Using Final Cut Pro
on a Cable Movie
At the beginning of June, Bert
Glatstein and Greg Dean began working on the first cable
movie to use Apple’s Final Cut Pro software. The Guild
Magazine asked the editing team if they would keep us
apprised of their progress using this new application. This
is their first report on how it’s been going, written
after they’d been cutting for a little over a month.
Since they started, a second show has begun using the
program, with editor B. J. Sears and assistant Daniel Fort.
We hope to get a progress report from them in the
future.
An Editor's Perspective
An Assistant's
Perspective begins below
by Bert Glatstein, A.C.E.
In late May, I was asked if I would be interested in editing a cable movie using Final Cut Pro (FCP) and I arranged to have the system demonstrated. The editing interface seemed intuitive and I was very impressed by the quality of the DV image it displayed. The project I was to cut was a contemporary western with numerous night scenes lit by campfire. The director and I agreed that working with this DV image would be very advantageous.
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Anyone familiar with the Avid or Adobe Premiere should find FCP easy to learn. The system I’m using has two computer monitors (only one is required but it can feel very crowded), an NTSC monitor, a DV deck, a VHS deck and a G4 Macintosh. Our dailies were received on DV tapes.
Editing on FCP can be done using the cursor to drag clips from the source monitor (called the viewer in FCP) to either the record monitor (the Canvas) or the timeline. There are also keyboard functions for insert, overwrite, and replace edits. The FCP keyboard is similar to the Avid’s, with now-standard editing functions, including JKL play, mark in and out, single frame advance, go to next (previous) edit, trim mode, etc. The keyboard cannot be customized.
Like many applications (but unlike the Avid) the system uses a tool palette, which allows the user to change the function of the cursor. There is a select clip tool, roller trim tool (for adjusting edit points in the timeline), select edit trim tool (which opens a trim window), a pen tool for adding key frames, an add-edit tool, a zoom tool and a slip and slide tool. FCP cannot play both sides of an edit while trimming, and the slip and slide tools open very small postage-stamp-sized windows, which I don’t find useful.
Bins can be viewed as text or as frames from the clips (icons). The representative frames are selected by adding a mark-in on the clip in the source monitor. They can only be viewed in two sizes. Text views have columns that can be shown or hidden as needed, including a column for thumbnail views of the clips. Bin views cannot be saved.
FCP employs a unique method for joining sequences, since they cannot be loaded into the source monitor. Instead, you ‘nest’ sequences by loading them directly into the timeline where they appear as single clips labeled with the name of the sequence. For instance, if I have cut scenes 1, 2, and 3 as separate sequences and want to join them together to form Reel 1, I would drag them one at a time to the timeline where they would appear as single clips, one after another. Internal cuts would not be visible. To show them, you double click on the scene clip in the timeline and a new timeline appears (via a tab in the timeline window) showing the original sequence with its edits.
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This function is useful when building the show out of cut reels. But when assembling a first cut, I found it more effective to load each scene into the record monitor/canvas, select all the clips (Command-A), copy them (Command-C) and then paste them (Command-V) into a new sequence. This allows one to build a sequence of many scenes with all cuts visible. One drawback to the nesting technique is that transitions between the cut reels cannot easily be adjusted.
Trims can be made either in the timeline or in a trim window where both sides of the cut are visible. In the timeline you select either the ‘roll’ or ‘ripple’ tool from the tool palette and click on the cut. Ripple trims change the length of a sequence, roll trims adjust the A and B sides simultaneously. Slip and slide tools are available, as well. You can also double click on a cut to open it for trimming or use the ‘select edit’ tool which works like lassoing in the Avid, to grab a number of cuts at once. All these tools provide the same functionality as trim rollers in the Avid, but in a more complicated and less intuitive way. There is no way to perform asymmetrical trims (trimming in both directions at once) to help keep a complex, multi-track sequence in sync.
At present FCP can play only a single stream of video and does not offer real-time effects. Both audio and video effects must be rendered. A two-hour sequence with about 15 dissolves and 10 audio futz effects took approximately 30 minutes to render on our setup. A single dissolve takes roughly 30 seconds.
