It's a Brave New World – Blog by Scott Arundale & Tashi Trieu

Avid, maker of high-end digital video and audio production tools, is bringing its “pro-sumer” video editing software to the iPad.

The app is available starting Thursday as part of the Avid Studio suite. The app will run on iPad only, though Avid says it’s exploring other mobile operating systems.

Avid Studio for iPad costs $4.99 to start; after 30 days, the price will jump to $7.99.

That’s still much less than what other current desktop editing applications cost, including Avid’s own Avid Studio ($129.99), Adobe Premiere Elements ($99.99), Apple’s Final Cut Pro X ($299.99), and Sony’s Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum ($59.95).

The iPad app marks the Burlington, Mass.-based company’s first video editing application for tablets. Video editing software generally requires a substantial desktop system or a bulky laptop; using video editing apps on relatively small smartphone screens can be cumbersome. Avid is hoping its app hits somewhere in the middle.

“We’ve seen a shift in how creation is happening, and it’s really happening on almost any device,” said Tanguy Leborgne, vice president of consumer and mobile technology strategy at Avid. “We think the tablet is more than just a consumer device; more and more people are creating on it.”

While Avid says the app captures most of the editing capabilities available on its desktop system, there are some obvious areas in which an iPad editing app would be lacking.

For starters, pro-level editors accustomed to using a large screen for edits will likely feel a tablet doesn’t provide enough screen real estate for real edits.

Also, with Avid Studio on a PC, video editors can export a Flash video file, and burn video files to a CD or DVD. On the iPad, neither of those functions is an option.

Users also likely won’t want to export lots of large, high-definition video files to the iPad and take up storage space on the tablet.

Fortunately, full projects and video files can be transferred to and from the Avid Studio app via iCloud and iTunes. Finished movie files can also be shared directly from the Avid app to Facebook and YouTube.

The idea is that the iPad app and the desktop software are complementary, Leborgne said, so that users who want to create and edit projects on the go can do so, but ultimately preserve them by taking them to the PC.

The Avid iPad app does have some nice features, including an interface that includes a storyboard area and an editing timeline. And while some video editors rely heavily on customized keyboards or a mouse, others might appreciate the ability to pinch and squeeze videos and images to scale them on the touchscreen of the iPad, or the ability to move text and titles around with their fingers.

Avid’s new product comes just a couple days after Apple released an update for its Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) video editing software, which addressed video editors’ complaints about the software’s lack of professional-level bells and whistles. Now FCPX includes multicam editing, advanced chroma-key features and the ability to open up old FCP projects in the new software.

While Adobe Premiere is considered the first popular digital video editing application, it was Apple’s Final Cut Pro, which launched in 1999, that eventually chipped away at the market of video editors using Avid’s high-end system.

Apple’s FCPX also comes at a significantly reduced price from previous iterations of Final Cut Pro, which used to cost around $1,000. Both Avid and Adobe responded to Apple’s new software by offering discounts to users who switched over to their software.

“Both Apple’s product and the pricing strategy were the same thing we’re trying to address here,” Leborgne said. “But for professionals, it relayed to them that Apple was not really focused on the higher end of the market.”

As evidence that some professionals were disappointed with the new FCPX, Leborgne pointed to Hollywood production company Bunim/Murray — the reality TV pioneers dropped Final Cut Pro in favor of Avid.

http://allthingsd.com/20120201/avid-brings-its-pro-sumer-video-editing-app-to-ipad/

Chris Foresman reports from arstechnica.com:

Following the controversial launch of Apple’s completely revamped video editing software, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media has announced (hat tip to MacRumors) that award-winning TV production company Bunim/Murray is dropping Final Cut Pro in favor of a complete Avid makeover. Going forward, the company will use Avid Media Composer and Avid Symphony for editing along with an Avid ISIS 5000 networked storage system to replace its current Final Cut Pro workflow.

“Due to the large volume of media generated by our reality shows, we needed to re-evaluate our editing and storage solutions. At the same time, we were looking for a partner who would understand our long-term needs,” Bunim/Murray’s SVP of post production Mark Raudonis said in a statement.

The message between the lines is that Apple’s latest offerings simply won’t (ahem) cut it anymore. Earlier this year, Apple completely re-architected Final Cut Pro X from the ground up with a new, modern media handling framework as well as 64-bit support. In doing so, however, it dropped many features that editing pros had come to rely on in their workflows. Apple also dropped its Final Cut Server product after phasing out its Xserveand Xserve RAID storage products over the past few years.

The decision has left many working pros wondering if Apple cares much about the professional market anymore. And, while the company has promised to improve Final Cut Pro X over time, those promises apparently weren’t enough for Bunim/Murray and others who have since migrated to competing solutions from Avid and Adobe. Let’s just say we don’t expect this to be the last we hear about major production companies making the switch.

