Final Cut Studio — the auxiliary apps

I’m a fan of Soundtrack Pro. Not so much a fan of its interface, which I would prefer to be more like GarageBand’s or Logic’s, but a fan of its capabilities. It’s great for dealing with pops and clicks in just a few seconds and the DynamicsProcessor filter is really good for adding depth and snap to music and dialogue. It’s like one-step audio mastering.

This new version doesn’t make it easier to use as far as interface goes (it’s not hard to use, but it is different to the aforementioned). But it does add some handy new features. 

Soundtrack Pro is also a multitrack recorder in its own right, and you can also use its sound library to instantly add Foley. Most commonly I just export a soundtrack out of Final Cut into Soundtrack Pro, analyse it for faults, do a little more level control, run the DynamicsProcessor, export the audio and chuck it back into the FCP project. 

However, round-tripping has been made easier to the extent that now you can easily work on the audio straight out of a Final Cut project. Choose File>Send To>Soundtrack Pro Multitrack Project. Soundtrack Pro opens a new multitrack project with the tracks, clips, and edits from the Final Cut Pro sequence, including the synchronised video. 

If I was to quibble, I’d have to say I could get confused: Final Cut allows you to ‘Share’, ‘Send To’ and ‘Export’, all with separate and individual attributes and advantages. Surely this could have been simplified under one heading?

Confusion aside, the Send To commands from FCP are what let you send multi-channel projects straight into Soundtrack Pro, where you can happily work on them. Save them, and the sound updates instantly in FCP, just like with Motion project workflows (of which, more later). 

One of them is Voice-Level Match, which seeks to level out dialogue. This is a new option in the Lift and Stamp dialogue. To use it, you click the Lift tool, and select the Lift Voice Level checkbox in the Sound Palette that appears. 

Then you click on a clip in the timeline. The tool analyses just the dialogue, not the underlying sounds or music bed (well, that’s the theory). Then you stamp that on another clip and it matches the levels. 

This seems to work as advertised, but the real soundie pros might find the concept that Soundtrack Pro knows better than them a little irksome. It’s definitely useful in some instances. 

Advance Time Stretch works like the Audio Stretching Tool, a tool that lets you literally drag a selection of audio longer or shorter. Obviously if you go too far, results will be odd. The Time Stretch tool in the Process menu, however, gives you a new dialogue that lets you set precise parameters for your stretch, in seconds, samples, HH.MM.SS, frames, drop-frames. non-drop frames or to a specific percent. There are three ‘stretcher engines’ installed, and third-party stretcher algorithms can also be installed. 

Noise Reduction – to me, always a strong selling point for Soundtrack – has more sophisticated controls added. For example, you can set the exact harmonic frequency of power line hum you want to remove, and you can set a noise print of something you don’t like and selectively remove it from a range of (or the entire) soundtrack using Noise Reduction in the Process menu. This works like similar tools I use a lot in the excellent Amadeus Pro II software. 

Be warned that dialogue with no background music bed may sound pretty odd if you remove all ambient noise between spoken words.

There are new commands for trimming and extending clips and adding fades. you can record directly into the Multitake Editor to add voiceovers, for example, and the Normalize (sic) function has been enhanced so you can select Peak or RMS algorithms when making level adjustments. A Waveform Zoom function allows you to closely inspect low-amplitude audio clips right in the Timeline.

There are actually a lot more new features, but as with FCP7, Soundtrack looks so similar to the previous version, you’ll be off and operating in no time. With the danger being you may actually miss many of the refinements – I suggest watching Apple’s tutorial new features videos.

All in all, Soundtrack Pro 3 is a solid upgrade. It’s still a little confusing for one used to GarageBand and Logic, there are a few little oddities like the ability to set track colours appearing in two different menus, and on my system (admittedly I also had FCP and Motion running, plus Safari and Nisus Writer Pro) the video dropped out of one project I was working on and refused to reappear. admittedly, I was kinda pushing a little 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Motion

Motion is a 3D animation program. It’s not as full featured as a stand-alone animator, but it’s excellent for adding perfect scrolling text, for example, that doesn’t pixellate horribly, and it has lots of other tricks up its sleeve. 

Now it has more tricks. In a way, Motion can be used as a sophisticated effects processor which 

It now lets you add three dimensional shadows, 3D reflections, depth of field … 

I like the Depth of Field effect – I’d been trying to achieve this with a third party filter in Final Cut, but it left abrupt transitions between ‘out of focus’ and in, making it look most inauthentic. 

