What is Final Cut Pro 3.0?

Final Cut Pro is a series of non-linear video editing software programs first developed by Macromedia Inc. and later Apple Inc. The most recent version, Final Cut Pro 10.6.4, runs on Mac computers powered by macOS Big Sur 11.5.1 or later. The software allows users to log and transfer video onto a hard drive (internal or external), where it can be edited, processed, and output to a wide variety of formats. The fully rewritten Final Cut Pro X was introduced by Apple in 2011, with the last version of the legacy Final Cut Pro being version 7.0.3.

Since the early 2000s, Final Cut Pro has developed a large and expanding user base, mainly video hobbyists and independent filmmakers. It has also made inroads with film and television editors who have traditionally used Avid Technology's Media Composer. According to a 2007 SCRI study, Final Cut Pro made up 49% of the United States professional editing market, with Avid at 22%. A published survey in 2008 by the American Cinema Editors Guild placed their users at 21% Final Cut Pro (and growing from previous surveys of this group), while all others were on an Avid system of some kind.

- From Wikipedia

 

Final Cut Pro is on a roll. The nonlinear editing (NLE) app, a prestigious hit for Apple, has quietly revolutionized video-editing practice. Directors and editors are so taken with the possibilities of portable editing that it’s hard these days to find a filmmaker who doesn’t tote a TiBook with a copy of FCP.

FCP 3 is an innovative upgrade that shows Apple has been listening to its professional customers, it addresses the two biggest limitations of low-cost digital editing: offline effects rendering and storage capacity. Also new are a suite of high-level color-correction tools..., a voice-over tool for adding narration, Mac OS X support, and dozens of other useful features.

Up to now, FCP couldn’t render common transitions (cross-dissolves, wipes, and so on), motion effects (scaling and cropping), or still-frame graphics (titles and imported images) in real time. You had to set up the effect and twiddle your thumbs while it rendered offline — and you had to go through that process dozens of times in a complex project. The other option was shelling out significant cash for real-time video hardware, such as Matrox’s RTMac card — hardware that fit only in a desktop Power Mac.

Now your TiBook can do the job, too. When editing in DV or Apple’s new OfflineRT video codec, all you need for real-time editing is a 500MHz G4. On our base-level G4/500 with 512MB of RAM, we found that FCP 3 could indeed handle single layers of supported transitions and motions in real time. Two layers worked occasionally; three layers never did. Apple says the number of possible simultaneous real-time effects depends primarily on your G4’s speed, and that a dual-processor Mac has significant advantages over most single-processor machines. Keep in mind that real time is only for desktop previewing (which is where you’ll make all the editing decisions); final encoding to DV or another codec is not real time, but you can take care of that once at the end of the project.

The other major performance and portability improvement in FCP 3 is OfflineRT. This highly compressed, PhotoJPEG-based codec can store more than 45 minutes of 320 by 240 video per gigabyte. That’s right, you feature filmmakers can actually carry all the footage for your movie on one hard disk and cut the whole thing offline. When the edit’s done, FCP 3 can assemble the work in a final-quality online format, such as DV.

FCP 3 has not received a major makeover for OS X — and that’s good, because moving to OS X won’t exact a learning penalty. The Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X versions work and look almost exactly the same. We moved a project back and forth between the two without a problem. However, editors with a significant investment in third-party video hardware (such as the RTMac or Pinnacle’s Cinewave) may need to wait on the release of new drivers and firmware before moving to OS X.

We liked the new voice-over tool, a blessing for documentarians and news editors. With it, you can record audio on the fly via any standard audio input, including a USB mic, as footage plays onscreen.

We use FCP daily and swear by it. We were impressed at the way Apple has thoughtfully and imaginatively enhanced an already superlative program.

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Anzovin, Steven, Anzovin, Raf. (April 2002). Final Cut Pro 3. MacAddict. (pg. 45).

Download Final Cut Pro 3.0 for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver