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Final Cut Pro: Now at 3
Created: December 17, 2001
Revised: April 1, 2002
Things are moving rapidly in the Macintosh digital-video arena as Apple continues to expand the capabilities of its integrated hardware and software offerings and significantly push the demarcation line between its products and those that were previously considered the sole domain of high-end professional users.
Four years ago, no video professional would have bothered to take a serious look at my Performa 6500/275 with Avid Cinema card and accompanying software, and even this decidedly non-professional lost interest. But today, Apple is moving toward center stage among digital video producers, punctuated once more by December's release of Final Cut Pro 3.
Apple is delivering a seamlessly integrated combination of excellent software, powerful hardware, innovative technology and marketing it at seemingly just the right time to move into the forefront of the digital video conversation.
Faster hardware; decreasing component costs; Apple's home-grown, industry standard for hi-speed data transfer, Firewire; keen business foresight; key product acquisitions; and excellent engineering are all starting to pay off big time.
Apple's recent digital video offerings have been exceptionally productive. The internal SuperDrive for burning DVD one-offs, iDVD for drag-and-drop DVD creation, DVD Studio Pro for full featured DVD authoring, and a significant upgrades to their flagship video editing suite, Final Cut Pro.
The ascension of the DV video format and compatible camcorders married to FireWire ports, helped to endorse a winning Mac combination. Today's Macs are primed to become not only the digital hub of Steve Job's vision, but the central point of professional digital video editing and DVD authoring.
THE ROOTS OF FINAL CUT PRO
The Final Cut Pro Story begins, not at Apple, but at Macromedia, where a team was assembled to create an all-purpose video product that would outdo Adobe Premiere, an early and still-popular digital video editing package. Three years into the project, Macromedia decided to opt out of the digital video arena and sold the product to Apple. Apple refined it, provided a sophisticated interface, focused it toward the DV format, and released version 1.0 in early 1999.
Final Cut Pro 1.0 ran on the G3s of its time ranging from 266 MHz beige models up to the top-of-the 400 MHz Blue and Whites. G4s with Velocity Enigne had not yet been introduced. There were no dual processor models. ATA hard drive speeds and system bus throughput were limited. But the die had been cast, and the initial reception was very positive.
Final Cut's look was familiar to video professionals. QuickTime provided seamless support for image and audio formats. Device control of media capture from qualified Firewire enabled DV camcorders and decks was incorporated. And native support was provided for other common formats via add-on cards or external converters.
Final Cut Pro 1.0 displayed a a refined four-section interface for organization, flexibility, and convenience: A Finder-like Browser window for importing and reconnecting footage and for organizing media and effects. A Viewer for editing clips. A Canvas to display entire movies or single frames. And a Timeline for edited sequences of up to 99 tracks of both video and video.
A neat user-customizable, tabbed structure graced each major component providing deep yet accessible pockets to hold resources and tools. Efficient scaling and navigation tools were applied in three areas. And shortcut (i.e., contextual) menus were available in seemingly every nook and cranny.
Final Cut Pro 1.0 supported familiar edits, such as 3-point, slip, roll, slide, and ripple. Each edit could be accomplished in a multiple including the use of highly-visual edit-overlay and trim edit windows.
Numerous video (and some audio) transitions and filters were incorporated. And, moving beyond Adobe Premiere and into the realm of Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro incorporated motion graphics and compositing, the ability to layer multiple video tracks and to resize and animate.
And there was much more: key-frame controls, support for Photoshop layers, output via deck or camera for full frame rate NTSC display, and the list went on.
In short, the initial release of Final Cut Pro provided a feature set to rival those of very expensive high-end turnkey systems like Avid Media Composer within a more accessible interface and a price of $1000 (on top of your G3 PowerMac.) Very, very impressive.
WHICH MARKETS?
Apple positioned Final Cut Pro 1 as a mid-range solution cautiously padded between desktop products like Premiere, Edit DV, Avid Cinema, Strata Video Shop and the high-end dedicated workstations from Avid and Media 100.