UPDATE:  12/31/12

Apple has updated the latest version of its video editing software, Final Cut Pro X, addressing some of the complaints video editors had voiced when it was released last June. The updated FCPX now includes multicam editing and advanced chroma-key controls, and supports a new tool for opening up old Final Cut Pro 7 projects.

http://allthingsd.com/20120131/apples-updates-final-cut-pro-x-addressing-video-editors-complaints/?refzone=topics_apple

In survey, 16% of school tech directors expect to have 1 tablet per student within 5 years

Whether counting heads at the Apple Store or buttonholing cell phone users at the Mall of America, Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster is the master of the small survey that may or may not be significant.

His latest: A survey of 25 educational technology directors at a conference on integrating technology in the classroom. “While our sample is small,” he writes in a note to clients issued Monday, “so is the population of IT decision makers in the education field in the US.”

And what did he discover? Among his findings:

• 100% were testing or deploying iPads in their schools. 0% were testing or deploying Android tablets
• Their schools currently have an average of one computer for every 10 students
• Nearly half (12) expect to eventually deploy one computer per child; two of their schools already do
• More than a third (9) expect to deploy one tablet per child; one of them already does

Given the huge problems facing America’s schools, it’s a slender thread on which to base a vision of broad educational reform. (Munster quotes outgoing Apple retail chief Ron Johnson, who has suggested that the current crop of students might be “the last generation with backpacks.”)

But Munster is probably correct that the overwhelming preference for iPads over tablets running Google’s (GOOG) Android reflects the power of Apple’s (AAPL) first mover advantage. He writes:

“We also see a trend in education (which is mirrored in the enterprise) that familiarity with Apple devices among students (or employees) is causing a demand pull within institutions to also provide Apple devices.”

SOURCE:  http://tech.fortune.cnn.com

Chris Portal attended the Boston Supermeet of the Final Cut Pro Users and reports:

Walter Murch, a long time Final Cut Pro user, and editor of Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part III, The English Patient, Cold Mountain, Tetro, among many other films, headlined the Boston Supermeet on Thursday October 27, 2011. It marked his first public appearance since the launch of Final Cut Pro X.

Hemingway & Gellhorn is his latest project for HBO, and is edited on Final Cut Pro 7. The film is a celebration of the tactility of film, yet a film that wouldn’t have been possible without the digitization of film. It uses archive material existing on a wide variety of film mediums, all with different grain sizes, in which actors are dropped in digitally, while trying to preserve the grain of the original element. The film takes you on a roller coaster ride diving in and out of this world, going into the grain and sprockets, and out into the digital world.

His Final Cut Pro project consisted of 22 video tracks and 50 audio tracks, combining sound elements ranging from 8 tracks of dialogue, to 24 tracks of mono and stereo sound effects with and without low frequency enhancements (LFE)!!

Another piece of the workflow was the integration of Filemaker Pro, which he uses to gain a different insight into his film. Using a dependency diagram of sorts, he associates every shot to a specific scene, what music and effects should belong to it, etc. It’s not a time line in any way, but more a view of all the relationships between your media assets.

As far as other equipment Walter used on the project, he used 2 Arri Alexas, outputting to codex materials. The codex downloaded into a ProRes 1280 LT, DPX “negative” (to do the final color timing), and H.264 with internet via PIX (to share assemblies with HBO). There were 5 editing stations, using an XSAN with 28 TB on XRaid running XServe.

There were 1862 shots in the finished film:

• 482 visually manipulated
• 227 visual effects
• 255 repositioned or blown up

While there used to be a rule of not blowing up an image beyond 120% to avoid introducing noise and grain, with the Alexa footage, he was able to take the film and blow it up 240% without being noticeable.

He used FCP7, which he acknowledged may be the last time he uses Final Cut Pro. He considers many professionals to be at a juncture where we need to come to terms with what the software can do in the time the film is being developed.

Walter was in Cupertino when Final Cut Pro X was first dangled in front of a few editors. It was a beta version, and Apple highlighted things like 64 bit support. After that initial exposure to FCPX, he dove into making a film, and it wasn’t until June when FCPX was published that he revisited it. He quickly looked at it, and said he couldn’t use it, wondering where the “Pro” had gone. It didn’t have XML support which he depended on, the ability to share projects on a raid with people, etc. He was confused and wondered what was happening.

He wrote Apple a letter asking what was behind everything that was happening, especially since they had end-of-lifed the current version, as well as a list of things he needed. Like a report card children often get, without XML, Walter explained to Apple that FCPX “did not play well with others”. The lack of tracks was another killer for him. While he doesn’t really need to work with 50 tracks, he does need to leverage the ability to selectively raise or lower the levels very specifically.

