Final Cut Pro X
Monday, 08 August 2011
Final Cut has jumped a couple of versions – it’s now called Final Cut Pro X, and this (apart from a likeness to ‘OS X’) is probably because the version is 10, whereas my previous up-to-date Final Cut was 7.0.3.
This X version has been incredibly contentious, with some Final Cut professionals panning the software and even demanding (and sometimes even getting) their money back. The main causes for concern seem to be FCPX not being able to open legacy projects – which I concur is a pretty incredible thing to overlook – and no longer supporting dual monitors.
Now, there’s one viewer, and it displays whatever your Playhead is over, whether it’s in the clips bin or timeline. With only one monitor, you can click the full-screen icon for a full-screen run-through, and Escape to go back – but this isn’t as good as having your full-screen viewer on a separate monitor.
However, I don't quite understand this criticism as there is an option in the View menu to Show Viewer on Second Display, or to Show Events on Second Display, and this works really well (below). You get a nice big picture of your efforts, and more space in your main editing layout. I like it – it works for me.
The controversy led to some professionals saying Apple is turning its back on them, effectively producing a ‘prosumer iMovie’ in the stead of the proper professional tool everyone was expecting.
And I can imagine the professional disdain at booting something up that looks like – the thought! – iMovie. Good gracious, that’s a free package (on new Macs)! And to be fair, it does look like iMovie and has the same skim thing, where you move your mouse over a clip and it plays in the view window, which is actually very handy, thank you very much. But hey, press a blue button over on the right and it’s off – you need to be aware of this as edits can happen at the skimmer position instead of at the playhead. So: warning. I reckon as soon as you start editing, turn that skimming off – but it’s handy to have on when you’re in the sort-through-your-clips mode.
And quelle horreur! There’s an instant exposure fix button like Enhance in iPhoto! But hey, this is handy, especially with supplied footage you need to fix in a hurry – especially considering you can pick one frame of another clip to make a colour match. And you can tune it after it’s applied, in the Inspector.
I am no Final Cut Pro-fessional, let me make that clear. I have made a couple of music videos with it and a short film, to learn how to use it. So I am conversant with Final Cut.
I am making a short film with the latest version – I will post a link to that once it’s done. (I haven’t made any money form these efforts, or tried to charge for them.)
You can watch the short film, All Of Me, which I made with Final Cut Pro 7. (The script was by Guy Hamling, who also helped edit. It was shot by Tony Smith and the actors are Paul Ellis and Liesha Ward-Knox.)
Other caveats
Tabs are gone from the Timeline, so it’s not as easy to switch between open projects. But you now have Back and Forward arrows just above the Timeline to the right which effectively give you back that functionality, allowing you to switch instantly between open projects, but this isn’t as good as it was in FCP7.
Final Cut Pro X demands learning some new routines – and if you’re a video pro, that may be a hard ask in a busy workflow, and I have to think that some of the resistance comes from this fact more than anything else. And hey, you’re going to have to learn new stuff, and new routines, sometimes, right? If you don’t, you may be ready for retirement. Among those new features:
Pressing the Delete key with a clip selected does a ‘ripple delete’ – the clips close up. But you have a Replace with Gap option – that’s Shift Delete (or Forward Delete on an extended keyboard). You can, of course, also see these options in the Edit menu.
There’s no Save – FCPX just keeps things saved, and likewise there’s no imposing of renders into your workflow. After a certain time, things just render. You keep working. And don’t worry, you can control these: click on the left-icon in the timer readout to bring up Background Tasks wherein you can turn things off. On my not-the-latest MacBook Pro, this was a dream: before I’d have to wait up to 30 minutes before I could do anything else while a clip rendered. The impact of background rendering on any workflow is dramatic.
So besides the amateurish looking package (if only by comparison to the also-surprisingly-able iMovie), Final Cut Pro X is a very good program, in my opinion. It’s a whole new package. Good points include way faster rendering, Soundtrack Pro audio editing (see below) wrapped into the product rather than standalone, and many great plugins and presets.
FCPX does not remember in and out points you set them, then click on another clip (the workaround is to mark it, again a la iMovie, as a ‘Favorite’).
