Final Cut - not the Pink Floyd one
Steve Longman - 8/31/2007
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
George Bernard Shaw
As a long time Windows user I have always been sceptical of the wild claims made by Macintosh users for their chosen platform. There has been lots of debate in the media about the skills of the Apple marketing machine. That clever campaign featuring Mitchell and Webb has made many Windows users check their wardrobes and throw away anything vaguely resembling a cardigan, and the success of the iPod has mainly been down to it’s desirability factor rather than any real technological advantage.
One of our edit suites was getting a bit long in the tooth. It was based around a Windows PC and the industry standard Avid editing software and hardware. We’ve been Avid users at DVA since non-linear editing became part of the TV industry. We have three Avid based systems and they are very good. However, the lure of a gleaming Apple Macintosh G5 with two quad core processors was too much for us and we took the latest Final Cut Pro system on a test drive from our supplier. Confusion reigned initially as we struggled to do some of the most basic things like joining our Windows network. Opening the DVD drive took about half an hour due to the lack of a hardware button on the drive. Fortunately, our friends in the DVA print department (who have had Macs for years) came to the rescue and showed us the Mac basics and we started to get down to some editing.
You get a lot for the money with Final Cut Pro, particularly when it is combined with the powerful hardware of the G5 and the flexibility of our chosen video card, the Aja Kona. One of the main drivers for our upgrade was the increasing number if inquiries we’ve been getting about HD editing and the Kona video card and Final Cut software will let us edit at any of the normal SD or HD resolutions. In fact the system will allow us to mix compressed formats and uncompressed formats on the same timeline at any resolution. The Final Cut software can work directly from almost any video or graphics file format, saving a lot of time over our old Avid that needed to copy everything to its own proprietary format. The clever video card allows us to edit HDCAM material and output both a HD master and a standard definition master. We can even make QuickTime or AVI files directly from the timeline for approval or final delivery.
Effects are handled by the Motion software, and much of the sophisticated compositing and keying that we currently need our Avid DS system for are possible. The Colour software allows a fine degree of control over colour and contrast to produce modern looking finishes. In the hands of our senior editor, Steve Whettam, it is a very powerful system indeed but even humble sound engineers like myself find basic editing simple and effective.
Needless to say, we bought a system and early indications are that it’s going to be popular with clients. Despite our initial misgivings about learning the Apple way of doing things, we are starting to get very enthusiastic about this system. After all, great programmes are about ideas and creativity; the edit system is a tool and is only as good as the operators that use them.