Even Apple Doesn't Use Final Cut Pro X

[andrgl]

As per a recent job listing, they're looking experience with:

• Adobe Premier
• Avid Media Composer
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Davinci Resolve
• Adobe Audition
• Adobe Pro Tools

No mention of FCP X or even FCP.

 

[jcs]

Lol that's for Beats by Dr Dre, in Culver City (surprised they didn't specify Sony products (they have a big studio in Culver City):  Vegas, Sound Forge etc. ).

(Avid) Pro Tools is the industry standard for pro audio: not a better tool than the competition anymore, but since it's so common among pros, it's still a requirement.

For 4K editing, surprisingly FCPX kicks PP CC 2015 (latest) to the curb (as does Resolve 12). PP can barely play 4K C300II files in real-time at 1/2 display res on a 12 Core MacPro 24GB with a GTX980ti 6GB and fast Samsung SSD, whereas a 2014 MBP 16GB with a GT 750M can play the same files in real-time in FCPX.  Adobe really needs a deep overhaul of their video processing engines.

[Xavier Plagaro Mussard]

Apple could also employ someone with a nice background in other apps to better FCP X (read copy features!)

FCP X works great!

[joema]

...For 4K editing, surprisingly FCPX kicks PP CC 2015 (latest) to the curb (as does Resolve 12). PP can barely play 4K C300II files in real-time at 1/2 display res on a 12 Core MacPro 24GB with a GTX980ti 6GB and fast Samsung SSD, whereas a 2014 MBP 16GB with a GT 750M can play the same files in real-time in FCPX.  Adobe really needs a deep overhaul of their video processing engines.

You are absolutely correct. I have done a lot of recent performance testing on PP CC 2015 vs FCP X on the same hardware. PP does fine on H264 1080p material but bogs down drastically on 4k. On a top-spec 2015 iMac, PP has several seconds of viewer lag when fast forwarding through the timeline. When doing rapid JKL editing, the keyboard lag to go from fast forward to rewind is several seconds. On FCP X direction change is instantaneous and the viewer update rate is over 10x as fast. If doing multicam 4k it's even worse. IMO PP is borderline unusable on multicam H264 4k -- even at 1/4 resolution.

Maybe a custom-built workstation with an overclocked liquid-cooled CPU and a Titan GPU would do better, but it would seem extreme to require that. The fact that PP has no built-in proxy mode like FCP X makes it even worse because of the workflow overhead of manual proxies. It's not OS X as I also tested PP CC 2015 on Windows. 

I noticed when fast forwarding on the timeline that Premiere's CPU utilization is much higher than FCP X. Maybe FCP X is using Quick Sync to offload the CPU burden of encode/decode.

I'm not slamming PP in general -- it is a great suite, very capable and feature rich. But 4k is rapidly proliferating on the production side, regardless of what happens on the consumption side. Years ago Mercury Playback was a revolution, mostly doing away with transcoding and mezzanine codecs. Adobe hitched their wagon exclusively to native codecs with no built-in proxy support, and now that wagon is breaking down under the 4k load.

[Oliver Daniel]

I don't know why FCPX continues to be bashed. 

It's an absolutely incredible editing program, very intuitive, very fast and greatly supported by third party software (plugins etc). 

 

[pablogrollan]

 

For 4K editing, surprisingly FCPX kicks PP CC 2015 (latest) to the curb (as does Resolve 12). PP can barely play 4K C300II files in real-time at 1/2 display res on a 12 Core MacPro 24GB with a GTX980ti 6GB and fast Samsung SSD, whereas a 2014 MBP 16GB with a GT 750M can play the same files in real-time in FCPX.  Adobe really needs a deep overhaul of their video processing engines.

Probably a Mac issue? I have edited several 4K formats on PP CC 2015 -Sony XAVC-I, XAVC-L, C300 MkII MXF, etc- without a hiccup on a lower specced PC (Win7 - GTX970 - 32GB Ram - separate Samsung SSDs for OS-PP, Rushes, Previews, Exports). Always played in real time with effects applied (Lumetri mostly). I know PP CC 2015 should perform similarly on both platforms, but it isn't the case, both with Premiere and After Effects. I also edit frequently on a top spec 2015 Mac Pro (dual CPU and GPU) and in my experience it is not as responsive, drops frames every now and then and render times are slightly higher...

I suppose it depends on how your workstation is configured but my experience is that Adobe CC runs better -in general- on Windows. Macs are great, but also have their quirks. I remember having  trouble a couple years ago with a 2011 MacPro (the tower before the cookie jar) that struggled to play long youtube-encoded mp4 files; it lost sync and dropped frames after a few minutes while an average windows laptop on crappy windows media player had no problem...

[KrisAK]

For 4K editing, surprisingly FCPX kicks PP CC 2015 (latest) to the curb (as does Resolve 12). PP can barely play 4K C300II files in real-time at 1/2 display res on a 12 Core MacPro 24GB with a GTX980ti 6GB and fast Samsung SSD, whereas a 2014 MBP 16GB with a GT 750M can play the same files in real-time in FCPX.  Adobe really needs a deep overhaul of their video processing engines.

Are you saying that, within the context of your specific setup, Resolve 12 performs better than PP CC?

[The Chris]

My 6-core trashcan mac with 32gb ram mows through 4k much faster in FCPx than Premiere CC. I"m editing on a 40" 4k monitor, FCPx scales better too, unless I'm missing something with the way Premiere displays.