Remember ‘three-point editing’? That’s a little limited in FCPX. Three-point editing basically refers to an In and Out point on a clip the timeline, and an In point in your event viewer to make place the edit. FCPX sets an automatic in if you only set an out, and an auto-Out if you only set an In. So you have to get your head around that.
Now, you can specify a range where you want an edit to go. For this, set In and Out points in the Timeline, or use the Range Selection tool which is the R key. This is a speedup – press R on your keyboard and drag over the clip in the Timeline for instant range marking, with In and Out points.
New, but good
Among the new things to get used to, the Replace Edit works differently. It lets you exchange one clip for another. It uses the existing duration of a clip in a sequence to determine what length the replacement should be – drag the new one over and a list of options pops up – the Replace from Start and Replace from End options mean you can do really fast edits. If the media you are moving is too short to replace fully, you get a warning the resulting clip will be shorter than the original.
Likewise, new Connected Edits should turn out to be real timesavers. Drop a new clip above one in the timeline and if connects to the clip below. The playhead goes through and plays the top clip when it gets to it, letting you fine-tune your edits. The ‘connected’ part comes from the fact that if you move either the top or bottom clip, they stay connected, and you can stack up your connects, giving you really, fast, easy flexibility that may result in a new look to movies, or at least just faster, more flexible on-the-fly compositing.
Below: a Connected Edit, with the connection circled.
The Clip Appearance button down at bottom right by the zoom slider gives you several options for how to view your clips, plus a clips height adjustment. You can view just the audio, just the video etc. In this dialogue you can also turn off the clip connection indicators. (They show up when you click on a clip – it’s a bit tidier – see below about connected clips.)
Moving a connected clip shows the point it’s connected to in the viewer – another great way to visually fine tune your edits.
When you Overwrite to Primary Storyline, they collapse down into the primary storyline. This overwrites the video, but, rather strangely, overlaps the audio, which you will have to clean up (re-trim) yourself.
I like the fact you can do Video Only or Audio Only edits, meaning you can use one component only of a clip to make edits to or with. This is very useful, particularly with Connect Edits (see below).
I also like the ability to add a ‘black’ gap (Option-W), which you can trim longer or shorter (it’s 3 seconds by default). You can also add a placeholder, which lets you put a note on it, for example ‘new clip to come’; ‘add shot two’ etc.
This is a configurable placeholder – you can change the backgrounds, the number of people, the type of shot (long, close etc) and more in the Inspector. Nifty.
This Inspector, by the way, takes the place of that second Viewer window you used to get, which you could (very handily) place on another monitor as you worked, and watch edited run-throughs – this is one of the justified complaints about FCPX.
Remember the complicated patch panel in which you worked out what source of audio etc you would edit? That’s simplified – now you use the Inspector, click on the Audio tab and your audio channels appear when you expand Channel Configuration.
Inspector also lets you access all sorts of things like crop and move, which you can fine tune with numerical input, and there are reset buttons if you go too far or change your mind. This also gives you direct access to opacity and blend modes (linear, burn, screen etc). I find this really useful, as I found the way you applied things like this in FCP7 really counterintuitive, although I guess you grew to like it if you used it a lot.
Note that Alpha Channels are built in, giving you direct access to masking and other effects.
Stabilization (sic)
Perhaps also borrowed from iMovie, you can apply stabilisation to any clip, also from the Inspector. This enlarges the image the more you want it stable, to end up with a stable centre section, but it may be worthwhile as a last resort and you can customise the tradeoff.
A Rolling Shutter control is for DSLRs, to address a problem typical of CMOS (ie, Canon) sensors and those that work in a similar way – that’s the wavey effect you get sometimes when the camera is moving. Now you can try and correct for it.
Speed keys
Learning the command keys will speed you up again. For example, make a selection in the clip bin, and whack your W key to insert it at where the playhead is in your timeline. D performs a standard Overwrite Edit forward from where the playhead is. And there are variations – for example, Shift D inserts it back form the playhead, instead of ahead of it – Shift and the other keys works in the same way.
To move the Playhead within the timeline, the Up arrow goes to the edge of the next clip and the Down arrow to the edge of the previous. The Home and End keys now take you to the beginning and end of sequences. There’s also direct access, numerically, to the timeline: type the Plus symbol and a number and you bounce to that position FCPX figures out if you’re referring to frames or seconds. This can be a real boon: Plus 25, for example, takes you 25 frames forward and the timer tells you how many seconds that is at your set frame rate. The Minus keys works exactly the same way. Press Escape to clear the input-position direction.
