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.

The beauty of this goes even further since this too runs in the background. You can continue to edit your project as files copy over to another hard drive. As soon as the files are done copying, it will delete the files on the original hard drive and let you work off the new hard drive you copied the files over to.

This same function is also available for projects. Simply select your project window and go to File. What was the Move Events selection magically transformed into the Move Projects option.

With moving projects, you get an added feature of being able to move your referenced events along with it. This makes it really easy to take your work on the go and have somebody else with Final Cut Pro X work on your projects and bring it back to your system to continue more work.

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.

Since this will be an article on my thoughts on the program, keep in mind that my opinions are specific to what I do and my style of editing. In this realm of digital media, cheap computers, and more affordable software, anybody can call themselves an editor and the definition of a “professional” is quite broad. I do see myself as a professional editor, but do not produce content for film and television. Instead, I do hobby pieces, corporate presentations, event, and many other kinds of videos. This review will be written from a perspective of editing those kinds of videos. If you’re a video editor for film or television, which probably feature a workflow that requires working with multiple computers, sending software to other applications, logging footage, and many other things, you may end up disagreeing and disapproving of what I say in this article. However, if you’re in “one person team” editing role, you may relate better to what I have to say about this new program.

Without further ado, here are my thoughts on Final Cut Pro X.

Final Cut Pro X import window

Importing (a.k.a. Log and Capturing, Log and Transfer)

In my editing workflows, I usually start off with getting my video material into the editing program. In Final Cut Pro X, this process is called Importing. In previous version of Final Cut Pro, people may refer to this as “Log and Capture” or “Log and Transfer” depending on if you’re working with tape or a file based workflow.

Overall, I do like the new import features in FCPx. It’s much more simplistic and is designed to allow me access to edit my footage much quicker than before. I also find that it’s intuitive. There’s no need to re-name clips. FCPx manages that all for you. Lastly, I love the fact that I can archive my material from within Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro 7 Log and Transfer Window

In Final Cut Pro 7, importing video material for a file based workflow involved the Log and Transfer Tool. Though it worked, I found it to be cumbersome requiring you to “Log” the material first if you want to keep organized the material you end up saving on your computer. Once you properly log the material, you can have to wait for the content to be transcoded to ProRes before you can begin editing or moving forward with your project. On a Mac Pro I have at work (quad core system), this process was a little bit faster than real-time importing seen on tapes.

in Final Cut Pro X, the new import tool is much more efficient. You simply select the clips you want and choose “Import Selected.” Clips appear right away in your Events (replaces the Browser in older versions of Final Cut Pro), so you can begin organizing your material or placing it into your timeline for editing.

But what if you want to log the material or put them into bins to keep things organized. Well, don’t worry, you can still do that in Final Cut Pro X. It’s just different, but I think it’s a better system. In FCPx, Logging is replaced by the Keywords system. You select the section of the clip you want to “log,” and assign your keywords or phrases to name it (more of this in the Organizational section of this article. If you just want to rename the clip to make it more specific, you can use the information window to do that.

In my old workflow, I would use the Log and Transfer tool in FCP7 to rename the clips to make them more descriptive for content and to make them unique in the event I need to import more than 1 file. In FCPx, the renaming schematic is taken care of automatically, assigning a unique name based on the date and time in which a video file was created. So rather than seeing Clip #1, you will see “2011-06-25 06:20:33.” I could rename that easily to “Birds Bathing in Water” if I really wanted to by using the inspector panel.

Events panel in list view

This automatic naming feature is one of the more intuitive features for importing material. Though it doesn’t automatically rename content to a descriptive phrase, it does eliminate the work required to prevent import errors due to clashing file names. Plus it assigns a date to make it easier to find content.

Also, the speed in which you can start working Final Cut Pro X is quite amazing. Unlike Final Cut Pro 7 which required you to transcode material to Pro Res before you can start working, FCPx grants you access to your material right away.It accomplishes this by allowing you to work off the memory card or source material first, referencing it within Final Cut to let you start working. In the background, material is being copied to your hard drive and doing any processes requested. This allows you to continuously work and make progress rather than sitting and waiting for the transfer to finish. The beauty of it is that it replaces the referenced file with the imported file automatically so you don’t have to deal with reconnecting media to make everything work again. If went further out into transcoding your material, FCPx still allows you to work by running the transcode process in the background and updating your media files automatically as the requested files are created.

