My oh my how time flies… Howe long has it been?  A week… A month?  At any rate, far too long for me to have kept quiet, and I do apologize for that.  Busy I have been, busy working through a project of monolithic proportions so that I might bring you a thorough review of a fine suite of software.  What software am I talking about?  Well, I’ll make mention of it in a bit, but you’ll probably gather what I’m talking about using context clues.  First off, this project had a tight deadline.  Less than two weeks to manipulate hundreds of photos, three hundred to be exact.  Now that I think about it, I could write a second review on the rest of the software I used, but let’s take it one step at a time, shall we?

So, where are we, ah yes, the project well, it was long. 32 minutes worth of FMV is no joke when your starting point is three hundred pictures.  But a PowerPoint-ish slide show is not enough to wow your clientele, I figured this out in about ’98, but it appears that the rest of the world still hasn’t caught on.  That’s where Final Cut Studio comes in.  This is a behemoth of a software package, I’ll ge that out of the way to begin with, a behemoth, both literally and figuratively.  Shipping at a staggering 17 lbs, Final cut Studio may well be the best $1299.00 that I have ever spent.  I am quite excited that Apple still chooses to send paper manuals along with their software.  So many companies skimp out on the manuals, those being the most expensive physical part of the software package.  But the Documentation included with FCS is thorough indeed.

Now I’ve been using Final Cut in one form or another since version 1.  While version 1 wasn’t exactly a clunker, it still didn’t have the polish of the solutions from Adobe, both of which I owned at the time.  Back then, something in my gut told me that I should keep using this, no matter how it presently compared to Premiere and After Effects; I did.  I have used every single version of Final Cut, not to mention dropping enough cash to finance the purchase of a Kia, since then, and I have watched the suite grow and mature with every revision.  I must say, the Final Cut of today is quite remarkable for a video suite that is only seven or eight years old.

Final Cut is another one of those things that I consider a gem of Apple ingenuity.  Final Cut represents the apple design philosophy to a T.  Where other companies stagnate, Apple innovates.  Take Premier for example, and After Effects.  Like lots of other applications, their interface has remained fairly static.  Adobe refuses to innovate the interface for fear of alienating their user base.  In doing this, they have done exactly what they have been trying to avoid, and people are jumping ship to Final Cut, or another app that offers a fresh perspective on video editing.  MS Windows suffers from this same quandary, but in another scope, and that is another article altogether.  With each revision, Final Cut’s interface has changed, things have been shuffled, menus and layouts changed.  Yet the constant intuitiveness of interface has not changed.  Final Cut has a less steep learning curve than any other video app in its class.

Final cut has one ace up its sleeve than the other video apps can’t touch.  While it interfaces well with the image-editing apps from Adobe, it absolutely sparkles when paired with its companion apps.  The list is long and distinguished, but with Final Cut Studio, you get Final Cut Pro 5, naturally, DVD Studio Pro 4, Soundtrack Pro, Motion 2, and LiveType 2, Cinema Tools 3, Qmaster 2, and Compressor 2.  Deep breath.  It stuns like a blunt object to the base of the skull to think about what all you’re getting for your $1299.  I’m going to shake it up a bit, give you guys a breather, and visit each component in detail in a paragraph or so.  The clock is ticking, so you’d better go potty.
[Elevator Music]

Starting with the tools, which are Compressor 2, Cinema Tools 3, and Qmaster 2… These three are small apps that do some of the things that help the studio be on its best.  Cinema Tools 3, I can’t really say a lot about.  It’s designed for use with film, and since I’m not shooting on cellulose, I have little use for it.  From piddling around in it, I gather that it tracks the video in its relation to the film, for 24p and whatnot.  Qmaster 2 was another app that isn’t really of use to me.  I do have multiple Macs, but the only other one capable of running Qmaster is a 450MHz G4, and I can’t imagine what impact that much extra processing power would have on the dual G5, which is roughly eleven times as fast.  If you’re working in a studio where you’ve got twenty Macs, get ready to be blown away, I sold a local production company on Final Cut, and when they’ve got footage to render, they run Qmaster when they leave.  The footage is usually rendered by the morning, and shots that would take premier a week to render on a PC takes a cluster of Macs a single evening.  The concept is killer.  One thing I did use was Compressor 2.  Compressor, as the name implies compresses video.  It supports every format that Quicktime does, and then some.  Compressor generates the highest quality MPEG2 files I have ever seen; side-by-side they look better than a commercial DVD in terms of artifacting and contrast.  Compressor also generates H.264 with amazing clarity, and is HVDVD ready.