Markers are a bit more configurable – press M at any point to set one, double-click on it to set it as a To Do (it goes red) or set it to Completed (it goes green). Handy.
Pressing Control-Semi-colon and Control-Apostrophe take you to the next and previous markers.
Zoom zoom
To my relief, the zoom commands for the Timeline are better. Command Plus and Command Minus zoom in and out, and here’s the kicker – they zoom around the playhead instead of … who knows where? Inevitably the wrong place, anyway, in FCP7.
Zooming goes right into samples now, too. You can control this in the View menu – even turn it off if that’s too much information – literally – for you.
The zoom tool under the Select pointer lets you drag over an area to fill the timeline with your selection – handy. And two-finger swipes on the trackpad let you swipe backwards and forwards in the timeline.
Get used to hitting A on your keyboard to get the Selector arrow and Z for the zoom magnifier. Once you’ve got it (and it’s the same as in previous FCPs), you fly through your work.
On the downside, the zoom slider at bottom right isn’t dynamic – you drag it and let go and see what zoom you’re at. It’s only really good for the right-out zoom, and I hope Apple fixes this.
There’s also a new Timeline Index, accessed from a little button at lower left (the shortcut is Shift-Command-2). It shows all the clips in the project and you can use it to navigate through the clips. You can add tags to the clips and navigate by these keywords, too – you can jump right to an area of a clip instantly. You can filter it to only look for Audio or Video clips. Here you can also tick the To Do markers when you’ve done them, so you can do a run-through and check your project off when nearing completion.
The Index is searchable, too, either right in the Timeline Index or any time by pressing Command F. This is another nice and handy time saver.
Shift-Z fits the timeline in the window, which is also handy.
Timings
The renders in FCPX are not only in the background, they’re also faster. I changed the speed of a 1080p HD clip (shot on a Canon 5D MkII) from 20 seconds to 1 minute, and Final Cut Pro 7 rendered it in 3 minutes 25 seconds.
That was over three minutes in which I used to have to sit twiddling my thumbs.
In FCPX, this 34% change in clip speed rendered in 1 minute 33 seconds, once it kicked in (there’s a five second delay before renders start). And it did the work in the background, anyway.
Final Cut Pro 7 booted on my 2.2GHz dual-core i7 MacBook Pro in 9 seconds – the OS was a pre-release of Lion. On the release version of Lion, Final Cut Pro X booted in 19 seconds the first time it loaded (putting in the presets and plug-in links, presumably), but in 9 seconds thereafter.
Plug-in EffectsAlong the centre-right of your FCPX display is a line of icons that access, in turn and left to right (pictured, left) Effects, Photos, Music, Transitions, Titles, Generators and Themes, and then to the utmost right is the Inspector logo (an 'i' in a circle).
The Effects Browser, when clicked, takes up the lower mid-right of FCPX’s typical display, as do the other items available.
It’s cool as it works on the Skim principle, applying the effect in the view window whether skimming is turned off or not/ Skim, in real time over the selected clip, to see what it does. Press Spacebar for a little preview loop of the effect on your clip.
Double-clicking applies it to the selected clip, or drag and drop it onto the clip.
Somewhat counterintuitively, you can’t mess around with the parameters of the plug-in until you have applied it, but once you have done so, its controls appear in the top of the Inspector window (you may have to scroll up to see them). But then again, it’s non-destructive – you can turn that plugin off just by clicking on the little blue square for each panel, whether the footage rendered or not.
You can stack them too, and rearrange the order, which is crucial to realise. You just drag them to rearrange.
Among the new effects is a more effective Keyer, for Green Screen. Once you’ve applied it you can adjust the sample colour and the edges, with three view buttons (source clip, matte and the final image) to help your refining. I like it. It’s like Adobe Photoshops Refine Edges tool. It has a Fill Hole slider, and you can fine tune the edges and suppress Spill, all very easily and intuitively.
Copying and pasting filters, though, works differently than before. You copy the clip in the Edit menu, select your target clips and choose Paste Effects (Command-Option-V) rather than just Paste, which is logical, otherwise you’re pasting the actual clip over the target. You can then play around with the parameters in the Inspector to make sure the applied filter is working correctly in the new clip.