Walter sees there having been a shift at Apple over the last 10 years. They have benefited from the professional market, and we all have made a lot of noise about Apple, but starting with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, Apple has broadened out into a mass-market creature, wanting to democratize capabilities even further.

While Walter is encouraged by the updated FCPX version last month, he hasn’t used it on any real work yet, so he is cautiously optimistic (and still traumatized he says). “Do they love us? No…I know they like us….but they keep saying they love us??”

Things wrapped up with a Q&A, mostly comprised of questions attendees had submitted that evening prior to his talk. A few interesting ones were:

Q: When is it time to walk away from the work?

A: ”When you see dailies, that is the only time you are seeing the images for the first time. There will be no other time for a first. It is the closest you can get to experiencing what the audience will experience. It’s a precious moment. I will sit and watch the dailies in the dark, holding a computer where I’ll type anything the image makes me feel or think, in order to preserve that first moment. Doing so will help clear the fog down the road when you’re feeling you’re getting lost.”

Q: How do you know if a scene works or doesn’t?

A: ”A scene may work on its own, but not in the context of the movie. It can be very dangerous to preemptively strike a scene from a film before you’ve seen the entire film. You can say you don’t agree with where the scene is going, but you don’t know if in the larger picture it may still have a shot.”

Q: Is there one piece of advice you can impart to sound designers?

A: ”Always go farther than you think you can go. Try to bend the literalness. Literalness doesn’t light the fire in the audiences mind. Levitate the film. Ignite the imagination.”

Q: Thoughts on 3D?

A: ”In 2D, your eyes focus on the plane of the screen while they converge towards the plan of the screen, but when you have something coming out of the screen in 3D, you not only need to focus on the screen, but you also need to converge on the detail protruding out of the screen. The mind can do it, but we’re not programmed for it. It requires processing many frames before your mind figures it out, and by then you’ve missed information. It’s analogous to the moment when the fan on your computer starts up.”

Q: If you didn’t use FCP, where would you go?

A: “I’ve used Avid in the past, so I know it well. There are some very good things that Avid has, but I’m also curious about Premiere since I’m interested in technology.”

Apple is working on a cloud service for movies that is set to launch late this year or in 2012, the LA Times reported.

Apple has been meeting with studio executives and is looking to finalize agreements that would allow consumers to  buy films via Apple’s iTunes and access them on any Apple device via its iCloud online locker, it said.

The news comes after Tuesday’s launch of the UltraViolet cloud service, for which Wall Street has a mixed outlook, with the home entertainment release of Warner Bros.’ Horrible Bosses.

Since Apple is not currently part of the consortium of studios, electronics makers and online distributors that launched UltraViolet, the company is considering allowing consumers who buy UltraViolet-enabled film to watch them more easily on Apple devices via apps, the Times said. BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield has said Apple’s lack of participation is a key hurdle for UltraViolet’s success.

Importantly though, movies bought on iTunes would continue to only work on Apple devices as Apple wants to keep encouraging consumers to buy its devices, the Times highlighted.

source: hollywoodreporter.com

Apple’s Final Cut Pro is the leading video-editing program. It’s a $1,000 professional app. It was used to make “The Social Network,” “True Grit,” “Eat Pray Love” and thousands of student movies, independent films and TV shows. According to the research firm SCRI, it has 54 percent of the video-editing market, far more than its rivals from Adobe and Avid.

On Tuesday, Apple pulled a typical Apple move: it killed off the two-year-old Final Cut 7 at the peak of its popularity.

In its place, Apple now offers something called Final Cut Pro X (pronounced “10”). But don’t be misled by the name. It’s a new program, written from scratch. Apple says a fresh start was required to accommodate huge changes in the technological landscape.

Apple veterans may, at this point, be feeling some creepy déjà vu. You’ve seen this movie before. Didn’t Apple kill off iMovie, too, in 2008, and replace it with an all-new, less capable version that lacked dozens of important features? It took three years of upgrades before the new iMovie finally surpassed its predecessor in features and coherence.

Some professional editors are already insisting that Apple has made exactly the same mistake with Final Cut X; they pointed out various flaws with the program after an earlier version of this column was posted online on Wednesday. They say the new program is missing high-end features like the ability to edit multiple camera angles, to export to tape, to burn anything more than rudimentary DVDs and to work with EDL, XML and OMF files (used to exchange projects with other programs). You can use a second computer monitor, but you need new TV-output drivers to attach an external video monitor. You can’t change the settings of your exported QuickTime movies without the $50 Compressor program.

Apple admits that version X is a “foundational piece.” It says that it will restore some of these features over time, and that other companies are rapidly filling in the other holes.

