I’ll say it: I like the way Final Cut Pro X works. I like the way it looks, the way it feels, how fast it loads up. I am excited about FCPX. I think good things are happening here.
But many video editors are still not so enthusiastic about Version Ten, and that’s understandable. For now, they insist on sticking with the previous FCP platform (Final Cut 7; don’t ask). Either they’re sticking with FCP7, or they’ve made that dreaded migration to an Avid system or, in many cases, to Adobe Premiere. To be fair: my optimism may fade tomorrow and I could end up being one of those guys too. But for the time being, I’m one of the editors that has decided to go along with what very well might be the future of NonLinear Editing.
Apple didn’t make a lot of friends when they introduced Final Cut Pro X. Make no mistake: it is a complete rewrite from the ground up. Of course, scores of video editors did not flock to the store when Apple released this product, all of a sudden, at a third of the cost of previous versions. In fact, once they got a look at FCPX, editors ran in the other direction. If anything, Apple lost a significant part of the market share. Although general acceptance of FCPX seems to be increasing again as Apple addresses the software’s most pressing professional concerns, I think it’s safe to say the company still has a lot of work to do winning back the offended video editor crowd.
So did I get rid of FCP7? Oh, hell no. (I do have a career to keep in mind.) And besides, does my job as a videographer-editor rely entirely on which NLE I use? Of course not. But I have worked with Apple products for many years, and I have always been willing to play along. While I know Apple has made its share of mistakes in the past—like Adobe—I depend on these companies’ willingness to take risks that lead to bigger and better things. Besides, mastering Premiere CS6 and it’s companion apps at a professional level sounds like a professional pain in the ass. I’m willing to give FCPX a chance. Or several, if need be.
So away we go. iMovie Pro… ahem, I mean Final Cut Pro X.
It Looks like iMovie.
I imagine that the biggest qualm most had with FCPX when it was first released last year was the completely redesigned interface which looked unsettlingly like iMovie, Apple’s consumer-oriented editing platform that allows very little room for precision editing. Back in 2009, iMovie went from being a program that looked kinda like a standard NLE to a dumbed down, cutesy little app with a frustrating file storage system and a tendency to crash. Well, FCPX looks like iMovie ’09 and later. Naturally, that made people who were at all familiar with iMovie—myself included—quite uncomfortable. And if you weren’t familiar with iMovie, then you were even worse off when it came to navigating the interface.
What’s more, when the price was announced at $300 (a fraction of what FCP used to cost) editors were left scratching their heads. Think of it this way: you’ve driven BMWs all your life, right? You’re just a BMW guy. One day BMW announces the new F-series, a line of vehicles that look like Geo Metros (no disrespect to Geos) and they start at $7K a pop. You’re probably not rushing out to pick one of these up. Now imagine that BMW has just announced that the F-series are the only cars BMW will ever plan produce from here on out… Panic might start to set in.
It Feels like iMovie
Nobody likes “Events” and “Projects” for organizing files. Nobody. Personally, I’ve never really liked the “Movies” and “Music” approach to folders that OSX uses in general. But it’s easy enough to get around that, and not so risky when you’re just talking about some home movies or your iTunes library. Maybe I’m a closeted Windows lover, but I like to maintain and consolidate my files where I want them. While FCPX allows you to allocate external drives for footage and project files, it doesn’t want you to have much more control than that. And just like in iMovie, if you start moving files around from their original “Events” and “Project” homes, you start breaking things. This is an architecture that I’m sure Apple has no intention of changing, although I am 100% confident that 100% of all video editors around 100% the world think it’s a stupid setup, just like I do.
FCPX also makes you grab those little yellow sections of clips in the same way iMovie does. You don’t set in and out points by default. Just as in iMovie, you drag clips from your Events library into your Project, which feels clunky. To be fair, you do have the ability to set precise ins and outs, but this is not clear at the outset; it’s not the default approach. So you can’t help but wonder if precision editing was really what FCPX wanted at the top of its claims to fame.
