LIFTING THE LID ON FCP X
Under the bonnet of the new FCP
Apple’s long anticipated Final Cut Pro X has finally been unveiled – it’s the first release of a brand new Final Cut Pro that’s an almost entirely different beast to FCP 7 and is set to rip up the editing rule book once more
Final Cut Pro needs little introduction. Apple’s non-linear editing tool has revolutionised the market for film and broadcast post production, enabling creative video editing at an affordable price on powerful Apple Mac computers. So it’s big news when such a product as Final Cut Pro undergoes such a radical change as has happened with Final Cut Pro X. It’s an entirely new flavour of Final Cut Pro that’s a very, very different editing system to Final Cut Pro 7.
New Direction
Make no mistake about it, Final Cut Pro X is not the software you are used to. With a new lower price, and a modular structure for applications such as Motion 5 and Compressor 4, it’s been rebuilt and re-engineered from the ground up to take full advantage of the latest Apple hardware and Mac OS.
For a start this software is a 64-bit native application, which in real terms means more access to greater amounts of RAM and therefore more power to your editing. It pumps tasks round the system to take advantage of all available CPU cores and can also make use of the new AVX capabilities of Intel’s ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor found in the latest Macs. Processor-intensive tasks such as rendering, transcoding, exporting and moving media now take place in the background, allowing you to just get on with the main task of editing. Final Cut Pro X also utilises the GPU and memory on the graphics card for far more video clout – you can render multiple layers of super high definition video, or playback HD footage on a full screen Canvas with finely rendered,
4 icons
synchronised scopes, for example. Meanwhile, resolution independence lets you mix and match formats and frame rates all the way up to 4K. Richer, more complex effects can play in real-time during the creative process, and a shared rendering engine between Motion, Compressor and the main application enables Motion templates to play back in Final Cut Pro X without rendering. Furthermore, this shared architecture renders commonly used effects such as blurs, scales and blends in linear-light colour space for exceptionally realistic results. Colour, an essential factor in any visual art, has been put at the centre of the workflow of Apple’s new look editing system, through the direct implementation of ColorSync within Final Cut Pro X. This ensures accurate and consistent colour from import through render and export, no matter what hardware you are using in the process.
FCP X doesn’t have a viewer, it has a smarter Canvas that auto changes depending on what you’re working on
New Look The rebuilt architecture of FCP X also enables Apple technologies such as Core Animation to make working with footage far more responsive and interactive. This is most evident in the main interface, which will look really different to editors used to a track-based workflow. Final Cut Pro X doesn’t have a viewer anymore, just a smarter Canvas that automatically changes depending on what you’re working on. If you move the mouse over the timeline or over the browser, the relative content scrubs automatically in the Canvas. In the new ‘Magnetic Timeline’, media is stacked in layers or grouped together in Compound Clips – a more elegant solution than nesting. Editing is simple and intuitive – when you drag clips, gaps open up in the timeline to edit those clips in place without messing up the audio sync, which is a real timesaver. Fine tuning is possible by double-clicking on the edit
Final Cut Pro X
It’s been rebuilt and re- engineered from to take full advantage of the latest Apple hardware and Mac OS. It’s 64-bit, meaning more access to greater amounts of RAM and more power to your editing
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36