Getting Started With Final Cut Pro
by Steve Cohen
What Is It?
Final Cut Pro is a new editing application developed by Apple and a development team originally from Macro-media. The lead developer, Randy Ubillos, was the designer of Adobe Premier. Final Cut Pro looks and feels very much like an Avid, with source and record monitors, a timeline and bins.
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What Do I Need?
Final Cut runs on stock Mac hardware – either a G3 or a G4. It needs no additional video or audio gear, but it can work with several third-party video boards that add additional functionality. You’ll need an appropriate Mac, plenty of RAM (128 megs or more) and plenty of storage. The system is designed to work with one monitor, but you’ll be able to spread out more with two. Final Cut costs $1000.
What is DV?
DV is a digital video format being adopted by many consumer electronics companies. (It is also used in some fully professional gear with slight modifications that go by such names as DVCam and DVCPro). It utilizes very small cassettes and produces surprisingly good images – approximately as good as Beta SP (not DigiBeta). This means that for many purposes, DV can be broadcast. And it means that when you are cutting DV in Final Cut you are looking at a picture that’s much better than VHS or most of the standard Avid AVRs we’re familiar with. DV is compressed, but when copied from one device to another, the copy is purely digital with no generation loss. Final Cut is most commonly used to edit DV materials, but the program will work with any Quicktime-compatible media.
Final Cut can use PC-standard, DMA-66 hard drives to play full-resolution DV on your Mac. If you have a new G4, your internal drive is probably of this type and you can add another without much difficulty (IBM just released one that holds 75 gigs). These drives are much faster than the old SCSI drives we’re familiar with and they’re amazingly cheap. As this is being written, Staples will sell you a 30 gig drive for less than $200 – and, of course, prices are coming down. DV takes up a lot of space. An hour of video and audio will fill about 13 gigs.
What’s Firewire?
Firewire is a standard for connecting computers and peripherals developed by Apple and now adopted by Sony, Panasonic and most PC manufacturers. It goes by various names: Sony calls it iLink and the PC manufacturers call it IEEE-1394. Firewire carries video at high speeds and it also carries control information (the equivalent of the old Sony serial protocol). A G3 or G4 will attach to a DV camcorder via a single, thin Firewire cable and Final Cut will then control the camera for digitizing and output to tape. Final Cut can use a stock Mac because it ingeniously uses the video hardware in the camera for DV compression and decompression. The only way for video to get in or out of an unexpanded Mac is via Firewire, which typically means a DV camcorder or deck.
Why Would I Need Extra Video Hardware?
If you have VHS or other tapes that you want to work with in Final Cut, you can copy them to a DV camera or deck and load from there. If you don’t like the idea of copying your non-DV tapes before loading them, you should invest in digitizing hardware. You can use a Firewire D-A/A-D converter in place of the camera or purchase an analog capture card that goes in your Mac and takes a direct feed from your deck. Capture cards offer somewhat better video quality for visual effects than native Mac DV and also permit you to compress your video while it loads. Another reason for additional gear is to provide real-time effects capability. A standard Mac will only play a single stream of DV. This means that all dissolves and other two-source effects must be rendered, and rendering is slow because DV quality is so high.
The market for third-party video boards is extremely competitive and new boards are being introduced all the time. By the time you read this Matrox should be shipping a two-stream SDI card for $1000 that will do real-time effects at full NTSC broadcast quality on a G4. At NAB, Pinnacle showed a board that could play three streams of SDI (full-resolution, uncompressed NTSC) or one stream of HD on a G4. The result will be a complete HD editing system for about $30,000.
But to cut standard DV, which means very high quality video, all you need is a Mac, a lot of storage, and a DV camera or deck.
What Can It Do?