For nonprofessionals, meanwhile, Final Cut is already tempting — especially because the price is $300, not $1,000. It’s the first Apple program that’s available only by download from the online Mac App Store, not on DVD. All of the programs formerly called Final Cut Studio have been rolled into Final Cut except Motion and Compressor, which are sold separately. Final Cut Express and DVD Studio Pro are gone.)

The new Final Cut has been radically redesigned. In fact, it looks and works a lot like iMovie, all dark gray, with “skimming” available; you run your cursor over a clip without pressing the mouse button to play it.

Once you’re past the shock of the new layout, the first thing you’ll notice is that Apple has left most of the old Final Cut’s greatest annoyances on the cutting-room floor.

First — and this is huge — there’s no more waiting to “render.” You no longer sit there, dead in the water, while the software computes the changes, locking up the program in the meantime, every time you add an effect or insert a piece of video that’s in a different format. Final Cut X renders in the background, so you can keep right on editing. You cannot, however, organize your files or delete clips during rendering.

Second, in the old Final Cut, it was all too easy to drag the audio and video of a clip out of sync accidently; little “-1” or “+10” indicators, showing how many frames off you were, were a chronic headache. But in the new Final Cut, “sync is holy,” as Apple puts it. Primary audio and video are always synced, and you can even lock other clips together so that they all move as one.

In fact, an ingenious feature called Compound Clips lets you collapse a stack of audio and video clips into a single, merged filmstrip on the timeline. You can adjust it, move it and apply effects as if it were a single unit, and then un-merge it anytime you like. Compound Clips make it simple to manage with a complicated composition without going quietly insane.

In the old Final Cut, if you dragged Clip A so that it overlapped part of Clip B, even briefly, you wound up chopping away the covered-up piece of Clip B. But now, the timeline sprouts enough new parallel “tracks” to keep both of the overlapping clips. Nothing gets chopped unless you do it yourself.

Source: David Pogue / NYTimes.com

Apple’s new non-linear editing app plots a roadmap to the future of video editing

by Gary Adcock, Macworld.com

With the release of its hotly anticipated Final Cut Pro X (FCP X), Apple breaks new ground—not just with its flagship video editor’s interface and underlying infrastructure—but with the whole mindset of what it means to be a working professional video editor.

Apple has revamped Final Cut Pro’s hands-on user experience in three major areas: Editing, media organization, and post-production workflow. New tools such as the Magnetic Timeline, Clip Connections, Compound Clips, and Auditions provide a smooth, intuitive editing experience.

With the rise of data-centric workflows and tapeless video recording, organizational tools such as Content Auto-Analysis, Range-based keywords, and Smart Collections work in the background to automate formerly tedious and time-consuming manual processes.

Post production workflows now offer customizable effects, integrated audio editing, color grading, and a host of streamlined delivery options.

With this new application, video pros can no longer follow traditional ways of working.

Clips in FCP X’s new Event Library are sorted by both user-created Custom Keywords (blue icons) and Smart Collections. The latter are created automatically by Content Auto-Analysis during import (purple icons).

Final Cut Pro X, despite its familiar name, is not an upgrade of Final Cut Pro 7. It is a brand new product. FCP X is also no longer part of a suite of applications such as Final Cut Studio, but rather one of a trio of component parts that include Final Cut Pro X ($300), Motion 5 ($50), and Compressor 4 ($50). All are available separately for download from the Mac App Store. There will be no boxed copies.

Rolling

Final Cut Pro X starts off by immediately analyzing your media as it begins to import footage, while at the same time archiving critical secondary information on color balance, motion, rolling shutter artifacts, tracking, and stabilization data on a clip-by-clip basis.

While handling the bulk of analytical information at ingest, FCP X is tagging the files with metadata in a manner that speeds secondary file processing, delivery, and rendering capabilities and vastly accelerates workflow. The heavy lifting of this content is invisibly handled in the background—between the application and the Mac operating system—as a byproduct of the conversion to a fully 64-bit application workflow.

The most profound interface changes to FCP X—beyond the new darker look—are the Event Browser and the Event Library. Importing your content into the app creates a new Event, a virtual folder that holds all of the information about your media: what it is, where it’s stored, and whether it’s from a specific date, place, or client. You can even rate, organize, and show or hide clips from view while accessing tools like Keyword and Smart Collections. Events are created by the application as part of the ingest, in addition to your organizational effort.

When you’re done creating your video, you can use the direct upload options within FCP X to share it on Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and CNN iReport. All Apple devices are available as options, as well as Podcast Producer, output for standard definition DVDs, and even Blu-ray devices, directly within FCP X. Plus, the application still offers fully integrated processing with Compressor. Standalone export output options offer all flavors of Apple’s ProRes, H.264, DVCProHD, Apple HDV, and even Sony’s XDCamEX format at 35Mbps and the 50Mbps version of the XDCamHD 422 codec.

