[Image courtesy Apple Inc. Click for enlarged view.]
Apple this evening provided a “sneak peek” at the next version of Final Cut Pro – now called “Final Cut Pro X” at the NAB SuperMeet in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The new Final Cut Pro is a bold move – a totally redesigned interface, 64-bit memory addressing, multi-processor support, tight integration of metadata in the project file with metadata stored in the clip not just in the project, heavy use of automation to simplify tedious tasks, and a rethinking of the entire concept of what it means to edit.
I can’t think of any other company that could so totally redefine what a non-linear video editor is than Apple. Since the release of Final Cut Pro 1, each version of FCP has contained incremental improvements. This is a complete restatement at every possible level.
As Phil Schiller, senior VP for world-wide marketing for Apple told me after the presentation, “This is a total rethinking of how we tell stories visually.”
Love it or hate it, our editing life won’t be the same again.
Oh, and did I mention — it has a ship date of June, with a suggested retail price of $299, and will be sold through the App Store (more on that in a bit).
TAKING A STEP BACK
But to look at Final Cut Pro in terms of its features or spec list misses a much bigger point that I want to reflect on for a bit. And it all revolves around a term I used in my first line – this was a “sneak peek.”
This is why you won’t see anything about the new Final Cut on Apple’s website – this is a preview, not the launch. There is still much work that needs to be done on the software.
Understanding an Apple event is like understanding a meeting of the Federal Reserve Bank. It is essential to concentrate on both what was said, and what was not said.
After the presentation, I spoke with Richard Townhill, Director of Pro Video Product Marketing for Apple (who served as the host for Apple’s presentation) who told me that “the purpose of today is to focus exclusively on Final Cut Pro, highlight some of the new features, and give people a chance to see and comment on the new interface. We will have much more to say about both Final Cut and our other applications in the future.”
Final Cut has been rewritten from the ground up and borrows a lot from other siblings in the suite. The audio cleanup and processing borrows heavily from Soundtrack Pro, primary and secondary color correction tools are taken from Color (see the screen shot below), and some of the motion effects techniques are taken from Motion.
However, this does not mean these other applications are dead – simply that Apple is not talking about them… yet.
I was reading posts this evening on IMUG and Twitter, where users were saying: “is it iMovie on Steroids?” I think this is a premature question.
[Image courtesy Apple Inc. Click for enlarged view.]
THIS IS A PRO APP APPLE DESIGNED FOR PROS
After the presentation, I went down front to talk with the folks from Apple about what I saw. And I asked Richard directly: “Explain to me why this isn’t a big version of iMovie?”
Richard replied: “We designed this to have professional features for the professional user. The reason we chose to present it here at the Supermeet was that we wanted the professional user to see it and understand what we are doing.”
As one attendee said to me after the event: “Both a Ford and a Ferrari have an accelerator, but that doesn’t make them the same car.”
Also, what viewers in the audience did NOT see was who from Apple was attending the presentation that did not appear on stage.
Somehow, I managed to sit in the Apple executive section of the hall. In front of me was Phil Schiller, Senior VP for Worldwide Marketing. The head of PR was sitting to his right. The two lead engineering directors, or VPs, were sitting on either side of me. I was surrounded by top-level executives from engineering, PR, marketing, product management — literally a dozen extremely senior executives were sitting in the front two rows.
Apple would not send this level of executive talent simply to watch the roll-out of a product that they did not care about.
SIDE NOTE: I was sandwiched between two senior engineering executives who had as much fun as anyone in the audience watching the demo and applauding. I suspect it was because they were finally seeing the public result of years of behind-the-scenes work.
Another interesting data point. This presentation was almost exactly the same one that I saw six weeks ago in Cupertino. Apple used it then to get feedback from a small group; I suspect they are using this exact presentation tonight for the same reason — to get reactions from a much larger group.
LOOKING AT THE NUTS AND BOLTS
Based on tonight’s presentation several long-standing irritants with Final Cut Pro disappear:
* Rendering is now in the background and much faster because it harnesses the power of the GPU.
* The 4 GB memory limit is gone – FCP will use as much RAM as you have installed on your system.
* FCP X now uses all the processors on your system, not just one and a half.
In addition, a flock of new features were added:
* It supports editing video image sizes from standard definition up to 4K.
* It uses fewer tools from the Tool palette (which is no longer there, by the way) by making the cursor smarter. WHERE you click something determines WHAT you can do with it.
