It must’ve seemed like unnecessary pain to many editors, having to learn a new piece of software when the old one works just fine. And no, I’m not talking about Final Cut Pro X (yet), but Final Cut Pro 7. Years ago, I saw a lot of hostility towards it from Avid guys, and I always thought that, frankly, they were just too lazy to learn a new bit of software.

That sentiment, though, has come back to haunt me as I’m being forced into the world of Adobe’s Premiere Pro for the first time. In my one day’s work with it, it hasn’t impressed me, but is that its problem or mine?

The thing is that when I started using Final Cut Pro 7, having been Avid-only for my first couple of years, I found its interface more natural in many ways than Avid’s. Sure, I was slower on it—I didn’t have all the keyboard shortcuts down pat (I still take some readjustment time when switching jobs done on different NLEs), and I still had to look for basic functions—but whenever I figured something out, there was, more often than not, a sort of ‘ah, that makes sense,’ moment. So I always knew that FCP7 and I would get along just fine.

Not so with others. Avid guys, forced against their will to work with FCP7, would scream, tear their hair out and shout about how ‘crap’ it was, how its way of doing things didn’t ‘make any sense,’ and how (yawn) it wasn’t for pros.

(Maybe this was just in Glasgow. Sorry if I’ve told this story before, but at some point in the noughties I was having a drink with an editor who’d recently relocated from London. He started slagging off FCP7, but when I defended it he said, “I know: it’s great. But since I’ve been here I’ve come to think that I’ll lose work unless I join in bad-mouthing it.”)

Anyway, just as that was dying down Apple pulled the infamous FCPX stunt and made a cat among pigeons look like a yoga class. As early as the announcement I could immediately see that I would love FCPX. Learning it was far, far more painful than the move from Avid to FCP7, of course, but it never seemed like unnecessary pain, and now I’ll cut on it if I have even the ghost of a choice.

Premiere Pro, though? I’m certainly not going to question its suitability for pro work, but do I really need to learn its ways? It may be magnificent (there’s no question it’s more fit for purpose than ole’ Final Cut Pro 7 these days); it just seems like a retrograde step learning a new app with that old track-based timeline that FCPX has done away with (to its benefit, in my opinion). Avid’s still there for that old paradigm, after all. It’s like learning how to work a new fax machine that’s much faster than the old kind: great, but we have internet now, yeah?

Sure, it’s another feather in the cap, string in the bow, NLE on the CV, you might say. But until now no one’s ever asked if I have this particular feather, that particular string. This is a job, though, I am pro (supposedly), and I am being asked.

This pain just got necessary. To be continued…

Gotta say, I agree with this post regarding Final Cut Pro 7. I just finished a job with it and, sadly, it wasn’t up to the task.

Admittedly, I’d over-estimated it, recommending against transcoding footage from a C300 (which poor old FCP7 insists is XDCAM HD422) when the client indicated that storage space was limited. I know we could’ve transcoded to proxies, but the initial tests with a few clips showed no performance hit and I figured it would preclude pernickety re-linking come Online Time. However, when trying to deal with an hour-long timeline and gazillions of clips, FCP7 continually freaked out.

And I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not just dead, it’s bean dead for nearly two years (if you count from the FCPX announcement rather than the release). That’s a long time not to have replaced it. Sure, you can say it works as well as it ever did, but we’re not using the media we always did. We’re hiring the latest cameras, using the latest codecs, so, in real terms, Final Cut Pro 7 does not work as well as it always did.

There’s also the dead bug problem. All software has bugs, but I’ve always been able to live with them because you knew that somewhere, someone was working to fix them. There were enough examples of updates that addressed that specific bug that you’d been ranting about, and it was like letting out a piss that had been getting painful.

The instant Final Cut Pro X was announced, though, you knew that no one was lifting a finger for version 7. It would crash and you’d get the standard ‘Final Cut Pro quit unexpectedly. Do you want to send a report to Apple?’ and it seemed like a joke. Did these reports now go in a killfile? Maybe the best ones got read out at the Infinite Loop Christmas party. “Quieten down: this one’s a belter. ‘Crashed while dragging keyframes on a .png that was’ — get this! — ‘12,238 by 9,496!’ Ahahahahaha!”