Final Cut can do much of what your Avid can, including most of the standard editing capabilities you might expect. It provides for 99 levels of undo and redo. It has an excellent three-button player (‘JKL’) that is actually more responsive than Avid’s. And it can do some things your Film Composer can’t. For example, it can scrub 8 tracks of audio simultaneously. It can cut audio off the frameline. It offers two types of real-time audio dissolves. It can automatically slip or move out-of-sync material into sync and it can lock picture and track clips into sync so that they move together during editing. It can create a title crawl. It can insert and overlap material (make a split edit) in a single step. It can nest one bin inside another (put a folder in a bin). It can nest one sequence inside another, which means that you could work on your show in reels but always keep a version of the entire show ready for screening or measurement. Final Cut’s audio waveform display is very fast and the program comes with many useful audio effects. It can import audio directly from a CD into a bin. And it’s visual effects capabilities, though not real-time without extra hardware, are in some ways more powerful than the Avid’s.
What Can’t It do?
Final Cut will make standard 30 fps EDLs, so it’s great for video-originated projects. But so far it doesn’t handle 24 fps media the way the Film Composer does. It does not remove extra fields while digitizing and it does not add them back on output. This means that to cut film materials with compression you’ll have to accept slight stuttering and the fact that every 5th frame looks like a one-frame freeze frame (if you cut normal DV you’ll digitize both fields and won’t see stuttering). Cut lists are possible via third-party matchback software, but with the standard caveat – every cut will potentially be cheated by a frame when the list is made (on average, every 5th cut). And because matchback is the only way to make a cut list, change lists are impossible.
Though Final Cut does many of the things you’ve come to expect from an Avid, it’s still in its initial release and it’s smoothness and integration of editing features isn’t as good in some areas. You’ll find much of it familiar, but you won’t be able to sit down and use it without some training or time with the manual. There’s no ability to re-map the keyboard, so you’ll have to accept Final Cut’s standard arrangement (similar to the default Avid layout). Its trim functions aren’t nearly as powerful as the Avid’s, a significant weakness. Its tools for cutting material from one sequence into another are also limited. There’s no way to view the source timeline and no patch panel. It doesn’t have some of the sophisticated media management tools that the Avid has acquired. In general, the Avid may be a bit less intuitive for a new user, but for a professional it’s smoother and faster. A few people have found Final Cut buggy, but many others haven’t had problems.
The system does not yet offer a way to share media between multiple systems. Final Cut Pro’s low cost should empower assistants, enabling them to work with complete systems of their own, but until robust media and sequence sharing is possible this won’t become a reality.
What About Audio?
DV audio can be either 32K/12 bit or 48k/16 bit. Final Cut will work with either and with 44.1k material, as well. It converts 12 bit material to 16 bit when loaded. It can also mix resolutions and will resample as needed on the fly, so you can freely intercut material at different resolutions – something your Avid can’t do. Final Cut can play as many tracks as the CPU can handle (about 8 on a stock G4) but it can only output two channels simultaneously. This is a big step backwards for those of us who like to output 8 tracks of digital audio directly to a DA-88. Audio is digitized and played back using the standard hardware built into your Mac, and while it sounds pretty good, it is not of the quality we’re used to from the DigiDesign boards the Avid uses. Support for extra audio hardware is limited.
What About EDLs and Timecode?
DV uses it’s own form of timecode, which is similar to vertical interval code (VITC). Rather than employing a separate timecode track, each frame is embedded with timecode data. This produces very accurate results. You can also work with a non-DV tape format using an appropriate deck and a digitizing card or outboard converter. In this setup timecode and control information are carried over a serial cable. You can batch digitize just like you can with other editing systems.
What About the Future?
Final Cut has enjoyed tremendous success since its introduction (as has iMovie, its little cousin that comes bundled with iMacs and is now available as a free download). These products change the price/performance ratio for our industry and will inevitably put more power into our hands and the hands of thousands of newcomers. You can have a new G4 for $1600. Final Cut adds $1000. DV cameras go for about $800 and up. So for about $5000 you can now have a capable editing system that competes surprisingly well with its more expensive competition. As this article went to press the first cable movie to use Final Cut Pro went into production. We’ll offer details about their progress in future issues of the Guild Magazine. For more about Final Cut, check out www.apple.com/finalcutpro and www.2-pop.com.
Steve Cohen is an editor, Guild board member and editor of the Guild Magazine.
He is currently cutting '15 Minutes' for New Line. He can be reached via email
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Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine
Vol. 21, No. 3 - MayJune 2000
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