* A lot of existing features are jazzed up (linking and grouping are replaced by the much more elegant Clip Connection and Compound Clips)
* While new features like the magnetic timeline, permanent audio sync and auto-metadata generation are flat-out stunning.
NOTE: Nothing said, or implied tonight, indicated that you would need any special hardware. My guess is that any Mac you buy now will run FCP perfectly. Also, contrary to some rumors, I spoke with Apple engineering about Thunderbolt. This is a system level I/O connection. If your Mac has it, ANY version of FCP – or any other Mac application – will take advantage of it.
[Image courtesy Apple Inc. Click for enlarged view.]
THINGS I WAS STRUCK BY
While the slide show was identical to the February meeting, the demo was not. Randy Ubillos, who did the demo, added more features and additional explanations on effects (see the screen shot above). However, I was told later that the build that was demoed was the same build that was shown in February – and that the application has moved significantly forward since that time.
In other words, what we saw tonight was nowhere near the final form of the application.
I was also very impressed that audio was not treated as an unwelcome step-child. First, the demo paid a lot of attention to setting and maintaining audio sync, however lots of little details were also obvious:
* Sample rate precision in scrolling an audio clip
* Pitch corrected audio scrolling in slow motion
* Displaying waveforms at a size big enough to see what they look like
* Displaying audio levels within the waveform that are approaching clipping (as one engineer near me remarked, “And THAT took us a LONG while to figure out.”)
* Displaying audio peaks for the entire mix that are approaching clipping
* Improved audio cleanup controls, which can be applied or ignored by the user (these look to be borrowed from Soundtrack Pro)
* Adding fades with a keystroke, or by pulling in the top corners of a clip, with four different fade shapes, rather than the limit of two inside FCP 7; these, too, borrow interface ideas from Soundtrack Pro.
THE CROWD’S REACTIONS
In brief, the crowd was loving it. Granted, many of them got well-lubricated at the no-host bar before the event, but nonetheless, everyone seemed to have a good time.
The new interface drew applause, 64-bit support and background rendering had people drooling and the new price of $299 received a standing ovation.
MY REACTIONS
I’ve been thinking hard about this since I first saw the software six weeks ago.
And, truthfully, I’m very torn. There are some features here that I really like a LOT. There are a few that I don’t like at all. But there is a great deal that has not yet been said.
And that, I think, is the key point. The devil is ALWAYS in the details.
Apple has done its usual magnificent job of previewing a new product. But this is only the preview.
I met Randy Ubillos, Chief Architect for Video Applications at Apple, after he presented the demo of the software. I told him that parts of what I saw I liked a lot and parts had me quite concerned. And I asked if Apple was interested in our feedback. He immediately said that Apple is VERY interested in our feedback, that they are listening and want to make this application something that all of us can be proud of using.
I believe him. And I also believe that it is way too early to make any final decisions about this version. There are too many unanswered questions. For example, here are some questions the answers to which are still unknown:
* The retail price for FCP is $299 – but what is the retail price of the other software parts of the Suite? Are we back to ala carte pricing?
* The application will be sold through the Mac App store. What happens to all the great data files that were available with the suite in earlier versions?
* How does FCP X work with existing FCP 7 projects?
* What other applications ship with Final Cut and how do they integrate?
* How many of our existing plug-ins, peripherals, hardware, and other gear need to be updated to work with the new software?
* Editing does not exist in a vacuum, how do we share files, clips, metadata, and project information with other software tools?
* How does it handle media?
* How has QuickTime changed to support what Final Cut Pro X can do?
* Real-time, native video processing is great for editing – however, we still need to encode to get files on the web. How?
As of tonight, Apple hasn’t provided answers to these, or many other questions. As they do, or as I’m able to find them out, I’ll share them with you in this blog and my newsletter.
As one engineer told me at the Cupertino meeting in February, Final Cut Pro is still a work in progress. We’ve seen the outline of the work – the rough cut, if you will. Now we need to give the engineers time to listen to our feedback, polish it up, and deliver the final cut of Final Cut.
ONE LAST THOUGHT
I’ve made a promise to myself to provide training on the new version of Final Cut Pro as soon as possible after the release date.
If you are interested in getting up to speed quickly on the new version – please sign up for my free monthly Final Cut Studio newsletter. As I learn more, I’ll be sharing it with you there.
And as I make new training available, I’ll announce it there first.
For now, I’m going back to the drawing boards. I’ve got a lot of new work to do.
Larry
UPDATE – April 13, 2011
I just posted an eight minute audio review and commentary on the new version of Final Cut Pro X, with Michael Kammes. You can hear it here.