Here are the currently available output options for file delivery when exporting your project directly from FCP X.

Magnetic Timeline

Acting as a trackless canvas for your video edit, the Magnetic Timeline allows you the freedom to arrange and re-arrange your media wherever you want. Existing clips on the timeline slide in and out of the way without danger of collision or overwriting a previous edit. They snap into place “magnetically,” dynamically aligning with existing media in the timeline. Despite being trackless, you can easily create multi-level compositions and properly maintain continuity as you move media around in your project. This feature interactively shows you exactly what’s happening in the timeline as you work, so you can easily execute your vision.

Clip Connections and Compound Clips

Designed to maintain the continuity of media in the timeline, Clip Connections are relational links between primary media in the timeline and secondary elements. Content such as titles, B-roll, sound effects, and even music, can be moved and repositioned seamlessly as a single clip, maintaining audio and video sync, and giving you a clear, visually defined connection to your assets.

Alongside Clip Connections and its facility at combining primary and secondary elements into a cohesive unit for editing and filtering, Compound Clips further advances the concept by allowing a complex multi-element group of media to be handled as a single clip. It’s easy. Just select the relevant media and choose Create Compound Clip from the File menu (or hit the Option-G key command).

Compound Clips let you move, duplicate, and handle clips as an individual segment. You can even share such clips across multiple projects or use a clip to apply filters and effects across all combined elements. The Compound Clips feature helps video editors remove clutter and simplify the timeline’s organization, while maintaining media continuity.

This is the Compound Clip when open.

The Compound Clip command offers a vastly simpler timeline that minimizes the additional track and clip information until needed. Think of it as a nested sequence on steroids. This is the Compound Clip when closed.

Auditions

Think about being able to create multiple versions of an opening or closing sequence for different clients or presentations. That’s the power of Auditions. With this feature, you can view various alternative scenes in your video without leaving the timeline. Auditions provides a fast and easy way to preview a number of variations—with any media collection—in real time. To create Auditions, just drag the shots to the same place in the timeline and choose the Add to Audition command. This allows the Magnetic Timeline to handle the sequence continuity and sync.

Auditions lets you dynamically preview multiple clips within the timeline without disturbing any other media.

Content Auto-Analysis and Keywords

Underneath the surface, FCP X mines metadata from your content from the second you ingest footage from the camera. That data stream includes information such as camera type, frame rate, white balance, and a host of other pre-defined parameters.

The Content Auto-Analysis feature can, during import, distinguish individual people, shot types (close, medium, and wide) and rolling shutter artifacts common to many CMOS cameras. It can also rectify stabilization issues with hand-held shots, adjust overall color balance, and analyze and remove excessive audio noise and hum or silent audio tracks from footage.

Much of FCP X’s automatic keyword creation is derived from this media detection functionality. The program uses the information gathered to create keywords and automatically assembles assets into Smart Collections within the Event Library. Thus, while importing your content, FCP X is sorting, categorizing, and auto keywording in the background. In addition to the keywords that the program assigns, you can add or edit your own keywords to identify specific shots in any manner you choose. Since you can have multiple keywords for the same clip, and all of those clips would appear in each search and link to a single original piece of media, you can accomplish faster, cleaner edits.

Applying customizable effects offers you a real-time preview of the effect on your video in the canvas. Note that the thumbnail view in the Effects Window also shows the clip. The new Skimming feature brings added power to the content preview in FCP X.

Another result of this metadata analysis is the ability to create a keyword selection across multiple pieces of media. Range-based Keywords allow you to flag a keyword across all or just small parts of multiple clips. Keywording offers a larger, far more flexible canvas. No longer are you restricted to specific bins or folders.

Content library access

Borrowing a page from its iLife line of consumer apps, FCP X lets you browse all of your attached media and content libraries within the program. View your iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture content as well as Motion Libraries directly, as well as 1300 royalty-free sound effects offered as a free download, available via Apple’s software update, after you purchase FCP X.

Customizable effects

FCP X provides a wide array of content, including animations, titles, transitions, and effects sequences, all accessible and editable within the application.

Much of this content was created specifically for Apple by Hollywood effects pros and graphic designers. Customizable from the start, these effects allow you to preview a clip by selecting a shot and then using the skimming function to get a true instantaneous, real-time preview—both as a thumbnail and in the viewer—of how your shot will look with that effect applied.

You also have access to all of the transform functions (crop, scale, rotate, and distort) as well as keyframing of those effects without having to jump between different parts of the interface. Effects imported from Motion 5 can be managed to allow you to modify different parts of the program’s new Parameter Rigging feature.

