Premiere User Tries Color Grading in Final Cut Pro

A couple of months ago, I tried Final Cut Pro for the first time. Surprisingly, there were many things I liked about Final Cut, but it wasn't enough to convince me to switch from Premiere. Today, I'm giving Final Cut Pro another try. 

At the moment, my biggest issue with Final Cut Pro is its inability to work on two or more sequences simultaneously. In many cases, I am editing hours of footage, and moving a two-second clip among four hours of footage by dragging it around a single timeline is a nightmare. 

Premiere lets you open multiple projects and/or multiple editing sequences simultaneously, and you can drag clips among them all. How is this done in Final Cut Pro? What am I missing? 

In the video above, I took a deep dive into color grading in Final Cut. Although Premiere does have more color grading tools, Final Cut has the most important and standard tools. After spending the day playing with it, I no longer feel that Final Cut is at a major disadvantage in this area. 

The other thing I've been playing with in Final Cut has been more plugins by MotionVFX. Although they are a sponsor, I can honestly say they make the best plugins I've ever used for any video-editing software. Installing them is easy, using them is easy, and each plugin stills allows you to fine-tune/edit each animation. If you're a Final Cut Pro or Davinci Resolve user, I highly suggest giving MotionVFX plugins a try. 

Lee Morris's picture

Lee Morris is a professional photographer based in Charleston SC, and is the co-owner of Fstoppers.com

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3 Comments

You can create multiple Projects in an FCPX Library, and you can cut and paste between them, but AFAIK you cannot have them open to view at the same time. Resolve can display multiple Timelines at the same time, so you can drag and drop between them - and is the better editor IMO.

You can open many projects at the same time. Beside the project title on the timeline, you have arrows that allows you to navigate between the open projects!

Anyway, this is not the ergonomiest way to do that. I agree.

Regarding Color Grading, you can create a blank sequence that play the role of Layer. On this sequence, you ad your colorgrading on top of your timeline.
I agree, this is not so logical.

Yeah, having them 'open' is one thing but not having them open in a dual view arrangement is what Lee was bemoaning. And no drag and drop. As you say, not the most 'ergonomiest' - great word! Your second tip is very good, but now I have moved to Resolve I am not looking backwards.