177 Responses to The Sound of 1,700 Jaws Dropping
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← Older Comments Newer Comments →Hi Larry,
I can’t help but notice there is no auto-select buttons or feed buttons on the timeline. Is this going to be a very mouse intensive program? That’s kind of my biggest problem with FCP now, is that you have to use the mouse way to much.
However, I am very excited about the magnetic timeline, compound clips, and clip connection. I spend so much time shifting around audio, this is going to cut my editing in half.
This brings me to another concern. Is there going to be anyway to pick where your video goes, or is it always going to drop directly on top of another piece of video if they’re stacked. Like you, I am extremely curious about the details.
I have come to rely on Final Cut pretty heavily in my business, so this scares me and excites me. The 64Bit and Multi-threading is very exciting, as is resolution Independence, but auto color correction, image stabilization and even the magnetic timeline kind of scare me really. Sounds like it will make a mess. I projects with so many graphics that I get up to 18-20 levels of video, with different types of things put specifically onto different levels for organization and this automatically making new tracks sounds like it will make a mess more than anything.
It is the details that I am not even hearing that scare me. I rely a lot on the viewer window, which seems to have changed completely. Can I still look at the waveform of a clip before i cut it in easily to get a clean cut as I edit?
Working on all the effects in the timeline might be nice, but is also weird to have it an always moving target, it was convenient to work on effects in the same place in the viewer, is that still possible?
Do the windows pull apart like they used to? I keep my bins on my second display, but it looks like the viewer and bin are combined, which doesn’t seem convenient for huge projects. I wouldn’t mind the combined bin, if I can have a separate viewer window as well.
How does FCP handle graphics? Hopefully better than the old version, but it was not mentioned.
How is the media managed, lets hope not in one file again, I would so much rather have a more AVID like file system.
If they lose editing to tape it loses a lot of it’s usefulness as I often still have to deliver digitbetas or even HDCAM.
Just went through the 64 bit thing on After Effects, going to be expensive to have to update all of my plug ins again! Wish they would get some specs out to developers so they can start updating.
I have a feeling Color is gone, much like Shake before it. They took some of the technology and then killed it. It sucks as I have really grown to like it and would love a massive update to make it even more powerful, but I don’t see it happening.
I am sure DVD studio is gone as well as Apple will never jump on the Blu-Ray band wagon even though I still often have to deliver discs.
I could give or take motion, as I mostly use AE, though I do like some of it’s particle effects. And it looks like the main thing I use it for, re-timing clips is now in FCP properly.
Most the soundtrack features I would rather have rolled into FCP anyway, and it sounds like they are in some form, and hopefully so is retiming with pitch shifting. And control over the hum removal would be nice.
The other essential App is a truly 64 Bit Compressor (not using QMASTER).
The one thing no one seems to mention about the app store is that like iTunes you can authorize the apps to be on 5 computers, and a 5 license FCP for $299 is pretty cheap.
Bill:
Regarding multiple monitors, iMovie is awesome with a second display. You can just set it to use it as a full screen player, freeing up space on the primary for clips and the (sort of) timeline.
iMovie makes simple editing really quick. FCPX looks like it will do the same for complex work.
I’m excited to try it. The interface looks refreshing.
Mmmm newsman
You commented…””If couldn’t care less about beauty of the UI. I’m interested in the functions. The same guy who, in my opinion, diminished the quality of iMovie the first time he got his hands on it, now has his hands all over FCP. I’m concerned””…..this is “the guy” who created premiere at adobe, wrote final cut at macromedia, then final cut pro at apple, then updated iMovie to it’s current state and now returns to final cut x….so I think he may know his stuff…your don’t like the changes in iMovie? …maybe it’s time to be a little brave, embrace the future of UIs or look at Media 100 or Avid ? Final Cut is moving onwards….
Having just started using Multiclip to edit multi-camera gigs, I’m a little worried about the lack of the Viewer – I hope there’s a way for Multiclip to still work.
Personally, I’m hoping they bring everything from Color, Soundtrack and Shake into FCP. Also that they keep it easy for outside developers to add plugins, whilst giving them the opportunity to use more of a GUI for them – for instance the Tiffen set of plug-ins are great… bar for the fact that everything is a drop-down menu or a slider, which becomes a very long-winded way just to look for the right gobo shape without even getting into trying to get it to do what you want it to.