LiveType 2 is another helpful companion app.  While some may find the way that it works outside of Final Cut strange, I find it refreshing.  Instead of trying to cram all this titling goodness up the posterior of FCP, a la Microsoft, Apple opts to create a more refined stand-alone app that generates pre-rendered video files with alpha data, and the files generated can be easily dropped into a project.  This may seem like an extra step, but at no time does it ever feel unnatural.  I’m just happy that the days of making a big ol’ Photoshop file that was about 8000 pixels tall, importing it in after effects, and then panning it from top to bottom to imitate scrolling text are over.  LiveType does one thing, and it does it well.

Soundtrack… Again, I didn’t use too much of soundtrack for my last project, but it has come along in leaps and bounds over its last incarnation.  Before, it was easier to use Logic Pro to create your audio.  Now, Soundtrack, with its native support for all Apple loops and just about every audio format worth its weight in rotten fruit, makes arranging a score for your Academy Award winning feature easier than ever.  Such that I only need to sync up pictures to a few songs, there was no need, but its nice to know its there.

Motion 2… Now here’s one that’s got potential.  This is the second version of one of the most amazing applications I’ve ever seen.  Motion 1 was a bout as stable as a drunk baboon with an inner-ear disorder.  The same cannot be said of Motion 2.  Motion uses scripts and all sorts of inexplicable compositing wizardry to produce some rather amazing motion graphic sequences that rival those of any network.  Slowly, I have seen motion produced sequences pop up here and there.  I’ve seen quite a few commercials. One in particular for Comcast cable is completely uninspired as it uses a template right out of the library that comes with the apps.  Apple is making serious inroads into the production world, so the current players will need to keep an eye on their six.

DVD Studio Pro 4… Here is probably the most profound app of them all.  That’s not to discount Final Cut, not by a long shot, but this app does what it is designed to do with almost heavenly adroit.  Complex menus and titling, not a problem, hell, this bad boy will even render seamless transitions for your menus and footage so there’s no jarring and uncomfortable transition from menu to menu or menu to scene, all with no extra effort on your part.  An application of this quality is seldom seen these days.  I have even heard rumblings in my production circles, that DVD SP outpaces the old industry standard DVD production app that runs in the tens of thousands of dollars.  Not bad, not bad at all.

Final Cut Pro 5… Ah, my sweet child, how I love thee.  You want to talk about a powerhouse?  This, my friends, is a Powerhouse.  This could be the single greatest application that Apple has ever marketed.  I don’t think that a product has come to market that made the kind of waves the FCP did, in a long time.  Version 1 was decidedly lackluster.  It worked, and was quite effective, but it lacked the clout and punch of the solutions from Adobe.  It didn’t have the features of either yet was trying to be both.  Adobe made a notable scoff at this new competitor and sailed on, blissfully unaware of a brewing storm.  You see Apple doesn’t like to be second in anything.  You may mention the installer base, but that’s such old news that it’s a moot point, and hardly worth mentioning.  Apple wants to be number one in its market, and the Windows and Mac markets are decidedly different.