Lastly, my favorite import feature is the Camera Archive tool. When working with a file based workflow, I often start with inserting the memory card into the computer, opening Disk Utilities, and then creating an image to backup material onto the computer. With the Camera Archive tool, all of this can be done within Final Cut Pro X. I haven’t personally tried this yet since I’m waiting for a dedicated hard drive to back up content to, this is definitely a welcomed feature for me.

However, the new import tool is not quite perfect. For as lovely as it is to not have to deal with logging footage, doing so can be quite useful when dealing with tape content. In FCPx, importing tapes is now only available through one option – “Capture Now.” With a Log and Capture feature, you can automate the clips you want to capture from tape, saving you time and money when it comes to editing. Though I don’t work with tape as often as I did before, having a logging feature is something that is definitely I would love to see restored.

Organizing

Replacing “Bins” as seen in Final Cut Pro versions 1 through 7, Events in FCPx allow for better, automated organizing of material.

FCPx Event Library and Window

This Events library is automatically generated. Upon import, you can create a new “Event” to put material in. Once importing has begun, you can start assigning keywords to selected video material. From there, smart folders are created which group video content with shared keywords together, making it very easy to find content. For example, I may assign 10 sections of a video clip with “crowds” and another 5 sections with “b-roll.” FCPx will generate two smart folders called “crowds” and “b-roll” and when selected, will display those sections of video you have applied their respectable keywords to. There is nothing like this in Final cut Pro.

And then there are other smart folders where you can create booleans and conditions to sort out video content with keywords. Or if you chose to do so in import, you can have video clips analyzed and organized by shot types such as medium or wide shots. I haven’t tried this analysis feature myself, but from the demos, it seems to just work.

All in all, this new organizational feature is very cool and is something that I definitely love. I’ve used it on one project and it surely helped me locate my material faster when it came to the next step in my post-production workflow: editing.

Editing

At the core of Final Cut Pro X is a very strong and capable video editing program. Overall, I am happy with the changes in the editing experiences in Final Cut Pro X. For one, the background rendering makes it easier to keep focused on what you want to produce. You can apply effects, add transitions, and layer your videos and let any rendering happen in the background, allowing you to keep moving forward with your project.

There’s also the magnetic timeline and clip connections which makes it very easy to move your clips around. In Final Cut Pro 7, if I wanted to move one clip from the end to the middle, that would mean sliding several clips down first especially if there is audio to keep track of and then sliding the clip into the new position, and then sliding the rest of the timeline back into place. In FCPx, everything just snaps into place. Want to move the clip from the end to the middle? Just slide it over and the entire timeline ripples. Though I could do a ripple edit in FCP7, the clip connections present in FCPx allow me to do a ripple edit and maintain proper sync of materials throughout the timeline. Though there are some areas where this may not work such as if all your shorts are cut to a musical beat and you insert an interview clip in between beats. This will probably end up throwing off some of your cuts to beat. However, it just does a much better job and maintaining the cuts you want.

Other changes in editing also include the trackless timeline design. There’s the primary storyline where you set the main pace of your video and secondary storyline where you can add b-roll, titles, and any other footage that’s not key to the story of your video. My thoughts on this new feature is somewhat undecided yet. Though it’s a cool concept, I do like the idea of tracks. Often, I like to have my b-roll on V2, titles on V3. For audio, I like dialogue on A1, ambience/effects on A2, and music on A3 and A4. These track are gone and are replaced with an automated system that I will need to get used to. The nice thing though is that items are much more clearly defined so even though tracks are missing, it’s easy to distinguish a video clip from an audio clip or text clip.

There are many more changes in the editing features of FCPx including the lack of a preview/viewer window and shortcut keys. Though very minor, these are the two main things that bother me about the new editing workflow in FCPx. However, for the most part I am happy with the changes.

In regards to color and audio correction tools, Final Cut Pro X seems to offer a better set of tools designed to get the job done quicker and easier compared to Final Cut Pro X. However, I should note that if your editing workflows included sending your video to Apple Color for color grading and/or sending your audio to Soundtrack Pro for mixing, these tools may seem on the weaker end of the spectrum.

Color Correction

FCPx has integrated a stronger set of color correction tools within the software. Though it’s no match for Apple Color, what is now built in surpasses the 3-way color correct filter in FCP7.

