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First-Person Final Cut Pro X, Day Five: Trimming and Closing Thoughts
First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of one pro editor's week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. Part 5 is the final installment. So today I had to go back to a multicamera FCP 7 project and, truthfully, it was quite a relief. I realized that part of that relief was the familiarity of knowing how the program would react when I did certain things. Do you remember when you were learning the difference between rippling an edit and rolling it and you were never sure which was the right one? That's a little bit how I feel with Final Cut Pro X. I'm getting a little more comfortable, though, comfortable enough to start talking about things that I kind of like. Let's talk about trimming, for instance. In X, there is only one trim tool (shortcut: T). Hover to the left of an edit and it ripples left; hover to the right of an edit and it ripples right; hover in the middle and it rolls; hover over the center of a clip and it slips; hover over the center and hold option, and it slides. And yes, you can click and type a number or use the keyboard to nudge. How much time do you spend going back and forth between trim tools in FCP 7? Another nice touch is the Precision Trim Editor. I've always hated FCP's Trim window and never used it, and this is a big improvement. Double-click an edit and it jumps into a mode where you see two filmstrips, the A side above and the B side below. The parts of the filmstrip that are not in the sequence are dimmed. But the important thing is that you can see the frames in the clip beyond the edit point, and to extend an edit you can just "skim" to its location and click and it ripples the edit. So if your objective is to extend an edit right up to the point where Indiana Jones cocks his head, this makes it pretty easy. It reminds me a little of Avid's Transition Corner Editor, which I love, only you don't have to apply an effect to use it. Complaint: often, when I'm adjusting pacing, I like to ripple the last cutaway, which opens up a gap on V1 and that way I get a little "air" between clips. In FCP X that doesn't work, because you can't ripple a clip on a connected storyline past the end of its primary clip -- it just rolls over the next primary clip. To do what I want in FCP X, I need to add a "gap clip" of 10-15 frames on the primary storyline and then I can extend the last cutaway over it. Maybe I'll find a better way, but right now I don't like it. Second complaint: split edits. A split edit is where the audio and video don't cut at the same time. In FCP 7, this was very easy to achieve: make your audio cut where you want it, and then use the rolling edit tool to move just the video edit forward or backward. Because FCP X treats video and audio as a single clip, it takes more work to achieve a split edit. The FCP X manual's instructions for creating a split edit could only have been written by somebody who had never used one in a real project: they suggest using a ripple edit, it takes five steps, and the result will not be what you want. Thankfully, it's not actually that hard to do it the right way in FCP X! After you make the audio cut, you just have to select the clips on either side, choose "Expand Audio/Video" to separate the audio and video, choose the trim tool and roll (not ripple!) just the video. You might say "that doesn't sound so much more difficult than FCP 7," but I might split a hundred edits a day. It gets really grating when something you do very frequently is just a little more difficult. Another positive change: exporting out of FCP X is a vast improvement over FCP 7. It has always driven me nuts that you cannot save a Custom Quicktime export setting in FCP. How many times did I have to set H.264, 2000kbps, custom size 640x360, AAC @ 320kbps, over and over and over. I know you could "Send to Compressor," but I don't like having to go to another program to do it. I will say that Compressor 4 looks very speedy and promising. Now, in FCP X, there's a Share menu that allows you to "Export Using Compressor Setting." That's the ticket! You can also send directly to YouTube, Vimeo, and even CNN's iReport. What's missing, though, is that FCP 7 ability to export multiple sequences at once. For instance, I might be working on a project that has 11 different scenarios. Before, I could select all 11 and batch export them. Now, those 11 sequences all need to be separate projects, so you'd have to open and export them one after the other. Or maybe you can just drag the project files from the Finder directly into Compressor? I guess now it's time to study up on Compressor as well. The piece is almost finished, and I'm very relieved and anxious to go back to FCP 7. All in all, I would much rather have done this project there. I don't think that's just inexperience talking, or the discomfort of