Final Cut Pro X comes with 101, although some of these are purely audio effects.
Transitions
I usually prefer a straight frame-to-frame cut myself, as Transitions can make your efforts look amateurish in record time, but it depends on the project and, sometimes, that arbiter of all creative transactions, the client.
Click between two clips and hit Command T for an instant Cross Dissolve, with an audio crossfade built in. You can set the parameters for this in Preferences, which is down to just three tabs as against the myriads in FCP7x.
But there are other controls for Cross Dissolves in that Inspector, also.
Of course there are loads, again a là iMovie, and many have onscreen controls like the plugins do, to control the centre of transitions, amounts, borders etc. If you like ’em, there are 88 to choose from!
Precision Editor
One of the better features of iMovie, this, and quite welcome here. It shows a transition, for example, between the outgoing clip on top and the incoming clip below. You can roll and trim with great precision visually, and do a ripple edit.
Text Effects
One-hundred and fifty-five come with the program. Titles appear as purple bars in the time line, and once again
Many contain prebuilt animations; some have drop zones you can put your own video into. If 155 seems a little overwhelming, you can filter them by the categories Build In/Build Out; Bumper/Opener; Credits; elements and Lower Thirds.
The Credits category look like iMovie themes, actually, which might put some off. Double-clicking the one you want superimposes it where your playhead is, with most being preset to three seconds long. You can also drag and drop to insert between clips if you prefer.
Once you’ve applied a title, click the Text tab in the Inspector to modify font, colour, timings etcetera. This works a lot like the one in Motion, if that’s a help, except you have more control still in Motion – for example, change the colour and all the letters take on that colour, whereas in Motion you can individually customise each letter. That said, it’s pretty handy, and in many instances, it will be all you need.
Generators
This covers content created inside FCPX: Backgrounds, Elements, Solids and Textures. Most of these are simply images stored as presets.
Once again, once applied is when you get the creative flexibility – apply Fabric, and then you get linens, silk, leather and wool, which you can then tint to your heart’s content. Mostly, these may form good backgrounds for titles, I’d say.
These will take a bit of exploring because many have unhelpful labels, like Texture 1, Texture 2 …
Final Cut 7 had more practical ones, apparently, but you can still get to these in Motion, and you can output those as plug-ins for FCPX. and there’s no bars and tone generator, which seems like a serious omission for the pros.
Themes
Another iMovie-type attribute is Themes. Basically, this is a filter of all the titles, transitions and effects to keep them unified by a style – a quick and dirty method to bash out a project in a hurry, if your client isn’t too discerning, maybe, but most serious workers will ignore them.
Timing
Timing was something I always found clunky in Final Cut … until now. To the left of the bar starting with effects and running through to Themes, there’s a Timer icon.
Optical Flow analyses the clip for movement vectors and then does a much longer render than Frame Blending, and the default, Normal, you’ll probably avoid. But since you’re stuck with 50%, 20% and 10% slo-mo, and 2x, 4x, 8x and 20x speedups (plus Reverse, Speed Ramp, Instant Replay and Rewind, you might think this is pretty limited, but don’t. There’s also Show Retime Editor (Command-R), which you also get if you double-click on a retimed clip.
The pop-outs give the presets as above, but drag the edge of the Retime handle and you can set whatever speed you want – the bar stays orange if it’s slow and goes into blue once you go over the stock speed. This is powerful and way easier to use than previously. Note you can also trim this clip in the same way, just by dragging the edge of the clip itself below the Retime handle, and the clip will add or subtract frames which will play at the speed you have set.
The Ramp speed effects are easy to use too – a segment can progressively slow, or speedup, but once again, Motion is better at customising this kind of process.
Freeze frames get a hole new level of complexity. It’s called Hold in the Retime menu, and a Hold frame (3 seconds by default) appears with a red indicator. This is also editable – just drag the edge of the Hold bar. Nice.
Animation
Turn on the Transform controls to add keyframe animation to objects, say with a title or an generated object. The Add Keyframe button appears at top left of the View window, and turn orange when on. So mark the position of where the object will end up first, as adding the second keyframe is when things start to animate.
