FCP7, FCPX, PPCS6, MC6 - which NLE is best suited for a long form documentary?

[Nicholas Natteau]

I'm about to start editing a WWII documentary film with over 700 newsreel clips and more than a thousand photos.

With so many choices these days - FCP7, FCPX, Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, Media Composer 6 - I'm unsure which of these NLE's would best handle organizing the vast amount of media i will have to navigate through to find my clips.

Although I've always used bins in FCP7 for example, I love the concept of metatagging and metadata that comes with FCPX, but I find that i edit so much faster in Premiere Pro CS6 with all its customizable keyboard shortcuts.

But I'm not beholden to any particular NLE. I would just love to hear from anyone who has worked on a long format documentary that involves hundreds of clips and stills. Which of these NLEs do you feel gives you the best sorting tools for organizing your media?

 

[Exact]

If you like the idea of FCPX metadata (which helps a LOT) then maybe it's worth learning it and making all the shortcuts you like. There are things possible in FCPX that aren't so easy in CS6, and of course visa versa.

If you are comfortable in CS6 then it's probably your fastest solution.

There is really only personal preference here. Some will prefer media composer and tell you there are compelling reasons to use it.

Others will evangelise for CS6 while others extol the virtues of FCPX.

Go with what you know. It will probably save you a lot of time and heart ache.

it's a while since I used Media Composer so I'm not so up to date. As far as the FCP7/FCPX/CS6 go, I could quite easily to it in any of them (and we do use all of them although FCP7 is kind of redundant now).

If you really need to do a lot of cross referencing then I find FCPX metadata hard to beat.

 

[Nicholas Natteau]

Thanks very much Exact. That was quite helpful.

I do like FCPX (the scopes for one are fantastic). I just wish you could maximize any of its windows (especially the events window) the way you can in PPCS6. And try as as I might, I just can't get used to scrubbing through the FCPX thumbnails and having to lengthen them to zoom in. I find it so much easier to set in and out points in the timeline of the source monitor window. But that's just me. It would be great if PPCS6 had a meta-tagging solution. That seems like a fantastic way of organizing footage.

I can't wait to see what FCPX and PPCS7 have in store for NAB 2013.
There's still much room for improvement on both those platforms.

 

[adkimery]

My vote is either for FCP7 or MC6. I'm currently working on a TV show that literally has thousands of hours of footage (both shot footage and licensed footage) and thousands of image files and MC6's asset management has been rock solid. It's not the prettiest to look at and some things drive me batty about it but it's the one I trust the most not to cave in on itself when you give it mountains of assets. I've worked on a few long form docs with FCP 7 and while it can certainly do the job it seems more fragile than MC does. By that I mean I've had FCP get 'confused' and link clips in the timeline to the wrong assets and you really have to watch your project file size otherwise FCP will become slow and unstable. You can remedy this by having multiple projects (one could be a project just for ingesting as while another could be just for cutting) but then you run into asset management problems because, well, FCP 7's asset management is not very robust.

The tagging and searching ability in FCPX is nice but I don't know how well it could handle a long form edit that's going to go on for months. I'm starting to dig into PPro 6, but I don't have enough experience to trust it for such a long project.