The initial release quickly found a loving home among independent filmmakers, amateur videographers, and other serious video devotees on a budget. But it also caught the eye of the more well-heeled, high-end crowd. Soon they were asking for This Enhancement and That Feature. And Apple listened, quickly grasping the business potential. Hi-end professionals spending tens of thousands of dollars on turnkey systems or hemhorrhaging small fortunes in rentals, might very well be willing to plunk down four or five thousand for a high-end Mac with Final Cut, in the hope (and often realization) of rapidly recouping their investment. Then the cycle might be repeated within two years as successful editors upgraded or added new stations. And even Avid and Media 100 owners might get into the act, adding several Macs with Final Cut in place of one new turnkey system.
In the early days of Final Cut Pro, hardware setup and configuration tended to be somewhat forbidding and expensive. It could be complicated to properly jerry-rig your Mac for additional drives, FireWire access, analog to digital converters, NTSC output, and optimal performance.
But over time, technology advances, a favorable marketplace, and Apple strategy has helped to make this a more accessible process for many users.
Larger, faster, and inexpensive ATA hard drives arrived on the market. Apple built Firewire into all its Macs, enabling easy transfer from DV cameras and decks and output to NTSC monitors. RAM prices declined dramatically removing barriers for the installation of adequate memory. And Apple's new on-line store and build-to-order configurations made it easier to specify and purchase a system suited for the video professional.
Apple also moved rapidly to upgrade processors, graphics systems, and bus speeds and to enhance Final Cut Pro's capability and performance.
EARLY FINAL CUT PRO UPGRADES
Within its first year (i.e., updates through version 1.2.5), Apple incorporated support for Power Mac G4 systems and OS 9, JKL keyboard functionality, 16:9 wide screen, YUV processing (i.e, video manipulation in the NTSC native color space), and the creation of reference movies (i.e., streamlined index files used to reference complete movies.)
Final Cut Pro 2's release (a $299 upgrade) was focused on speed and efficiency. It dramatically increased performance on the now-current G4 and dual processor systems and provided an architecture for real-time previews via third party hardware (e.g., the Matrix RTMac card).
Version 2 also incorporated significant enhancements in configuration (Easy Setups) audio (meters, OMF export, bundling of Peak DV), user interface, media management, text generators, and taking a page from its iMove sibling, the incorporation of DV Start/Stop Detection (to automatically break up DV clips at each scene change.)
ON TO VERSION 3
And so we come to the new features in Version 3 announced in December. Again there are many enhancements but we'll start with the key headliners, then move to others less ground-breaking, but often quite useful.
The most significant new features of Final Cut Pro 3 are the ability to preview realtime effects without additional hardware, to create and work in an off-line format that holds eight times as much footage as the DV format, to provide color correction capabilities, and to run under OS X.
REAL-TIME PREVIEWS WIHTOUT HARDARE
Final Cut Pro 3 can now enable most of the real-time DV playback capabilities of the Matrox RTMac card within its own software. No extra $1,000 Matrox card is needed if your PowerMac G4 is running at 500 MHz or faster. And you can now benefit from real-time previews on G4 PowerBooks as well.
The Realtime Preview effects of Final Cut 3 encompass various transitions (cross dissolve, five irises, five wipes), a new three-way color correction filter (discussed below), and six real-time motion effects (opacity, scale, center, offset, crop, and aspect).
As with the Matrox card, supported real-time previews are indicated in boldface in the Effects Menu (in the Final Cut Pro menu bar) or in the Effects Palette in the Browser. And as with the Matrox card, real-time previews are specific to material in DV format. In contrast to Matrox, however, the complexity of the effects you can preview in software will be related to the capabilities of your system. The faster the machine, the more complex the previews you can see.
In either case, Matrox RTMac hardware or Final Cut's software, you will see a red line at the top of the Timeline when the you have surpassed the product's realtime capabilities. In some case, you may also see a yellow line, which means an approximation will be shown in real-time.
And with all the previews, hardware or software based, remember we are still talking about just that, previews. At some point, you will have to render.
