1204 flm post editing-fcpx-review

7/29/2019 1204 Flm Post Editing-fcpx-review

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70 F IL MM AK ER FALL 2012

Editing is older than motion pictures.

The ordering and pacing of dialogues,

scenes, entrances and exits to build

conflict and resolution have long defined

Western theater, from Aeschyluss Oresteia

to Wagners The Ring of the Nibelung [Der

Ring Des Nibelungen]. It was the insertion of

first-person thoughts into dialogue and plot

that modernized 18th- and 19th-century

novels and clever sequencing of mechani-

cally animated magic lantern glass slidesthat thrilled Victorian audiences to popular

epics like Ben-Hur.

Nevertheless, as Walter Murch likes to

point out, film editing was invented 14 years

after motion pictures. Uncut reels of on-

rushing locomotives, sneezing and kissing

were gripping, profitable entertainments,

such were the frisson and novelty of realistic

moving images. (Vitascope was the You-

Tube of its day in this regard.)

It would take Georges Mliss camera to

jam and restart in a Parisian street in 1896,

and a similar mishap at a 1901 horse race in

Bristol, England, to reveal, respectively, the

trick of editing within shots (effects) and

between shots (cutting). Disruption of time,

place and point of view through film editing

would soon yield a new dramatic art: Cinema.

It could as easily have been called Cubism.

As film syntax matured, technique

formed and a profession emerged. A cen-

tury on celluloid carried us from scissors

and glue to guillotine tape splicers and up-

right Moviolas, then flatbeds. Video brought

big iron linear editing systems for online,then finally PC-based non-linear editing sys-

tems (NLEs) all mostly operated by pro-

fessionals, at least through the late 1990s

when hardware-based Avids still cost tens

of thousands of dollars.

What cracked the door to editing for

the rest of us was the introduction of

software-based Final Cut Pro 1.0 at NAB

in 1999, coincident with the arrival of

FireWire-enabled DV camcorders. All dis-

missed as amateur, naturally.

Weve seen how that turned out. Digital

democratization spread inexorably. Its not

hard to draw straight lines from FCP + DV to

HDV and DVCPRO HD, to the rise of small

camcorders, Internet streaming, cheap SD

cards to record on, RED usurping film and

cheap HDSLRs usurping RED. (With a re-

grettable drop in pay rates along the way.)

As a consequence, there are exponen-

tially more people, professional and nonpro-

fessional alike, of all ages, in all countries,

now creating, editing and distributing digital

movies. Everyone with a point-and-shoot

or smartphone in their pocket is a potential

HD source. (Todays equivalent of a Kodak

Brownie: You push the button, we do the

rest. Insert irony here.)

And yet, though weve embraced digitalcode as the motion picture medium of our

time, the technology of nonlinear editing re-

mains very much a work in progress.

For one thing, picture, sound, music and ef-

fects continue to invite the forces of invention.

For instance, we now need torrents of meta-

data data about data simply to keep

track of everything. Not only during editing,

but to manage future access and archiving.

And another thing, nonprofessionals

whatever this distinction signifies in an in-

formation age rife with underemployment

have vaulted forward in technical savvy and

technique thanks to the explosion of shared

knowledge on the Internet, plus the extensive

capabilities of their low-cost digital tools.

As an NLE designer today, where would

you draw the line between professional and

nonprofessional? Which features would you

include or deny? Wouldnt you wish to meet

the high-end needs of the workplace, yet at-

tract that vast center of the bell curve of po-

tential users? If only to carve out the largest

possible market share?

As it happens, this past year ushered in a

crop of powerful, affordable, newly 64-bit pro-

fessional NLEs, including Final Cut Pro X, Avid

Media Composer 6.5, Adobe Premiere Pro

CS6, Sony Vegas Pro 12, Grass Valley EdiusPro 6.5 and the resurrected Lightworks. (Me-

dia 100 Suite remains 32-bit. Another dozen

Windows-based NLEs exist for under $100.)