FCP can be used on a G3 or G4 Mac. It needs about 128 MB of RAM. An editor with a PowerBook and Firewire drive can cut sequences at home or on the metro. Despite several frustrating interface and media management issues, I believe FCP will become an alternative to Avid for television features. It is far less expensive, and the image quality, using low-cost hard drives, is much better. A production company can buy a complete Final Cut Pro system for the price of a few weeks of Avid rental. Many producers are going to find that combination irresistible.
Bert Glatstein is an editor and member of ACE.
He can be reached via email
An Assistant's Perspective
by Greg Dean
After viewing a demonstration of Final Cut Pro and with many Lightworks and Avid shows behind me, I was very interested in seeing how effective the program would be in the post-production of a cable movie.
Dailies: We received our daily tapes on DVCAM with flex files that I imported through Slingshot, a third party application (FilmLogic, another third party program, would also have worked). After making folders and setting a few preferences, Slingshot automatically converted and sent import logs, telecine logs, and daily logs to their designated folders with a single drag and drop. It was then very easy to go directly into the digitizing tool (‘log & capture’ in FCP) and import the batch list to a designated capture bin. Once the clips had been captured, I copied them into scene bins the same way I would with an Avid. Slingshot also keeps timecode/key number information and will eventually produce our negative cut lists. Because FCP does not yet understand film, cuts will be adjusted via matchback when the list is created – with many cuts being cheated by one frame.
Batch Capturing: In FCP there are many preference settings that must be chosen prior to capture. Batch digitizing was usually accurate, but I found seemingly random clips in every batch that were off by a frame from the burn-in and had to be recaptured. We began with four internal ATA drives in a G4 Macintosh, for a total of 125 Gigs. We later added two 46 Gig external Firewire drives. When we first used them we had problems, such as dropped frames and video hits. After exchanging them with better drives, playback was fine. Note that FCP won’t allow same-name clips to be captured regardless of distinctive timecode. The program will prompt you to rename a duplicated clipname but it does so before you can see the shot’s video, so it’s helpful to rename clips in the log conversion software.
In the scratch disk preferences, I originally selected ‘capture video and audio to separate files’. We later learned (from Dan Fort) that this may have been the cause of some re-linking problems we had. Capturing video and audio to the same file appears to work better, perhaps because it means that they are saved to the same drive.
Organizing bins, clips and sequences was a breeze and cueing shots for the editor is done with a quick click on the mark in too.l (In the Avid I would need to drag the entire bin to the record monitor to do this.) Non-batch capture from our VHS deck was relatively simple – it’s routed through the DV-CAM deck for compression.
Playouts: Playouts to the VHS seem effortless. The longer the sequence the more difficult it is for FCP to handle playouts, and it may drop frames while playing long sequences. But if you check the ‘don’t report dropped frames’ box in the settings, playouts work without a hitch.
EDLS and Cut Lists: We haven’t gotten there yet except for a few tests. The program does not handle film in any way: it doesn’t display footages, ink numbers or key numbers, doesn’t measure in feet and frames, doesn’t remove or reinstate pulldown, doesn’t make a cut list or a change list. We’ll get our cut lists from Slingshot, but because the program isn’t running at 24 fps, change lists are impossible.
The Good: Importing music from almost any format is quick and easy, including straight imports from the web. Video resolution is the best I’ve ever worked with. The cost of this system is nothing but affordable. And if you take the time to compress your video, you can cut on a Powerbook. B. J. Sears, working down the hall from us, is doing just that, using an external 46 Gig Firewire drive. There is a great book available, called Final Cut Pro for Macintosh, by Lisa Brenneis, that I have found very useful.
The Bad: Rendering time. (Remember Lightworks?) But they promise a real-time card soon. The system becomes sluggish and hangs at times as the project gets larger or after rendering effects, but we are told that this has been fixed in the latest version. Because FCP doesn’t understand film, there are no duplicate frame warnings in the timeline. The project window takes some getting used to. There’s no ‘find bin’ function and it takes too much time navigating through the browser to find bins.
The Ugly: I don’t think FCP will enter the feature world until it has true 24 fps capability and change lists. But it’s definitely going to give other systems, including the Media Composer, a run for their money in television. I’m almost certain that many of the things I’ve noted in this article will have been resolved by the time you read this. We hope to present another report when our project is finished.
Greg Dean is an assistant editor.
He can be reached via email
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 21, No. 4 - July/August 2000
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