John August

John

Final Cut Pro and Con

Software, Stuart, Video

Final Cut Pro X has been [controversial](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/professional-video-editors-weigh-in-on-final-cut-pro-x/?pagewanted=all) because it greatly alters the traditional workflow and eliminates features many editors find essential.

Some of those missing pieces — like multi-cam editing — are apparently coming soon. But most of the big changes are simply The Way Things Are Done Now. They go beyond keyboard shortcuts and helper apps to fundamentally different ways of working.

It’s fair to call this a brand-app that happens to be named Final Cut Pro.

I’ve used several incarnations of Final Cut Pro over the years. I don’t cut things that often, so each time I started editing something new, I had to spend a few minutes reminding myself how everything worked. In 2006, I finally took a FCP class at UCLA.

Here’s a very juvenile video I cut using the sample footage that comes with one of the tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS6mrp7Sbu4

My assistant Stuart actually used to teach FCP in college. It’s fair to say he’s more experienced with how the old app worked.

Over the past four weeks, each of us has had the opportunity to cut a few projects in the new FCP X and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses. I think the differences in our reactions are largely based on how familiar we were with the old version.

I’ll go first.

Runner
—-

I wrote, shot and edited this spot for FDX Reader myself.

Everything was shot on the Canon 7D. Rather than import directly from the camera, I used Image Capture to transfer the movie files to the hard drive, then created a New Event in FCP X and imported the files.

I find the Event metaphor to be one of the most annoying choices in FCP X. Events make sense for iMovie — here’s Katie’s birthday! — but not for Final Cut Pro. Functionally, you want a container for all the footage related to what you’re cutting. Events aren’t exactly analogous to Bins in the old FCP, but Bins would be a better name than Events.

Regardless, once I put the footage into an Event, and began a new Project, I found the process surprisingly enjoyable. FCP X churns away in the background, analyzing footage and transcoding proxies. But at no point did I notice, even on my 2006 Mac Pro. I could start going through footage right away, versus waiting an hour or more for FCP 7 to transcode to something editable. Big win for the new guy.

In FCP 7, I would often drag little bits of footage to the timeline and start picking favorites. FCP X strongly encourages you to make some choices right in the Bin (err, the All Clips window).

Using the standard J-K-L keys, you play through your clips. When you find something that you might want, mark ins and outs (I and O). Then F to mark that section as a favorite. Yes, the handles that mark ins and outs look a lot like those in iMovie, but the functionality remains pretty traditional. You can do a lot more from the keyboard in FCP X than I’d expected.

Once you’ve looked at everything, Control-F switches you to Favorite Clips. These are basically your selects. Everything you’re going to want will probably be here.

From there, you drag clips to the storyline and start assembling your cut.

Unlike FCP 7, you can’t just throw clips anywhere. In FCP X, everything is magnetic and wants to stick together. To leave blank space between clips you have to deliberately Insert Gap to get a chunk of dark nothingness. It’s neither better or worse than before, but it’s certainly different.

Also different:

* You have one Viewer, rather than two.
* The Inspector handles almost any variable that needs to be adjusted, from video to image to metadata.
* Recorded audio stays attached to its video unless you very deliberately detach it. Things don’t get randomly out of sync.
* In addition to the normal playhead, you can scrub across footage to play it. I found the scrubber mostly benign, but occasionally turned it off when it got annoying.

I found Compound Clips to be incredibly useful.

Often when editing, you have a section that’s working nicely and want to make sure you don’t mess it up while working on other things. In FCP X, just select the relevant pieces of audio and video and make it a Compound Clip. Everything sucks down into one filmstrip. It’s logical and works. ((One exception: If you pin something to the outside of a compound clip — a sound effect, for example — it’s likely to slide around if you change something inside the clip. The sound effect only knows its position relative to the entire clip, not any component inside.))

In the Runner video, all the opening stuff with Amy typing lived as a compound clip.

I did all the titles and graphics in FCP X. I found one bug: the final tagline “Now on iPhone and iPad” wouldn’t animate properly unless I added spaces to the end.

On the whole, I like FCP X. Most of what’s missing I honestly don’t miss, because I never used it.

