There has long been just one leading nonlinear editing package for the Mac — Adobe Premiere. Competitors such as Strata VideoShop and Radius EditDV have had little success in unseating Premiere, which is more powerful than its rivals and better supported in the industry, despite a few irritating misfeatures and lackluster speed. However, a serious challenger has finally arrived — from Apple, of all places — in Final Cut Pro. This app not only delivers on digital video’s promise of faster, more efficient editing, it is also a pleasure to use. Even seasoned Premiere fanatics will want to take a closer look at this compact and elegantly designed new editing tool.
For starters, you would never know this is a 1.0 release; it feels like a 5.6 release. No doubt this is because the program went through an unusually long development period, first at Macromedia and then at Apple. Amazingly, once we had the app properly installed on our test machine — an over-clocked 466MHz beige G3 with 288MB of RAM and an UltraWide SCSI drive — everything ran smoothly and without a hitch.
Editing with Final Cut Pro is much more like editing with a high-end turnkey system such as Avid’s Media Composer. Final Cut Pro allows playback of final-quality edits directly from the timeline, without time-wasting rendering. Of course, this only applies to straight cuts; you have to render transitions or special effects as in any other program. However, Final Cut Pro renders only the portions that need it, integrating them seamlessly with the rest of the sequence. This allows you to work smoothly and efficiently, in many cases without any rendering.
However, Final Cut Pro’s editing approach does have a few drawbacks. Notably, the app makes it difficult to stitch together clips of different screen sizes (as you might have to do if you were assembling a reel of video mixed with wide-screen film, or a quick animatic from scanned drawings of various sizes). Final Cut Pro won’t play back any clip that is not exactly the same size as the rest of the sequence until you’ve rendered that clip. While this makes perfect sense within Final Cut’s paradigm, it can be a pain. Note that Premiere can do scaling for previews.
Final Cut Pro’s interface looks a bit crowded, but it’s actually easy to navigate and use. In one video window, you view and prepare clips for insertion into the sequence. In a second window, you view the entire sequence as a movie. Completing a basic three-point edit was simple. In fact, it often involved just a single movement, thanks to the pop-up menu of edit options that appears as you drag clips from one window to the other. The timeline and the trimming window show careful attention to interface design, borrowing from the logical and wonderfully transparent design in Adobe’s After Effects. The timeline navigation bar, for instance, looks like a device from another planet — but get the hang of it and you can jump between parts of the timeline, moving and scaling all at once, with an ease that makes the slider-and-magnifying-glass interface of Premiere look like stone knives and bearskins.
Organizing clips within Final Cut Pro is similarly intuitive. It’s easy to drop clip icons into bins (folders), and to make an entire custom folder structure. More important, you can actually use one Final Cut Pro edited sequence as a clip in another — an incredible timesaver that lets you assemble large movies out of shorter, easy-to-handle segments.
Another strong point is Final Cut Pro’s special effects and layer compositing features. Final Cut Pro doesn’t approach the special effects power of Adobe After Effects, but it does offer some high-quality effects that are great for quick composites. A complete set of motion tools allows any clip to move, scale, or spin, and you can generate motion blur based on a layer’s movement. Full bicubic scaling means the clip retains most of its detail and smoothness even if you zoom in or out on it. (Premiere’s scaling algorithm tends to create nasty-looking jaggies.)
Equally important are Final Cut Pro’s Transfer Controls, which allow you to add, subtract, multiply, or otherwise combine the values of the pixels in one layer with those in another. These operations are the cornerstone of many complex effects. There is an abundant selection of filter tools, too. You can animate all of the attributes for any video or audio effect using function curves, a gigantic leap beyond Premiere’s lame keyframe interface.
About the only caveats with Final Cut Pro involve hardware compatibility. You’ll definitely want a G3 and Mac OS 8.5 or later to run Final Cut Pro. This may cause grief to editors who have older machines with six PCI slots (which may not be compatible with 8.5). FireWire I/O is very desirable, too, as the app is especially good at interfacing with FireWire devices (see “Final Fire”). However, Final Cut Pro fails to support a number of popular analog video output cards. We found our unsupported Aurora Fuse MJPEG card had sound-sync problems with unrendered output direct from Final Cut Pro. Check Apple’s FireWire site for an up-to-date list of compatible video cards.
The final analysis? Final Cut Pro is a robust program with killer features that editors who want a fast, efficient workflow will find irresistible. If you’ve got a heavy investment in older hardware (such as a six-slot Mac), you may need to think hard before choosing Final Cut Pro over time-tested Premiere. But if you’re moving into the world of DV, FireWire drives, and just-in-time content creation, Final Cut Pro is the way to go.
Anzovin, Raf. (September 1999). Final Cut Pro 1.0. MacAddict. (pgs. 50-51).
Apple Computer, Inc.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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2015-03-22 / 
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FinalCutPro125Ger.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
