Final Cut Pro X – The ‘Rest of us’ Review

Final Cut Pro – Apple – $299 (Trial available)

You may recall a certain bun fight that happened a couple of months ago. Apple released a brand new version of their best-selling video editing software Final Cut Pro. They had, they said, rebuilt it from the ground up, because the old code was well past its use-by date. Fair enough, you’d have thought. Only on release the software was nearly universally derided for being little more than iMovie Pro. Video editors the world over took to the Internet and spat gobs of wordy venom at Apple. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was free global advertising for what is, let’s not forget, very much a niche product.

So the question is – if Final Cut Pro X is no good for professional video editors (who have apparently now moved en masse to Premiere Pro and Avid) – is it any good for everyone else? Is it worth looking at if you find iMovie limiting? Is it better than Premiere Elements? Is the market for this product now the serious home user or part-time video editor? If the ‘pro’ crew have moved on to pastures new, can we home and hobbyist users claim this as our own?

First Impressions

There’s no escaping it – Final Cut Pro X looks a lot like iMovie. If you compare the interface of Final Cut Pro with the design of ‘X’ it’s pretty obvious where Apple took their inspiration from. Is that a bad thing though? Final Cut Pro 7′s interface looked like something from the System 7 era – all nasty metal style windows with tiny buttons – a real throwback. On the other hand Final Cut Pro X is sleek and refined and, like most recent Apple software, a thing of beauty. Where Final Cut Pro 7 favoured tiny little silver buttons, tabs and an interface that would have confused a Space Shuttle pilot, X is an object exercise in interface design. I have never used the software before but I immediately, instinctively, know where to begin.

Getting started

Importing pretty much anything into Final Cut Pro X is as simple as dragging and dropping it into the Event Library window. You can organise all your media into different events as you see fit. You can import directly from camera or SD Card. You can also import directly from iMovie (perhaps it was this feature that pissed the planet’s video editors off so much). X makes organising your media a breeze – you can view stuff in a list, as thumbnails, in a pseudo cover-flow mode. You can group it in logical ways (by file-type or duration for instance). You can even favourite certain files and get speedy access to them whenever you wish.

At the bottom of the interface (in the default original layout) is the timeline. To add stuff to your movie, you put it on the timeline. If you add another clip in the middle of some footage everything shunts along nicely to make room, rather than leaving empty portions of the timeline. If you want to add music or a commentary you just drag it to the layer above or below your main footage. To reposition anything you just drag and drop – to line things up perfectly just drop into the precision editor and work on those individual edits.

When you’re happy with your film, you can output it via the Share menu. There are default outputs for YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook (perhaps it was this feature that pissed the planet’s video editors off so much), along with Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac/PC), DVD, Blu-Ray, Podcast Produceror Email. There’s also an Export option that enables you to output in the Apple ProRes formats, H.264, DVCPro, HDV and XDCAM formats.

Enhancing Video

Once you’ve mastered the basics of creating your video, Final Cut Pro X has all the bells and whistles you need to polish it.

Transitions
X comes with a great selection of transitions that you can drag and drop onto your timeline. There are standards such as cross disolves and blurs, but also iMovie style effects such as comic books and film strips. Alternatively you can create your own in Motion and import them directly into X for immediate use.

Titles
It’s easy to add titles, credits, subtitles, captions or any other kind of text directly to your video. There are classic plain text styles and flashy animations such as sports, tributes and photo album.

Effects
There’s a vast number of video and audio effects supplied with X. You can treat your footage to a trendy bleach bypass effect, add random bokeh, add a night vision overlay or even make it look like it was filmed underwater. Audio can be treated to distortion, echo and modulation effects or you tap into the collection of over 100 audio effects units.

Features

Final Cut Pro X does an incredible job at hiding dizzying complexity behind a stunningly simple interface. The magnetic timeline is a dream to use, because it enables you to simply juggle all your different clips and media without worrying about the technical complexities of it.

Considerable thought has gone into adding features that are so useful you wonder why it wasn’t always done this way. For instance, compound clips enable you to add narration, remove camera audio and add special effects and then bundle the whole thing up into one single easily manipulated clip. It’s a bit like creating a complex image in Photoshop on multiple layers and then putting those layers in a folder for ease of use.

The auditions facility is genius – if you’re not sure which piece of footage you should use you can add them all to the timeline and view them in-situ, committing to the one you like best when you’ve done a run-through. I also loved the clip connections facility, which enables you to link media such as titles or music to other clips and when the parent clip moves, so the connected clips move with it. It might not be how the pros do it in Premiere Pro or Avid, but it works well for me.

Finding your way around a piece of footage is a cinch with the skimming tool. You skim across a clip, independent of the position of the playhead, to find the bit you need. You can skim in the Event Library or in the timeline and when you find the bit you need you can hit spacebar to play back from that point.

Issues

There are some strange features in Final Cut Pro X that may serve to confuse users. For instance it took me the best part of a day to find out why my hi-def movies were exporting in grainy low resolution – turns out you have to switch from proxy to original media in preferences before exporting.

You’ll also experience some speed issues on older Mac hardware. Demanding software like this needs up-to-date hardware and my 8Gb mid-2009 Macbook Pro suffered a bit when dragging clips around the timeline. That said it was still very useable, just not as snappy as it is on current i5 and i7 hardware.

Conclusion

There are so many features in X that it beggars belief that anyone could call it dumbed down. With the 10.01 release, Apple added a basic import facility for previous versions of Final Cut Pro so inevitably those add-ons and features that the pros are all crying about will arrive over time.

Let’s also not lose sight of the fact that this is a $300 application (FCP7 is $999) – that pricing alone suggests that FCPX is pitched at a far wider audience than FCP7. They have also designed the interface in line with iMovie to ease hobbyists and prosumers into the more advanced application. Apple have produced a video editing suite that can meet the needs of the vast majority of users, from home users editing holiday videos to professionals who are willing to make the change. It probably won’t meet the needs of Peter Jackson on the set of The Hobbit, but it’s a game changer for pretty much everyone else.