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Final Cut When we looked at Final Cut Pro last year, it stood out from the midrange video editor crowd, which included Adobe Premiere and Vegas Video, largely thanks to its precise editing tools, slick interface, and powerful composition features. Version 3.0 takes Final Cut Pro even further, with real-time effects, video-signal analysis, real-time color correction, and other new features designed to make your productions even more professional. But Final Cut is not yet the ultimate video-editing tool because the Mac's processor limits the apps' effects. Still, Final Cut Pro 3.0 is the best program for Mac professional editors looking for the most powerful, software-based editing application available.
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drag and drop When you fire up Final Cut Pro 3.0, you'll notice a brand-new window that hosts the so- called Video Scope tools. There you'll find a variety of tools for gathering information about your video, from color strength to signal levels. Although a bit clunky to use, these tools give you a good idea of how to correct bad video images or color-match different video clips. What sets Final Cut Pro apart from other video-editing applications is how fast it gets you from the first cut to the finished video. Unlike rival editing programs, such as Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro allows you to drag clips within the program from the Monitor window, where you preview the shots, into the Program window, where you assemble the video you want and perform one of six different types of edits automatically. Just drag the clip onto the graphic overlay that says Insert With Transition, and Final Cut adds your clip to the timeline with a nice dissolve (or another default transition) between it and the previous clip. Real-time effects;
real small video Preview like a pro Another feature, the Media Manager, allows you to convert any type of video file (from standard DV to HDTV clips) to Final Cut Pro's new OfflineRT mode. According to Apple, OfflineRT compresses your files to let you record more than five times more video material onto your hard disk. Technical support The
winner and still the champ The most immediately apparent difference between Final Cut and say, Adobe Premiere, is the fact that Final Cut does not utilise the timeline as its primary means of manipulating video. You can use the timeline to perform many operations, but most are divided between two video display windows - the Canvas window and the Viewer window. The Viewer window holds the currently selected clip, and it's from there that you perform edits, set in and out points, specify chromakey settings and so on. Once a clip has been configured in the Viewer window, it's dragged across into the Canvas window, where it's added to the current sequence. As you add the clip to the sequence, a panel of compositing options appears enabling you to specify how the clip will be added to the sequence (overwrite, insert, transpose...) A sequence is basically a mini movie, and you can have multiple sequences open at once as you work on your overall production. This is great for working on larger productions in manageable chunks, while still retaining an overview of the entire project. Many Premiere users, will be initially sceptical about Final Cut's alternative approach, but it should only take a couple of hours before you really start to come around to its video window approach. You get a much better feel for your production because you're always working directly with actual video footage rather than graphical representations of it. However, the interface, while brilliantly streamlined and well-designed for some operations, has an infuriating habit of forcing you to jump back and forth between menus, control panels, dialogs and the Canvas or Viewer windows in order to achieve a single operation. Thoughtful design would have grouped all of the operations pertaining to each decision in the places where that decision is to be taken, rather than wearing you out with all the extra mousework! Open a trade magazine to the Help Wanted section, industry job website, or just talk with professionals at a meeting or gathering, and the buzz on editing systems is that a very large majority want editors who know Apple’s Final Cut Pro 3. It is not hard to see why, Final Cut Pro 3 is inexpensive, powerful, and, in this latest release, has more features for editors creating content for various media.When I first got my hands on Final Cut Pro 2 a little over a year ago, I was blown away by how easy the program was to use, and how quickly a complex edit could be put together. After a year of working with the system, you discover the pitfalls and weaknesses, and are eager to see what the next release would offer. When Final Cut Pro 3 arrived, I was overjoyed, and as much as I’ve tried to contain my excitement and take a level headed approach to really trying to find the problem areas of the program, I still find myself running down the hallways of the DMN Central Division yelling, "Yippee!" Real Time? Well, maybe you are doing okay. G4 real time effects are preview only effects, meaning you can only view these effects on your computer, and not on a video monitor. Because most of the processing power is being used to create a preview version of your effect, there isn’t enough power to also encode a DV signal (or other format). This could be a problem for those who insist on monitoring everything on their NTSC or PAL monitor. For me, the real time desktop preview is fine as it let’s me time my effects and get a very good approximation of how the filters will look. Plus you can always park your play head on the timeline and view a still frame of the clip on a monitor if you are doing color adjustments.
If you are worried about not having a monitor, don’t throw away or sell your RTMac card just yet. It is still a very valuable component to your Final Cut Pro system. If you do have an RTMac card installed, be aware that you aren’t doubling your real time effects capabilities. As soon as Final Cut Pro 3 sees the RTMac card, it switches to the RTMac real time effects, and not the FCP ones. If you want/need more storage space, and you are not finishing your editing masterpiece, you might want to take advantage of the new OfflineRT option in Final Cut Pro 3. In the simplest terms, OfflineRT is a low-res format for those systems without a lot of power or storage space. The OfflineRT format is an enhanced version of the PhotoJPEG format, so you are encoding at 320 x 240 and a low compression ratio, but it does allow you to get over 40 minutes of footage per Gigabyte. This is perfect for those editors who might be editing a project on a G4 laptop, or those who may be editing a piece that had a huge shooting ratio (like a documentary).For anyone who is creating content outside of the DV environment (i.e. HighDef), many of the third party cards like Pinnacle’s CineWave, Matrox’s RTMac, and Digital Voodoo cards do not yet work under OS X. Hopefully all of that will change at this year’s NAB convention. I for one am keeping my fingers crossed.-sprung-The other problem with OS X and Final Cut Pro 3 are plug-ins. Right now I am having some difficulties with Boris Red loading correctly inside Final Cut Pro 3. While Boris Red will run under OS X, if you are using plug-ins from those companies that have not made the migration to X it may be impossible for these enhancements to work in your system. If you are not happy with Final Cut Pro 3, and use other applications to enhance your workflow, then you may not want to make the OS jump just yet.-sprung- Final Word I learned all of my NLE skills on an Avid system running on a Mac, and there are hundreds of others who were either raised on Avid or migrated to it years ago based on need, and who still rely on Avid/ Mac to make their fortunes. Just around the corner, and possibly a huge competitor for Final Cut Pro 3 is Avid XPressDV 3. Both are competitively priced and appear to have similar features (see Charlie White’s recent review of XPressDV 3 for the PC). When XPress DV 3 is released for OS X in June, DMN will do a side-by-side, blow-by-blow, comparison of these two systems for the Mac. For now, my money rests with Final Cut Pro 3. 
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