64-bit architecture introduces dramatically

faster importing, transcoding, rendering and

output. It demolishes the old 32-bit perfor-

mance barrier of 4GB RAM, replacing it with

a theoretical 17 billion GB, just in time to meet

the coming decades demand for rock-solid

stability, instant timeline loading and flawless

playback of real-time effects in H.265 (twice

as efficient as H.264), 3D, 4K and beyond.P

HOTOC

OURTESY

OFAPPLE

Final Cut Pro X

Is FCP X the Future of Editing?

LINE ITEMS

David Leitner assesses Apples innovation.


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71FILMMAKER FALL 2012

Details vary, but on the whole these

NLEs offer the latest camera codecs;

codecs for proxy editing and finishing;

timelines that accept mixed codecs,

resolutions and frame rates; motion ef-

fects; image stabilization; primary and

secondary color correction; audio mixing;effects plugins; sophisticated titling; sup-

port for third-party hardware (Matrox,

AJA, Blackmagic, MOTU, Bluefish); sup-

port for multicamera editing; support for

stereoscopic 3D editing; extensive meta-

data tagging of clips; media management

across myriad drives and sources; output

compressions; and project/timeline in-

terchange with other apps, NLEs and au-

dio editing programs.

All you need is a credit card, not a guild

card. Whats not to like?What these NLEs dont aspire to, with

the exception of FCP X, is evolution. Despite

constant churn in the technology of creation

and consumption of digital moving images

viewing now entails phones, tablets, lap-

tops, TVs, cinemas editing hardware re-

mains tied to a mouse-driven desktop envi-

ronment conceived decades ago.

On the software side, why perpetuate

dual source/record windows from 1970s

tape editing, or interface metaphors adapt-

ed in the 1980s from film editing (Avid Me-

dia Composer), or 1990s timeline design

(Final Cut Pro 7)? Why not exploit this 64-

bit great leap forward in speed and process-

ing to rethink, perhaps even reinvent, editing

for the coming file-based century?

In introducing its mobile operating sys-

tem, iOS, five years ago, Apple seized an op-

portunity to innovate new file systems (hid-

den), control interfaces (touchscreen), ges-

tures (multitouch), screen displays (full),

app switching (fast) with saved states (flash

memory), Internet upgrades (App store),

and voice commands (Siri). And lets notforget erasing pixels (Retina display).

iOS is an offshoot of OS X, 32-bit but writ-

ten in Objective-C like OS X. Both operating

systems possess a layer-cake architecture

with a dedicated media layer that contains

graphics, audio and video frameworks

such as Core Animation (fluid icons, con-

trols that fade), Core Audio and Core Media.

Frameworks are collections of functions that

can be shared by different apps in a modular

fashion, without having to be rewritten each

time. With iOS 4 (2010) and OS X 10.7 Lion

(2011), the media layer of each OS gained a

new framework, AV Foundation the en-

gine of FCP X.

A big advantage of conjoined operat-

ing systems is that user-interface break-

throughs on mobile devices such as the

iPad can readily migrate to Mac apps like

FCP X for instance, use of animation,

multitouch, auto-saving, full screen display,

Retina display, integration with flash archi-

tecture all of which in turn optimize FCP

X for use on portable MacBook Pros with

trackpads. On the latest MacBook Pro with

Retina display, for example, you can view full

1080p in FCP Xs small Viewer window.

Of particular significance: the 64-bit AVFoundation found in OSX supplants the now

legacy 32-bit QuickTime framework (video

files will continue to sport QuickTime ex-

tensions). AV Foundation brings, at last,

multi-core and GPU-assisted speed to Final

Cut Pro rendering tasks (using OS Xs Grand

Central Dispatch and OpenCL), as well as

full color management from input to output

and finer time accuracy for subframe events.

