Ryan Valle || The Blog

The more I play with Final Cut Pro X, the more apparent it becomes that the program is built around data/media management. Yesterday, I posted an article about the Sharing inspector, which essentially is a management tool for exported/shared content.

For Events and Projects, Final Cut Pro X has a move feature to move files around to different hard drives. In previous versions, this would require you to go to Finder and manually projects on your own or use the Media Manager to automate things. In Final Cut Pro X, you simply select your Events Library that you want to move then go to File > Move Events.

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Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be writing up small articles of features I run into within Final Cut Pro X that like, dislike, or am simply surprised by. To start, I’d like to share the Sharing inspector for the projects I have within FCPx.

The more I play with FCPx, I can really see that the program was really built around media management. It automatically organizes your imported files, keeps projects neatly organized, and now, even manages the files you’ve exported.

Within the Sharing inspector, you are presented with the project settings (e.g.: resolution, frame rate, TRT or total run-time), but also with access to information as to all the exports/shares you’ve made. For this “Camp Fire” project I worked with, I did two initial exports and a YouTube export.

For the YouTube export, the application goes as far as giving you options to visit the video on the site or telling friends about your upload. A remove function is also available to take it off YouTube which I find very convenient.

For the exported files, there’s an option to locate where the files are. For myself, these location features are useless because I often do an export to my desktop, review it, and then move it over to an external hard drive for archival purposes.

For all the exports, there’s one neat feature included. I don’t know what it’s official name is called, but what it does is inform you if the exported/shared versions you have out are up to date. I find this really cool just because as I deal with so many rough cuts that I export and share to clients, having the software tell me which one is the latest version just makes my life as an editor that much more convenient.

That is all I want to share for the sharing inspector. Sure XML and EDL support is gone and tools like multicam/multiclip editing has been taken out, but these small things, to me at least, make up for those missing tools I never really used.

In April, an audience of 1,700 editors were treated to a preview of Apple’s next version of Final Cut Pro X. Leaving with much excitement, members of that audience were posting positive “reviews” on the web and videos of the presentation shared that excitement to the greater Final Cut Pro community that was unable to attend.

However, that was only a preview. The excitement in the room was joined with an equal amount of questions and concerns. As a Final Cut Pro user myself (since version 5), I was eager to try out the new program, but had questions myself. How will trackless editing affect my workflow? How are tapes supported? How will I function without my preview window? As a single window application, how can I customize my window to fit my needs? Dual-monitor support? The list goes on and on.

Come June 28, 2011, this much anticipated software was released to the public alongside Motion 5 and Compressor 4. I woke up to a tweet announcing it’s release and downloaded it as soon as it was available on the App Store. Ever since then, I’ve been playing around with the program, having edited a few short videos to test out the new features like the magnetic timeline and how the new UI (user interface) will affect the workflows I have developed with previous versions of Final Cut Pro.

In this article, I hope to cover my thoughts on the new program based on the experience I’ve had with it the past few days. This article will be divided into several sections, covering the various stages in post production I go through when I edit a video together. These sections are importing, organizing, editing, color correction/effects, audio correction, and delivery.

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This morning, Apple finally released the latest version of their “professional” video editing program, Final Cut Pro. Accompanying the release, they also launched an update to their motion graphics program, Motion 5, and an update to Compressor which is now on version 4. There’s plenty of new features to geek out about for this release (read up on the new stuff on their product page @ http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro), but its the items that are missing from the previous releases that makes me question – who is this product really for.

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My latest video is an animated music video to my friend’s original song, “Happy Ending.” Being the huge Disney fan that I am, and the fact that the song is Disney inspired, creating a music video for the song was definitely one project that I was looking forward to. It did take me sometime to get started at first since the original concept I was trying to make was doing a live action video at Disneyland. That obviously never happened and after months of pushing the project aside, I decided to go the animated route, creating a video with a cartoonish feel, using vector artwork to really showcase the various Disney themes in the song.

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