Is the Matrox RT Mac card, which Apple promoted heavily earlier this year, dead as a viable Final Cut Pro add on? Close, but not completely. As mentioned, Matrox previews are not dependant on the speed of the processor and will be helpful for older G4s. Matrox also provides a few realtime effects that Final Cut Pro 3 software does not (rotation, some slide transitions, edge feathering, picture in picture with distortion, and drop shadow).
On the other side, Matrox RTMac does not provide realtime color correction which is a new filter and realtime effect in Final Cut Pro 3, and awaits a driver and/or firmware update for OS X compatibility.
Matrox does provide analog video capture and input, a connector for a second VGA monitor, and full-resolution to an NTSC or PAL video monitor without connecting a DV device to your PowerMac. The latter may be useful for some, because the Final Cut Pro real-time software effects do not allow for a dual stream to go out via FireWire to an NTSC monitor connected to your camera or deck. It's just too much DV processing to be accomplished in software.
However, some of the Matrox advantages can be accessed through other means at less cost (e.g., Sony Media Converter, ATI Radeon card).
You decide.
OFFLINE IS BACK
"We don't have to offline we don't have to online. It's all online," proclaims John Broncaccio, Editor of the ESPN series "The Life" via QuickTime video during the Apple seminars "From First Shot to Final Cut."
And Evan Schechtman, Chief Technology Office, of @Radical Media, the producers of ESPN's "The Life," goes one further "These is no format, there is no resolution that we cannot handle natively."
Now all this is true. Final Cut Pro is a resolution independent product. In addition to DV, Final Cut Pro can handle High Definition, Standard Definition, and other formats natively...if you have the right converter boards, fast SCSI cards and corresponding drives with plenty of storage space.
But even in the five-to-one compression ratio of the DV format (achieved within your camcorder), your hard drive space will be filling up to the tune of 13 GB per video hour.
Welcome to the prominent return of off-line to the Mac digital video equation.
Employing a new Apple QuickTime-compatible codec based on the Motion Photo JPEG format, Final Cut Pro can now squeeze your DV stream to a small fraction of its original size. And this Offline RT media can be fully edited within Final Cut Pro 3.
The end result of the Offline RT compression is that each gigabyte of storage space will hold 40 minutes of time-code accurate, editable video as opposed eight or nine times as much as standard DV footage.
Now you can easily save space on your desktop Mac as well as go mobile with your editing.
With Final Cut Pro 3 you can capture your DV footage directly to the Offline RT codec. Or you can capture your files as DV footage and then transcode to Offline RT. Have it your way.
When you're ready to go mobile with your desktop projects, use the Media Manager to move your Final Cut Pro projects and Offline RT files to your PowerBook over your network, via an intermediary FireWire hard drive, or in one quick step using Firewire Target Disk Mode on your Titanium 667.
If you're shooting on the road and want to do preliminary edits on your PowerBook, just log clips as usual, capture directly to the Offline RT format and go at it.
When you're done with offline RT, transfer the project back to your main editing station If it is not there already), if necessary, and simply use the Media Manager to reconnect to the higher resolution source media.
Offline RT can also be used in conjunction with standard and high definition formats for accurate, low-resolution offline editing. A plug-in is included on the Final Cut Pro 3 CD to provide easy setup settings for these formats.
COLOR CORRECTION
Apple has added new color correction capabilities to Final Cut Pro 3, addressing tasks that were previously the domain of dedicated hardware.
Broadcast and NTSC color spaces differ from RGB and if you're not careful your neat-looking computer video may look far less attractive on an analog monitor.
Color correction is a complex topic, often the domain of dedicated life-long professionals. But like other fields of expertise caught in the current confluence of digital video integration (shooting, log and capture, editing, audio, compression and output) they now can fall under the auspices of a single person on a single Mac.
The result is somewhat of a mixed blessing. A single individual can do so much more. On the other side, that person needs to know much more to achieve the same level of professionalism as the sum of the subsumed expert parts. Can one person do it all and achieve the same results? Probably not. But will their efforts still produce work of high quality in fewer hours and with less cost? The answer is up to the craft of the integrator, the complexity and scope of the project, and the quality of the support mix.