Whatever. They certainly weren’t helping to improve the software. The problem you’re having? You’ll have it forever. That was the thing, for me, that really made Final Cut 7 really feel dead.

And yet I still hear people saying, “I suppose I’d better think about where to go next.” Mr. Ostertag is right though, the day’s getting late for that kind of talk.

For me, Avid’s been a constant throughout my career, so it’s there for the broadcast jobs. When I get the chance I use Final Cut Pro X because it’s already the best way cut shots together, in my opinion, and has the scope to go stratospheric with its new paradigm in the way that the track timelines can only tinker themselves better as far as I can see. I still mean to give Premiere a serious go, though. Hell, I’ve bought it, and a FCPX-shy director I work with is making noises about using it for a feature next year, so I’ll start mucking about as soon as I get a chance.

But I’d be happy to abandon Final Cut Pro 7 forever, frankly. I only relented and installed it on my iMac because the deadline for the job I mentioned at the start was bearing down and I needed to take it home if I was ever to see my wife. I had hoped to keep it just on my old MacbookPro, and only for those times I needed to convert an old project. I didn’t want it on a new machine.

That’s not that I didn’t love it. I did. I loved my father, but I don’t want him exhumed. He’s dead, and so is FCP7. Better face it.

If the keyword editor is open, the act of committing a keyword (or keywords) to a clip leaves the clip itself in that kind of half-selected limbo where its highlight is grey and not blue. Like it’s selected, but in an inactive window (which, I suppose, is what it is).

[pic of situation]

Here, type all the keywords you want to apply to the next clip (even if there’s a shortcut), select them all and cut them, leaving the field blank. Then click on the next clip and paste the keywords in.

The clip will vanish, but it’ll have all the keywords you wanted associated with it.

If there’s one level-headed criticism levelled at him, though, by fans and haters alike, it’s that he can be self-indulgent. He can, and has, had moments where he’s seemed to go in a direction that’s hard to follow{{1}} [[1]]Could be too brilliant, could be too crap.[[1]] and appeared disdainful of anyone not up for it. But you don’t stay vital and successful in the creative arts by being unconcerned with the audience.

That’s why I liked this exchange in the Melbourne Sunday Herald which came to my attention via prince.org, particularly the part about planning the set list for any given gig. That this supposed diva has an awareness of how long it’s been since a particular part of the world’s heard When Doves Cry and plans accordingly, humbles me.{{2}} That he has designed a major tour so he can appraise the audience on the night and exercise what he calls “crowd control” with his choice of song (and version of song) speaks not of an artist with no regard for his audience.

All too often, though, I’ve been faced with work—short films, mostly—by new artists (and some who should know better) who have utterly neglected the fact that some poor sap’s gonna hafta, y’know, sit through the damn thing. And those’re just the times when I know ’cause I’ve been in the room; they have been countless times when I’ve been an audience member myself with the strong feeling that the value of my time and attention didn’t figure at all in the planning and execution of what I was watching. What’s more, I don’t believe anyone who’s produced in me that sensation has gone on to do great things.

Here’s the editing bit: in our collaborative process, we’re the last chance, the last pair of hands than can make structural changes.{{3}} My little motto is, “50% of the job is having a good, productive relationship with whoever else is in the room,” which means you’re not there to be superior, judgemental or any other dickish thing. You can offer suggestions, you can steer the course somewhat. If—and I must stress that this happens rarely and most often with newbies—no one before you has thought of the poor sap in the audience, then you must certainly not neglect your duty to her. Do, as always, what you can.

After all, even the man who changed his name to O(+> and made Under the Cherry Moon respects and caters to his audience.

[[2]]Maybe I’m romantic, but I picture this role being performed for most great artists by a cigar-chomping manager, pouring over spreadsheets and begging the difficult, temperamental performer to concede—just a little—to commerce. It’s the fact that Prince needs no such person to respect his audience that impresses me.[[2]]

[[3]]Wonders can be performed in the grade and the dub, but what happens and when is (or certainly should be) locked by then.[[3]]

In my day, my young ’uns, faster frame rates than the usual 23.97, 24, 25 and 29.97 frame rates were only useful if you wanted smooth slow motion. With Peter Jackson boldly using 48 frames per second for The Hobbit, the idea that they could be used as a playback option has a good chance of taking hold. The effect is the smoother motion that TV viewers associate with news shows, talk shows, daytime soaps and certain multi-camera sitcoms. To the editor, that’s known as interlaced, and it’s a pain and a remnant of antiquated broadcast systems. Can we now consign it to the cutting room floor of history?

