Affordable HD Focus PageEdit Review — Apple Final Cut Pro 5
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Jan Ozer
Putting FCP to the test.
Unless you've been living in outer space, you probably know a few things about Apple Final Cut Pro 5. First, Apple added native support for HDV and multi-camera editing, and beefed up the preview capabilities and network sharing over Xsan. For most Final Cut users, these features make upgrading a very simple decision. (At MacWorld this year, Apple announced that the individual components of Final Cut Studio would no longer be available separately.)
Final Cut Pro 5 supports formats such as DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, and DVCPRO HD, but its user-friendliness for mixed-format projects such as HDV/DV is limited.
You also know that Final Cut Studio is an irresistible suite of tools with arguably the best DVD authoring tool available (DVD Studio Pro), an engaging and rapidly evolving audio editor (SoundTrack Pro), the most usable motion graphics designer available (Motion 2), plus some lovely bits and pieces like Compressor and LiveType. Regarding Final Cut Pro itself, you’re undoubtedly aware of support for network broadcast and film formats like DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, and DVCPRO HD, native editing for IMX at 50Mbps, support for uncompressed 8- and 10-bit HD (4:2:2 YUV) and uncompressed 8- and 10-bit SD (4:2:2 YUV), as well as HD at 1080i 50/60, 1080p 23.98/24, and 720p 23.98/30/60.
All this is wonderful for higher-end shops that shoot exclusively in these high-end formats, but how does Final Cut Pro work in mid-range shops that are just now starting to experiment with HDV? In addition, in terms of the day-to-day workflow issues that all of us face, how does Final Cut Pro stack up against the competition?
To examine these issues, we’ve hired you, the reader, as a corporate video producer about to shoot and edit your first mixed-format HDV/DV shot. It’s a simple job: a product training video for the new widget your company is introducing, which you’ll output on DVD and in Windows Media and QuickTime formats. The product marketing manager and chief engineer will discuss its features and benefits, then demonstrate the widget in a small auditorium before a friendly crowd of local sales and marketing reps.
You place the HDV camera in the back, connected to the sound system. You decide to shoot in HDV mode to catch the big picture, thinking you’ll zoom into the high-definition video while editing for any necessary close-ups. You place your DV camera on the side, shooting audience shots and close-ups of the execs and demo.
You’ve shot the event, and now you’re sitting down to edit in Final Cut Pro 5. You capture your videos, and then try to group them to use the new multicam tool. You see an error message that says “Unable to make a Multiclip. The video frame sizes don’t match.” You check the manual (Volume II, p. 248) and see that not only do the frame sizes need to match up, you need identical codecs and frame rates.
You do a bit of research, and you learn that Avid Liquid and Xpress Pro both can synch HDV and SD streams with their multicamera features, as can Sony Vegas with third-party plug-ins, making Final Cut’s limitation somewhat unique. It's irrelevant, of course, to filmmakers or broadcasters who shoot all their work in the same format, but a pretty big problem to you for this job.
Ever intrepid, you consider your options. You might say to yourself, “Well, I’ll do it the old-fashioned way: drop both clips on the timeline and cut away what I don’t need, kind of like Rodin (or was it Michelangelo?).” Nope, you decide: While you can insert HDV and DV clips on the same timeline, producing the proper aspect ratio is challenging, and Apple recommends against it.
You can downsample your HDV footage to SD in one fell swoop—maybe overnight so you won’t lose any working hours—but that means forgoing your plan to pan and zoom around within the HDV video, which is, of course, why you shot in HDV in the first place. You can scan through the footage trying to figure out which scenes you’d like to pan and zoom within, but it’s probably simpler just to adjust the entire tape, then render to SD. You know this boosts editing time significantly, since you’ll be adjusting scenes that you’ll replace with footage from the other camera, but it’s probably your best option.
2D adjustments
Fortunately, panning and zooming through the HDV footage plays to many of the strengths of the dual G5 system you’re probably working on, and of FCP itself. You’d drag the clip to the timeline, and then use FCP’s motion controls to pan and zoom through the video, setting keyframes at every move, enabling safe zones to ensure your image stays visible on DVD. You may choose to work in Fit All view so you can see the outline of the entire frame while positioning the window within it, which is useful visual feedback during positioning.
The zoom control has a nice slider, and once you switch into Image + Wireframe view, preview becomes very responsive while you're dragging the frame around. You might wish for horizontal and vertical positioning sliders (as in Adobe Premiere Pro and Liquid) so you can pan and zoom precisely in one direction, but with Final Cut you’ll need to enter numbers in a centering dialog. That slows things down a bit.
After working for a few minutes, you’d probably give your firstborn for the ability to copy and paste keyframes (Liquid, Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas) or create motion presets you can apply with one click (Liquid, Premiere Pro), so you don’t have to create them manually, or copy and paste motion attributes from clip to clip, which is much more cumbersome.
Still, when it’s time to render the HDV to SD, Final Cut Pro will be very responsive, and the image quality of the sub-sampled output will be best in class. With Final Cut Studio, you also get distributed encoding, which distributes the encoding chores over multiple nodes in order to speed rendering, which will take some of the sting of having to downsample the entire HDV source tape, rather than just the sections included in the production.
Multicam
Now that you’ve got your source videos into SD DV, it’s time to use FCP’s multicam feature, which really is all joy, especially compared to Liquid’s spartan offering and Xpress’ complicated interface. You can synchronize files via timecode or in or out points, and link multiple sequential clips into separate groups automatically following well-defined naming conventions.