Effects in viewer.

Audio editing

Apple has chosen to fully integrate audio editing into FCP X. Starting with the ingest, the program analyzes content for hum, noise, and dynamic audio changes. It even automates audio sync from an external recorder and the camera, matching audio and video via the waveforms, to connect content and sync it properly. This was formerly a manual process.

With a large library of sound effects and high-quality audio effects plug-ins available in FCP X, you now have greater control of your audio enhancements than ever before. You can access control for sub-frame audio edits as well as many of the available 64-bit versions of third-party Audio Units plug-ins.

Color grading

Whether you need a single-click correction or want to create a stylized look, all color work now happens within FCP X. From the first analysis, color balance and correction are mapped for use, allowing you to quickly match multiple shots in the same group or refine the look of any clip in the Event Browser or the timeline.

The Color Board gives you a dynamic way to make custom modifications to overall color, saturation, and exposure, while allowing keying and masking to be done simply and directly within the app. The Match Color feature offers a fast and easy way to match the overall color, contrast, and look between two different shots to maintain a project’s visual continuity.

The Color Board represents the essence of Apple’s FCP X interface changes. It allows you simple control over exposure, color, and saturation.

Bottom line

Apple’s new Final Cut Pro X has been re-designed from the ground up with a radically different approach—one that acknowledges and uses device and camera data in a manner that has never before been attempted in the video editing environment.

With this release, Apple shows us the future in which data streams from all the devices we work with communicate seamlessly, sharing media behind the scenes. Think of the advantages and possibilities when all the effort you put into setting up a shot or project continue downstream from your camera into post-production, or follow your content when it’s delivered on the web. That’s the promise of Final Cut Pro X. Will that promise be fulfilled?

[Gary Adcock is a Chicago-based consultant who specializes in building workflows for film and television productions. He is the founder and past president of the Chicago Final Cut Users Group, Tech Chairman of the NAB Director of Photography Conference, and a member of the I/A Local 600/ Camera Guild Training Committee, teaching tapeless production techniques and workflows to professional camera operators. His writings and musing can be found at his blog on Creative Cow .]

Matt Toder has been editing video professionally for eight years, and currently works at Gawker.TV. These are his thoughts on Apple’s latest Final Cut Pro release.

I landed my first job in post-production in 2003 at a small house which used Avid exclusively. It had plenty of problems; we struggled with the Dragon error for a few months, converted to Xpress Pro when it came out, and then wrestled with that. There just weren’t any other options. And then Apple’s Final Cut Pro was released, although it too had some problems. But when Avid stopped listening to their customers and became more and more inflexible, Final Cut Pro became an increasingly attractive option. By 2009, significant portions of the editing community were using it.

And now we’ve been given a glimpse of FCPX, a massive, from-the-ground-up revision of Final Cut Pro which proves one thing definitively: that Apple understood many of the problems that were inherent to Final Cut Pro. But, instead of fixing them, they just decided to change everything.

At the preview event, Peter Steinauer, FCP Architect, assured the audience that FCPX was just as much for professional editors as FCP7 was. It really doesn’t seem that way, though. After getting through some of technical aspects of what makes FCPX better than its predecessor in terms of processing power and such—which does seem awesome—Steinauer moved on immediately to color sync. He boasted that FCPX would make sure that pixels looked exactly the same throughout the editing process, noting “you can trust that the pixels coming off a pro file device track all the way through your workflow to display on the screen and ultimately out to output.” This all seems well and good, except it’s completely unimportant for professional editors who aren’t finishing in Final Cut. Some of us color correct in a da Vinci with a professional colorist and then conform in a Flame. Steinauer’s point proves the underlying key of FCPX: that it really isn’t for professional editors.

If it were a device for professional editors, FCPX wouldn’t require a complete rethinking of non-linear editing. It would have instead addressed some of the problems that Final Cut Pro presents for professionals, problems that have existed since day one and that have solutions in the Avid. Like the ability to save your export settings. Or the ability to have an upackable project that allows editors to share bins and not force them into creating multiple projects to share. Or a reliable shared media solution, like Unity or LanShare, so we don’t have to work off of local drives all the time. Or a reliable find bin command that doesn’t constantly tell you your clips aren’t in the browser when you know for a fact that they are. Or a title tool that not only allows you to kern your text but allows you to see what you’re doing in the sequence without having to click back and forth constantly. Or, as the most recent updates to Media Composer have, a way to read RED files directly and then export DPX files. Because, again, not everyone is finishing in Final Cut.

