Final Cut Pro
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| File:Final Cut Pro.png | |
| File:Fcp5 screen.jpg Final Cut Pro 5 | |
| Developer(s) | Apple Inc. |
|---|---|
| Stable release | |
| Operating system | Mac OS X |
| Type | Video editing software |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | Final Cut |
Final Cut Pro is a professional non-linear editing system created by Apple Inc. that allows both professional and home users to edit both video and film. The latest releases are for Mac OS X only. From the early 2000s, Final Cut has developed a large and ever expanding user base. One of its greatest strengths is its ease of use.
Final Cut Pro has found acceptance among professionals and a number of broadcast facilities because of its cost effective efficiency as an off-line editor as much as a digital on-line editor. Final Cut Pro is also very popular with independent and semi-professional film-makers. As such, it can be used to edit material ranging from FireWire-attached MiniDV video from a consumer digital video camera or professional DV camera to High-Definition (HD) material in the various HD specifications and flavours including HDV. The software logs and captures video onto the computer's hard drive, where it can be edited and processed. The current version of Final Cut Pro 5.1 runs on both Intel and PowerPC processors (minimum G4/867Mhz).
Final Cut Pro was originally intended to be a resolution independent editing system but so far has not fully achieved this aim with real-time performance restricted to resolution, frame-rate and codec uniformity with source material. Resolution, format and codec independent editing systems are available in competitive products to Final Cut Pro (namely Sony Vegas, Grass Valley Edius and Adobe Premiere Pro). However, because Final Cut Pro is not entirely resolution and codec agnostic, it can deliver higher quality video than its competitors because the editing is done in the native codec of the acquired video material.
History
Randy Ubillos and other members of his team originally created Adobe Premiere [1]. They were then hired by Macromedia to create KeyGrip, built from the ground up as a more professional video-editing program based on QuickTime. Macromedia made a decision to be a web company instead of competing head-on with Adobe in every category and decided to find a buyer for their non-web applications, including KeyGrip, by this time (1998) renamed as Final Cut. Final Cut was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exposition in 1998 after Macromedia pulled out of the main show floor. At the demonstration both Mac and Windows versions were shown. The Mac version was working with a Truevision RTX dual stream real time card with limited real time effects. *1 When no purchaser could be found Apple purchased the team as a defensive move. When Apple could not find a buyer in turn, it continued development work, focusing on adding FireWire/DV support and at NAB 1999 Apple introduced Final Cut Pro.
With the introduction of Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere's market share remained strong on Windows but began to decline on the Mac,[citation needed] since its older codebase was more difficult to maintain and enhance. In 2003, Apple announced a program for Premiere users to trade in their discs for a free copy of Final Cut Express or a $500 discount on Final Cut Pro [2]. Later that year, Adobe introduced the successor to Premiere, Premiere Pro, a Windows-only product with a modern codebase and several more advanced features than the current version of Final Cut Pro including more sophisticated audio editing and mixing tools, surround sound encoding and mixing, a wider diversity of format compliance and specialist workflow features such as Adobe Clipnotes.
A contributing factor to Final Cut Pro's initial success was Apple's appointment of Ralph Fairweather as web evangelist for Final Cut Pro. Along with other pioneers like Lawrence Jordan, film editor and founder of *2-pop, Josh Mellicker of *DVcreators.net and Philip Hodgetts, the presence of knowledgeable Final Cut Pro users on user forums and in email groups helped smooth the path for users to adopt Final Cut Pro.
In late 2001, the studio motion picture "The Rules of Attraction" was edited on beta versions of Final Cut Pro 3, proving to the film industry that successful 3:2 pulldown matchback to 24fps could be achieved with a consumer off-the-shelf product. Roger Avary, the film's director became the spokesperson for Final Cut Pro, appearing in print ads worldwide. His advocacy of the product gave confidence to mainstream editors like Walter Murch that the product was ready for "prime time."
In 2002, the application won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award [3] for its impact on the television industry.
Version 4 of the application was announced in April 2003. It included three new applications: Compressor, used for the transcoding between video formats; LiveType for advanced titling (such as the creation of animated lower thirds); and Soundtrack, for royalty-free music soundtrack creation. It also bundled Cinema Tools, which was previously sold separately for filmmakers working with telecine.
In April 2004, version 4.5 of Final Cut Pro was introduced, and rebranded by Apple as "Final Cut Pro HD" (even though the software has been capable of HD editing since version 3.0). Final Cut Pro HD did not support the burgeoning HDV format, however. Its "scaled-down" cousin, Final Cut Express, gained support for HDV 9 months after the release of Final Cut Pro HD. Native HDV support was later added with the release of Final Cut Pro 5.0 in May 2005 (which was first announced at a pre-NAB event in April).
