The much anticipated new version to Apple's Final Cut Pro video editing suite was unveiled this week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas. In true Apple fashion the details were kept under wraps until presented at the FCP Users Network Group Supermeet.
The NAB presentation was only a beta preview. The software will not be available in the App Store until June. However, at first glance I found lots to be excited about. First, the price point at $299 makes the software affordable for even the smallest of producers and production houses. Freelancers the world over should rejoice. And a host of new college graduates will be able to enjoy the "perks" of forming their own production companies without waiting in line to interview for one of the pitifully few openings at network affiliates or established production facilities. I'm sure the price tag will lure me to update the edit suite in my home studio (affectionately known as Blue Plaid Hat Entertainment). I'm equally sure that Apple will market an updated line of hardware later this spring that will supplement the software nicely.
But back to my excitement about the product at hand--FCP X. One notable improvement in the software is range-based keywording and smart collections. That's really just a Apple's term for adding metadata to your clips. While tagging clips in earlier versions of FCP was technically possible, the process wasn't necessarily intuitive. Entering descriptors during capture, adding comments via clip settings in the browser, or creating subclips worked, but it also slowed down your workflow. In FCP X you can tag clips or portions of clips directly in the Browser at any stage of your edit. No need for multiple subclips in multiple bins to categorize your video. Footage can be queried using keywords and easily identified in their smart collections.
Yet another new feature is content auto analysis and the ability of the software to recognize shot attributes during the ingest process. The software divides your footage into close ups, medium shots, or wide shots as well as tallies the number of people in the shot. Like shots are categorized together in a Smart Group list in the Browser. A new expanded filmstrip view with skimming (or scrubbing) gives you even more flexibility. Additional bells and whistles include automatic color correction and audio sweetening. FCP X detects issues as you begin to ingest footage and allows you to apply fixes from the beginning rather than during the edit process.
Apple has redesigned the multiclip functionality so that you can group or link a sequence of clips together and edit from that group in the timeline. The new moniker is "compound clips." It will be interesting to see if the multiclip function remains an option in FCP X or if that folds into the compound clip function. The new Auditioning function is another play on the multiclip functionality. Say you have three versions of a rough cut. Rather than creating three separate sequences all three versions can be placed in the timeline and you can go back and forth between them. Think of this as clip enabling/disabling on steroids. Okay that feature will be a little easier to understand when you see it, but if you've ever used multiclips in FCP you will understand my excitement about these features.
The magnetic timeline and clip connections certainly represent an improvement to FCP's editing interface. Clip connections insures that primary audio and video remained linked (and synced) unless you specifically unlink them. Plus the software allows for creation of a secondary association between video and audio, so music or sound effects can be linked to a video clip. This alone will save me lots of frustration in the edit suite. With the magnetic timeline feature hard tracks (and I hope the destination controls that go along with them) are no longer the norm. FCP now adjusts by automatically adding tracks and moving media to lower tracks rather than overwriting or shifting existing clips in the timeline.
Finally the feature I think will be most helpful to amateur producers or new users of FCP is the ability to sync video from secondary cameras via the nat sound track recorded. Using the camera mic to provide a reference audio track will be a life saver when shooting an event with multiple cameras that are not sharing timecode. Jam syncing the timecode is now merely a hindrance from the past.
The inline precision editing tool feels like the most anemic upgrade to the suite. The presenter tried to sell it as new and innovative, but it's really just a graphically oriented repurposing of the ripple/roll and slip/slide tools.
These are few of my first impressions based on the marketing materials released so far. I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of the software. I'll follow up as I get to use the tools, but for now I'm excited about a new arsenal of editing tools to add to my suite.
