I'm gonna make an FCPX wish list...

What would you like to see changed in FCPX?  I thought I’d make a list. Would you care to give me YOUR ideas?

Comments

[Kevin]

Chris!

Was listening to the DCP and heard you were making this post, so I hustled over here to leave you a comment! My background is in cutting videos for small businesses, though recently I have been working as an assistant editor for several reality TV shows. I love FCPX for many reasons, but it still isn't my everyday editor, here's some of my concerns:

Media management- FCPX is totally not set up for having several people working on a project together. Moving bins or sequences from person to person is essential for what we do, and FCPX makes working that way really difficult if not impossible. Actually Avid's bins work really well for that kind of thing, it would be sweet to have "events" maybe turn into something similar?

The magnetic timeline- I actually like cutting using the timeline for many things, but there are a lot of situations where you need something to happen at a specific time. For instance, the opening titles have to be at this timecode, and have to be this long, then this has to happen at 1:20 in etc. So if there's anyway to have a magnetic timeline AND a regular timeline option that would be awesome!

Windows- I would love more options about configuring windows. All of our edit bays have dual monitors, and every editor has their own way of working. I would love to have more options about where I'm putting windows, and how big they are.

Color corrector- I see where they were going with this, but come on, three way color corrector all the way!

Anyways, this post is long enough, I'd be really interested in hearing your list of things you would like to change!
Thanks for all you do, hope to meet you someday!
-Kevin FitzGerald

[Philip]

Hey Chris,
For me I'd like to see more audio professional features on FCPX, audio mixers etc.

Here's a list that someone has done on what they want for FCPX, thats worth looking at.

http://fcpx.tv/top.html

Philip.

[Daniel]

Hello Chris,

A couple things I would like to see.

I think it would be awesome to allow FCPX to utilize LUTs in color correction.

I would like to see them fix the bug that causes screens to blink certain colors (like purple) when using some third party plugins (such as neat video). I know that the work around is to export through compressor but it's a pain to deal with when editing.

Thanks and love listening to DCP.

Daniel

[Ron Dawson]

Mr. Chris,

I'll probably pop back over here for some more ideas as I think of them, but here are a few:

1. PLEASE ADD BACK THE WHITE BALANCE COLOR PICKER. Why in the world they got rid of that is beyond me.
2. A REMOVE ATTRIBUTES feature that works the same way as their paste attributes. Or at least the option to remove all attributes.
3. Ability to find a font in the font drop-down menu by typing the first few words

That's it for now.

Talk to you next week!

[Sam Brown]

I'll second what Kevin Fitzgerald said.

Also, provide a "fast" editing mode that NEVER beachballs. I have the fastest MBP you can buy with projects on SSD's, and I still get frequent beachballs or slow response when scrubbing or previewing effects. I'd be willingcompromise resolution and gingerbread if the interface was always up to speed with me.

[Drew Perry]

Firstly, I love FCP X. I don't have 7 installed anymore on my laptop. I'm a DCP listener and if you can pass on my appreciation that would be great :)

Now there's a few little tweaks and bugs that I find annoying but probably the biggest thing for me, is an easy way of having Audio only crossfade. Alex4D has a free one which works, but it'd be nice to have that built in. Otherwise I'm relying on all the other editors I work with having the same plugin. A little messy for such a simple task.

White balance colour picker. This should be in by now.

Here's a funny thing. I edit with a bunch of different cameras. Some play nicely, some require transcoding to get smooth results (2.7k Gopro for example). So I make proxies of those files. I can then switch over to using proxies. However, when I do that any clips which do not have proxies, just don't play and give 'media missing' errors. In my opinion it should play all the clips still, but use the proxies where possible. Therefore I can just proxy off my bigger files or awkward codecs and leave the nice stuff as is.

The import dialog is pretty cool, I like the improvements in this. It currently allows for you to record from your iSight camera right into an Event. I'd love for this to support more live inputs - such as my Blackmagic UltraStudio Express - which it uses as an output brilliantly. For live event work it means I can record directly into an Event, top and tail the clips and export them out nice and quickly. Skipping a part of my workflow.

Window layout can be improved. So things like waveform monitors can be seperated rather than taking up so much space. When grading I'd love for one monitor to be the canvas monitor, then the 'main' FCPX window have the grading panel to the top right (as it is) and a waveform monitor to the top left. Makes much more sense to me. Really I guess it just needs greater flexibility as all editors like different layouts.

