The End of Final Cut (for me)

 By Edgar Burcksen, A.C.E.

I’ve had it with Final Cut. After editing three documentaries with enormous amounts of footage, enduring multiple crashes every day, with media that had to be reconnected every time, waiting for shots to render at every turn and losing many edits to unexplainable saving miscues, I finally told the producer of my upcoming editing job – another documentary with enormous amounts of footage – that it had to be ported to Avid from Final Cut Pro.

I started out on film and worked on flatbeds and uprights and then from the early tape based off-line video editing systems like Convergence to the laser based non-linear editing on Editdroids to the early Avid Film Composer, but none are as inadequate in dealing with the intricacies of editing long form film or TV projects than Final Cut Pro.

I embraced “electronic” editing in the early nineties because it expanded my creative possibilities especially with the advance of the Editdroid which I used on the Young Indiana Jones TV series at Lucas Film. Opticals like speed changes, flops (we called them mirror image), blow-ups, dissolves, fades, wipes, color corrections, titles, etc. all of the sudden became a ready to use arsenal in my daily work. After dealing with Final Cut Pro (FCP) in the last two years I felt like I was slowly being boxed in again, because all the freedoms I earned as an editor were complicated and annihilated by the clumsiness of FCP. I had long resisted working on FCP and even rejected some jobs because they were on that system. I finally relented when a job came along that was too good to refuse, thinking that a tool is a tool and I could probably learn how to work on it in a couple of days. That turned out to be true, mastering FCP is not a big thing, editing is editing and FCP had come a long way according to some editors.

Well for me that turned out not to be the case. FCP has two major flaws and in addition to those a myriad of smaller but not less annoying ones. First FCP is designed as an all-in-one system: you input your media, edit it, finalize it with all the effects, opticals and color correction tools available in it and you’re ready to output for your final product to be screened or broadcast. This might all be good if you are only editing small projects that only use one format and uses FCP to output the final. But in the real world you’re mostly dealing with different formats, different frame rates and massive amounts of footage that needs to be managed by assistants.

FCP might be fine to do an output that you can use as a final, but forget trying to use any of the lists or formats that FCP tries to spew out to talk to other machines or facilities because it is a complete nightmare. Ever tried the FCP to give you an accurate change list? FCP is arrogantly designed as its own entity, not needing to talk to anything else but itself. When you’re operating in the long form TV and movie business, it just does not work.

Avid has always worked as a link in the chain of post production making sure it would be able to talk to all the platforms through OMF, ALE, AMA and other tools. Over time Avid has added the gear to make it a finishing tool as well.

So what are the detailed gripes I have with Final Cut Pro? When you create a project in FCP it has a limited project size that you become aware of when your project starts to grow beyond 100 MB. Frequent crashes are the result and the bigger the project the slower the start-up. Because of the limits of the project size you have to create multiple projects to make your media accessible in a workable way; for example different projects for camera media, archival material, sound effects, and music. When you go through a lot of edits and re-edits of your sequences you have to create different projects, and when they become too big and when you want to move around through these projects because you want to rearrange your sequences or use an older edit that seemed better than the one you currently use, you have to make sure that you don’t have more than three projects open because… you guessed it; FCP will become more prone to crash.

When you crash you hope that it has saved your latest edit. Well this might not have happened because FCP only saves the project highlighted in the project bin. If you have the media project open because you last checked out a shot, it will save the media project, a useless exercise because nothing ever changes in it apart from media additions. Why it does not save the timeline you’re working in, is a mystery to me. Yes, I know there’s a Save All button but when you’re in the momentum of editing, you don’t think about that. And shouldn’t the Autosave function take care of that? Noooo.        

When you import media with a different frame rate or format from your project, you have to render it to make it run smoothly. When you move these shots around they lose their render and it makes FCP prone to crash. If you want to prevent this from happening you have to export these shots (with the project settings in place) and import them again. You lose all the pertinent information of the shots which you have to manually input. In Avid when you import a shot of whatever frame rate and/or format it creates a new media file that you can use and abuse however you want. In FCP when you attach some kind of effect and/or formatting to the shot it makes it even more vulnerable and prone to crash.

In Avid you can put any sequence you have created in the source monitor and use it as a source you can cut in as a whole or partial. By using the toggle button it will give you even the timeline of the sequence with a yellow position indicator so you can chose whatever you want to cut into your sequence. You can move video or sound tracks around to fit into the timeline you’re editing. In FCP you can move a sequence into the source monitor but it loses all the pertinent information attached to each individual clip. It becomes its own entity with no reference to the original: not very useful. To do what you can easily do in Avid using the source monitor, you have to copy and paste the exact piece you want from one sequence into another.

(Editor Note: you can copy clips, then hit Shift+V to ripple insert those clips in another sequence, but this is not obvious or well known) 

The effects in FCP are awkward too but that’s something you can learn to live with once you’ve figured out where they all live and how to manipulate them. Some effects live in the effects tool tab but others live embedded in the source monitor. Motion effects you’ll find in the source monitor, just like titles and sizing. Most other effects you’ll find in the effects tab organized in categories that you have to get used to. What all the effects have in common is that they need to be rendered otherwise won’t play them properly or becomes prone to crash. Move your shot one frame and you have render it again and this goes for the titles as well. In Avid when you create a title, you create a media file that you can manipulate any way you want to without re-rendering. 

The trim tool is worthless in FCP because it always goes into clip collision mode or something like that so you find work-arounds: to refine your edits you resort to a typical FCP view, you start stacking shots so you can move them individually until they fit right. The clean ‘one video track’ mode with effects, titles or superimposed shots in other tracks of the Avid is thrown out. In FCP you have easily 12 video tracks just to cover a simple edit without much else going on.

Crashing is annoying but in FCP it is extremely annoying. It happens most of the time totally unexpected; you’re editing away, absorbed by the momentum and “plop” everything disappears to put you back at the computers desktop. When that doesn’t happen it starts to hang and the colorful spinning beach ball appears, inviting you to force quit the application. Most of the time in Avid you will get a message that the computer is about to crash, so either continue or force quit. It gives you the chance to save before you force quit.

On my last project on FCP SOS/ State Of Security, a documentary with about 250 hours of footage, I crashed at least 5 times a day, sometimes 5 times an hour when I had to work in multiple projects with a lot of archival footage that always needed to be rendered. Darfur Now a similar project I edited on Avid: during the almost one year of editing I crashed maybe three times. Bluetopia, the Dodgers baseball documentary edited on the Avid during a period of six months, there were two crashes. Crashes on FCP also make that you often lose media connections that you have to reconnect and renders that have to be re-rendered; all these are time consuming momentum killing annoyances.

Is everything bad on FCP? No, you can actually port over your personal Avid keyboard settings to FCP. Also a nice feature is the interactivity of the timeline: you can drag and drop clips on the time line and extend or shorten shots by dragging the end or beginning of a shot. But is this enough to reconsider working on FCP? No, because the new Avid Media Composer 5 has these features added to its repertoire.

What about this as a replacement: Diane Weynand wrote a book called Final Cut Pro for Avid Editors, may I suggest that she should write a book called Avid Media Composer for Final Cut Pro Editors? Because with the latest software updates for the Media Composer and the fact that Avid also has made their pricing equivalent to Final Cut Pro, there’s no reason for me to use Final Cut Pro ever again.

Setup:

FCP 6.0.5

Mac Pro 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon

5 GB of RAM

AJA Kona 3

3 G-Technology RAID 5 towers total 9 TB SATA

1 G-Technology 1 TB drive SATA

1 G-Technology 1 TB drive FireWire 800

Media @ Apple ProRes 422