I’ve used Final Cut Pro for some time now, but it hasn’t always been this way. In high school, Andrew used an old Version of Adobe premiere and I had messed around with Sony’s Vegas – both PC only apps. I have no love for Adobe’s premiere (but I really don’t know much about the newer versions to make a solid judgement). Vegas, on the other hand, was a spectacular, intuitive editing program – and I would probably still use that if it not for a few considerations and a feature or two from Final Cut.

Crossover

Apple’s Final Cut Studio made sense for a variety of reasons: budget, our recently puchased Macbook Pro’s, and the newly added multi-angle editing support. What this last feature does is sync all of the feeds you have and have them playback in panes (much like a live video mixer would) and we are able to make edits on the fly by choosing the most appropriate feed in real time. The old method was to either cut segments and keep track of time (way too complicated!) or have two or more tracks of video in parallel and then “revealing” whichever angle we wanted. The main disadvantage of this last route was the inability to see both angles simultaneously. So that was, and still is a great selling point, especially since a lot of our work is recording live shows.

It’s Suite!

The cool thing about FCP Studio is that along with the editor (which is very powerful, even if sometimes annoying) there are some great supplemental apps that help with the parts of the project Final Cut would undoubtably butcher. I’m speaking mainly of audio and visual effects. Now I’ve messed around with effects apps like After Effects, Combustion, and the recently defunct Shake – and Apple’s revamped Motion (which borrows a lot from Shake) is gaining more power with each incarnation, but remaining very easy to use. I would definitely say it is is the easiest of those listed.

Audio is always a problem with FC, because it’s just not meant for all the nice plugins one uses in regular audio processing apps like Logic. Soundtrack is bundled with FC and it’s workflow is… nice. I would much prefer something that looked more like Logic with a better sample editor… but the ability to send sound files from FC to Soundtrack and then right back after things have processed is useful enough. I am not always pleased with the flattening/destructible edits I have to do, but I can usually live with the results.

Coloring was a new feature – I didn’t really get into color correction/grading until we had issues with some very “red” shots that needed cleanup for a certain job. FCP’s color corrector is fantastic, I find it very easy to work with. Beyond that, and for larger projects (especially creative ones) the application Color is useful for grading. This isn’t so much about fixing the color so much as styling it and making it more appropriate and/or vivid. It’s definitely one of the most fun apps to mess around with, even if it is one of the harder ones to master.

Final Thoughts

I can not justify giving Apple a full 5/5 rating for this suite of apps, because it really isn’t as good as it gets. I will give them 4/5 because they have a system that works well and beyond that, each new version comes with really useful tools. There are only a few real glitches and most of them have to do with updating the workflow. The way that the apps change and interact is very logical and organic and I feel this suite meets the needs of the current videographer/creative film-maker wearing all of these hats.