In January 2006 Apple stopped selling Final Cut Pro as a stand-alone product. In March 2006 the Universal Binary version was released as part of Final Cut Studio 5.1. The upgrade was performed by sending the original source discs back to Apple with a fee. One noticeable difference is that the Intel versions of Final Cut and Motion no longer recognize After Effects plug-ins as Adobe has not released a universal version of After Effects.
On Sunday April 15, 2007, Apple revealed Final Cut Pro 6 in the new Final Cut Studio 2 bundle.
See also a release history in context with the rest of Final Cut Studio.
Feature Films edited with Final Cut Pro
Final Cut Pro has been used to edit many feature films, including American Beauty, Cold Mountain, Corpse Bride, Jarhead, Napoleon Dynamite, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Wassup Rockers, Conversations With Other Women, The Ring, The Ring 2, Bye Bye Miss Goodnight and Zodiac.
Features
Final Cut Pro provides non-linear, non-destructive editing of any QuickTime compatible video format. It supports an unlimited number of simultaneously composited video tracks; up to 99 audio tracks; multi-cam editing, for cutting video from multiple camera sources; as well as standard ripple, roll, slip, slide, scrub, razor blade and time remapping edit functions. It comes with a range of dissolve, iris, distortion and basic 3D transitions and a range of video and audio filters such as keying tools, mattes and vocal de-poppers and de-essers. It also has a manual 3-way color correction filter, videoscopes and a selection of generators, such as slugs, test cards and noise.
The latest version of Final Cut Pro (version 6) claims better integration with Apple's other Pro applications and improved codec support for editing HD, DV and SD video formats, along with Panasonic's new solid-state recording technology, P2. A new technology called DynamicRT built on the RT Extreme technology was released with Final Cut Pro 4. DynamicRT allows a real-time multistream effects architecture, which can be set to automatically adjust image quality and frame rate during playback to maintain real time effects. For example, when there are a large number of video streams playing simultaneously, it will change, on the fly, to a mode that reduces the quality of the playback so that all of them can be seen in real time; when the computer is capable of it, it will automatically return playback to native quality (that is, when there are fewer simultaneous video streams). Limitations of the program include the inability to edit different video formats on the same timeline without rendering the video to the settings of the timeline.
Final Cut Pro, like all current NLE systems, also has the ability to up-convert standard definition material to high definition as well as the ability to cross-convert video of differing frame rates. This feature is important to Final Cut Pro because, while Apple was slower than other developers to implement this functionality, they still have not achieved resolution or codec independence which would allow Final Cut Pro to mix resolutions without rendering or diminishing real-time performance on the timeline. Thus, the ability to cross-convert easily is important for mixed format and resolution workflows.
Final Cut Pro 6 uses the included application Cinema Tools to keep track of original film sources through the telecine editing processes. Calligraphy 2 from BorisFX - a plug-in that works natively in Final Cut Pro - is included for higher quality titling and is a subset of the Boris Graffiti titling technology. Final Cut Pro 6 is part of the Final Cut Studio 2 suite, and also has the ability to edit natively in HDV.
Though Apple aimed to make the need for hardware-based rendering obsolete, the software's lack of compatibility with render accelerating hardware and third-party render farms may be a hindrance to big-budget studios.
Final Cut Express
In 2003, Apple launched Final Cut Express, an inexpensive version of Final Cut. It uses the same interface as Final Cut Pro, but it lacks all of the film-specific tools and other advanced options, pruning the feature set for amateur and professional digital video producers.
In January 2005, Soundtrack and Live Type, previously only available with Final Cut Pro, were added to Express, and features were added to edit HDV.
Interface
The Final Cut (Pro and Express) interface has four main windows: the Browser, where source media files are listed; the Viewer, where individual media files can be previewed and trimmed; the Timeline, where media can be cut together into a sequence; and the Canvas, where the edited production in the timeline can be viewed. The positions and sizes of these windows can be changed, but by default, the Browser is at the top left, with the Viewer and Canvas to its right, in that order, and the Timeline below. There is also a small Toolbox window and two audio level indicators for the left and right audio channels.
Both the Viewer and Canvas have a shuttle interface (for variable-speed scanning through a clip, forwards or backwards) and a jogging interface (for frame-by-frame advancing). The standard J, K and L keys can be used to play the video at full speed backwards, to pause the video, and to play it at full speed in a forward direction, respectively. The I and O keys can be used to set in and out points for a clip, or for the entire sequence.
Browser
As in most digital non-linear editing applications, the Browser is not an interface to the computer's filesystem. It is an entirely virtual space in which references to clips (aliases) are placed, for easy access, and arranged in folders called 'bins'. Since they are only references to clips that are on the media drive of the computer, moving or deleting a source file on the media hard drive destroys the link between the entry in the Browser and the actual media. This results in a 'media offline' situation, and the media must be 'reconnected'. Final Cut Pro can search for the media itself, or the user can do this manually. If multiple clips are offline at the same time, Final Cut can reconnect all the offline media clips that are in the relative directory path as the first offline media clips that is reconnected.