It takes a while to get used to the new interface, but I can’t imagine needing to take a class to understand how to use basic features. And while I still have FCP 7 on my hard drive, I doubt I’ll need to open it again.

Stuart’s impression of FCP X is far less favorable.

[Read more…] about Final Cut Pro and Con

TV reboots have a bad track record

Television

Kevin Fallon points out that most reboots of classic series [don’t stick around long](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/print/2011/08/tvs-history-of-failed-remakes/243609/):

> Sleek, hip, and expensive relaunches of *The Bionic Woman* (which in 1978 starred an indestructible Lindsay Wagner) and *Knight Rider* (the ‘80s series in which a pre-Baywatch David Hasselhoff talks to his crime-fighting car) were high-profile disappointments for NBC in 2007 and 2008, respectively. The one-two punch of failure would be the cautionary tale against remaking TV classics—had attempts at reviving *Get Smart, Love Boat,* and *Melrose Place* (among others) not tanked spectacularly before them. Given the graveyard of TV remakes haunting Hollywood, why do networks keep churning them out?

Because familiar brand names are worth something, particularly when trying to launch a new show in the fall. And while the batting average isn’t great, several shows have worked, including 90210, Battlestar Galactica and Hawaii Five-O.

One could argue that the reboots Fallon lists simply weren’t very good (though I enjoyed the new Melrose Place).

For example, V was a slo-mo car crash of lizard sex and muddled religious allegory. The only reason it stuck around for a second season is that V is in its very DNA kind of awesome. ((I watched every episode of V. But then again, I would watch Elizabeth Mitchell boil water. When I close my eyes, Juliet is still living in her Dharma Initiative bungalow, waiting for her reading group.))

Look at it from a network president’s point of view. You’ve ordered pilots. They’ve been shot. Now you’re trying to decide what you want on your schedule.

Given two shows that seem roughly equal in quality, wouldn’t you pick the one with a pre-sold name? Do you want a comedy with a witch or *Bewitched?*

TV reboots will continue. Most of them will fail. But that’s because most TV shows fail. That’s TV.

Oh, they’ll remember his name

Film Industry, News

There are better ways to [attract agency attention](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/08/script-left-for-talent-agents-is-instead-blown-up-by-cops.html):

> Beverly Hills police responded shortly after 9 a.m to an office building in the 400 block of North Camden Avenue after an unidentified man brought a locked briefcase to a talent agency with the hope that someone in the office would review the script inside.

Nearby offices were evacuated. The briefcase was blown up by the bomb squad, with the man’s laptop and script inside.

No word on whether the agency plans on representing the writer but yeah there’s no way. Don’t do this. Stunts often backfire.

Ye Olde Shoppe never existed

Words

That quaint “yee” was actually pronounced “the.” The confusion with the “y” sound began because Medieval scribes had to make some [difficult choices](http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2922077):

> Medieval English thus contained a variety of signs for the sound ‘th’ – the digraph ‘TH’, the thorn, and the eth (or thok). Scribes ended up using a mixture of these, although some tried to make a distinction between those used for a voiced ‘th’ sound and the signs used for a voiceless ‘th’. As a result, reading medieval texts today can be enormously confusing. Is that a ‘y’? Is it a ‘p’? Or a ‘th’? The problem is compounded by the inclusion of yet another runic sign which made it into Medieval English – the wen, a symbol that looks very like a thorn, except that the triangular portion sits even higher, giving it a strong look of an angular ‘p’.

The thorn symbol persists in UTF-8 character sets – Þ – but was lacking in early typesetting.

> There was no thorn sign in the printing fonts, as they were usually cast outside of England. So, since the sign for thorn slightly resembled the lower-case ‘y’, that’s what was substituted.

In screenwriting, you’re always balancing accuracy with expectation. Thus, the warriors of Sparta speak English with British accents — because anything else would feel strange to the audience.

But in portraying your characters’ world, you have wide latitude. If you’re writing a broad comedy set in Medieval times, go ahead and ye it up. Put it Zapf Chancery if it helps sell the joke.

But in more serious films, I’d love to see written English portrayed more as it would have been in the time. That is, really odd to modern eyes, filled with runic characters and odd constructions.

(Link from the BBC via [Andy Baio](https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/103166642791522304) via [Phil Nelson](https://twitter.com/#!/philnelson).)