In Britain we use PAL, which is 25fps (so our over-cranking’s usually 50fps{{1}}). In interlaced footage, though, every other scan line (horizontal lines of which there are 625) is drawn, first all the odd numbers (line 1, line 3, line 5, etc.), then all the even.{{2}} So instead of showing you 25 complete frames every second (as would happen in ‘progressive’ video and traditional film), it shows you 50 half-frames. This is why it appears smoother than, say, movies. Often, though, you want that cinematic effect, so you would artificially deinterlace footage to make it progressive.{{3}}

Conversely, it’s traditionally held that viewers are resistant to news and current affairs being brought to them progressively. They associate it with drama, fiction and, basically, stuff that isn’t true. Interlacing feels live and somehow more trust-worthy. So we stick with it, even though LCDs and plasma displays can’t actually display it, and need extra hardware to deinterlace it on the fly (with varying results).

Also, progressive has its problems for the TV editor. If your camera operator has panned very slowly or super-quick (whip pan) then you’re fine, but anything in between risks a technical fail.{{4}} This is because it has a tendency to judder. I admit to becoming exasperated by these failures, as I’ve been aware of that judder in the cinema all my life. Part of the cinematographer’s craft is avoiding it by having a fixed point of focus (that’s audience’s focus, not the camera’s) in a frame with panning or other movement; in other words, something in the frame (a spaceship, a speeding car) stays roughly in the same place and so doesn’t judder while everything around it, which the audience isn’t looking directly at, does.

Often, though, it can’t be avoided. You’ve seen, no doubt, The Shawshank Redemption. Famously, it bombed in cinemas but was a smash on home video. Well it didn’t bomb in the theatres through any fault of mine: I saw it nine times, sometimes following the same battered print from cinema to cinema, and dragged friends along to the point of harassing them. It was photographed by Roger Deakins, one of the modern masters. You know that bit when Red gets out and makes the trip to Buxton where he finds the letter from Andy?{{5}} Well, you know he’s going to Buxton because Andy told him to a few scenes ago, so you’re looking out for the sign on the road when Red hops off the back of the truck. Let me tell you: in the cinema the word, Buxton, juddered so much it was barely legible. Back then all TV was analogue and interlaced. Fifteen years later I take phone calls from technical review teams saying, “This progressive stuff judders.” Well, no shit.{{6}}

In one case, a lot of footage for a progressive show had been shot at 50fps, ostensibly so that we could slow down any shot we wanted. The whole thing, near enough, was over-cranked. To solve the judder problem, I actually took those 50 frames on certain shots and created a genuinely interlaced version which passed tech.{{7}}

Nevertheless, progressive, from and editing point of view, is easy to work with (you can never land on a frame that’s half ’n’ half) and aesthetically pleasing (it’s cool and ‘cinematic’). So we’re stuck with both.

Ah, but the game’s changing. On that show where we shot at 50fps, if we watched the footage at 50fps, it had that same smoothness that we all know from interlaced. Indeed, I once cut a music video that had half the footage shot at 50fps by mistake and in context it looked great because it gave the interlaced effect on a computer screen{{8}}. Alas, because it’s so hard to turn 25fps progressive into interlaced-looking video, we had to abandon the serendipitous error because the conceit wasn’t consistent.

But here’s Peter Jackson, shooting The Hobbit at 48fps (movies are normally 24fps), and intending to actually screen it that way. Unsurprisingly, the initial reaction was, “But that looks like cheap TV.” Well, I’ll have to wait ’til Christmas to see how, exactly, it looks, but if this catches on there’d be every reason to abandon interlaced video forever.

