Final Cut Pro, a new users perspective

Part 1; Aren't you a Vegas user Simon?

Well, yes, I am, and I will still use Vegas since I believe it is a brilliant editing package. But I will now also be using Final Cut Studio 2 extensively now too. Needs must, and for collaborative projects Final Cut was the way to go for better compatibility with more people, along with the fact i was made an offer I couldn't refuse.

Of course the first stage for any long time Windows user is obtaining a Mac. In this case a quad core Mac Pro with 4GB of memory, and as many hard drives as I could cram into it. Why not the new Octo core, or any other forthcoming Mac Pro? Well, if a person is always waiting for the next best thing, then they would never purchase anything. Considering how well the quad core handles all formats, an Octo core would be overkill for my needs. I went with a 30" Cinema display, a 23" Cinema display, and a Matrox MXO. I had heard great things about the MXO from people who are generally very finnicky about their grading monitors, aside from a slight green tint which can be sorted out via some extra calibration.

To be honest I have wanted a Mac for a number of years. But maturity of the OS, as well as justifying the expense had put me off. I come from the days of the Atari ST and the 80's Macs. I loved both. With the ST I loved the way that to delete programs they could simply be dragged to the trash can. I loved the simplicity of file organisation in general. And then in a puff of smoke Atari's home computer market was gone. Replaced by a glorified word processor, the PC. I've always hated PC's. I hated DOS, and I hated Windows. Not only because of the way Windows was just a bodge built on top of DOS, but because of the criminal way it spread files around the hard drive. The way that Microsoft for some reason decided to use a thing called 'the registry'. Why couldn't things be like the old Atari's or Macs? Well, they could have been. If Steve Jobs had accepted Bill Gates offer we could all have been using something like OS X. Windows is made by programmers for programmers. No amount of sprucing it up can hide that. To have an efficiently running Windows system requires that you have Jedi like knowledge to be able to clear things out and sort out all the driver issues, weird error messages, and general slow down over time.

I was actually a bit disheartened when Apple went to Intel. I loved the Motorola chips. So fast, efficient, and for people with greasy hair who like to think like machines, easy to program in assembly language. But luckily the Intel switch hasn't harmed Apple computers. It has breathed new life into the Apple brand. And now, not only do we have available some of the most stylish looking computers on the planet, they are also some of the easiest to use, most stable, and also capable of running the most operating systems of any machine. 

And now I have one.

Now, why am I talking about the operating system so much? Well read on. I have always believed that it is nicer to work in a tidy office than a messy one. Actually, scratch that. It is nicer to work outdoors with a fantastic view on a nice sunny day than to be stuffed in an office or a cubicle. I believe that an operating system should be really nice to look at, inviting to use, simple to use for people who don't know their RAM from their ROM, and pretty much almost transparent in use. This is, I believe, what the latest incarnations of OS X have achieved. Whoever programmed OS X has actually thought about the none technical persons thought process. On the rare occasion when things do go wrong, the Mac OS lets you know in simple language what happened. The people who programmed Windows on the other hand seem to be under the impression that the 55 year old father of 4 who's idea of a computer program is a set of punch cards will know what "Exception 10002000030040 in the registry, oh and there's a DLL file missing from somewhere, dunno where, but you'll have to find it yourself" means.

Likewise most normal people, and that includes creative types who use programs like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, don't want to know what those sorts of error messages mean either. They don't want to be waiting for Norton Anti-virus to make their computer boot up in 50 years every time they have to restart after a Windows security patch update. In short they do not want their productivity to be affected by Bill Gates. They also want their network to work. I know that I do. In a hilarious twist I found that all the Macs I have tested have quite happily connected to and printed through an existing Windows network, while the native Windows computers had difficulty connecting or printing a document within the current millenia.

For those reasons and more I have now got myself a Mac. Once I have myself sorted out I'll be transferring Vegas over from my old PC and running either via Bootcamp in Leopard (which I'll come to in a moment) or a virtual desktop. I haven't decided yet.