having to learn something from scratch. There were things that I didn't do on this program at all because I just couldn't figure out a way to do them. I wanted to add some transitions, for example, but first you need to get the two clips on either side of the transition into the same storyline. I don't like that, because once again it's an example of how FCP X often adds another step to a process and makes it take longer. And often I would select the adjacent clips and press command-G to link them into a storyline so I could add a transition, and it simply wouldn't happen. I don't know if that was a program error or user error, but it was very frustrating. So I just gave up and didn't add the transitions. Which brings me back to where I was on day two: the "magnetic timeline" is cute, but it keeps me from making the sequence I want and therefore it really has to go. It reminds me a little bit of when Apple was introducing FCP 1.0 and Steve Jobs showed us how we could take a clip from the Viewer and drop it on this beautiful transparent overlay in the Canvas to choose insert/overwrite/replace/etc. and the crowd went, "oooooooh." But who edits that way? Maybe you'll say I didn't give it enough of a chance. That might be fair. I just played around with it for a few days. But the truth is that we have an editing paradigm that works for us in FCP 7. It's not enough to show us that if we completely rethink our workflow then we can do the same things in FCP X as we can in FCP 7 with a couple of extra steps. What can we do that's more efficient, faster, better? Yes, the infrastructure is improved; yes, the 64-bit implementation and background rendering mean things will be much faster... if we can still figure out a way to tell the stories we want to tell. In conclusion, I think if Apple's FCP X team really is serious about wanting professionals to use this program -- and maybe they're not, and that's okay -- we will need to see it go back to a track-based editing metaphor, at least as an option. If that happens, I can't see why I wouldn't use it eventually. I don't really care about the feature set: they can always add multicam and OMF export and whatever else, and I'm sure they will. But if they add those features while retaining the current editing paradigm, it will still be very difficult to use professionally. Film & video editor Matthew Levie is based in San Francisco; he produced and edited the documentary Honest Man and writes Blog and Capture. First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of his week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. Note that all opinions and assessments of FCP X expressed here are Matt's own, not TUAW's, and the representations of FCP X features represent Matt's hands-on first reactions. –Ed.
First-Person Final Cut Pro X, Day Four: Gaining Perspective
First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of one pro editor's week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. I thought the next installment would be on trimming, but I wasn't able to write it, because FCP X failed to save all the work I did yesterday afternoon. You may have heard that there's no "Save" command in X. This is true. It just instantly saves everything you do, just like Google Docs (and just like most applications will do on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, in a few weeks). Unlike Google Docs, it seems that sometimes it completely fails to do this. Sigh. Apparently there have been other reports of FCP X failing to save, as well, so it's not just me. I'm actually less upset about this than you might think. I'm not thrilled about it, of course, but I've been down this road before, back in 1999, with a new product called Final Cut Pro that professionals did not want to use because it didn't have a lot of features that professionals needed. Like, for example, multicamera editing. From my perspective, FCP X is a totally new product that I'm testing out, and many of you have cheerfully watched me messing up as I did that; thank you for pointing out my mistakes. I don't expect X to instantly replace FCP 7. So if it doesn't have some features I regularly use, or it crashes or screws up on a project that wasn't that critical to begin with, that's not the end of the world. In fact, it's kind of expected. And having to redo the edits helps me master the program. Furthermore, we all need to realize that FCP 7 is at the end of its road. As Apple moves its hardware and OS forward, at some point in the not too distant future that hardware and OS will not support FCP 7 and its legacy code, and so anybody who sticks with it for too long will get hosed. I suppose there is a small chance that Apple will announce that they're abandoning FCP X and will go back and just port FCP 7 to Cocoa exactly as it was, but I'm not seeing it. [Keep in mind that there are plenty of shops still running legacy versions of Final Cut on Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.4. –Ed.] But there are some things about the way FCP X is structured that make it unusable for certain projects. For instance, as I've mentioned, the lack of defined tracks is a significant problem. On a long project, I will segregate certain types of audio on certain tracks -- for instance, all the sound effects might be on tracks A5 and A6. The reason for this is that if the producer listens to the mix and says, "all the sound effects are too loud," I can easily find them all and lower them by 2dB. On FCP X, I guess I would need to do this using the Timeline Index. I'd tag all SFX with the keyword "SFX," and then search for that in the Timeline Index and select all those clips and lower their audio. I would be very reluctant to undertake, say, a 90-minute documentary in FCP X unless I knew for sure how this was going to work. And so are all my colleagues. When I first posted my FCP X experiences, my editor friends ripped me apart for appearing to defend this program too much! And a program that sometimes silently fails to save your work could be more powerful than any edit system in the world -- I'm still not going to adopt it if I can't trust it. So I think we are all thinking about our options now. You can tell us that we're just too stuck in our ways to see the power of this awesome new program, but I've been doing this for decades now. In my career, I've already switched platforms three times: from linear editing to Avid and then to Final Cut Pro. This would not be my first paradigm-shift rodeo. But many editors are thinking that if they have to make a change, FCP X is not their only option. In fact, the alternatives are eagerly courting FCP editors with some pretty aggressive cross-grade pricing. Option one is to jump ship to Avid Media Composer. You could go to Media Composer today if you wanted; if not having to learn a new interface is a priority for you, its interface is pretty much frozen in carbonite, so if you used it in 1992 (I did!) you can use it today. It has all those features that FCP X doesn't. If you're a single-editor shop and you've got $2500 (or even $995) in your software budget --- just buy MC and be on your way. If you don't know how to use MC, now would be a good time to invest in learning it (there is a 30-day free trial of MC, which is not an option with FCP X). It's a great program. Option two is Adobe's Premiere. I'm of two minds about Premiere. Don't let me stop you from buying it (or trying it), but if you weren't using it yesterday, why was that? Did it suddenly get better than FCP 7 overnight? I think that Adobe is in kind of a bind with that program. For years the Premiere market mainstay has been hobbyists. As a result, even though I think Adobe really want to make it a professional product, there are places where they are afraid to change it because they think their installed base will rebel -- just like Apple's just did. So Premiere, for me at this point, is a prosumer program with some professional features tacked on, even though Adobe is making a full-court press to convince FCP users to give it a try. [Premiere does have native support for RED and many other formats that FCP X lacks, and if it's bought as part of the Production Premium bundle you get the advantage of dynamic linking with After Effects straight from the timeline. Premiere also will roundtrip import/export (or at least try to) your FCP 7 projects so you can choose the editor that works best for what you're doing; FCP X will not. –Ed.] It's worth mentioning again: both Avid MC and Adobe Premiere allow 30-day trials of the application, which is crucial for effective evaluation and figuring out if the app works the way you want to work, rather than you having to change gears to work the way it thinks you ought to. Final Cut Pro X's price point of $299 is a big improvement over the FCP 7 pricing, but it would be even better with a 30-day trial in the mix; better still if FCP 7 remained available through the transition period, instead of dropping off the price list like a hot potato. Other than standing pat for the next six months to see how FCP X evolves, the remaining option is to give FCP X a chance. Start learning it now, on the understanding that Apple will probably make big changes. Plus, even if you decide in a year that it's not the right solution for you, if you're truly a professional, it's likely that at some point somebody will ask you to use it or teach it or something, so you might as well start at least considering it now. Professional film & video editor Matthew Levie is based in San Francisco; he produced and edited the documentary Honest Man and writes Blog and Capture. First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of his week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. Note that all opinions and assessments of FCP X expressed here are Matt's own, not TUAW's, and represent Matt's hands-on first reactions. –Ed.