If this were truly a device for professional editors, those improvements would have been in FCPX, and Steinauer would have made a point of mentioning them considering the room he was playing to. But he didn’t. He also didn’t mention EDL’s, OMF’s, XML’s or any changes to the Media Manager that might make generating a cut list for telecine a little easier. He also would have mentioned how the new Compound Clip feature would react when EDL’s are being generated from a sequence full of them.

The idea of Compound Clips speaks to another issue with FCPX. One of the hardest adjustments an Avid editor had to make when switching to Final Cut Pro was no longer being able to load a sequence into the source monitor and cut it into the sequence while maintaining master clip information; FCP turned it into a new clip, which really was just a work around for not being able to generate video mixdowns. This meant that you couldn’t build a select string and then edit from it while still being able to match to your master clip. One would have hoped that FCPX would be able to do something like this, have a more nuanced understanding of the timeline, the way that Avid does, and improve upon a situation where every little move throws everything out of whack unless you’ve gone through and manually locked tracks.

Apple seems to know that keeping things in sync in Final Cut Pro was extremely problematic and have attempted to solve this with Clip Connections and the Magnetic Timeline. Clip Connections can lock a piece of video and its corresponding dialogue to, say, a specific sound effect so that they all travel together all the time. The Magnetic Timeline feature ensures that when this group is moved, you don’t get a clip collision or have to eliminate something from the next piece of media in the timeline. Instead, the next piece of media slides down one track in the timeline. Of course, the demo contains one track of video and two tracks of audio so it’s easy to see that everything works out. I wonder what will occur when you’ve got two pieces of video composited together with a title on top and your audio has dialogue, music, and a couple of sound effects. Will it move everything in the higher audio tracks down as well, thereby destroying the scheme of your timeline?

The biggest, most apparent change is the absence of the source monitor: it’s the iMovie-ing of non-linear editing. Of all the people watching the preview, applauding wildly and yelling out “I want it!” and “thank you,” I can’t believe that one person didn’t scream, “where’s the freaking source monitor?” This represents a gigantic change in the way non-linear editing occurs, a nearly unfathomable one. Since non-linear editing was invented, the mainstays have been the source monitor, the record monitor, the browser and the timeline. To take one of these away means that non-linear editing has to be rethought entirely. I’m not quite sure how you can set an exact in point without it, especially when you’re forced into using the iMovie yellow selection brackets.

All this being said, there certainly are some incredible things about FCPX, most obviously that it will render in the background and that no one will have to stare at the “writing video” dialogue box anymore. That really does sound great. And that it will analyze clips upon import so it will stabilize more quickly (although it already does the analyzing in the background). The FCPX function of analyzing clips for shot length and content (wide two shot, close single, etc) also seems great, though it would have been nice for Steinauer to mention whether this increases import time or not. And since it’s doing all this during-import work, can it also provide a transcript of some sort? That would have been truly useful because it takes a lot of work find an interview subject saying the exact right phrase, much more work than scanning through dailies for the close up series.

Another thing that I would have loved Steinauer to discuss is whether or not an editor can customize how clips are analyzed upon import and how find bin will work now. Specifically, where you will get thrown when try to find a clip in the browser. Do you get thrown to the folder with other wide shots, with other two shots, with other sunset shots or do you get to the original master clip housed somewhere else? These are the questions that need to be answered, the ones that professionals are asking. Because these are the features that change individual workflow and force editors to alter the habits that they’ve developed over time.

(The audio also gets analyzed during import, to remove hum and balance levels. Do these adjustments hold when you export an OMF and do they carry over to ProTools? Who knows, Steinauer didn’t mention anything about the way FCPX talks to other applications.)

If this is the future of Final Cut Pro, and indeed non-linear editing, then that’s fine and I can’t change it. Just don’t tell me that it’s for pros, but you have to change the way you’ve been thinking about everything. And don’t make me change for the wrong reasons, for reasons applied because the improvements speak most to people who aren’t professionals. I love that editing is something that a lot of people can do now, that there’s a greater level of understanding about what it really takes to make a compellingpiece out of a collection of images and sounds and your imagination. Editing, for me, is still where the magic is. It’s one thing to make changes for the sake of the people you claim are your clients and quite another to make changes for the sake of people who aren’t. That’s what these changes are, they are changes for the sake of making editing more accessible, not more functional.

FCPX shouldn’t be about helping people who don’t know what they’re doing, it should be about helping people who do know what they’re doing work better and faster and, most often, that means giving them the flexibility to work however they please, using the techniques they’ve developed over years of working in tough conditions. Because when you don’t have a Senior Creative Director sitting behind you, you don’t really have to worry about finding clips fast enough or making precise edits immediately. But when you are in that situation, you won’t have time re-think the thing you’ve been doing for years and years.