Many thanks Chris and keep up the awesome work!

[JS Alexander]

I would love the ability to sort clips from a keyword collection in a desktop view similar to Smoke. I've noticed that clip reel names are not carried into X, the reel field is blank even-though the info is in the file-header from the camera. Additionally Apple needs to add support for CMX3600 EDL's to be compatible with finishing systems.

[Einar Johnson]

A lot of great thoughts already listed here. Especially agree with the media management issues and bringing back 3 way color corrector.

I use FCP X pretty much every day for a variety of small to midsize commercial work. The things I'd like to see are mostly about making it faster to use overall.

I'd like to see:

- Would love to see them fix the issue where you can't open a compounded clip in a timeline if FCP thinks there's a missing file that is used in that compounded clip. Really compounded clips needs to work as fluidly as nesting does in anything else or did in FCP 7.

- Really want FX plug-ins in a drop down menu at the top. I don't find the windows in the lower right very effective most of the time. It's useful for things like transitions or text options, but I find myself scrolling up and down a lot for basic items a lot of the time.

- The things the timeline does when moving things astound me in how bad it can be due to FCP's odd storyline setup. Somedays I think they looked at nodes in Shake (RIP) and said, "Hey, lets put that kind of idea into FCP X somehow." and the storyline came into existence.

- The ability to actually adjust your export settings without having to have Compressor. I use MPEG Streamclip or Squeeze, but I feel FCP X should allow you to make some choices about the parameters you want to use to export your work without forcing you to use Compressor.

- Last but not least, a global mute button. Might want to listen to some pod-casts or something else in the background when doing editing that doesn't require sound.


BTW - Really liked your post on managing projects and events with Sparse disks. Been trying it out and find it really works well.

[Steve M,]

My wish would be to bring back the feature of keyframing your audio levels (on the fly) as we had with legacy Final Cut Pro versions.

[Tom McWilliam]

Hi: am a novice but avid user of FCPX. Why can't I export only the used portions of events-read favorites- with the finished project when I want to archive? Come on.

[Chris Fenwick]

Why can't I drag a clip from another part of the timeline and lay it into an "Audition"... I can only match frame back into the "Event" and then drag it down and put it in an Audition.

[Chris Fenwick]

Still image durations? I can't figure out how to change the default still image duration.

[Chris Fenwick]

Transition Duration???

I can't set it in FRAMES???? Its only franctions of a second. .67 of a second is 20 frames (at 29.97) REALLY? can't we teach the soccer dads what a frame is? or at leasts give ME the option of changing it in a preference? I don't even care if you don't let EVERYONE do this... just let ME do it at least. PELASE?

[Chris Fenwick]

I think the pucks in the Color Board are too sensitive. how about hold down the option key for them to be either more aggressive or more sensitive?

[Chris Fenwick]

When you are in the color board, there should be a way to toggle the board "on" and "off" or to audition the look that you have set. before and after without sliding back out to the effects list.

[ted irving]

I would like compressor functions merged into FCPX. Since I can now conducst multiple exports and still edit at the same time, I"m not sure why I or we still need compressor. Or at least update the compressions settings to allow for more manual changes since many of us have to provide compressed footage based on client specs. Second, color coding like FCP7 was essential for my logging. I like all the metadata but logging and identifying clips, images and music by color codes was extremely helpful. Finally, get this software to do what many don't want it to do...work on an iPad. As a matter of fact, an iPad Pro. I want to use just my fingers to edit with swipes, twists and taps. Yes, like iMovie on iPad currentl does.

[Chris Fenwick]

How about if I can "Add to Audition" from a clip that is already in the timeline... not just from the Keyword Collection. Oh sure, there is a way for me to "Shift F" and match back to the clip selection in the Event Library, but thats an extra step that doesn't seem necessary.

[Chris Fenwick]

oh please please please... give me a way to heal across a match frame... remove edit... what did FCP Classic call it?

[Chris Fenwick]

i don't really understand why an Event XML and a Project XML have to be different? Do they? XML out to other apps?

[Chris Fenwick]

I'd like to be able export marker data from one and then import it into another system... Imagine a producer working on "to do markers" on one system and then emailing the data to an editor in another location. yea... that would be very cool.