The Depth of Field settings are found in the Camera tab of the Inspector, and allow you to set a range of focus by changing the Near Focus and Far Focus parameters. Objects outside that range will be blurred. You can modify the type and amount of blur used to render the out-of-focus effect, giving you a fair bit of control and more realistic effects. 

Credit rolls have always been a mission, if they’re extensive. In Motion 4 you can import a text or rich text file and Motion 4 retains the formatting. This means you can deploy your word processing tools before you go to Motion – at the very, least the spellchecker!

Once within Motion (just get the text file using the Import command) you can edit the text on screen and set it’s scrolling speed and other behaviours with the new Scroll Text behaviour under Text Animation. 

There are new text generators too, like Numbers, Time Date and Timecode.

You can also now work on the individual glyphs of text – for example, setting a drop shadow to a letter using the new Adjust Glyph tool with is an option on the Pointer pop-out. Behaviours once set can be applied to other letters in sequence. 

The new Framing Camera behaviour lets you ‘fly’ from one camera to another, and set speeds accordingly, and Motion 4 lets you use the movement of one object drive another. This is with the new Parameter Linking behaviour – for example, get one bicycle wheel spinning, then apply the spinning behaviour to the other wheel. Multi-touch gesture support has been added for MacBook users, there’s a spirals generator and other new filters, like the Polar filter which creates complex image distortions. 

Color

The colour tools within Final Cut are fairly robust, I reckon, but the standalone Color engine now supports round-tripping with FCP7 like the other components, above. You right-click on a Final Cut sequence and choose Send to Color. The clips arrive with edits, speed changes and multicams all in place. 

Color handles more than just, erm, colour – you can colour-grade of course, in the primary and secondary gamuts, but also change framing (under the Geometry tab) and add vignettes and other colour effects, then output in a range of formats, all the while using film-tracking to relink original RED camera or DPX files. New, high quality formats are also supported, like Pro Res etc.

(There’s a great explanation of Pro Res at PC advisor.)

There are also 20 signature looks provided in Color, and you can download over 90 additional new Apple-designed colour grades too, including Glows, Sepias, Day for Night and Blues and Greens.

Weirdly, on my secondary monitor plugged into a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the tabs themselves were so badly rendered as to be almost unreadable (left). 

Compressor

Apple’s format rendering engine, Compressor 3.5 adds efficiency, providing new batch templates, job actions, and enhanced droplets Apple says are “like miniature encoding applications”.

Blu-ray (including H.264 compatible Blu-ray) and DVD burning is now supported direct from Compressor, and job actions, autsetting detection and enhanced distributable networking all go to making the experience better for you. 

Graphics compositing applications and film workflows that use image sequencing formats for cross-platform compatibility are supported, too.

Compressor 3.5 imports sequences in standard formats including TIFF, Targa, DPX, and OpenEXR. You can specify an audio file to incorporate with the image sequence as you import it – for example, the original field-recorded audio for a clip that was converted to a sequence.

Best of all, you can set a Compressor task going and go back to Final Cut Pro – Compressor doesn’t lock it up any more. 

Cinema Tools

Another element to this powerful package is Cinema Tools 4.5. It’s a database that tracks the relationship between film frames and their corresponding video frames, no matter which video standard you use. Because Cinema Tools is deeply integrated with Final Cut Pro 7, you can use it to edit a film or 24p digital intermediate just as you would edit any other project in Final Cut Pro.

To create a new database, you just drag your files from the Finder into Cinema Tools. The film lists it creates are completely customisable and can include both timecode and keycode in the same list. The lists can then be exported as plain text or as XML, then imported into industry-standard tracking systems used to pull film negatives. 

DVD studio Pro

DVD Studio Pro doesn’t add Blu-ray burning – you have to do that direct from Final Cut in the Share menu, or from Compressor. 

I’ve always found this software difficult to use. It also output a 16:9 ratio film all squashed up – it was only when outputting the footage direct from Final Cut to DVD that the format stayed correct. Sad to say, DVD Studio seems no easier to use at all. I’d advise lessons for this baby. 

Conclusion: a few annoying interface quirks aside, the whole Final Cut Studio HD package is solid, dependable, builds upon an excellent base. It offers a lot of power for the money – but the auxiliary apps that ship alongside don’t seem to have had as much work, and some of the interfaces remain obtuse. Thank goodness for Soundtrack Pro. 

What’s great  Soundtrack Pro is even better.

What’s not  some things are simply hard to learn, and no manuals are included. Good for the planet, bad for the learner.

Needs  some serious training time.

Looks 8/10

Usability 6/10

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.