So, I have a confession to make. Apple released Final Cut Pro X in June of 2011. I remember the moment well. In April 2011, the University of Chicago Film Studies Center was lucky enough to score a talk with the legendary editor and sound designer Walter Murch, and the very first question he took in the Q&A was someone who practically leapt from his chair to ask him what he thought about the new program. Murch seemed uncertain, and equivocated in his response, attempting to soften his obvious distaste for the new UI. And, in the coming months, as the software was commercially released, that distaste spread far and wide. Editors weren’t picking up Final Cut Pro X. They were teaching themselves Avid, or Adobe Premier, or announcing that Apple could pry their Final Cut Pro 7 from their cold, dead hands. And Apple did, in fact, continue supporting Final Cut Pro 7 for an unusually long time.

And I stuck with it. At first, I wasn’t editing video much in graduate school, so it made sense to just keep old software on my computer, rather than to attempt to learn a new UI. But then I started making things again. This and this and this and this were made on FCP 7. Less than 4 weeks ago, I made a video on FCP 7. I put up with countless headaches in my continued devotion to software released in 2009. I put up with agonizingly slow rendering. With severe lag that frequently made frame-by-frame viewing of clips untenable. With the program’s complete inability to deal with MPEG-4, which meant hour upon hour spent on transcoding. With the fact that the program would instantly crash to the desktop any time I tried to use some of its titling features. And with the fact that I couldn’t upgrade my main computer to High Sierra, because Apple had finally dropped support for FCP 7 on its most recent operating system.

Well, no more. I got FCP X two weeks ago, and already edited parts one and two of “Let’s Study Half-Life 2” on it. I think I’m adapting pretty well, so far. I have minor quibbles with the UI, but that’s true of any piece of software. And, seven years on since its launch, its benefits far, far outweigh any tradeoffs when it comes to replacing the now-fundamentally-broken FCP 7.

Anyway, just a small life change for me. Probably not worth sharing, but, what do you expect? This is a blog, after all. Oversharing is baked into the format.