First-Person Final Cut Pro X, Day Three: Media Management
First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of one pro editor's week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. Today, we discuss media management in FCP X, or the complete lack thereof. So far this is the most frustrating thing about this program. Like many FCP X features, it's designed to keep you from screwing up, and as a result will no doubt screw you up royally. First: understand that what we've been calling a "Project," FCP X calls an "Event." You make a new Event, import footage into it, organize footage within it, and try not to think about slowly aging aliens being held captive in Alaska on a really stupid TV show. I guess we all failed that one. FCP X also makes a corresponding Event folder on your internal drive [or on any other drive you have connected –Ed.]. If you like, when you import files you can tell it to copy them there. The nice thing about this is that it will happily let you start editing and do the copying in the background, and the transcoding as well if necessary. Now, my first thought was, wow! That's awesome! But I have to admit my next thought was, damn! There goes my last coffee break excuse! The trouble here is that you have no real control over where this Event folder is. It seems to always go to your username>Movies>Final Cut Events on your internal drive, which of course is a horrible place for your media. It's like Avid, except that on Avid at least you could choose what freaking drive to put everything on. Here you don't even seem to have that. [Matt's first impression here was incorrect. It is possible to import media directly to an Event on any attached drive, to move Events with drag and drop in the library, or use the File menu's Move command to move the Project and the Events together. FCP X's media management approach is so different from FCP 7 that many pro editors, like Matt, are not sure where to begin. –Ed.] So you might think, okay, I'll just tell FCP X not to move my media to the Events folder, I'll organize it myself. Except if you have to transcode it (think XDCAM), or render it, all those files will go there automatically. How annoying is that? As it turns out, not nearly as annoying as this: move or rename a media file, and it's lost forever. FCP X has no Reconnect Media command. That's right, one of the things you hated most about Avid has now been adopted by Apple. And it's worse than that: modify the file externally and FCP X won't be able to find it! Yes, folks, bring a file into After Effects, add some zip zap zoom, save it back to the exact same location with the same filename and your super-advanced editing system will pretend it's offline! Now for some sort of good news. There has been a lot of press about how you can't move projects around. This doesn't seem to be true. You can create a Project (which is what we've all been calling a Sequence), select the project, choose File>Duplicate Project, and have FCP X copy the entire project and its associated Event (meaning all its associated clips) to another drive. I did this successfully. [You can also simply move the Project + Events, rather than creating a Duplicate project. –Ed.] In fact -- bonus -- it does this in the background too. So you can keep editing while it moves your files anywhere in the universe! And if you do that, then your Event and Project get to be on whatever drive you want. If you transcode or render anything, those files will go to that drive. So it seems to me that as a workaround we might want to do something like create an Event, import one file, create a Project, duplicate it to the proper drive, and then import the rest of the footage. It seems to me that this would totally work for networked editing, because FCP X will find all Events and Projects on any drives connected to the system (without even rebooting, thank you). So there's a big plus. One thing that really worries me about this whole Event/Project thing is that the terminology itself seems pretty revealing. Apple says this is a professional product, but the terminology is clearly from iMovie and so are the keyboard shortcuts. Doesn't that say that it's more important that iMovie users feel comfortable with this product than FCP 7 users? Tomorrow, for the Fourth of July -- the fourth installment in this series: trimming. I think you guys are going to like most of what you hear on that subject. Stay tuned. Professional film & video editor Matthew Levie is based in San Francisco; he produced and edited the documentary Honest Man and writes Blog and Capture. First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of his week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. Note that all opinions and assessments of FCP X expressed here are Matt's own, not TUAW's, and that any misconceptions or misunderstandings of FCP X features represent Matt's hands-on first reactions. –Ed.
First-Person Final Cut Pro X, Day Two: Learning the Ropes
First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of one pro editor's week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. Since my traumatic first day, I've been cutting a small project in FCP X. It's growing on me in some ways and driving me bonkers in others. The good news is that, unlike last night, I don't think I'll wake up tonight with night sweats after having feverish nightmares about my editing software. Basic editing is not that different. I kind of like the new "skimmer," which is kind of like a second playhead, and you can make a three-point edit just like you used to. I need to get re-accustomed to some basic functions here. For instance, you can "overwrite," "overwrite just audio," and "overwrite just video." That could be a plus, because frankly, patching is a pain in FCP 7 and doing it from the keyboard was always awkward. The trick is that I only found those last two commands when I tried to reprogram my keyboard, because they're not on any menu and I couldn't find them in the docs. So I suspect there's a lot of things that are in the program, but to use them you'll have to reprogram your keyboard. I took a couple of minutes and reprogrammed as much of my keyboard as possible to vaguely resemble FCP 7. I found a lot of