At first, these double frame rates, 48, 50, 60fps, could take the place of interlaced now, on the news, on game shows, on sport, etc. However, if Jackson pulls off the Hobbit films, and James Cameron shoots his Avatar sequels at 60fps, maybe we’ll become more broad-minded about the nature of our image in its varying contexts. All those old interlaced dramas, from I, Claudius, to Brideshead Revisited and—yes—Dr. Who weren’t so bad, after all, were they?

;

[[1]]Called ‘over-cranking’ after the method of winding film through a camera faster to achieve slow motion when it was played back at ‘normal’ speed.[[1]]

[[2]]These are also called Upper and Lower respectively[[2]]

[[3]]Don’t quote me on this, but I believe this may have been happening as recently as Christopher Eccleston’s Dr. Who. I remember the pilot leaked and fans freaking out that it was interlaced (as traditional Dr. Who always was), looking cheap as a result. It was certainly broadcast as progressive, so if reports were true then it would have been made progressive in post. Not long after that, though, they began shooting progressively in HD.[[3]]

[[4]]Shows for broadcast have to pass a technical test to make sure it’s up to standard, both aesthetically and within ‘legal’ limits of luminance, etc.[[4]]

[[5]]I blame that letter every time I get one that starts, “I hope this finds you, and finds you well.” Any email that starts that way gets deleted before I read the rest.[[5]]

[[6]]In one such call, where the broadcast-ability of a show was in question, I gave up and said to the dude, “Do me a favour: go to the movies tonight and see Scott Pilgrim versus the World. First of all, it’s a great movie and you’ll thank me. Second, it’s riddled with so much judder it makes my show look like a milk smoothie.”[[6]]

[[7]]To me, having parts of your show suddenly go from progressive to interlaced for a second and half while the camera pans is far more distracting than a bit of progressive judder that Roger Deakins is fine with.[[7]]

[[8]]Computer displays have been progressive since the 70s, even the old CRTs.[[8]]

The show featured a lot of live music. It was a holiday weekend, and I’d taken the work drive home to get ahead of the game a little. The situation arose when I’d made lots of lovely multicam clips of the performances. Each had one big clip of the live vision mix of between 45 minutes and an hour, plus two additional angles for only those portions that I wanted. In legacy Final Cut, I would have needed separate multiclips for each portion, but in X I could have one multiclip for all. Nice.

Having made them all, I started laying down my project. Then, it crashed. It happened when I was trying to extend a placeholder. (Why placeholders are so tough on resources I’ve no idea.) This is where I admit that my old MacBook Pro isn’t officially up to the task of running FCPX. It had been, back at version 10.0.0, but 10.0.1 brought with it a ‘Graphics configuration not supported’ dialogue every time it opens. It still does open, and runs pretty well, even with multicam clips over a Firewire 800 drive. I’m fairly certain, though, that the crash that stared this whole thing would’ve been far less likely on a more recent machine. [1. That’s not certain, though, and even the 12-core, 12 Gb 1333 MHz Mac Pro at work will crash, you know.] I don’t know if background tasks were running. I had ‘Create optimised media for multicam clips’ selected in preferences, but as the clips were captured as ProRes422(HQ) they were optimised already, surely.

So far, no biggie. When I opened again, though, I found my multicam clips were populated with blank clips. Not gap clips, but clips that seemed to be all alpha, if you know what I mean, all nothingness. No warnings, no error messages, just wrong.

Not only that—they couldn’t be fixed. I tried replacing the clips in the Angle Editor, the way you can in the Timeline, but it just seemed to overwrite instead of replace, and then, immediately, crash.

Neither could I relink the clips from the Angle Editor—a much-touted ability as far as clips in the Projects and Events are concerned, added in 10.0.3.

Giving up on rescuing the clips, I tried to delete them, but whenever I did I got a one-two of error messages that I hadn’t seen before.

First this, that the Trash was somehow not ‘supported’.

Then the killer, that nothing could be saved, and that I better quit, pronto.

I should point out that I had 2.6 TBs available, moved no Events and recently checked the permissions. It was right, though: nothing stuck after the warning, not even after the old duplicate-project-to-force-a-save trick. And the Event in question always needed to be restored, although the back-up was increasingly recent.