When FCPX is released in June, the countdown will be on for FCP7. Whether it takes a year or possibly less, support will dry up and eventually it won’t be a viable editing platform anymore. I’m not gonna wait that long. Instead, I’ll reacquaint myself with my old friend Avid, catch up on what I’ve missed and fall back into the warm embrace of my fully customized appearance and keyboard settings. It’ll take a minute to get completely familiar with it, to remember everything, and even to be reminded of all the things that drove me crazy. But at least I’ll still have a source monitor.

source: uk.gizmodo.com

PART ONE
Apple just introduced a new version of Final Cut at the Final Cut Pro Supermeet during NAB 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Touted as “revolutionary as the first version” from 1999, Apple introduced the new Final Cut Pro X saying that every major broadcaster and film maker nowadays relies on FCP for their video editing needs.

Basing on live updates coming from attendees at NAB 2011, Final Cut Pro X has been built from scratch, and it’s entirely 64-bit. It’s based on technologies like Cocoa, Core Animation, Open CL, Grand Central Dispatch and it focuses on image quality. It features a resolution independent timeline up to 4K for scalable rendering — in fact, it appears the old render dialog is gone entirely as the app uses the available CPU to keep files always rendered. FCP X allows you to edit while you’re importing thanks to its new engine, and it’s also got automatic media and people detection on import, as well as image stabilization.

Apple is promoting the new FCP X as a complete and total rebuild. Smart collections look very similar to iMovie, and overall there is a feeling Apple has borrowed some UI elements from the iLife application to make the general design more accessible, even for professionals. For instance, Apple has brought “single keystroke nesting” to Final Cut Pro — a new functionality that allows you to group chunks of media into a single clip in the timeline.  The “inline precision editor” allows you to make edits by revealing media with an iOS-like menu.

Source: http://www.engadget.com

It’s possible that the GUI is more user friendly and the functionality has improved but based on the comments and features presented today the jury is still out as to whether or not FCP will be going head to head with the competition.  This means that ease of use may or may not improve functionality but instead lowers the playing field for all the non-editors out there.  I am all in favor of making editing easier but the roll-out today suggests a beta experience that does little to assist the professional editor in cutting a long form project.  Feels like a step backward on the time/space continuum and I always get a little queasy when the word iMovie is mentioned in the same breath as Final Cut.

-Scott Arundale
PART TWO

UPDATE 4.13.11

Upon watching the demonstration in full, I got the impression there were some shills in the audience shouting their appreciation for the new features.

Now that calmer minds prevail let’s look at the upside.  Instant nesting with a single keystroke. Easy keyword features. Better sync and collision options. Automatic color grading, stabilization and background rendering.  Excellent use of the 64 bit engine.  But all of this suggests Apple is more interested in the young editor cutting short form trailers than the longform editor trying to cut a feature, nevermind the hapless assistant who must keep it together.  Much of the work that FCP is trying to achieve is normally the work of the assistant but they pre-suppose that the editor is working solo.  Pity that editor if they don’t have a second pair of hands to help him or her.  I’m all in favor of having the machine do the work.  I’m ready as an Apple Certified Trainer to go back to school and re-learn how to cut faster and easier.  What I loved about FCP is that copy and paste makes it easy to move stuff around.  Apple has made it even “easier”, but again requires a new mindset i.e it takes more thought and fewer keystrokes to achieve the same thing.  If this is the future than I am in.  But it begs the question: who is the target audience for this product?  Surely not the Hollywood narrative professional.  Instead the trailer/bumper/extreme sports crowd may find these new features useful.  For improved storytelling techniques, the jury is still out.

-SA

Many complained that FCP vers. 7 was not really worthy of a new number but belonged in the vers. 6 family.  In my opinion Apple has always been trigger happy with upgrades to all their software but nevertheless much of their brain trust has been noticeably absent when it comes to improving their editing platform.  It has been assumed that the tech wizards were otherwise engaged in the cash cows of iPhone and iPad.  This new version is long overdue.

Apple’s Final Cut Pro made its debut at NAB in 1998 before being released as a product the following year. The software has a history of April releases, though its last major version came in July 2009. The software itself hasn’t been a standalone product for quite a bit longer though, instead being wrapped up as part of Apple’s Final Cut Studio suite, which bundles together Final Cut Pro with Motion, DVD Studio, and Soundtrack Pro, as well as the Color and Compressor applications.

Reports began circulating in late February that Apple was nearing completion on a complete overhaul of the software that would bring Final Cut Pro into the 64-bit era and more importantly a release this spring. That report from Tech Crunch which cited anonymous sources, said that the design was both under the hood and sporting a new user interface.

A new report from ProVideoCoalition says Apple plans on “taking over” the 10th Annual SuperMeet event taking place on April 12 to announce a new version of the software.

It may be time to break out the champagne.