So why would I want to carry on using Vegas after using Final Cut? use vegas for a period of time and you'll find out why. In fact possibly one reason I warmed to Vegas is because the programmers actually have a very 'Mac' like attitude to how a video editing package should work. They thought outside of the box, and the result is a deceptively simple looking NLE that holds much of the power of the full Final Cut Pro on the Mac. Oh how I wish they'd port it to OS X so i can be rid of Windows for good!

So anyway, I ordered my Mac Pro from Jigsaw Systems who were exceptionally helpful. Delivery was prompt beyond belief. The system I ordered mid afternoon on the Monday was delivered to me first thing on Tuesday morning! Now that's what I call service!

The first thing that strikes you about a Mac when it first arrives is the packaging. Apple are style throughout, right down to the type of cardboard they use for the box. I've heard that Apple boxes have been going for around £30 on Ebay after people mistakenly threw them out. Open the box and there is more packaging lovliness inside. Everything is packed carefully and very neatly with everything you need to get up and running. A complete contrast to PC's which usually come with a power lead sort of just rattling around in the bottom of the box somewhere. A Mac is packaged so nicely that it really does feel like an event taking it out of the box. Yes, I realise many of you will accuse me of starting to sound like a Mac zealot, but I assure you it really is that nice!

The Mac Pro itself is a tower of aluminium, with those nice sculpted handles to make carrying it into place easier. I bought my RAM seperately from Crucial (sorry Apple, your RAM is far too expensive), as well as some Western Digital 24/7 Enterprise drives. Now, I realise that if you build a PC, or have one custom built, there are some very nice cases around. I own a couple of them. But I haven't yet come across a PC case, especially one with a prebuilt PC, that matches the ease of accessibility of the Mac Pro. The RAM boards are held on an easy to slide out tray, and just as easy to slide back in. Hard drives were similarly easy. Slide out an empty tray, attach the new hard drive to it, and slide it back in like a drawer. And when I say 'slide' back in I really do mean 'slide'. No grating metal, just smooth glided operation. 

The 30" Cinema Display is a beast. It is quite a funny thought to be using a monitor that is bigger than many peoples television sets, and it draws gawps from everyone who has seen it so far. It is big and very stylish looking. Switch it on and it is bright and vibrant with a very wide angle of view. The 23" looks puny in comparison, but that one is for another use, the MXO.

Once connected up, a very simply operation given that Apple group all their wires into one cable that splits at the end, I turned it on. That is another thing that i notice about the Mac. There is a complete lack of a birds nest of wires all over the place. Once switched on OS X Tiger loaded up. Because it was the first time that I had used the computer it asked me a few questions, and let me assign a password that would be used to access administrative privaliges (such as installing some programs). It gave the opportunity to register, but I was not forced to. There is no silly activiation needed for OS X. Subsequent bootups show that OS X is much, much faster than Windows at loading. In fact I find many timings of Windows bootup times to be a fallacy because they never take into account that Windows is not usually ready to use when the main desktop appears. Usually there is a long wait while other programs, such as Norton Antivirus and all the other rubbish that came with preloaded with your computer loads up. My Athlon 64 used to take 4 minutes sometimes. A colleagues laptop was clocked at 7 minutes!!

There is no such issue with OS X. Once that desktop appears it is ready to use immediately.  The Dock is a static graphic in its default setting. Going to the System Preferences allows this to be changed to the really cool animated Dock that has been the envy of many a Windows user. A little more functionality could be added to this. Object Dock on the PC was a great immitation and actually surpassed Apples version in terms of configurability.

The general layout of the main hard drive is easy to use with applications and documents being easily sorted and clear to use even for a non-techie user. One thing that I found myself doing that I never used to do much on Windows is using keyboard shortcuts to open and close windows and to hide programs etc. It is very intuitive on the Mac to do this.

In general OS X is exceptionally slick. It looks great and is fun to use due to the really cool touches that programmers put into their programs. One gets the impression that Mac programmers really care about the user experience. Through more use I have found most of the types of programs that I used to use on the PC, often with more functionality, such as Panic's Transmit FTP client and Coda, a web coding and CSS organisation tool.

Get to the point Simon, what about Final Cut Studio 2?!