Color Board in FCPx

This new tool is the Color Board. Though essentially it can do what the 3-way color correct tool can do, I feel that it’s more intuitive and easy to use and understand. In addition, this new tool features a global adjustment setting so you can affect the entire image in color, saturation, and exposure in not only the shadows, midtones, and highlights, but also for the image as a whole. Also, this new color correct tool features selective correction, allowing you to choose sections of a frame to color correct rather than the whole frame.

Another welcomed feature is the new Color Match tool. In previous versions of Final Cut Pro, I would need to match color manually by using the 3-way color correct tool. This new Color Match tool allows me to match different cameras with just a click of a button. I will admit that it’s not always perfect, however what this tool does just saves me time and gets me to my finished product quicker and easier.

Overall, these new color tools are awesome and is a welcome change in Final Cut Pro X.

Audio Correction

Audio Correction in FCPx

Audio is one important component in making a video and the tools available in FCPx now is just something that makes it easier to improve your audio. The two features I’m excited about is the new background noise removal tool and also the new keyframing functions within the timeline.

As a feature that comes from Soundtrack Pro, Background Noise Removal will analyze your audio, detect the noise, and give you options to reduce background noise. By integrating it within Final Cut Pro, I no longer need to send out audio to a secondary program and re-import it into FCP to get the job done.

Audio Volume adjustment with keyframes

Final Cut Pro X features a new Clip Selection Tool. With this tool, it makes it very easy to create and adjust keyframes. For audio, this tool serves especially helpful since I can now select the range of audio and fade down the audio all together. Before, this would require me to set four keyframes (represented in the image above as white dots) and setting the areas volume levels accordingly. Now its just a matter of two clicks on the mouse.

All in all, the audio controls in Final Cut Pro X make my job as an editor much easier, once again moving my workflow towards getting the job done much quicker than ever before.

Delivery

Share/Export Options

Final Cut Pro X builds upon the original Final Cut Pro 7′s export/share options. As you can see in the screenshot above, there are several new options including direct exporting to Facebook, Vimeo, and CNN iReport. YouTube is updated to allow exporting to 1080p.

Simply, I think that these new share/export settings are much easier to understand. One of my biggest gripes about the export settings in older versions of Final Cut Pro were the two export options: Export using Quicktime and Export using Quicktime Movie. I always found those two confusing but at the end, learned the difference. For new users, this is much easier to understand and serves you common formats you may want to deliver to. For the uncommon, there’s Compressor which sadly did not gain 64 bit status for version 4. I will stick to my older generation Compressor 3, which even though installed on the same system as FCPx, does not integrate with it.

Summary

All in all, i am happy with this update of Final Cut Pro X. There is much debate and controversy about the missing features and it’s “iMovie Pro” look. All I can say about those complaints is that Apple is a forward thinking company. I’m not speaking for the company, but the way I see it, video editing workflows and styles are changing. I feel that old tools such as Final Cut Pro 1-7 were designed for video for film or tv. Final Cut Pro X changes things up and serves a non-techniacl audience working solo to deliver video formats for the web. Final Cut Pro X is an all in one tool that gets the job done in a non-traditional fashion.

]]> http://www.ryanvalle.me/blog/2011/06/my-thoughts-on-final-cut-pro-x/feed/ 4 http://www.ryanvalle.me/blog/2011/06/final-cut-pro-x-whos-it-for/ http://www.ryanvalle.me/blog/2011/06/final-cut-pro-x-whos-it-for/#comments Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:00:45 +0000 Ryan Valle http://www.ryanvalle.me/blog/?p=409

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.

Upon opening Final Cut Pro X, one who is familiar with iMovie may recognize many similarities. Those familiar with legacy versions of Final Cut Pro will probably be somewhat lost in the new interface. To me, this is sign one that this is not directed at “professionals.” Though the app was previewed to an audience of 1,700 working professionals at NAB earlier this year, I think Apple see’s the “professional” market as one that is currently changing.

With digital video and easy distribution through the web, I see the professional market shifting, or maybe expanding from more than just a group of people editing content for film and television (for which I think Final Cut Pro versions 1 through 7 were built for) to a group of people who also produce video content for the web.

