TED Goes FCPX with the help of FCPWORKS

In what may be one of those Cold Mountain moments for Final Cut Pro X, TED reveals it has made the complete move to FCPX for all of its editorial work. Our own Sam Mestman was privileged to be a big part of TED’s transition plan as he worked directly with Michael Glass, TED’s Director of Film + Video. For the full story, please head over to Studio Daily. Some nice excerpts:

TED made the official transition to FCPX on September 1. “There really was a long runway before officially switching,” says Glass, “but we made that the date at which we would never open FCP7 again in order to edit a talk from scratch,” he says. “If we need to go back into a previous edit, instead of trying to translate from one to the other, we’ll edit in the old software.” Assisted by Sam Mestman from FCPWORKS, the TED editorial team spent six months training in the new version, starting with tutorial on Lynda.com and Ripple Training and moving to one-on-one tutoring with Mestman, especially at the beginning and again during the week “marathon” leading up to the official transition.

“This whole process really started almost two years ago,” says Glass. “We knew Final Cut Pro X was there, but we also looked at Premiere, Avid, even Smoke at one point. We narrowed it down to Premiere and FCPX, and once we had the lay of the land from the press and what we could read about it, we took two-to-three-day intro courses offsite to both softwares. That gave us a good handle on where the problems would be, whatever we took on, and also what the advantages would be.

People were starting to come around to the idea of FCPX before Sam showed up for a week here, rotating through two-hour sessions one-on-one with each of the editors and assistant editors. I think having someone be able to walk you through the nuts and bolts of how it all worked, as well as give the context of how to think about this new-ish approach to editing made the editors finally feel safe and excited about taking on the new technology.

"I think having someone be able to walk you through the nuts and bolts of how it all worked, as well as give the context of how to think about this new-ish approach to editing made the editors finally feel safe and excited about taking on the new technology."

But to make that leap you still need someone to encourage you along the way that you’ll land safely. That’s when everyone came around. They went from saying, half-heartedly, ‘OK, I can use this,’ to ‘Wow, this will actually improve my workflow, and even makes editing kind of fun again.’ That was better than even I expected.

The meme has been stated over the years that Final Cut Pro X isn’t a professional tool… And yet a company as intelligent, world-renown and respected as TED is now using it as their primary editorial platform. It appears that the game has changed…

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