Version 2… By v. 2, many of the quirks had been worked out.  Final Cut Pro was now strolling along happily, and was clearly not going to fade away.  The steady pace of improvements continued, and version 3 was released.  Adobe started awake… They could see the grumblings of a revolution.  Their few years of a stale interface were catching up to them.  Apple released version 4, and 4.5 to stunning reviews, and both were very capable apps.  The pace of people flinging themselves from the Adobe deck like rats from a burning barge has reached a fever pitch.  Adobe had taken notice, they had spruced up the interface of their applications, even introduced a competitor to DVD SP.  I will say this.  If anyone has used Encore DVD in its 1.0 or 1.5 iterations, they will understand instantly why I would rather stab myself repeatedly in the temples with a slotted screwdriver than try to author a DVD with that.  It is disheartening that Adobe would allow such a piece of crap to roll out of the door.  Adobe’s history with Photoshop, Illustrator, et al is legendary.  I think, however, that it’s days of dominating the low end NLE market are over.

Now the first thing you should know about FCP 5 is that is is a BEAST.  It likes ram, but with a fast processor and a fast scratch drive, it is quite capable of being perfectly civil. While I was finishing the DVD out, I had 5 Apps open at once, Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, Motion, DVD SP4, and FCP5, and they all ran like champs.  While this is a testament to the hardware, it also shows how Final Cut will be docile in the background instead of monopolizing your system resources.  Plus, I’ve got a dual 2.5 and 4 gigs of ram, so if you’re on a Mac mini, God love it, you’re mileage will vary.  The feature I like the most and the one which I think has seen the most improvement over the last few revisions has been real-time playback.  The transitions appear a bit muddy during real time playback, but at render time, they prove to be as crystal clear as the rest of the video.

One thing that I loved while producing a photo montage, was that FCP allowed me to move the photos around and time them with the music, all while receiving instant gratification and being able to see the fruits of my labor immediately.  You honestly cannot imagine the ease that this brings to the project.  All the transitions that can be rendered in realtime are bolded in the menu, so if you’re a deadline is looming, it’s easy to select the transitions that won’t eat up render time.  One thing I will say is that FCP 5 does not have as many transitions as Premiere.  This hardly matters though, because FCP has the ones that are frequently used, and also includes a programming interface to build your own transitions.

All around, I noticed areas where Final Cut Studio had streamlined my workflow to an amazing degree.  I would seriously say that the same project would take me four to five times as long if I were using a Premiere/AE solution.  This is not simply conjecture; I did a very similar production for the same client last year, the differences being that it was much smaller, yet took nearly twice as long.  Sure, it was a Windows PC with a scant 1 gigabyte of ram, but equipment inequities can only account for so much of a decrease in productivity, and I think a 400% decrease is a little beyond the realm of hardware.

For all its strengths, Final Cut Studio is not without its niggling complaints.  First and foremost is an inconsistent handling of Adobe files.  While most Photoshop files work wonderfully, and there are a few tricks that you can do with Photoshop layers that bend the mind, some times the transparency just didn’t seem to be coming through right, and Illustrator files never seemed to have the desired transparencies.  The other glaring complaint that I have is that DVD SP refuses to render Final Cut files.  This is very perplexing for one reason.  I can drag a Motion 2 file into DVD SP and it will behave exactly like an asset.  However, when I try to drag a Final Cut file in as an asset, I get an incompatible format warning.  With the job of encoding that compressor does, it doesn’t surprise me that Apple hasn’t made that change, and it doesn’t affect my work flows at all because I always use Compressor 2 to encode because of higher quality, it just strikes me as odd.  That’s about it for complaints.  This is just a solid app that can’t be greatly faulted in any real way.

Bottom line… You can’t beat this with a stick.  Seriously, there is not a single application or suite of applications under ten grand that can come close to doing what FCS does.  This is the single best investment that anyone even remotely serious about video editing can make.  For $5,000, I can get an entire video-editing suite, with a computer!  It is impossible to get even comparable software for anywhere near that price, let alone a computer that will run it.  For video editing houses, this suite is even more of a no-brainer, with the ability to do distributed rendering, this one can easily play with the big boys.  Bottom line, if you consider yourself even a Pro-sumer, and you have a Mac, you need to buy this app, hands down.

5 out of 5