With this new release, I think the target audience/market is this new group of professionals – those creating videos for the web. Many of these people are coming from an iMovie workflow so the switch will come easy for them with the similar interface. Also, many of these “professionals” come from a file based workflow rather than a tape based workflow. Final Cut Pro X does great in working with file based formats. For tapes, not so great – logging and batch capture are gone and writing to tape is gone. Lastly, gone is DVD Studio Pro so DVD based delivery is done through templates. Not very professional if you ask me. However, in are a new set of web based delivery formats including integrated delivery to YouTube and Vimeo. For podcasts, Final Cut Pro features easy delivery for iTunes and creation of files for iOS playback.

Could editors for film and television still use this program? Sure, but features like tape in/out, monitor output, and application round-tripping (my term for sending your project to other applications like Apple Color – which is now dead – to perform a specific task and then taking it back to Final Cut Pro for continued work) are gone. So depending on your current workflow, this may or may not be an issue.

So is this for you? Maybe. Maybe not. For now, I think the features are lacking compared to older versions of Final Cut Pro so I’m certain many studios or facilities using legacy versions will not upgrade right away. However, as time goes by and more video is produced and delivered strictly for web, I think this application will slowly grow amongst many production facilities. Picking it up today may not necessarily be a bad idea. Learn it early, get the skill sets now, and get ahead of the game for whatever tomorrow has to offer.

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.

Since no live action shots were needed for this video, there was no filming necessary. Instead, all the graphic elements were created in Adobe Photoshop. In this step, I grabbed artwork of scenes I wanted to use to serve as a guide and utilized the pen tool to create my own renditions of those classic scenes.

Image of a paper model of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle

For example, the art I used for Sleeping Beauty’s castle towards the end of the video drew inspiration from a paper model which I assembled. I took the image into Adobe Photoshop and outlined it using the pen tool to create a vectorized version of the castle. The end result was the following.

Vector Art of Sleeping Beauty’s castle

To create the video, I had to create various vector elements for all the art pieces used in the video. This included all the various characters used and miscellaneous elements such as the water featured in the beginning and clouds used throughout the video.

Once all the elements were created, I took the artwork into Apple Motion to create the animations. Essentially, the entire project revolved around the practice of keyframing with some use of behaviors to automate some of the keyframes I needed to do.

Screenshot of the keyframes created for the three clouds

For the clouds, I created keyframes to bring them in and out of frame. In the screenshot above, you can see the extent of how much keyframing was involved to animate just the clouds. Other elements of the videos were not as intense as they were not featured throughout the video like the clouds were. Instead, they had single instances and involved setting keyframes to move it on the X or Y axis.

For some elements of the animation, I had “looping” animations where essentially the artwork repeated it’s motion. For example, the clouds were repeatedly tilting left and right, the waters were waving, and some of the people characters were moving up and down to simulate walking rather than sliding. To do this repeated motion, I stepped away from keyframes and instead used behaviors, Motion’s way of automating some keyframe behaviors. In the example above, I had the cinderella character moving up and down to simulate walking as seen by the red line across the visual screen. However, within the keyframe scene, there are minimal keyframes. To do this, I utilized the oscillate behavior which allowed me to set parameters in how I want an object to move. By setting the oscillate parameters to adjust the Y values a certain amount for a certain speed, I was able to create the walking effect without having to use keyframes.

Where this method became really handy was in creating the wave motion in the beginning of the scene. What would’ve taken hours to do keyframes, I was able to accomplish in minutes with the oscillate behavior. This is because the waters were created by multiple graphics.

A “wave” to serve as the basis of the water effect

The graphic above was the basis of creating the water effects. having to create the animation through a keyframe method would’ve meant having to create hundreds of keyframes for a few seconds of video.

Each one of those boxes is a wave – can you count them all?

By using the oscillate function on each one, I only needed to create 4 different settings for animation – one for each layer of waves. I can then just copy and paste those settings for each element to create a wave effect. For everything else that wasn’t animated through a behavior like oscillate, I used keyframes.

Once I was done animating all the elements of the video, the final step I had to do was the finishing touches. In traditional video productions, that would mean doing color correction and sweetening the audio. In the case of this animation, I took care of one thing – adding drop shadow. Here are a few comparisons of shots before and after drop shadow.

From my personal view point, it gives the scenes an added depth and dimension. Once that step of the project was completed, I just had to export the project and deliver it to the web.

All the keyframes used in the video

All in all, this project utilized 18 vector art pieces, several automated behaviors, and a countless amount of keyframes to create a 2 minute, 23 second animated music video. All this was done in two days of on and off work and required about 20 minutes of rendering before taking about an hour or so create various formats for web delivery.

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