I was one of the early adopters for Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X. My friend shared the link with me about Conan O’brian’s bash of it. You can see it below.

I think the jury is still out on FCPX. But this was my response to him. Perhaps it’ll share some guidance for you too.

“FCPX is a major re-write. It’s very different from FCP and FCE. For the hard core users, it’s going to be an about face. I know a lot of them don’t like it. And to be fair, their complaints are valid.

However, for the rest of us, it maybe a different story.

I know lots of people swore by iMovieHD. But once you got familiar with iMovie ’08 and now ’11, it’s really a pretty sweat package (for it’s intended audience.) I suspect FCPX will be the same way. The ability to ingest video and begin working on it right away is sweet. The magnetic timeline is nice too. I was immediately able to work with FCPX because of my familiarity with iMovie. I can also see how it has improved upon iMovie.

I’ve also seen some downsides. There aren’t traditional tracks like we’re used to using to stack video, images and audio on top of our main track. And the rendering of the final video is ridiculous. I’ve tested a 2:40 minute video w/limited effects and it’s taking over 30 minutes.

I’ve done something similar with ScreenFlow and the results take about 7 minutes. And oh yeah, it has multi-tracks so I can bring in (no ingesting required either) several different camera videos, sync them all to the clap, and then switch between each track for different camera angles. This one feature is very important to me as I want to record w/3 different cameras. I have to easily be able to drop them all into a timeline and switch between them.

FCPX won’t do this easily. My $99 ScreenFlow does.

In the meantime, I like FCPX; I’m just not in love with it–yet.”