While I have obtained the Leopard upgrade to OS X I have decided to hold off installing it just yet. New versions of OS X are not immune to driver problems with hardware, although they are usually sorted out much more quickly than with Windows. So I went ahead and installed Final Cut Studio 2. This is a bit of a mammoth task and you should allow a couple of hours for this. 99% of Mac programs are simple to install because they consist of a 'package' which looks like one icon. If you wish to delete the program you just drag this to the trash can and it is gone. Final Cut Studio is a bit more involved and needs more care because of the extra template and sound files that go with it. You need to be careful and make sure that for optimum performance these extra support files are not installed on the main operating system drive. At least not if you wish to remain sane while using FCP.

Final Cut Studio 2 comes with a number of different packages. Those being Final Cut Pro, Motion (like After Effects), Livetype (animated titling tool), Soundtrack Pro (like a hyper Sound Forge/Acid crossover), Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, and last but not least the biggest addition to the package, Color, formally known as Final Touch.

Loading up Final Cut Pro for the first time is slightly bewildering for anyone who hasn't used the package before. It all looks good though and has an air of class about it. Getting used to it was going to take a while I thought. Vegas ditched the source/record style workflow years ago, and here I was with a package that used 3-point editing as its main way of working. So anyway I set about editing some footage that I had lying around.

I spent a lot of time fumbling to find functions that I use in Vegas. They are all here plus many more so I needn't have worried. Most functions work in the same way as Vegas, which was good for me. I was also surprised to find that I could drag and drop footage to the timeline just like Vegas. This was good to start with so that I could ease myself into FCP's way of working. Keyboard shortcuts are logical. As an indication of how logical, many of you will be surprised to find out that I rarely use keyboard shortcuts. My memory is rubbish and I can never remember them, but for some reason with FCP I am using them all the time.

One aspect of FCP that is confusing however is setting up an initial project. You not only have to set tup the global project settings, but also the sequence (timeline) itself. A project can contain several sequences, and any sequence can be nested within any other. If the sequence, the project, and the files you import, are mismatched in any way you could have problems. For example if you have a project and sequence set to have no field dominance (progressive scan) and you import progressive scan footage with the field order set to lower first, you may find FCP line doubling the footage to conform it to the sequence settings. Final Cut will alert you to the mismatched settings though and give you the option to either conform the footage to the sequence, or vice versa. It can get confusing though. Especially for someone like me who wants to know EXACTLY how things are working. Annoyingly the XDCAM import tool thinks that 25p footage is lower field first (Vegas correctly flags it as being progressive). I hope to hell they get this sorted when the new version of the XDCAM software for Mac is released in the next few weeks.

A cursory glance shows initial filter support in FCP to be good. But what's this, no curves support? C'mon that's a basic filter nobody should be without. Never the less there are enough colour correction adjustments available here to keep most would be colourists busy for a while. More on colour correction and filters in the followup articles. For now I just want to concentrate on initial impressions.

FCP allows window layouts to be changed for performing different operations such as audio mixing, general editing, and colour correction. The 30" Cinema Display with its vast real estate really comes into its own with these.

Now back to my efforts with the timeline. After more playing around I started to get the hang of things. Keyboard shortcuts were making life easy, and within a day of playing I found that could move around the interface pretty quickly. The supplied manuals and tutorials helped a lot in this regard, although there were still a few hiccups. Not least being the confusion over what the option key is. I had assumed that this was the Apple key. However it turns out that it is the Alt key. This did cause me a bit of hair pulling at first, but it was soon sorted out with the help of the internet forums.

Adding transitions is pretty easy. Click on the join between two clips and use the add transition option. You can select the bias of the transition (whether it starts or ends at the edit point) and the duration by right clicking on the duration timing numbers overlayed on the clip on the timeline. Transitions can also be added automatically when you insert edit a clip into a sequence. Although FCP has a great number of transitions, if anyone can tell me where I can obtain a luminance based transition plugin for a more film style 'optical' dissolve I'll be a very happy man!

So here I am, finally using FCP. I'm still getting used to it, but I'm liking what i am seeing so far. In the next part I'll be looking more closely at the editing options available, setting up the Matrox MXO and my multicam editing experiences so far. 

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