This, to me, is a blessing compared to Final Cut Pro 7x. Now I know you seasoned professionals out there could do this easily, sure, after all your experience, but to a knew user, this is a huge improvement in usability.
Colour adjustments
You can do opacity effects right in the Timeline, but you have to turn the capability on. This is accessed via a little pop-out effects menu (left) that’s accessed right from clips, from a little adjuster icon at the top left of them. There you get quick access to the Effects Browser and more, plus Show Video Animation, which is where the opacity control comes in.
Expand the clip view and you can draw instant opacity ramps by eye, and you can add control buttons like you can with audio (say, in GarageBand and Logic) to really customise your control. Control-V is the shortcut to this, by the way.
Audio control
The major addition to FCPX is the audio controls built in, negating the need for boosting soundtracks into Soundtrack Pro as before. I personally found this so daunting that once I needed to do more on audio in Final Cut Pro 7x, I booted it into Logic instead, which I was a lot more familiar with.
It supports all sorts of audio formats and you import them the same way you import existing clips (File>Import?Files).
The wave-forms in the clips show volumes, including red (distorting) peaks and they are also skimmable, which is useful. You can also import audio via your iTunes library, useful for any tracks you have permissions to use, with drag and drop.
You get some Foley to get you started, too (most pros will have reams of bought and created sound effects anyway). There’s the Final Cut Pro Sound Effects Library plus the iLife Sound Effects Library (if you have already iLife installed on your machine). This is searchable from a search field at the bottom of the audio browser. And 1377 items in the FCP Sound Effects Library is a fairly decent start to your work, considering you can also do a lot of work on the individual sounds as well, to personalise them.
In the Inspector, you can change the type of sound (Surround, Stereo etc), equalisation yourself or with presets (Hum Reduction etc), volume and pan etc. There’s even a Match feature to match it to the EQ set to another clip. This creates a frequency map from a clip you’ve already made and applies it to a new clip.
You can choose between a 10-band or a 31-band EQ. I like the way you can drag across several sliders and move them all together. Loop the playback to listen and get it right (use the Backslash key, by the right-hand shift key, to play just that clip).
You can break the existing audio off from the video clips, of course, in the Clips menu. You can drag them back up into the clips to collapse them again, too.
Click on the tiny audio meter on the right of the timecode window to get a larger volume meter to the right, where the effects load up – you can drag the border leftwards to make this as big as you want. It has peak indicators (of course).
You can Option-click on the volume line in the volume clips to create keyframes you can adjust dynamically, giving you much finer editing. Zoom in, of course, to do this properly. The volume waveforms change dynamically to reflect your changes. You can also edit your keyframes in the Inspector, which has handy backwards and forwards arrows to instantly navigate between keyframe points.
Click on keyframe, it turns orange, and press Delete and it’s gone.
The little circles at left and right of each clip allow you to add audio fades instantly. You just drag them right and left, and there are choices (right-click on the dot) to choose from four types of fades – two more options than previous.
In the Inspector, you get 12 pan modes (including None). Most of these (after Stereo Left/Right) are surround modes, and they come with sound stage scope view (right) to assist you visually. If you don’t have a 5.1 editing system, FCPX tries to simulate it with your stereo.
Advanced adds all sorts of additional controls for those who know what they are doing (LFE Balance, Original/Decoded, Rotation …).
You can keyframe your panning, too, for effective sound design.
Audio Effects
In your Effects browser there are 136 audio effects (!) and these are also skimmable to hear what they do. Apply the effect and your Inspector populates with settings dedicated to this effect. Some of these are from Logic, and if you also have Logic installed, all of its effects will be available here, too. (Below: Distort)
The Channel EQ is particularly effective due to its Analyzer checkbox, which shows the waveforms form the actual clip, great for identifying hum. Post and Pre EQ buttons makes this really powerful. This borrows from one of the best features of both GarageBand and Logic. It’s stacked with presets and gives a visual EQ display.
If you’re already a Logic user, you’ll love the audio capabilities of FCPX. If this is all too much, an Auto Enhance Audio analyses the clip, detects hum and background noise and applies compensation – all of which is tunable, in turn, in the Inspector, so it sounds crude but it’s actually quite sophisticated and, once again, may prove to be a real timesaver.