And maybe one of FCPX’s biggest drawbacks is that it won’t import FCP7 files. That’s just wrong.
It Does Things That iMovie and FCP7 Have Never Dreamed Of
-Magnetic Timeline
It’s so cool. What the magnetic timeline enables you to do is move a clip within the timeline, and anything that is attached to it (cutaways, multiclips, audio tracks, sound effects, anything) will stay in sync with the clip you’re moving. Not only that, but all the other clips and their related content stay in sync as well as you push them around. You don’t have to make room in the timeline for extending or shortening a clip, everything just clings to the in and outpoints, and stays synced up. The implications here are pretty impressive when you think of what a timesaver this must be to a user who’s mastered it. Best of all, when you need to, you can just turn it off.
-Shot Stabilization in Post
Stabilization is something you might be accustomed to doing by exporting clips from FCP7 to Motion, stabilizing them, and then reimporting them back into FCP and cropping them. It essentially works the same way your video camera or DSLR lens stabilized shot: detect motion in a certain direction, shift ever so slightly in the other direction, then crop the whole shot to fit. It is something you don’t want to get too used to, but it can be a lifesaver every now and then. Post production stabilization is like Autotune; you should only use it when you have to. Just as there are certain performances in the studio that you want to save for their emotional or performance power—though they might be technically lacking—there are moments in video that just have to be saved. Sometimes the shot is not steady, but the subject is just too compelling to give up. This is when you go for digital stabilization, and you accept what residual artifacts may come. Bottom line: once you get the hang of the controls, FCPX handles stabilization in a powerful way—it’s quick, accurate and it’s all self-contained.
-Background Rendering
The fact that FCPX renders everything automatically is just logical. It makes sense that editors would want to see their cuts the way they will look in final production, as soon as they can. That rendering has been something traditionally handled manually is due to the fact that software is often developed much faster than hardware. This is the case no matter what kind of multimedia you work in. You want Maya to render a nice, long 3D animation in 1080p? Shut down Maya and open Maya Terminal to free up memory. You want to bounce a 64-track song from Pro Tools down to an mp3? Bus those complicated MIDI instrument tracks to audio and print some of those inserts. Well, the same thing goes for HD video. You want to do all these fast edits, add all this cool grading and apply a bunch of effects here and there? No problem. Set it to render, fix yourself a drink and catch up on Breaking Bad or whatever.
Except now, you don’t have to do that. Just as soon as you switch applications or take your fingers off the controls, FCPX starts rendering your work in the background. Preview a clip or scroll the timeline, it pauses the render. Get distracted, and FCPX gets back to work. As far as I’m concerned, this makes sense. Once again, when and if doesn’t make sense, you can turn it off.
-Color Matching
I’m on the fence with this one. It looks like a really cool function, but again, only if used when you really need it. Basically, with Color Matching, you can go into the color correction window of any clip, select “color matching”, and then select any point in any other clip to try and match that color space. For you print designers, think of it as eye-dropping an entire “style” in Adobe InDesign. At first, this seems like an invaluable tool. Especially if you’re working on one scene with different cameras, taping to different codecs, from different angles and lighting scenarios. In an instance where I needed to match colors on a multicam setup to get quick rushes out the door, I tried this function out, and I was more or less pleased with the results. The images below were from two different cameras (my AVCHD camera and an HDSLR rig):
But don’t expect Color Matching to give you a lot of control over the color parameters once you’ve copied them between matched clips. If you’re used to working with third-party grading applications like Red Giant or Davinci Resolve, you might be able to simulate color parameters from clip to clip, but you won’t really know what you’re looking at. This function seems a little iMovie to me, too. Great idea, something FCP7 never came close to tackling, but perhaps something best left to folks who don’t have the time or patience to go in and do it the right way.
Next Post: Auto-Saving, the Learning Curve and How it Works in the Real World…
*Additional screenshots courtesy of T. Payton, One Creative, Creative Cow and the Indianapolis Final Cut Pro User Group