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Over the last few years, Final Cut Pro has won a wide following among low-budget independent filmmakers. However, editors working at the highest levels of production have been slow to warm to it. While this may have been due partly to editors’ natural reluctance to jettison familiar and proven tools for something new, it was also true that in some ways, Final Cut Pro 3 simply wasn’t ready. Avid users who had experimented with the program almost universally complained about its trim functions, and its sound capabilities were limited, with audio effects that had to be rendered so often that using them became a time-consuming exercise in frustration. It couldn’t generate a film change list, and you couldn’t sync dailies, because there was no equivalent to Avid’s Autosync function.
But with Final Cut Pro 4, the application has taken a major step forward. It comes bundled with Cinema Tools, Apple’s film list program, as well as Compressor, a compression and batch-processing application, Live Type, a titling tool, and Soundtrack, a music creation program that allows you to easily build cues out of a large library of loops. But the advances in Final Cut Pro 4 itself offer reason enough to try out the new version.
Editing and Effects Clearly, a great deal of work has gone into improving the editing functions in FCP4. The program offers much-improved trimming capability and now mimics Avid’s JKL trimming far more closely. But there are still some limitations: execution of the trim happens only when the K key is pressed — this can be a little confusing initially, because even though the space bar will stop playback initiated by J or L, it won’t execute a trim. Moreover, when you’re trimming, you don’t see moving indicators of where the trim will end up, the way you would in Avid. Another oddity is that the JKL playback occurs in whichever side of the Trim window has the cursor resting over it, regardless of which side is chosen as the target for the trim. Also note that Final Cut Pro’s JKL function is subtly different from Avid’s. For example, in FCP4, if you are moving forward at high speed and you hit the J key, you slow down forward play. In the Avid you immediately go into reverse play. However, in spite of those limitations, Final Cut Pro has become a much more pleasant program in which to edit. It’s now possible to scrub audio in the Trim Edit window, and the Viewer and Canvas (Source and Record monitors) can be ganged together in three different ways. Zooming in the Timeline has been improved, so that it’s now possible to zoom in on the playhead; this is particularly important, because even though the Trim Edit window has gotten better, Final Cut Pro remains a program in which a lot of the trimming takes place in the Timeline, with tools such as Roll, Ripple, Slip and Slide. Even FCP4’s new asymmetrical trimming ability is tool-based: to initiate an asymmetrical trim, you select the Ripple tool, then Option-click a cut point, and Command-click to select one or more additional cut points. Effects can be easily controlled in the Timeline too, using the new keyframe editor, which will bring up a graph for any filter that has been applied to a clip. The same area of the Timeline also shows the new speed indicators — tick marks that get closer together or farther apart when that portion of the clip has been sped up or slowed down. And changing the speed of clips has become very easy and intuitive with the Time Remap tool. In color correction, a new window called the Frame Viewer lets you do a side-by-side comparison of a frame with color correction to the same frame without it, or with a frame from the two previous or two next clips within the sequence. The division between the two views can be easily moved and resized, for viewing of specific areas of the frame — and all of the color-correction adjustments take place in real time. Real-Time and Rendering One of the most exciting new features in FCP4 is its ability to play many layers of visual effects in real time, due to Final Cut Pro ’s rendering engine, RT Extreme. As with Avid Media Composer Adrenaline (see September/October 2003), the performance of FCP4 is highly dependent on the power of the system it’s running on. To push the computer to its maximum threshold, the user can set RT Extreme to Unlimited mode — this allows you to play more effects, but increases the likelihood that frames will be dropped during playback. To ensure that they won’t be, RT Extreme can be set to Safe, which only lets the computer play back those effects it can definitely handle without rendering. But rendering has become a much less odious proposition in FCP4. In previous versions, if something was rendered and then moved elsewhere in a sequence, it would become unrendered, even if the move didn’t alter the effects that had been applied to the clip. But FCP4 can now preserve its render files, with these exceptions: when the visibility of a clip is turned off and on again the clip becomes unrendered, and if you turn off the visibility of a track, all clips within it become unrendered. In addition, the machine can be set to automatically start rendering all unrendered files whenever the machine is left unattended for a period of time (which you specify). The Interface Another objection that some Avid users had to Final Cut Pro was that its interface wasn’t customizable enough. But this too has completely changed.
The Keyboard Layout window offers
virtual representations of
the keyboard, with separate tabbed
pages for different combinations
of modifier keys:
the
Shift key, for example, has
its own
keyboard page, where different
functions can be assigned
to each key. A search engine
within the Keyboard Layout
window enables you to look for any function
by typing in even a part
of its name — possible choices, and the
keyboard shortcuts for them,
appear instantly. Another notable new feature is the Timeline Editing Controls panel, which allows you to flexibly cut sequences together and route tracks as needed. It is also easy to change the track heights in the Timeline by dragging the boundary between them within the patch panel. Film A key advance in FCP4 is the ability to make change lists. This is accomplished with Cinema Tools, Apple’s film list application, which is now bundled with FCP. Change lists are very similar to Avid’s in both layout and terminology. However, the program can’t make audio change lists and because Cinema Tools is only loosely integrated with Final Cut Pro, you must generate an intermediate database file before your list can be created. FCP4 is still missing some important features for those working on film projects. The program won’t measure in feet and frames, nor will it display ink numbers or key numbers. Film information can be burned in at telecine, of course, and this would provide a partial workaround. (The program can also add timecode and feet and frame counters to a sequence, but the effect must be rendered. Go to Video Filters>Video> Timecode Print.) The program also now makes it possible to synch dailies using the new Merge Clips function. One video clip can be synched to multiple audio tracks this way, using timecode or marks. Audio
Another important new feature is the Audio Mixer window, an on-screen virtual mixing console. Working in the Mixer window, you can adjust the volume of a track as you play it. If keyframing is turned on, FCP4 will track the volume shifts and create keyframes — you can specify how dense and detailed you want the keyframing to be. Final Cut Pro’s improved performance makes doing audio work much easier: audio filters can also be adjusted in real time, as the audio plays. (Audio dissolves have been real-time since Version 3.) FCP4 comes with both its own filters, and others built on Apple’s new Audio Units plug-in architecture. As with all filters within Final Cut Pro, the settings you create for an audio filter can be copied, stored and pasted onto other clips. The program can now work with 24-bit audio. It also handles different sample rates within the Timeline better and allows the use of audio at 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz (although mixing 32kHz and 48 kHz in the same sequence will reduce the number of real-time tracks you can mix, and is not advised).
Conclusion FCP4 has many other promising features, including improved media management and support for the XML interchange format, which may open the program up to more third-party developers. While it still has some shortcomings — for example, it doesn’t have multi-cam capabilities, nor does it allow clips to be grouped together — this new version goes a long way toward addressing many of the concerns that editors have expressed about Final Cut Pro in the past. Even before the release of FCP4, the application had begun to make inroads into major productions, most notably when Walter Murch chose to use it on the feature Cold Mountain. The improvements in FCP4 will undoubtedly tempt other productions to try it out, as editors John Michel and Rick Blue are now doing on the television series Scrubs (see page 18). Learning any new application means investing a certain amount of time, but Final Cut’s relatively low price takes some of the pain out of the process. It costs $999 ($399 for an upgrade) — a price that now includes all the add-ons, including Cinema Tools.
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