On the umpteenth restart I simply made a new multicam clip, which seemed to work fine. I then tried to delete the corrupt one it replaced, only to be met with the ‘cannot save’ error. Making another multicam clip just for the hell of it, I quit manually. Another restart, another ‘restore from back-up’ message.

Neither new clip made it. The next time, I made a new multiclip, then manually quit before angering the Final Cut God by touching a corrupt multiclip. (Had to wait a fair while for the waveform to build, not knowing how the Final Cut God would react to cancelling it.)

I could tell from the ‘restore from back-up’ warning that the new clip hadn’t stuck—the back-up was the same one I’d used on my last restart, according to the timestamp.

So I made a new Event and dragged all the (non-corrupted) clips into it from the corrupted Event. Final Cut reported that there were ‘shared references’ between the two Events (presumably meaning that in couldn’t just move clips that were being used by a project) and that the clips would be copied. Despite the fact that the Original Media folder had only QuickTime References in it, and the option to copy media was deselected in preferences, all the media would be copied into the new Event’s folder. With 300+ GBs to copy that’s an overnight job at FCPX’s pace.

Or so I thought. In the morning, only 50% had been done, and with a screening at noon I couldn’t wait for it. Problem: it wouldn’t let me quit. It insisted that I’d have to wait for the media management task to finish. Would cancelling the task anger the Final Cut God? I’d soon know. Already 10 minutes late for work, and only 60% done, I force quit FCPX and relocated to the office edit suite.

Because I had a screening with the client, I forwent dicking about and just recreated my multicam clips in the new Event as quickly as I could and got the project ready for viewing. All temptation to play about with the issue on a more robust system was allayed with the promise that, after lunch, I’d go media management crazy.

The force-quit hadn’t ruined everything (thank Final Cut God). Curiously though, it made no attempt to restart the copying process. Also, although background tasks had been at 60% when I force-quit, the Finder reported that the new Event was less than half the size of the corrupted one (120 Gb compared with over 300). Opening the Original Media folders in each showed that the new Event was quite happy, all of a sudden, to use QuickTime Reference files for all the ones that hadn’t copied. Conclusions: copying clips to other Events creates references first and foremost, then replaces them with full-bloodied clips in the background as normal (a process you can interrupt without harming anything, despite what the dialogue box says); and the background task percentage in FCPX was determined by something other than file size, most likely number of clips (i.e. it had copied 60% of the number of clips, not 60% of the media as a whole).

In the Finder, I tried moving the corrupted Event’s folder into a different directory on the same drive [2. precluding actually moving the media from their physical locations on the hard disc], having shut down Final Cut. Upon reopening, I found that it seemed to know where all the clips had moved to, but in the Project Library the missing Event was flagged up. Confusingly, the Inspector now referred to it by its original name, not what I’d renamed it to within Final Cut. Not liking the nasty warnings, I quit Final Cut again, moved the corrupted Event back to the Final Cut Events folder and reopened FCPX.

Now, the Inspector for each project [3. I make dupes every so often as I do with sequences in Final Cut Legacy and Avid] showed the corrupt Event (back to the name I’d given it) as present and correct.

This is where the Modify Event References button at the bottom of the Inspector’s Properties tab came into play. The dialogue that opened showed all the events containing clips that appeared in the project. To my relief, it recognised my copied clips in the new Event alongside those in the corrupted one, and helpfully reported that, in the case of such duplicates, if I wanted to change which Event’s clips the project used, I need only drag that Event to a higher position on the list. When I did this, placing my new Event above the corrupted one and hit OK, the project immediately reflected the change. I was on my way to being able to delete the bad Event and get on with my life.

I couldn’t resist, though, one more try at just deleting the offending multicam clips and saving the original Event. The only thing that this would prove would be whether my old laptop or Final Cut Pro X itself was responsible for all those crashes the day before, all those funny ‘cannot save changes to projects or Events’ messages I’d been getting. Not the most useful information, and there was a risk that I was inviting the weird corruption back into my life, here on the verge of getting rid of it. Why I needed to know such a thing, I don’t know. I just know that I did.