Of course the broad gibe against FCP X

at its introduction in June 2011 was that it

represented nothing more than a pro version

of iMovie, which, not surprisingly, also relies

on AV Foundation.

Apples senior vice president of Industrial

Design Jony Ives is a devotee of German de-

signer Dieter Ramss Less, but better, phi-

losophy, evident in all Apple products. FCP

X chief architect Randy Ubillos was the cre-

ator of the first three versions of Adobe Pre-

miere in the early 1990s, while senior prod-

uct manager Steve Bayes, a working editor

for years, was once Avids principal product

designer for Media Composer, Symphony

and DS Nitris. He also wrote the essential

The Avid Handbook. As futurists endeavoring

to envision the shape of tomorrows pro ed-

iting, theyre not exactly chopped liver.So why the virulent public protest?

In addition to incorporating OS innova-

tions and building out extensive control

of metadata and media management, the

FCP X team sought to directly address sev-

eral prominent trends in production: Digital

cameras generate endlessly more footage

than film cameras ever did, which must be

readily reviewable and searchable. Multiple

cameras are now common and often wild

(no sync). Democratization encourages

see page 83

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Where would an editor fit in this mix?

While Telltale doesnt hire anyone for that

specific job title, Parson says, filmmakers are

certainly in demand. Weve hired cinematic

artists who came from film backgrounds

and didnt always have experience working

in 3D software. Of course, any of that you

do know would only make you more quali-

fied. Teaching software packages is prettyeasy. Teaching talent and creativity is hard.

In discussing the future of gaming, he adds,

I also fully expect to see more integration

between games and other media, especially

filmmaking. I think it will become more and

more common for ideas, talent and proper-

ties to cross-pollinate between filmmaking

and game development.

FCP X AND THE FUTURE OF EDITINGfrom page 71

many to edit regardless of experience; at thesame time, audiences expect perfect fin-

ished quality regardless of budget.

FCP Xs solutions, in order: fast Skimming

with pitch-corrected audio, Keywords &

Smart Collections, Multicam (introduced in

January in FCP Xs third upgrade in a year),

and a friendlier, less cluttered interface for

those with less experience, with deep con-

trols located just below the surface for ex-

perienced editors.

The uncluttered interface is key to under-

standing how radically innovative FCP X truly

is. Conventional timelines resemble orches-

tral scores, with dozens of staffs represent-

ing myriad instruments and sections, each

charted across time. In a conventional NLE

timeline, video and audio tracks can similarly

number in the dozens, overflowing even the

largest display. In many cases, these tracks

are mostly empty, containing only a handful

of clips. Arguably, a massive waste of pre-

cious screen real estate is the result.

FCP X has no tracks. It adopts a different

metaphor, one that Aeschylus would recog-

nize. Instead of a timeline with tracks aboveand below, FCP X provides a single primary

storyline that serves as a narrative spine,

with a beginning, middle and end. Individual

clips are connected at points along the sto-

ryline, floating on, just above (video) or below

(audio) the storyline. A complex stack or se-

quence of clips can be collapsed and nested

into a simple compound clip that can be ed-

ited like a single clip or momentarily reopened

into its own storyline for internal editing.

Sync relationships are preserved by a Mag-

netic Timeline. Since clips and compound

clips are attached to points along the storyline,

its impossible to knock them out of sync in the

course of inserting or deleting other clips. If

two clips happen to collide in the course of an

edit, one slips above or below the other (liter-

ally, using animation), preserving the relation-

ship of both clips to the storyline.

The editor, free from worry about acciden-

tally knocking clips or complex sequencesout of sync, can playfully shuffle clips and se-

quences, focusing entirely on story structure.

Dispensing with the clutter of conven-

tional tracks also favors use of FCP X on

mobile devices and compact laptops with

smaller screens a clear nod to the future.

