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Final Cut Pro X: An Apple Apologist’s Assessment

by Travis Chandler

The latest release of Apple's flagship video editing application hits a few bumps in the road and offers a significantly streamlined workflow as well.

When Final Cut Pro X was released in late June, there was a lot of hubbub. It was not the happy feel-good hubbub usually attributed to an Apple release, however. It was closer to the hubbub of the townspeople gathering to burn a witch at the stake. It got so rowdy, in fact, that it warranted this sketch on the Conan O’Brien show. Apple’s not usually the brunt of late night comedian tomfoolery. How could technology’s hippest company find itself getting burned by late night’s hippest comedian?

Part One: The Bad

Well, let’s start with the well documented missing features:

  1. No OMF or XML support (What are these? I’ll tell you in a second.)
  2. No support for any of the 3rd party hardware that used to work with FCP.
  3. No Multicam functionality.
  4. You can’t open up projects from any previous version of Final Cut.
  5. There’s no “Save As” function. Actually, there’s no “Save” either.

If any of those made your jaw drop, you’re not alone. Those last two made my brain explode when I first encountered them. Let’s go through them, starting with the last first.

5) It’s not that your work is not saved; it is. You just don’t save it yourself. FCP’s constantly saving your work for you as you go. As a guy who likes to “Save As” and then turn every clip backwards just to see how my project would turn out should the time-space continuum ever reverse itself, I hated this right off the bat. The solution is that you can duplicate your project at any point, in essence, saving-it-as. It is odd though, and hard to get used to.

4) You really can’t open up any of your old projects. At first there were rumors that this functionality would come later. Now it doesn’t look like it. Wow.

3) Some people absolutely need Multicam. It’s priceless for multiple camera event shoots like live concerts. This functionality is supposed to be coming soon. See this excellent article by Steve Martin (no, not the comedian / banjoist) about the wonders of Multicam editing in Final Cut Pro.

2) All the video cards and I/O devices you may have purchased don’t work with Final Cut anymore. Your fancy AJA Kona card is now a doorstop. Studios with nice gear will be grinding their teeth over this one.

1) OMF and XML are used in the video post-production world to get your media to specialists. For instance, if you want a dedicated professional colorist to touch up your work, you’re going to need to send them an XML file. The audio mixer is probably using Pro-Tools and will want an OMF file.

Many clever folk have been suggesting that Apple is moving Final Cut out of the professional world and into the “pro-sumer” market. Looking at the list above, I think that’s a pretty strong argument. However, there’s also a strong argument to be made that some of these changes are intended to force the industry to abandon its antiquated ways and join the 21st century. It’s worth noting that all of the negative hollering had no effect on Apple as a business: They’re very rich and this Final Cut thing is just a tiny blip on their radar screen right now.

Part Two: The Good

The new software has its share of pros as well:

  1. The “Magnetic Timeline” has some wonderful features. More on that in a second.
  2. Visible audio waveforms are hugely helpful for working with sound.
  3. Media management has taken a huge, if slightly complicated, step forward.
  4. Background rendering on a powerful enough machine is pretty incredible.
  5. 64-bit architecture means that you can actually use more than 4 gigs of RAM.

“But wait,” you say, “I’ve got 12 gigs of RAM in my super awesome FCP-running Mac Pro. So that last one doesn’t refer to me.” But it does! Allow me to explain:

5) FCP has been laboring along on some pretty dated architecture. For instance, until this version, the most RAM it could use is 4 gigs. It’s true! Now it can handle pretty much as much RAM as you can throw at it, making it much, much more powerful under the hood. The video scrubbing and background rendering it can do would be pretty much impossible based on the old architecture.

4) Background rendering is pretty incredible. No more of the old “Hit Command-R and go get lunch!” which makes me a little sad, but only because I love lunch so much.

3) The new media management system seemed crazy complicated to me at first, but the more I checked it out, the more I realized that it’s actually very simple. It’s just totally different. That’s probably a good thing considering how often folks got into trouble with media management in the old version. The new system is basically just a Finder window. You navigate through the files on your machine or attached drives and tag clips with metadata, which you can then sort. Odd side-effect: You can actually delete media on your machine from within the program, which used to be impossible. So be careful!

2) Audio workflow is drastically improved. The first project I tried working on in the new version involved syncing a lot of clips to music tracks. Seeing the way FCP X handles audio waveforms I had one of those great Apple “why haven’t we been doing this all along?!” moments. It’s a drastic improvement in overall audio handling, and it’s not getting a lot of press. Yet.

1) The “Magnetic Timeline” takes some serious getting used to, but it’s worth it. There aren’t video “tracks” the way there used to be. Everything is sort of anchored to the main clip. There’s a work-around: Using the new “P” (for position) tool, you can move stuff wherever you want. But without using that tool, everything snaps together and dodges each other in an intricate dance intended to keep editing noobs from over-writing stuff. It’s pretty clever, and great for the pro-sumer level. But to be honest, if they want to keep the pros around, they’re probably going to have to come up with a master off-switch for it.

I work on a TV show now, and we can’t use this software. The deliverables we have to create simply aren’t possible with this version of the software. I think back, however, to my days working for smaller, more modern production companies (like the delightful Mightybytes) and I can see just how powerful this new software could be. And did I mention that it’s only $300? A lot of the limitations that make this useless for production houses are based on antiquated workflows anyway. Once the production companies start joining the 21st century and stop insisting on deliverables like (gasp) tape, this software will start making more sense. If it survives that long.

** Special to the Mightybytes blog from Travis Chandler, former Mightybyter and current television industry post-production draftee.

 

 

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