Final Cut Pro X
www.apple.com
$299.00, v. 10.0.1, available for Mac download only, through the Apple App Store
There are very few talents out there who make life interesting and full of magic moments worth waiting for. Walt Disney was one. Steve Jobs, who passed in October, was another. We miss him the way we miss Walt. It seems sensible they joined up toward the end of his life, as he sold Pixar to Disney and served on its board.
Both men delivered great products and always endeavored to provide the wow factor in their own domains. In the world of computer software, many of us in media were anticipating the wow factor radiating from the next hotly anticipated version of Final Cut Pro.
But the reaction to Final Cut Pro X (“ten”), revealed while Steve was alive, at the Las Vegas SuperMeet in April 2010, was sort of “Wow! What? Why?” Within days of release, the editors of Conan O’Brien’s late night TBS show were all over FCPX with a scathing parody- it made mainstream news.
Lots of stuff has changed. The familiar “four corners” of all popular NLE’s are only echoed here. There is no Project Browser with bins, no Viewer for source marking, no Canvas / Record / Composer monitor for the assembled program, and no timeline as we know it. They’ve been reworked into four general areas: Event Library with Event (Source) Browser, Project Library with Project (Sequence) Timelines, a Viewer window which does double-duty, and a context-sensitive Inspector panel.
Accessed from the Project Library are your edited “primary storylines” and ancillary timelines. Here you can shift, trim clips, and apply transitions and effects. Color matching from scene to scene has been made tremendously easier. Title design is a little more interactive – you can actually see the video background when you build titles.
Audio fixes such as rumble and DC hum can be tackled while the clip is being imported, as can image stabilization, and correction for rolling shutter from the new DSLR video cameras. All extremely cool.
Central to the new version is the Magnetic Timeline, a sort of free-form sandbox for editing your sequences. You keyboard or drag clips in from your Event Browser and if they collide with others they dodge automatically to a new layer. That’s very cool. It allows you to arrange your story unhindered.
The problem is, when you’re done, it’s a visual mess. There is yet no magic button to complete the work, to cascade this creative chaos into orderly tracks for fine tuning or export of audio stems or image for finishing. Or for any of several kinds of deliverables – FCPX wants you to export your work from your messy sequences based on how you’ve tagged your clips.
Underlying the new architecture is heavy reliance on metadata – in the form of favorites, keywords, smart collections, and Roles you can define. It’s a bit much to work with these when all you want to do is grab clips you’ve imported and edit. But they provide tools for sequestering selects for easy searching and auditioning, and Roles in particular, a feature of the newest 10.0.1 release at this writing, tags a clip to best describe what “track” it’s on: Dialog, Music, Effects, or anything you define – this in response to the groan over missing tracks. In this manner can you define exported deliverables required by your client or broadcast venue?
The present incarnation of Final Cut Pro X is better described as “iMovie Pro X” and reflects not the need and workflow of professional users but Apple’s bottom line exigency of leveraging millions of iMovie users into a more professional tool. Those readers of this column who are versed in iMovie 11 are going to have a ball with the new Final Cut Pro X! Go for it.
The most well-known proponent of Final Cut Pro before this release was Walter Murch, master editor of GHOST, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, COLD MOUNTAIN, JARHEAD, TETRO and many others, and the man who coined the term “sound designer,” as he graduated from audio to image editing, as did many greats, like Dede Allen. He made using FCP for studio feature work acceptable and cost effective.
Walter aired his opinions covering what’s wrong with Final Cut Pro X from his point of view, at the second annual Boston SuperMeet held on October 27th, fast becoming the sine qua non convocation of editors and post pro’s in New England who want to network and keep up with latest products and changes. Walter hit highlights of a very articulate bullet list of issues he sent to Apple marketing; the group seems to control the product’s future more than any at this moment. Other professionals have also logged in their thoughts.
I met recently with the same marketing people behind this product and they’re basically bright and considerate folks, but they’re charged with moving FCPX to the greatest numbers, and it’s safe to say, most of those are not professional editors. I’ve suggested they’re not going to get many pro’s interested in the product until longform documentary and feature work can be demo’d in it, with dramatic scenes and takes or documentary events efficiently accessible and storable, rather than tagged clips from shortform extreme sports videos, travelogs, and home movies for YouTube. They are surely listening. To their credit, for instance, multicam capability returns early next year.
FCPX is certainly a cool tool – but for who?
Loren Miller is a freelance editor working coast to coast, using FCP7 and Avid, and reports regularly for IMAGINE. Reach him anytime at techpress@mindspring.com.