Post by Michael Kammes

LOS ANGELES — I thoroughly expected to see the Hollywood post community villagers, torches aloft, en masse at Tuesday nights Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group (LAFCPUG) meeting. I anticipated rioting and perhaps even a lynching or two. The buzz for the past week and a half surrounding Apple's release of FCP X has been nothing short of incredible, and appears to have polarized the community. As the center of mass media for the United States, Hollywood's user base’s uproar and commotion was deafening. An estimated 300 people showed up to this meeting to see what the experts had to say.

The lineup for the event included a who's who of heavy hitters in the Final Cut Pro community: Phillip Hodgetts, blogger, author and president of Intelligent Assistance; Larry Jordan, trainer, author, and blogger; as well as Michael Wohl, author, award-winning filmmaker and part of the original engineering team for Final Cut Pro 1.

Kicking off the presentation portion of the evening was Philip Hodgetts, who illustrated the powerful metadata abilities inherent to FCP X, including keyword tagging ability & the concept of a "smart collection" — FCP's way of organizing content for seemingly faster organization and retrieval. "I've been singing the metadata song for a decade, and Apple has finally joined in with a resounding chorus", commented Hodgetts. There were a few technical hiccups, however, which seemed to only underscore the pink elephant in the room — the perceived notion of, 'This wont work.'

Philip praised the software for many things: it's speed, it's organization and it's media analysis (albeit slow). Hodgetts also noticeably concentrated on the positives of the software — not its limitations. This was definitely a theme for the evening.  read more...