One last thing that I would LOVE to see in FCP-X would be the ability to graphically mark up the timeline independently of the clips – being able to show where I wanted the acts to fall, where scenes were supposed to run to according to the script, where different days start… The more ways I could get to show the timeline in ways that are more descriptive than merely seeing a bunch of cuts, the easier it would be to think about the way the structure of the story works (or should work and isn’t yet).
So here’s my question – if they’re eliminating the “suite” package and eliminating upgrade pricing aren’t they killing the current FCP editors who use all of the other suite apps? Currently FCP 7 charges $299 for the upgrade. So if they’re eliminating the upgrade price and I want to upgrade 3 of my systems I have to pay $299 for FCPX and then an additional $700? for the other apps for each system? I’ve just gone from an upgrade cost of $900 (3 systems) to $3,000!
Please tell me it ain’t so!
Looks like Apple took some notes from the folks over at Sony Creative Software. A lot of the features that make Vegas Pro so fast and straight-forward to work with have been incorporated in FCP X (as have many other features)… the majority of the feature list just affirms all the reasons we haven’t been using FCP for our workflow in the past!
Matthias,
I used to be a beta tester for Pinnacle Liquid as well (from 5 to 7.2) until Avid closed it down. I loved that application and still use it sometimes on bootcamp, together with the USB ProBox for monitoring. I kept thinking of Liquid (previously Sony ES3, Fast Studio/Chrome/Blue/Purple, etc.) and its very early implementation of background rendering way before processors became multicore. Yes you could buy accelerator boards for blue, etc. but very quickly it became powerful enough for background rendering without these accelerators. It introduced GPU rendering of layers in version 7 and it was astounding. Together with the mixed timeline it scaled as your computer grew and even with a relatively old gefore card you could get four layers simultaneously without having to render. It also had ‘instant save’ (never had to press save) and you could ingest over a network. I loved it, but then they killed it off, I bought a mac and started using final cut. As well as having excellent contextual menus, you could customise the interface in many ways by moving or removing buttons, etc. This way you could bury some things in menus, or have them out in the open. It was a beautiful piece of software.
Anyway before Avid bought it and killed it off, Pinnacle had updated the interface to look really toyish. Nothing radical in terms of overhaul, but just gave it the look of Pinnacle Studio in terms of a quite sweet candy look. Just made you feel you were driving a toy car. The older interface looked more like autodesk software but based on icons instead of text-buttons. It was dark and serious looking but based on buttons that made it feel like a pushbutton machine. Would have been great on some touchscreen, I always thought. It could have gone places and my hope was that it would grow its strengths in compositing (like Smoke). It had great addons like the colour corrector, filters, surround sound and even a rudimentory dvd designer.
As Matthias says, there are overtones of Liquid in this new turn with Final Cut but, as it stands, it feels like there are possible dangers afoot. Apple are dialogically aware people. Dialogically? They know what is being gossiped and what is worrying its customers. They know people are worried about losing these things that are so central to Final Cut ‘Classic’ and worried about ‘Final Cut Classic’ being dumbed down. Why didn’t they address this with “we know you’re worried, but it’s all still there”.
I am so happy that all this is being added, but it has such a toyish feel. I just hope that it plays nice (XML) with other software and that they see that this is not standalone software like iMovie but part of a modular pipeline that needs to hook-up with much more than itself alone. Again this was the hill that Liquid started to decline. The Liquid stable was a very serious series of software versions (used in many broadcast areas and many will know it and remember it) , but then it started being targeted more squarely toward one man shop event videographers (hence the dvd/menu engine) and it lost its identity. While I hope that Final Cut does not lose its identity too much to iMovie, at the moment, at least, it looks like it is adding and not taking away. Perhaps it is only the toy-overtoned look that is making us worry that things are being stripped away. Perhaps they were only emphasising the new by de-emphasising the old. Hopefully the old is still there.
I hope so, or me and my new i7 macbook pro with thunderbolt are moving to Avid or Premiere Pro (but sadly not back to Liquid through bootcamp, although the background rendering screams on my new laptop when).
Please Larry be the voice of conservation…
Looks quite fun and innovative, but in some ways potentially frustrating. I can’t imagine doing complex trims with the “precision editor” for example. And losing the viewer means you also lose some really useful techniques, like ganging a clip and an edit, or ganging two edits for comparison.
The magnetic timeline seems pretty handy, but will it let you organize your audio in any meaningful way? A traditional track-based approach makes it easy to apply effects or EQ to all the dialogue, or mute a track to watch a scene without music. How will this be possible in FCP X?
Can’t wait to try it out, but it won’t be in a production environment, that’s for sure!