I selected the first corrupted multicam clip, brought up the contextual menu and selected the last option: Move to Trash. The pointer turned to the spinning beach ball and then it came up. “Final Cut Pro cannot save changes to projects or Events. The disk where your projects of Events are located may be full or unavailable, projects of Events may have been moved, or permissions may have changed. To avoid losing your work, quit Final Cut Pro.”

I quit.

I restarted the machine, just to be safe. I opened Final Cut Pro X to check that my new Event was still good, and that my projects were dutifully referring to it and not the corrupted one. They were. Bullet dodged. I then shut down Final Cut, moved the corrupted Event out of the Events folder (but not off the disk—you never know) and started Final Cut again. All was well.

So I lost about a day to this nonsense, and a day that should’ve been a holiday at that. All I know now is how to modify Event references and that it wasn’t my faithful old laptop’s fault. Not entirely, anyway. But that knowledge, somehow, was worth it.

Final Cut has never let you specify that the clip you’re capturing is anamorphic{{1}}; only when it’s been digitised can you instruct it to display correctly, either by checking the box in the Browser or Item Properties/ Format dialogue.

In one of the later updates to Final Cut Legacy (perhaps from 6 to 7, I can’t remember), exporting a QuickTime movie from and anamorphic timeline would result in an anamorphic QuickTime. Sounds obvious, but previously one had to go into the export settings and insist that the QuickTime be anamorphic. This means that the QuickTime file “knew” that it was anamorphic and would automatically display correctly. Hell, if you re-imported it into Final Cut, it knew it was anamorphic without the user having to check the box.

However, checking the box in Final Cut Legacy did not affect the original file. Outside of Final Cut it would still display at 4:3 and make everyone look like the diet was working. This was never a problem, since, traditionally, once the clip was inside Final Cut, and Final Cut knew it was supposed to be anamorphic, you never need think about it again. Now, though, there’s a bit of a problem.

Final Cut Pro X doesn’t have the anamorphic checkbox. If the QuickTime file you’re importing “knows” that it’s an anamorphic QuickTime, then FCPX will respect it. If not, there’s no way to have FCPX treat it as one. Sure, you can use the transform tools to stretch out the image to 16:9, but this involves FCPX rendering a new image rather than just displaying the original one correctly, which takes CPU time (albeit in the background) and is just plain wrong. Not to mention a pain when you’ve got a ton of clips that all need the Transform effect applied to them.

As usual, when tasked with a problem whose very starting point is a mystery{{2}}, I hit the forums. What I found was a whole bunch of frustrated editors grappling, not solving.

In the absence of a solution, the only hope is a workaround, and graham106 on the official Apple forum came up with two.

graham106 UK

Re: How do I tell Final Cut Pro X that my DV PAL Anamorphic video is anamorphic?

Apr 11, 2012 5:03 AM (in response to olafromenskede)

So although Atom is free, it’s hard{{3}} and, crucially, a one-file-at-a-time deal. No good. As it happened to be pay day, I resolved to buy Pro Media Tools, only to find there’s a 15-day free trial. Not only that, but it’s fully featured during that time. As I could accomplish everything I needed to do in half an hour, thanks to its super-handy batch processing, that would be fourteen days, twenty-three and a half hours superfluous to my requirement.

Here’s the thing with that, though. Immediately, I liked these guys. I like the software they’ve made, I think the price is fair and letting the trial be fully-featured is definitely a move to be encouraged. I resolved to invest.

I can imagine Apple’s attitude to this: anyone who wants to shoot on DigiBeta is living in the noughties, and can use FCP7 or Avid or Premiere or a linear tape suite. It would be so, so easy for them to stick a button in, I can only assume this is a conscious decision. To be honest, they’re right. This project is destined to be broadcast in SD only, but that’s already a rare situation. The HD version of anamorphic{{4}} isn’t deemed good enough to broadcast as “HD” so it’s square pixels all down the line from now on.

DigiBeta will continue to have its supporters, and will always be the king of standard def. But that’s only because there will never now be a standard def format to supersede it.