Final Cut Pro's new color corrector is a filter that sports a new visual interface. To make adjustments, use the controls to pick three spots in the video that need to be corrected. One for black, one for white, and a third for a solid midrange tone. Your Mac then uses these data points to adjust the colors in the clip (as a realtime software effect). Once clips have been modified, the information can copied to other clips just as you can for other Final Cut Pro effects.
A new three-up viewing mode enables you to view four color-correction monitors simultaneously. The instruments will either inform you or confuse you based on your level of sophistication in this area. The monitors include vectorscope and histogram (which also appear in the Log and Capture window) and waveform and RGB Reader.
You can also perform automatic range-checking to find colors that are outside of broadcast specifications and easily adjust them based on parameters you provide to the broadcast safe filer.
MAC OSX COMPATIBILITY
Final Cut Pro 3 now runs natively under OS X as well as under OS 9. Two separate installer CDs are included in the box. If you want your operating system both ways, you will need to install Final Cut Pro twice, once under each OS.
Apple system requirements are for OS X version 10.1.1 and Mac OS 9.2.2. Make sure you are using these latest system software updaters.
The two install CDs form a "parity" release. The only differences I'm aware of between the Mac OS 9 and X versions are those related to the OS X interface (e.g., moving items into the Dock) and OSX's enhanced capabilities (safe multitasking, allowance for continuous capture of media over 2GB in size).
If you are running Final Cut Pro 3 under Mac OS X and you need to run DVD Studio Pro, which runs only in 9.x as of this date, reboot into OS 9. It is not recommended to run DVD Studio Pro as a Classic application Under OS X.
Both releases take advantage of G4 multiprocessor and Velocity Engine capabilities. The big performance bumps came in version 2, so speed boosts in version 3 will only come with faster Macs.
THE KITCHEN SINK
Here's a quick look at some of the other new features in version 3.
• A neat new Voice Over Tool for audio capture directly to the timeline from a built-in or external microphone. Position the playhead in your sequence, summon the new tool, listen to the sound cues, and record. The audio appears as a new audio track. Then play back. Not sure if the take is good enough. Do it again and again, each time adding new audio tracks until you hit the 99 audio track limit. Then choose the one you want and delete the rest.
• The new Quick View is another very cool feature. Create an effect, use Quick View to generate a preview in RAM and continuously playback over the targeted effect. Make a change and Quick View re-renders on the fly. The feature works with Offline RT as well as regular DV media thereby providing assistance for PowerBook on slower PowerMac users where real-time effects are not supported.
• Boris Calligraphy, a 3-D title generator plug-in, is now included and accessible within Final Cut Pro 3.
• An enhanced Media Manager supports offline RT format and displays before and after compression size charts.
• A new External Editors features allows you launch some other programs, such as Photoshop, from with Final Cut Pro 3
• As before Peak DV is included for more advanced audio editing outside Final Cut Pro. This time the product is bumped to version 3 to support OS X.
• New CGM FX Script plug-ins provide for 2D and 3D animated titles and video cuts
WHAT'S OUT?
Cleaner 5 EZ, Commotion DV, and Cinema 4D, included in version 2, are no longer part of the package.
PRICING
The Final Cut Pro version 3 upgrade is $299. It is available for ordering now and is scheduled to ship by the end of the year. The full product release is $999 as were the previous full releases.
I
CONCLUSION
Final Cut Pro certainly looks like another must have upgrade. Faster machines benefit from realtime effects in software. All qualified machines benefit from space saving via the offline RT format. OS X users find another piece completed within their new interface. Color correction speaks to the high-end broadcast crowd.
Everyone wins, except maybe Matrox.
That's it for now.
Best,
Fred Balin
MacResolutions
3790 El Camino Real, #2005
Palo Alto, CA 94306
650-565-8120
info@macresolutions.com
©2002,
Fred Balin, MacResolutions
All rights reserved.
Apple, Mac, and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.