things that I thought weren't there: the scopes, for instance. I've never been so happy to see a waveform monitor! I have to say that the magnetic timeline's "primary storyline/connected storyline" paradigm just does not work for me yet. The concept is this: think of a documentary. The interviews are your "primary storyline," and the music, titles, and B-roll are your "connected storylines." In theory this is very cool, because a particular piece of B-roll is "connected" to a particular piece of interview in a particular place, and you can reorganize the interviews and the associated B-roll comes with them. In practice it's really annoying. It assumes that you always have a block of footage that starts and ends with a cut-in video and audio simultaneously, which I actually almost never do. If you use a B-roll clip to "bridge" two interview clips, is this clip connected to the end of the A clip or the beginning of the B clip? What about the music? If I connect it to the first clip in a montage, and then I decide I want to swap the clips around, the music winds up in the wrong place. Maybe it's just a matter of getting used to it. Right now I feel like I'm dragging a lot of things around in a really imprecise way and it makes me uncomfortable to feel like the project is more or less what I want rather than exactly spot-on. The magnetic timeline also irritates me because I'm a strong proponent of track discipline. If I put something on V2, it's there for a reason. But in the magnetic timeline, items on subordinate tracks just jump up and down all over the place. Your music might be towards the top here and towards the bottom there. I suspect that in a complicated project, it will become impossible to find a given element. Something I really like: auditions. You can put a clip in the timeline, and then put an alternate clip in the same place. Then you can swap out your "picks" very easily. Imagine having two very different reaction shots on take 2 and take 3, or two voiceover reads, and being able to have them both in the timeline simultaneously. That could be very useful in session with an indecisive client. Something I despise: the loss of Reconnect Media. Not having that on Avid was one of the worst things about it, and losing it on FCP hurts. A file suddenly went offline for no reason -- I hadn't moved it -- and I was just hosed. That sucks. Professional film & video editor Matthew Levie is based in San Francisco; he produced and edited the documentary Honest Man and writes Blog and Capture. First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of his week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. Note that all opinions and assessments of FCP X expressed here are Matt's own, not TUAW's, and that any misconceptions or misunderstandings of FCP X features represent Matt's hands-on first reactions. –Ed. Part III coming up: more on media management.
First-Person Final Cut Pro X, Day One: Completely at Sea
Professional film & video editor Matthew Levie is based in San Francisco, produced and edited the documentary Honest Man and writes Blog and Capture. First-Person Final Cut Pro X is the unvarnished story of his week-long introduction to the new Final Cut. [Note that all opinions and assessments of FCP X expressed here are Matt's own, not TUAW's, and that any misconceptions or misunderstandings of FCP X features represent Matt's hands-on first reactions. –Ed.] So I really, really did not believe that FCP X would be "iMovie Pro." But I have to say, my friends, I was far too optimistic. Apple has thrown us squarely under the bus. Somebody at Apple decided that making professional editors happy was just too damn much trouble, and that a much simpler program would allow them to fire 80% of the engineers and lose only 10% of the customers. If you thought no multicam was the problem, you're thinking way too far ahead for this program. How about no split edits? No roll? No subclip? There is, in fact, a way to mark a perfectly good in and out point, contrary to rumor. But what if I told you that you could change the speed of a clip to 50% or 25%, but not anything in between? Heck, I can't even find a way to do an overwrite edit. [As noted by commenters and by ScreenCastsOnline producer Don McAllister, both overwrite edits and intermediate speed adjustments are in fact included in FCP X -- as Matt acknowledges below, citing the challenge of working through FCP X's documentation. Keep in mind that this series is documenting Matt's opinions and reactions over the course of several days, and that first impressions can be incorrect and revised over time. –Ed.] I should confess at this point that I've never used iMovie. I've been editing for twenty years, on linear systems, and then Avid, and then Final Cut. But I'm guessing that if I were a regular iMovie user, I wouldn't feel so awfully lost in this program. It turns out, of course, that all of these basic features are in the program, but the documentation isn't very well written. You'd think that if they were going to radically change the way we edit, they'd throw us a lifeline and walk us through it. In fact, when I looked up split edit, it proposed a really Byzantine five-step process involving a ripple trim. It only takes three with a rolling trim. Of course, in FCP 7 it only took one step. That's not promising. My intention was to take this project I have coming up that has very little deadline pressure, it's only two minutes long, it's not that complicated. I thought I'd do that in FCP X and that way I'd learn where the gotchas were and where this program's limitations were. Now I doubt we're going to get that far. I don't think that I could cut the simplest project I've done in the last ten years on this program. Not because it would take too long, as bad as that would be, but because it is simply not possible. There's definitely going to be a revolution in post-production, dudes. It's the one where the masses pull Apple off the throne and cut its throat. I'll keep reading the docs and playing around. Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and realize this was all a really bad dream, and actually it's as brilliant as an iPod. But don't hold your breath! Part II coming up... Learning the Ropes.
