FCPX: Ready or Not, Here it Comes...

Apple FCPX - Final Cut Pro X Review at Creative COW

Gary Adcock Chicago Illinois USA ©2011 CreativeCOW.net. All rights reserved.

Article Focus: We knew that Gary Adcock was the perfect person to deal with an app that aspires to meet the needs of the hardest-core, highest-end pros. Or does it? What if Apple told you that Final Cut Pro X wasn't meant for you? Gary goes beyond his own knee-jerk reaction to the release to get under the hood of FCPX, and he likes a lot of what he sees. In Part 1 of his look at FCP X, he starts with an area FCP has historically struggled most, yet that matters most to editing professionals: media management. For an additional look at the subject of this article, see FCPX: Hardware changes - PART Two.

FCPX: READY OR NOT, IT'S HERE

I'll be honest. When I first opened FCPX, my first title for this article was, "What the @#%, Apple?!"

Let's get the hard part out of the way first. FCPX is NOT an upgrade to Final Cut Pro 7. This is a whole new app, literally built from the ground up. Here's one thing that this means: upgrades traditionally allow you to open previous projects. That is not allowed here, so let's just call this a whole new app.



This is a look at the full interface of FCPX


This release is not for the professional editor, not yet. Apple knows this -- BOY, does Apple know, and they understand that if they want to make this useful for pro editors, they have a short window to deliver some of what's missing.

The main issues for most pro editors now: no support for any tape based capture, no third-party hardware support, and no third-party codec support. That means that you cannot send or receive an EDL or XML file for online editing or finishing.



These are the available direct output options for Final Cut Pro 10, Note that Blu-ray is finally an option for mac users, and that the Export Movie Option offers all flavors of ProRes, DVCProHD and 2 Versions of Sony's XDCam Codec, and the Export Image Sequence offers output of DPX or Open EXR format frames using the libraries for Shake.


Apple has been very specific, that this is not the final state of FCPX. Features are expected to be added quickly, via the App Store, with some of them waiting to show up natively in OS X Lion and with support for Thunderbolt.

Once we get past the knee-jerk reactions (like mine was), the fact is there's a lot to like about FCPX right now. The GUI has naturally received the most attention so far, but I'd like to show you some of what's going on underneath the hood.

Some of it has to do with 64-bit speed that you're not going to believe, but I'm going to start with our old friend, FCP media management. Even more important, is the information about your media, called metadata. The changes that Apple has made will change the future of non-linear editing for film, video and digital cinema professionals, with power that high-end pros have only been dreaming of.



Finally Apple has been able to include a true Background Tasks Indicator that is more than a spinning beach ball and a locked up interface.

INGEST OR IMPORT?

Since there is not a way to open previous projects, your best practice here is to start from scratch with the newest tapeless camera you have access to.

However, while Apple's approach with FCPX defaults to ingesting the media directly from the camera, a reality is that we no longer shoot our projects on a single camera or a single form of media.That concept precludes using the camera as a media ingest device, especially when you consider that many cameras use USB as the only connection, yet I can transfer from SxS, SDHC or CF cards over SATA at 10x the speed of USB.

My main reasoning for this is simple--why bother hanging a camera when you can edit with the content directly from the cards while the transfer of media is going on in the back-ground? The only difference is when the media copy is complete your timeline playback be-comes noticeably faster.



Final Cut Pro has gained enough intelligence to be able to understand media location and organization as part of this release, that level of commitment is at the foundation of this release and is evident throughout the application.


Currently FCPX easily supports the DSLR cameras, Panasonic's P2 and AVC-I format cameras along with any Apple Devices. My pre-release version of the software had some issues with importing of Sony's EX and XDCAM formats, so I resorted to using the XDCAM Transfer Tool.

There is no support for any of the RAW camera formats or frame based workflows like DPX or Tiff working with this release. Workarounds for higher end cameras include using the QT reference files with R3D media, and just importing ProRes from the ARRI Alexa. However in both of these cases much of the camera metadata is ignored.



This is the metadata folder from my ingest test with FCPX, my original media included a 20sec video clip from my iPad and a Nikon DLSR card archive. You can see from this that AutoContent Analysis is doing quite a bit in the background.

AUTO CONTENT ANALYSIS: IT'S ALL ABOUT THE METADATA

The real fun starts once you get your media in, you can then see some of the industry-changing approaches that Apple has built in for tracking metadata. Metadata is not magic and what is done with it is not voodoo. Metadata is nothing other than information about your data, being handled as a secondary part of the content.

It was only with the onslaught of digital still cameras that we started to understand the vast amount of data that a camera could embed into the content stream, simply not possible with video or film. If you have never ever opened the EXIF panel in Photoshop and taken a peak at what is viewable in that file, you get some idea of what it's possible to include in a digital cinema file.

That extra information covers everything from your camera's serial number, GPS loca-tion data, time of day, zoom settings, exposure, even auto color settings and the date the data card was last formatted are cataloged, all of this information a secondary result of leaving film and videotape behind.

Now that more and more cameras are moving into the data realm, expect to see even more metadata on movie and film sets: SMPTE has defined the R210 protocol for metadata in a way that allows recording of up to 2048 fields of information embedded as data.

How great would an editor's job be if he has an assistant whose only job was to pre-sort the ingested material into workable bites based on script or shooting information? B-roll could be flagged at the camera, and then deposited in the proper bin based on location and time of day it was shot. Studio interviews are separated into close up, 2-shot or wide shots. Exteriors are logged based on where and when the content was recorded. Even graphics and animations sorted into bins based on whether they are lower thirds or opens.

All of it happening automatically, nearly invisibly, in the background because of all that metadata being read and cataloged, so in this version of Final Cut Pro that assistant editor you cannot afford is called Auto Content Analysis, readying all of your incoming media and defining it as it is ingested into your system, placing the content in multiple places within the Event Library, based on both application and user defined keywords.

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