Alphabet Soup: The Brothy Murk of Video Formats

My love of Final Cut runs deep. In school, when there was a choice between focusing on Avid and Final Cut, it was a no-brainer for me. I’m a Mac guy, for one thing, and Final Cut is sooooo Macintosh. It also just felt right, and I found the vast majority of the program to be powerful and intuitive. There was only one stage of the Final Cut process that I found disturbingly complicated: the insane amount of options offered to you when you’re trying to export.

You just finished your project, and you’re excited as all get-out to show some folks. You planned ahead, and know exactly what format you’re going to be delivering in because you read how important that is in my article on video encoding tools. You go to “export” and select “using quicktime conversion” because you know you’re going to need to compress it a little. Let’s say you either don’t have or don’t want to use Compressor. So you click the options button and…Blamo!

I don’t know if they tried to make it look this intimidating on purpose, but it’s possible. While it seems unlikely and perhaps a bit conspiratorial, I think that sometimes certain “Professional” applications like to leave certain parts of their interface complicated, so that dabblers will be impressed by the pros who can navigate the maddening hierarchies with ease. If my conspiracy theory is correct, then the sheer volume of codecs offered on this menu in Final Cut is a great example of it.

It’s not that there should be fewer options. Not at all! But for the love of Pete, could we please organize these options into categories? Is that too much to ask? For instance, Apple Pro Res is always used for HD. It just wouldn’t come up in a standard definition workflow. Ergo, that codec can all be put into a subcategory of, oh, let’s keep it simple and call it “HD” along with the other high definition options. Of course, SD would be the second option, with perhaps “Web” being a third, teensy option. And I think it’s cute that currently they’re alphabetically organized, but does that make sense? The Animation codec is popular, but nowhere near as popular as the NTSC DV/DVC PRO. Or H264, for that matter. In case you forgot, this is why H264 is important.

Call me crazy, but I think the most elegant solution would be a wizard. A few quick questions that you could click through, like “what will this video be played on?” and a drop-down list of devices would appear, listing things like “DVD, the internet, Blu-Ray disc, fancy phone, JumboTron, Lars Ulrich’s pelvis”. For some reason that last one requires square pixels, incidentally.

There’s something a little similar to what I’m talking about in the menu previous to this hellish list, which allows you to pick from what amounts to a short list of Apple products (iPhone, iPod, Apple TV…) but where’s the DVD player listed? Or do they think the DVD is already obsolete? And if that’s the case, where’s the Blu-Ray option?

I think Adobe’s a little ahead of the curve here with “Device Central”. At least they’re trying to integrate the idea of exporting for a specific medium. And while that interface isn’t perfect either, it’s at least somewhat visual and intuitive. And that’s exactly where Final Cut is a bit lacking at this stage. The go-to program that they developed for dealing with this monstrous problem is Compressor, which is useful but daunting as all get-out. I have yet to hear a single solitary person say “Oooh, I just LOVE Compressor” because nobody does. It’s just a gross, lumbering means to an end, lacking the finesse and style that it’s older brother Final Cut is famous for.

I’m not saying they have to dumb it down to iMovie standards, what with all of that pseudo-communistic “Share” business. I’m just saying that grouping this massive list into more palatable sub-menu chunks would be helpful to your average user. Of course, having navigated the murky waters of that massive list a million times at this point, I know where the jaggy codecs lie, and I’m able to steer clear of them, making me seem far cooler than I actually am. And maybe that’s the point…