Apple Final Cut Pro 7

I was excited to have a look at the new version of Final Cut, Apple’s premiere film editing software, but first I had to organise to borrow a fast machine with enough hard drive space on it and then, just when I got underway exploring its new features, Snow Leopard arrived to throw a spanner in the works, delaying me while I wrote thatcrucial review.

Refreshingly, for one who’s just spent months learning the previous version of Final Cut from MacProVideo tutorials (which were great), this latest version looks exactly the same as the previous version. However, it has many changes (of course), and in some very handy ways.

For a start, the new Share feature (left) is excellent. If you make a film and you want a small version for a website or to put on your iPhone/iPod to show people, plus a high resolution version, you used to have to carefully render and test each one. 

Now you can output them all together, which is an absolute boon, just adding the options you want in a stack similar to Apple’s Automator script-compiling process. FCP7 supports a range of new outputs, including direct export to YouTube, MobileMe, and Blu-ray.

Exporting movies was, frankly, a mission in previous versions and I often yearned for iMovie’s much handier, more useful and easier to understand options. That yearning has been satisfied. (But if this all seems too easy for you, don’t worry: there’s still the usual Export option in the File menu where it always was.) 

Another thing is that a project I made with a broadcast quality camera was looking good in my older version of Final Cut Express (v4), but whenever I exported it, there were strange horizontal lines appearing when the camera panned left to right, or right to left. I must have exported the footage a dozen times to no avail, trying different settings and reading advice on websites. Sometimes I got large, fuzzy files that didn’t have the lines problem, but I wanted sharp. 

Sharp I could get, but only along with the horizontal lines problem (left), so … anyway, the same project exported for DVD in Final Cut Pro 7 was completely fine – sharp, clear, no horizontal warp-lines.

Actually, you can see the promo page for theshort I made using Final Cut here.

Apple has added new ProRes protocols to #7 too. Now you can edit in three new protocols – ProRes 422 (proxy) for offline editing, ProRes 422 (LT) for broadcast quality with reduced file sizes and ProRes 444, for top quality compositing and digital workflows.

Another thing that’s been added is support for Panasonic’s AVC-Intra high quality format, at 50 or 100 fps. 

Up (or down) to speed 

Speed changing is something I like to have some control over. To make this easier, Final Cut Pro 7 has had new speed change tools added, in a Change Speed window (above) available from the Modify menu. With this you can create constant or variable speed changes, and you can do so without rippling the sequence. In other words, if you uncheck the Ripple Sequence checkbox, the speed change you do to one clip will not effect the following clip. You can also create speed changes right in the timeline by adding keyframes and using a pen tool.

This is pretty good. You turn the TimeLine speed tickmarks on by clicking the Toggle Clip Keyframes on at the bottom left of the Timeline window. Select the clip in the timeline you want to modify, and right-click on it. Choose Change Speed from the pop-out menu, (or just hit Command-J) and type in a percentage. Anything under 100% is slower, anything over that is faster. You can also type in a duration – typing 10,000 is 10 seconds. 

I appreciate the tick-marks because they provide an instant visual check – tick-marks closer together means you’ve sped up the clip, and further apart means you’ve slowed it (left). 

The arrow buttons in the Speed Change window let you ramp (or ‘fade’) in and out the speed changes. The straight-arrow buttons are selected by default – these don’t give you the ramping. The next buttons along give you Bezier curves so you can smooth the transition into a change, and out. Apart from unevenly spaced tick-marks on the effected clip, the word ‘Variable’ gets appended to the clip name. 

You can then double-click the modified clip to see it in the viewer, and click the Motion tab to see the effects on a Bezier curve you can drag to manually fine-tune your speed fades; now if you bring up the Speed Change window, you’ll see the Bezier curved-arrow have become active. 

It’s still a bit of backwards and forwards if you ask me, but hey, it seems to be effective, and with use it becomes easier. I like that you can copy and paste the speed changes as attributes and apply them to multiple clips, which is cool for maintaining the pace of changes in your project. Also, you can click-right in the tick-marks’ line to add precise keyframes for starting and ending speed changes.

Collaborators

Do you have any? iChat Theatre has been boosted in Snow Leopard anyway, offering higher resolution in iChat Theatre (now 640x480 pixels). Final Cut Pro 7 builds on this, adding iChat Theatre support so you can collaborate in real time. You send your video to iChat by choosing iChat Theatre Preview, which has been added to the bottom of the View menu. Then everyone can see the same sequences; you can switch between clips and sequences as you talk, and turn on a timecode overlay to help collaborators identify and note specific frames. 

Timecode overlays (left) can also be turned on in the Canvas window (Option-Z).

Alpha is something Apple has been playing withfor a while, adding alpha transparency support to its consumer graphics apps already a couple of years ago (ie to iPhoto, iWeb, Pages, and even Preview with an Instant Alpha selector under the Select button in the toolbar). 

Now you can apply moving mattes in FCP, using Apple-designed transitions (you can download these for free; see below), third-party transitions or from animation programs including Motion 4, which comes with FCP7, of course.  

You can even select a number of clips and add a transition to all of them – what a time saver.

Apple also improved the markers function, including the ability to colour-code markers and to add them in realtime as the video plays.

Finally …

There’s more. Apple has put up a page of free, downloadable resources for Final Cut Pro 7, including alpha transitions (Circle, Countdown, Graph Paper, Leaves, Mist, Sparkles, Static and Veil), colour ‘looks’, compressor droplets and more. If you upgrade to FCP7, check out this page! There’s plenty of extras to consider here. But note that the transitions package weighs in at 768MBs. 

There’s more – MacProVideo has 60 minutes of FCP7 tutorial videos online for free (you normally pay to dpownload these, or subscribe to watch) teaching you how to ‘round-trip’ between Final Cut Pro and Color, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, & DVD Studio Pro.

Motion, Compressor, SoundTrack Pro and Color: that’s in Part Two of this review, comin’ soon ...

Conclusion: Not exactly a whizz-bang upgrade, FCP7 is nevertheless solid, adding greatly to Final Cut’s usefulness factor. 

What’s great  time stretching, more Pro Res formats, Share is great and the whole package is designed to speed up day-to-day edits.

What’s not  there are a few interface quirks. iMovie ’09’s type tools are better.

Needs  well, a stonkin’ Mac. Although this worked fine on a 13inch MBP, I’d soon be wishing for faster render times if I was working on a big project.

Looks 8/10

Usability 8/10

Value for money 8/10

> Apple Final Cut Pro 7, $1999 (upgrade from previous version, $599).

Description  a greatly refined version of Apple’s excellent OS X Leopard. 

System  Mac with 1GB of RAM minimum (2GB of RAM recommended for working with compressed HD and uncompressed SD sources; 4GB of RAM recommended for working with uncompressed HD sources).

ATI or NVIDIA graphics processor (integrated Intel graphics processors notsupported) with 128MB of VRAM; display with 1280-by-800 resolution or higher; 

Mac OS X v10.5.6 or later (works really well in Snow Leopard, 64- and 32-bit); QuickTime 7.6 or later; DVD drive for installation. Requires 4GB of disk space required for applications and 46GB of disk space required for optional content.

Contact Apple NZ Ltd. Available online or from Licensed Apple Resellers.