Learning Final Cut Pro X
This is a download-only application, so goodbye to the copious, but extremely useful manuals you used to get. It has Help, though, but this is a very dry way to learn a program and requires considerable patience.
I therefore recommend MacProVideo’s tutorials on the subject, in this case by Michael Wohl, who was one of the original Final Cut developers. I would have been lost without MPV’s training on the last version of Final Cut, and since this program is quite different, it has been utterly indispensable to me. With the dollar high, MPV training is particularly good buying right now at US$19.50 per module (currently under NZ$25 each).
I download the videos and pay for the ones I want rather than subscribe, but it’s up to you.
These have consistently been excellent over the years, especially if you have two monitors – run the training video on one while you work in the program on the other.
Stability
I managed to crash it when I tried to use the Zoom selection tool. I did have iTunes and Photoshop open at the same time, which was probably a bit dumb. At one point, a long render effectively froze FCPX, but I quit, rebooted, everything was there and things carried on working (I had quit out of Photoshop in the interim, though).
A third crash happened when it was just sitting there doing nothing – I hope Apple takes note of these crash reports and does something about it. The third report starts:
Interval Since Last Report: 86263 sec
Crashes Since Last Report: 2
Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 57539 sec
Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 1
Anonymous UUID: EDC982DC-E1E6-4B22-80B8-2900F961D6C6
Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x00000001867ffcc4 ...
Final Cut Pro X Supplemental Content
This is available via Software Update once you have installed Final Cut Pro X. This adds over 1300 rights-free sound effects installed into the Audio Browser of Final Cut Pro X and Audio Effect Presets for the Space Designer plug-in.
Additionally, you get ProApps QuickTime codecs which adds the following video codecs for use by QuickTime-based applications:
• Apple Intermediate Codec
• Apple ProRes
• AVC-Intra
• DVCPRO HD
• HDV
• XDCAM HD / EX / HD422
• MPEG IMX
• Uncompressed 4:2:2
This update is recommended for all users of Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 or Compressor 4.
Motion Supplemental Content adds the following content for use in Motion 5:
• Motion Templates: A variety of professionally-designed, customizable templates.
• Motion Library Content: Animated vector graphics, backgrounds, template media, sample Motion projects, and royalty-free still images.
• Motion Sample Media: Clips and images for use with Motion Help examples and tutorials.
This update is recommended for all users of Motion 5.
Keep the old one?
And you can have the old version if you really like it. Why not? FCP X doesn’t replace it (it all gets put into a folder in Applications via the process of installing FCPX) and considering what a bargain it is, why not have both? Meanwhile, Apple has promised to fix and upgrade the new version as we go.
Which is a good thing, as the smaller anomalies can be really annoying, too, and many need addressing.
Conclusion — People have accused Apple of arrogance, turning its back on the professional community it has fostered. I don’t think this is the case. Final Cut Pro X is a professional product, based on its output and capabilities.
The arrogance was in expecting professionals to have to essentially learn a new program, without unleashing a big enough sell to explain that this would be the case, and in leaving out backwards compatibility, but the versions (7x and X) are so different, this is hardly surprising.
My advice is — give FCPX a chance. It’s bloody fast and has some great features, particularly the connected edits and the lovely inline audio tools. Once you’ve come to grips with it – surely a week’s worth – you will be working much faster than before, partly because it does things more easily and more visually, and partly because the code is fast and so is background rendering, although I did notice my fans cranking up during renders, as the CPUs took a hit.
You’ll also have to come to grips with the Position tool, which behaves differently to the Arrow tool, which does ripple-edits. Position works like the regular arrow tool in previous versions, letting you position clips exactly and complete with gaps. (Snapping can be on or off – there are yellow Snapping guides to show your alignment points.)
What’s Great — Really fast, packed with handy presets and plugins, much more intuitive to use which makes it faster and easier to learn. This is at least 90% the Final Cut I always wanted.
What’s Not — No second viewer for dual-screen setups; doesn’t open legacy Final Cut projects; lots of little anomalies that need sorting. (If it wasn’t for those, my rating would be higher.)
Needs — a good training session and some practice for brilliant results.
4/5
What — Final Cut Pro X $399.99 in the Mac App Store
More information — Apple NZ Ltd