The browser has an 'effects' tab in which video transitions and filters can be browsed and dragged onto or between clips.
Canvas
The canvas outputs the contents of the Timeline. To add clips to the Timeline, besides dragging them there, it is possible to drag clips from the Browser or Viewer onto the Canvas, whereupon the so-called 'edit overlay' appears. The edit overlay has seven drop zones, into which clips can be dragged in order to perform different edits. The default is the 'overwrite' edit, which overwrites at an in point or the space occupied after the playhead with the incoming clip. The 'insert' edit slots a clip into the sequence at the in point or playhead's position, keeping the rest of the video intact, but moving it all aside so that the new clip fits. There are also drop zones to have the application automatically insert transitions. The 'replace' edit replaces a clip in the Timeline with an incoming clip, and the 'fit to fill' edit does the same thing, but at the same time, it adjusts the playback speed of the incoming clip so that all of it will fit into the required space [in the Timeline]. Finally there is the 'superimpose' edit, which automatically places the dropped clip on the track above the clip in the Timeline, with a duration equal to the clip below it. Unless an in or out point are set, all edits occur from the position of the playhead in the Timeline.
Using the wireframe view on the canvas, the clip can be manipulated directly - dragging it around in the canvas to change its position, for example, or resizing it. Precise adjustment controls for these things are in the viewer.
Viewer
The viewer has tabs for each channel of the selected clip's audio, in which the waveform for the audio can be viewed and scrubbed, and where its volume can be keyframed. The filters tab is where effects for the clip appear and where their parameters can be adjusted and keyframed. If the clip selected is a generator (such as an oval shape), a control tab appears for changing its geometrical properties. Finally, the viewer's motion tab contains tools to adjust the scale, opacity, cropping, rotation, distortion, drop shadow, motion blur and time remapping properties of the clip. Mini-timelines to the right of each parameter allow the property to be keyframed.
Compositing
Clips can be edited together in timelines called sequences. Sequences can be nested inside other sequences, so that a filter or transition can be applied to the grouped clips.
The timeline in Final Cut Pro allows 99 video tracks to be layered on top of each other. If a clip is higher in the timeline than another, then it obscures whatever is below it. The size of a video clip can be altered, and the clips can be cropped, among many other settings that can be changed. Opacity levels can also be altered, as well as animated over the course of the clip using keyframes, defined either on a graphical overlay, or in the Viewer's 'motion' tab, where precise percentage opacity values can be entered. Final Cut also has more than a dozen common compositing modes that can be applied to clips, such as Add, Subtract, Difference, Screen, Multiply, Overlay, and Travel Matte Luma/Alpha.
The compositing mode for a clip is changed by control-clicking or right-clicking on the clip and selecting it from the cascading contextual menu, or by selecting the mode from the application's 'modify' menu. For either matte modes, the clip that will perform the key is placed underneath the fill clip on the timeline.
For more advanced compositing Final Cut Pro roundtrips with Apple's Shake and Apple Motion software.
Easter Eggs
If the correct sequence of keys and mouse clicks is pressed, a patch of grass will appear to which "Bruce the Wonder Yak" walks and starts munching. His name is known to be Bruce the Wonder Yak because he announces it from time to time. After a while, he'll have random thoughts all of which seem to be single liners added by the development team over the course of the product development. He'll keep having these thoughts until the mouse is moved, at which point he runs across the screen, disappearing to the side (after which the grass vanishes).
Apparently Bruce has been in Final Cut since v1.0 and, although could always be summoned, he turns up on the screen just by himself from time to time when the application has been left idle for some hours.
This has been in one of Apple's most strategically important products since 1999. The fact that management have yet to force the removal of the feature is unusual.
You can invoke Bruce as follows:
- Final Cut Pro 4.5:
- Press [Option-J]
- Type [Shift+b] then "ruce"
- The search box will now display "[shift icon]Bruce". Erase the shift icon using the arrow keys and and backspace only. Do not press return.
- A button should now appear named "Call Bruce". You can drag this button into any window where it will be added to the toolbars.
- Press the button.
- Final Cut Pro 5.x:
- Select [Videoscopes] from the [Tools] item on the main menu
- In the Videoscope window, hold the CTRL key and click multiple times
- Bruce should appear at the bottom of the screen
See also
References
Hodgetts, Philip (Sep. 7, 2003). "Apple Final Cut Pro Archives - 2003". CreativeCow.net. Retrieved Jan. 20, 2007. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)