[[1]]Anamorphic means stretching the image to make it wider. In film, that’s done with a lens, both when filming and projecting. Digitally, it’s just a little metadata that says, “Hey, instead of displaying the pixels in this image as squares, display them as rectangles.” The footage has to have been shot as anamorphic (i.e. everyone’s too tall and thin if the pixels are square) for it to come out looking right[[1]]

[[2]]In the old days you could use QuickTime Player Pro to specify any apparent size of the video you wanted. i.e. I know this video’s 720 x 576, but show it as 1024 x 576, will you please?. Or 10 x 10, or 4000 x 7000, it didn’t matter. Alas, QuickTime Player Pro became QuickTime Player X, and all you can do now is make an iPhone version.[[2]]

[[3]]The instructions Graham points to are for NTSC, as far as I can tell, not the PAL that I use.[[3]]

[[4]]1440 x 1080 masquerading as 1920 x 1080[[4]]

The thing is, the only thing you can’t do within FCPX is log, digitise and lay back to tape when you’re finished. Everything between digitising and laying off never involved tape anyway, not since the old linear suites.{{2}}[[2]] I had the pleasure of wrestling with linear suites at drama school. If you were fortunate enough to have adjacent shots on different rushes tapes, the beast could actually preview an edit before you committed it to a third tape. Fuuuuun.[[2]]

As Apple were keen to point out as FCPX raised howls of protest in June 2011, Final Cut Pro 7 and previous (henceforth “Final Cut Legacy”) would still work as well as ever (just never, now, any better). So you could still use it to do your tape stuff, which is what I did on my current project.

The one thing I learned was that metadata in Final Cut Pro 7 isn’t intrinsic to the media file. Pretty basic and obvious, I suppose, but as Final Cut Legacy was the beginning and end of the process{{3}}[[3]] …with optional detours to Motion and Soundtrack Pro.[[3]] (I left Color and ProTools to others if I could help it), it’s never been an issue.

So, all the stuff you can put in in Log and Capture is only for Final Cut Legacy’s benefit; aside from the file name, nothing is transferable, it seems.

So what? You can enter all that stuff in Final Cut Pro X, just leave it ’til then. Ah, but Final Cut Pro X doesn’t have that little checkbox that told Legacy that the clip was anamorphic.

And that is an issue that deserves its own post.

(via litreactor.com)

So… Final Cut Pro X, eh? Lot of chatter about it. Lot of controversy.

I bought it the day it came out expecting to jump in and find an editing Nirvana. Instead I found something that made my head hurt. I believe this reaction was not unique. Being slightly busy, I resolved to keep an open mind and give it a proper go when I had the time. Turns out that time is now: six months later!

I want to put my thoughts about it down properly, so I’m not going to do so here, now. I want to finish my initial experiment so I can report fully, but it is getting under my skin. So much so that I dreamt a haiku last night that I could remember when I woke up. It goes like this:

New app taxes mind

Solace in lovers’ embrace—

Magnetic timeline.

Well, I was asleep.

As a teaser I’ll just say that it’s anyone’s guess if Final Cut Pro X will ever be a contender against the traditional track-based editors in professional workflows, but simply considered as a way of editing video, and especially as a way of managing media, it’s simply marvellous.

There are very good reasons why many pro shops need to switch to Avid (or even Premiere) now that Final Cut Pro 7 has been End of Lifed, but surely that’s good? I had the impression that Avid (or DigiDesign, or whoever they are) weren’t doin’ so hot; it’s good that they’re benefiting, good for everyone. Apple, on the other hand, is doing very well, thank you, and can stand to lose some pro customers in the short term. They certainly no longer need the “life-support” that many pro users felt they gave them in the ’90s. It’s true that the pro market probably kept Apple afloat during those dark times, but I don’t hold with the idea, put forward by some, that Apple now owes those users, and should take profit-killing decisions out of gratitude. Bought Apple gear in the ’90s purely out of charity did you? Wished you were on Windows the whole time? Bullshit. They stuck with Apple because Apple served their needs better than anyone at the time. If that’s no longer the case, take your custom elsewhere. Oh, you have.

Anyway, I’ll give my full account in due course; suffice to say that I don’t hate Apple for Final Cut Pro X, think they might just have done exactly the right thing, but don’t expect it to be any use to high-end broadcast or big-budget movies just yet (or maybe ever, but we’ll see).

Stay tuned…