When 64-bit FCP X displaced 32-bit FCP

7, which was summarily discontinued, theres

no question pro editors whose livelihoods

depended on FCP 7 were deeply shaken. But

many experienced editors groused because,

I believe, FCP X was strangely unfamiliar ter-ritory. Others faulted FCP X for features that

were, at first, missing, instead of lauding in-

novations like Magnetic Timeline and the

fact that, with OS X 10.7 Lions autosaving

and Resume, a power loss or unlikely crash

no longer means loss of work. FCP X projects

reopen exactly where they left off, like magic.

Rome wasnt built in a day and neither was

what became FCP 7 (10 years). In the course

of FCP Xs first year, five free upgrades have

arrived via the App Store (no need to change

out of your bathrobe), including support for

Multicam, XML, media relinking and broad-

cast output. Features to arrive later this year

include multichannel audio editing tools,

dual viewers and support for MXF plug-ins

and RED. And then there are useful OS fea-

tures like voice dictation, which arrived in

July with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Double-

click the function key and you never have to

type an event label or clip description in FCP

X again. Just speak.

Concision, after all, is the soul of editing,

and the film-editing project begun a century

ago with scissors and glue may yet reclaimits own simplicity. What we really want,

if were unashamedly honest, is facility of

editing with the ease of dreaming. To say,

wouldnt it be cool if and see instant re-

sults on the screen. Maybe someday we can

tell Siri where to make that cut and how long

to extend that dissolve. Change the tint,

add vignetting, a little more saturation...

With FCP X, were taking baby first steps

in that direction.

Final note: I cut a 17-minute documentary

one evening last summer (footage I shot)

using FCP X on a 17-inch MacBook Pro with

an internal 500GB SSD and fast G-Tech 8TB

RAID with Thunderbolt. I loaded files, re-

viewed footage, cut picture, sound, music,

added titles and credits, and finished in 11

hours straight. There was no initial rough

cut, then fine cut. I edited carefully along the

way, with utmost precision. The finished re-

sults were projected before an audience thefollowing morning. I couldnt have pulled this

off using pokey old FCP 7. In other words, if

this is the future of editing, Im loving it.

EDITINGLIFE OF PIfrom page 73

behind the screen. The way that we wanted

to do the fade-up is that the sun comes up

first, and then everything else follows. If you

just fadeout, where infinitys at 20 pixels and

then you fade-up the sun at 32 pixels, your

eyes are still thinking infinitys at 20 pixels,so the sun feels like its in a hole. It feels very

strange. So what we did is this: when the sun

comes up first, it comes up at 20 pixels back,

and then, as the rest of the scene comes in, the

sun drops back to 32 pixels. You dont feel it

[when you watch the movie], but if we did it

differently, you would feel it, and it would feel

strange. For every dissolve you have to think

about how the shots interact. For some of our

transitions, the outgoing shot has to drop back

as the dissolve is starting, or even before the

dissolve starts. Theres one dissolve where we

cut from a wide shot of the boat at night to a

close shot of Pi writing. If you just do the dis-

solve, this little tiny boat looks like its floating

right on Pis nose; it just looks dumb. Leading

into that cut, we had to drop the boat back, so

[coming in] it feels like its behind his head. [In

3D] you have to carefully consider every dis-

solve, every transition. So [the stereography]

really is part of the editors job.

Thats fascinating. And Im sorry, but can you

explain how pixels are the unit of measure-

ment here?Yes. Thats the offset between the

left eye image and the right eye image. Letssay you have an image of a star. If you look at

it on the screen without the 3D glasses, youll

see two stars. When you put the glasses on,

each eye only sees one and they automati-

cally reconverge. If the right eye image is to

the right and the left eye image is to the left,

[the star] feels like its behind the screen. If

its the opposite, it feels like its in front of the

screen. And so, by repositioning the images

left and right, you can control whats behind

the screen and whats in front of the screen,

and you can do that in postproduction.

1204 flm post editing-fcpx-review

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