Apple’s Final Cut Pro is the leading video-editing program. It’s a $1,000 professional app. It was used to make “The Social Network,” “True Grit,” “Eat Pray Love” and thousands of student movies, independent films and TV shows. According to the research firm SCRI, it has 54 percent of the video-editing market, far more than its rivals from Adobe and Avid.
Stuart Goldenberg
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Final Cut Pro X.
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Did I use the present tense? Sorry about that. Final Cut was the Canon Powershot SD300 charger industry leader. It did cost $1,000. But that’s all over now.
On Tuesday, Apple pulled a typical Apple move: it killed off the two-year-old Final Cut 7 at the peak of its popularity.
In its place, Apple now offers something called Final Cut Pro X (pronounced “10”). But don’t be misled by the HP Compaq Business Notebook NX6110 ac adapter name. It’s a new program, written from scratch. Apple says a fresh start was required to accommodate huge changes in the technological landscape.
Apple veterans may, at this point, be feeling some creepy déjà vu. You’ve seen this movie before. Didn’t Apple kill off iMovie, too, in 2008, and replace it with an all-new, less capable version that lacked dozens of important features? It took three years of upgrades before the new iMovie Acer Aspire 3614WLMi battery finally surpassed its predecessor in features and coherence.
Some professional editors are already insisting that Apple has made exactly the same mistake with Final Cut X; they pointed out various flaws with the program after an earlier version of this column was posted online on Wednesday. They say the new program is missing high-end features like the ability to edit multiple camera angles, to export to Dell Latitude D630 battery tape, to burn anything more than rudimentary DVDs and to work with EDL, XML and OMF files (used to exchange projects with other programs). You can use a second computer monitor, but you need new TV-output drivers to attach an external video monitor. You can’t change the settings of your exported QuickTime canon nb-4l charger movies without the $50 Compressor program.
Apple admits that version X is a “foundational piece.” It says that it will restore some of these features over time, and that other companies are rapidly filling in the other HP G7000 ac adapter holes.
For nonprofessionals, meanwhile, Final Cut is already tempting — especially because the price is $300, not $1,000. It’s the first Apple program that’s available only by download from the online Mac App Store, not on DVD. All of the programs CANON ZR-90 battery formerly called Final Cut Studio have been rolled into Final Cut except Motion and Compressor, which are sold separately. Final Cut Express and DVD Studio Pro are gone.)
The new Final Cut has been radically redesigned. In fact, it looks and works a lot like Dell Inspiron Mini 10v battery iMovie, all dark gray, with “skimming” available; you run your cursor over a clip without pressing the mouse button to play it.
Once you’re past the shock of the canon digital ixus 400 battery new layout, the first thing you’ll notice is that Apple has left most of the old Final Cut’s greatest annoyances on the cutting-room floor.
First — and this is huge — there’s no more waiting to “render.” You no longer sit there, dead in the water, while the software computes the Dell inspiron 1526 ac adapter changes, locking up the program in the meantime, every time you add an effect or insert a piece of video that’s in a dell latitude c640 battery different format. Final Cut X renders in the background, so you can keep right on editing. You cannot, however, organize your files or delete clips during rendering.
Second, in the old Final Cut, it was all too easy to drag the audio and video of a clip out of sync accidentally; little “-1” or “+10” indicators, showing how many frames off you were, were a chronic headache. But in the new Final Cut, “sync is holy,” as Apple puts it. Primary audio and video are always synced, and you can even lock other Acer Aspire 9300 Series battery clips together so that they all move as one.
In fact, an ingenious feature called Compound Clips lets you collapse a stack of audio and video clips into a single, merged filmstrip on the timeline. You can adjust it, move it and apply effects as if it were a single unit, and then un-merge it anytime you like. Compound Clips make it simple to manage with a complicated composition without going quietly insane.
In the old Final Cut, if you dragged Clip A so that it overlapped part of Clip B, even briefly, you wound up chopping away the covered-up piece of Clip B. But now, the timeline sprouts enough new parallel “tracks” to keep both of the overlapping clips. Nothing gets chopped unless you do it yourself.
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There are new features, too. The Auditions feature lets you compare alternative shots in the timeline, trying them out without having to place them individually. This is great if you’re sitting with a client or director, asking for input. Color Match does an impressive job making the overall color cast of one clip (a broad-daylight shot, for example) match the lighting of another (say, a sunset scene).
You can adjust the playback speed of a clip — slow-mo, fast-mo, whatever — just by pressing a key and then dragging the clip’s right edge, so that it occupies a longer or shorter chunk of the timeline. It’s visual, immediate and render-free.
The new Timeline Index presents a tidy, clickable chronological list of everything in your movie: clip names, markers, clip keywords and so on.
Like iMovie, Final Cut can analyze newly imported video and figure out which shots have people in them — one person, two people, group shots — and put them into virtual folders automatically. You can also apply keywords to any portion of any clip —“Closeup,” “Grandma,” whatever; the program puts keyworded clips into appropriately named virtual folders, too. Final Cut can also stabilize shaky footage during the import process, and even eliminate hums or hisses in your audio.
The bottom line: The rewritten Final Cut is much, much easier to use than the old one, and its immediacy keeps your creative flow going.
But not everyone will fall in love. Switching to the new Final Cut from the old one is like coming home from college to discover that your parents remodeled your bedroom. Longtime Final Cut jockeys, in particular, may grind their teeth for a few days — and not just because they have to pay $300 for the “upgrade,” same as newcomers.
Here’s one example. The new “magnetic timeline” works like iMovie’s; your clips always snap to the left, leaving no gaps. You can no longer freely park clips temporarily off to the right, using the timeline as a workspace.
Also, the fact that Final Cut is much less intimidating may be a bitter pill to swallow for professionals who have sweated blood to master the old version. Online, some early adopters are already cursing how “consumer-y” the new program looks.
Video editing screams out for horsepower. Final Cut is now a 64-bit program, meaning it can exploit Macs with more than 4 gigabytes of memory for even better speed. And you’ll need it; on even medium-powered Macs, scrolling and dragging operations can get laggy.
I also ran into a bunch of typical first-release bugs. Don’t entrust your next Cannes entry to this program until Apple produces the inevitable bug-fix patch.
The biggest disappointment is that Final Cut X can’t open old Final Cut projects. They’re now orphaned, stuck forever in the old program. Apple says the architecture of the new program is too different from the old one. Well, O.K., but what a drag to have to maintain your video projects in two separate collections: B.X. (before X) and A.X.
Of course, that’s the way Apple rolls. Here’s one more Apple-imposed migration to a new, very different platform.
Yes, some bugs need fixing, and the “coming soon” features need to come soon. But despite the footnotes, and if you can get past the shock of the new, Final Cut X is already intuitive, powerful and very sweet.