After grouping the video files, you drag the composite clip to the timeline and viewer, where you can display up to 16 angles simultaneously. You press the space bar to start playback, then choose the desired camera angle by clicking it in the viewer window. Apple modifies the composite clip on the timeline as you go, adding the cuts as you change camera angles. Once you’re done, you can use the roll tool to change the in/out point between any two camera changes, or even choose a different camera angle for any section. You can also drag any clip up to track 2, then close the gaps with other camera angles to present layers of video or picture-in-picture, both excellent effects for concerts, plays, and other entertainment videos.
As with all implementations, FCP’s multicam interface is moderately technical, with lots of buttons to push and settings to set. The documentation is excellent, though, so you should have no trouble quickly getting up to speed. When you do, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without multicam capabilities, and you’ll be glad that Apple’s implementation is so polished.
Color correction
Then, more than likely, you’ll notice that the background wall looks a bit different in each clip—not so unusual since they were shot from a different camera and angle. So you decide to color correct each clip and then make sure the backgrounds match.
Unfortunately, you’ll find the job tougher than it needs to be. When first introduced, Final Cut’s three-way color corrector was a breakthrough. Since then, however, most competitors (Premiere Pro, Liquid, and Avid Xpress Pro) have introduced similar tools, but also one-button, automatic color correction tools that work remarkably well. The only major competitor that hasn’t, Sony Vegas, provides a split-screen, single-frame preview (as does Xpress) that really simplifies single-clip corrections. Admittedly, Final Cut Pro has all the scopes and tools necessary to get it right in the long term, but when you’re in hurry, auto-color or even the split-screen views can be valuable timesavers.
If any of your clips have back-lighting issues (hey, it happens to all of us), you’ll be hard pressed to find any Final Cut filter that can brighten the foreground image without also blooming the background light. Here, Premiere Pro’s Shadow/Highlight tool (also available in Adobe Photoshop) is an absolute gem. Ulead’s brand-new MediaStudio Pro 8 features a similar tool that works nearly as well.
When it’s time to match the backgrounds and skin tones from your two cameras, you’ll find the matching controls in Multiple Edits view far less intuitive (and likely less effective) than Avid’s three-window color correction tool. Apple does provide nice controls for copying and pasting the color correction filter to clips before and after the source clip, but overall, in terms of ease of use and some areas of color correction functionality, Final Cut Pro lags behind.
Titles
Now it’s time to create titles that identify your speakers and summarize key features. You’re in a hurry, so you want to keep it simple—just plain text over a slightly transparent background to ease readability.
If you’re new to Final Cut Pro, you’d probably fumble around looking for a titling or character generation function, but would find only the simple text generation capabilities. You’d open one of these, type the name and title of your exec, drag the new track down to the timeline, and use motion controls to place it where you want it. Then you’d use a similar “generator” to create a box or oval to place behind the text, sizing it via sliders and positioning it via motion controls.
To create the next title, you’d copy the two clips and paste them into the new position, then open each to change the text and reshape the background to fit the new contents. Not hugely difficult, but you’d probably find yourself thinking, “Why can’t I open a simple WYSIWYG titling utility that works over the background video and lets me build both text and rectangle in the same tool?”
Why, indeed, since Xpress Pro, Premiere Pro, and Liquid let you do just that? You might also think, “I know I’m supposed to be a creative professional and all that, but how about some lower-third styles to get me started? Maybe some that match the bullet points I’m about to create (like in Premiere Pro).”
To be fair, if you were creating more ornate titles or had more lofty goals, you would love LiveType or Motion, which truly simplify the complex. Your goals here, however, are different—you just want to simplify the simple.
Rendering
About this time, your client comes in and asks, “When can I see a rough cut on DVD? And how it’s gonna look in QuickTime and Windows Media formats?” Since Final Cut Pro is now part of the Studio suite, which includes authoring, you might assume you can press a single button and produce a DVD from your timeline, just a rough cut with no menus or chapter points (as you can in Premiere Pro).
But you can’t, so you export your video, go to lunch to let it render, start a DVD Studio Pro project when you get back, and burn a DVD. Using a QuickTime container file might speed things up, but waiting time would still be significant if you’ve added significant color correction or similar effects. Console yourself by remembering that once you’ve started authoring for real, DVD Studio Pro is best in class, particularly when it comes to templates, transitions, and playlist functionality.
You finish the DVD, then turn your attention to the streaming files. Though Compressor is easily the best home-grown batch compression tool on the market, it doesn’t produce Windows Media files (or RealVideo, for that matter) as do Premiere Pro, Vegas, or Xpress (through the bundled Sorenson Squeeze), which all output QuickTime as well. Note that Autodesk’s Cleaner for Mac and Sorenson Media’s Squeeze for Mac do output Windows Media (and RealVideo), so it’s not impossible on the Mac, just not available in Compressor.
So, you tell your client you’ll need to buy a third-party tool and will get back to her in a day or two.
What’s the net?
OK, fable over; we’re back to reality. I’ll acknowledge that parts of this review are patently unfair, pitting Final Cut Pro against the best features of the competition and, to a degree, focusing on FCP’s weaknesses rather than its strengths. Perhaps more to the point, a similar analysis with a different editor like Premiere Pro might reveal a similar laundry list of product disadvantages.
That said, these are not abstract issues. I have personally felt the pain of trying to use Final Cut Pro for my first HDV/DV dual-camera project, only to discover the shortcomings identified above. I frantically searched for the one-button output to DVD while a client sat waiting and have fumed while creating titles in a text generator rather than a simple titling tool. Color correction has been a consistent frustration, and, for better or worse, QuickTime is not the only format that our customers care about.
Overall, the key new features in Final Cut Pro version 5 were obviously the right focus. Multicam and HDV support were competitive necessities, though the implementation was flawed, if only for those using mixed formats in their projects. Before pushing the envelope for new features in version 6, however, Apple should resolve these shortcomings and focus its attention on day-to-day features and workflows that affect all editors.
