

Right about the plugIn, but the concept applies to any color box parameter.

 

[Oliver Peters]

I posted this link earlier, but it also applies to the color wheel comments. A number of filters use the OS color picker as a color wheel. This includes filters that are built into Motion but aren't included in FCPX. However any Motion filter can be published to FCPX as a Motion template, so you can roll your own color correction plug-ins if you like. I talk about it in this post of mine.

https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2015/07/04/building-fcp-x-effects-update/

- Oliver

 

[Christian Schmitt]

Right about the plugIn, but the concept applies to any color box parameter.

It's really not that. I shouldn't have used "color picker". I was referring to the way you could balance out an image in FCP7. There was a "picker" each for lift, gamma, gain, so if you new
you had true black, true white and middle gray in your image, you could pick those colors in the image and balance it out. This is gone with X sadly.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

I've started to update the Bad for anyone still following this.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

Excellent. You may want to adjust the font size of The Good so that it matches The Bad (and everything else). Otherwise, the content looks biased in favor of The Good (because of the larger font size).

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Excellent. You may want to adjust the font size of The Good so that it matches The Bad (and everything else). Otherwise, the content looks biased in favor of The Good (because of the larger font size).

Adjusted, good catch!

 

[Richard Luke]

Pretty sure the text edit window size is now adjustable in the latest update

 

[Oliver Peters]

On your "bad" list - Rendering in general is a problem. I turn off background render and typically work in real-time for everything, although this is with optimized media. Either the format is already an optimized codec or I transcode it first or inside FCPX. You might also try working in the Position mode ("P" tool), which makes it behave non-magnetically. Unfortunately connected clip stacking order is a problem. Often something is placed lower in hierarchy when it should be higher. That's definitely a UI design issue. As far as titles, I also find that connected title clips tend to bog down the UI responsiveness in the sections where they are applied.

- Oliver

 

[Oliver Peters]

This might fall into the "ugly" category, but the biggest beef I still have with FCPX is the poor UI response with large timelines. I'm curious how that was for you, Steve?

I currently have a timeline for a documentary. It's 90 min. of primarily DV25 media. Just the storyline, so only talking heads and scratch VO. No b-roll yet. I have duplicate versions in Premiere Pro CC 2015 and in FCPX for comparison.

Regardless of which machine I'm on (my old 2009 tower or my new Retina MBP) the results are the same. Zooming in or zooming out of the timeline is very sluggish in X and instant in PPro. If I go from several clips filling the window to the full timeline (shift+z) it takes about 4 sec. on either machine in X. Instant in PPro. This is regardless of whether media is online or offline.

The one narrative feature film I've cut from scratch in X was built up from scenes to scene chunks to reels to a full feature. I do almost no edits in the feature-length project timeline, because it's just too frustrating.

What did you find?

- Oliver