Spent a lazy Sunday afternoon having a great lunch and dropping by a buddies house to drop of a long term piece of loaner kit. Invited us in and we sat around chatting and catching up. Dave is a manager at Cisco and an audio engineer who dabbles in video stuff. He asked me about spreading a single video across a tripple screen playback device so we went into his den where he has a 27” iMac and a slightly older copy of FCP6 so I could show him a few tricks.
I didn’t bother getting into the whole “Switch to Premiere” thing with him because frankly, he doesn’t edit that much anyway. I did, however, miss having COMMAND - E for “Export Sequence”. (Sadly, perhaps one of the BEST features of FCP7 over FCP 6. If you don’t know what I’m saying thats ok.)
This experience got me to thinking. You know, it IS hard to switch. When I think about all the experience, all the ‘muscle memory’ and all the problems that I’ve solved over the years of dealing with FCP, it IS hard to walk away from that. However, I’m also pretty well convinced it is time to look over the fence and see what is growing in the next yard.
Swithcing is not easy but there does come a time when it is necessary. In the late 80’s we gave up on tube cameras for CCDs. Think about all the time we spent (ok us OLD guys spent) learning how to properly register the tubes of those old broadcast cameras. In the early 90’s we gave up on offline editing on VHS systems and toward the end of the 90’s we even began to see non-linear systems as finishing tools. But those changes eventually brought improvements. Eventually we get to the point when thinking back to the way things were before seems like the dark ages.
So, if you are looking at your FCP Bins and Viewer and Canvas and Sequence windows and thinking, “but how can I say goodbye to these old friends?” just remember. Change is good but sometimes it IS hard.
If you want to see some of the things I thought Premiere couldn’t do but I figured out it CAN do, check this video out.