OPINION
The beginning of a new chapter in FCP
Mark Keller, chief technology officer at global Apple- equipped ‘advertising implementation agency’ Hogarth Worldwide shares his first impressions of Apple FCP X
Advertising implementation agency Hogarth Worldwide Ltd, a WPP Group company, offers a unified production and approvals system, designed to distribute advertising material across all media globally. The company has around 350 Macs, ranging from the lightest Macbook Air to the most hardcore workstation you can buy. Chief Technology Officer Mark Keller was one of the first professional FCP users in the UK to be given a serious look at Apple’s revolutionary Final Cut Pro X. His first impressions? “It is completely new and has a radical new interface,” says Keller. “That was quite a shock, but it’s clear once you’ve sat down and used it, that an awful lot of thought has gone in to effectively re- engineering the editing experience. It’s clear it’s not an evolution of Final Cut Pro 7, but a brand new paradigm for editing.” “It really takes maximum advantage of the
hardware,” continues Keller. “It’s very, very fast and it makes full use of the graphics card and processors. Background rendering, for example, is really important – you can just keep editing while it happens and obviously rendering is so
much quicker now.”
Keller says he found the new clip browser ‘quite startling’: “We run big workgroups so were really into tagging and descriptive metadata,” he explains. “Apple has obviously paid an awful lot of attention to how Final Cut Pro X can extract as much metadata as possible from the raw files it is reading. It also allows you to enhance the metadata in a really sensible way. It can have time-based metadata as well, so you can span a set of frames and describe that set, rather than put markers all through the clip. That’s great for us; it has a huge amount of potential and it’s just really sensible.” When it comes to Final Cut Pro X’s newly designed interface, Keller says: “The interface is quite unusual. Most editors are used to having the playhead on the right hand monitor, so to speak, and the clips they’re looking at on the left hand, and they make their edit decision based on that environment,” he says. “Final Cut Pro X doesn’t have that. It has other layouts – dual screen views, for example, that pop up interactively depending on what you’re doing. But clearly all the ‘muscle memory’ that’s been built up will need a slight amount of retraining.” The Hogarth team are particularly keen on
Keller on FCP X...
It’s very, very fast and it makes full use of the graphics card and processors
An awful lot of thought has gone in to re- engineering the editing experience
It lays the foundation for the environment we’re going to be working in for the next five or 10 years
FCP X’s new ‘Match Color’ feature, especially when having to match ungraded and finished clips on reversioning jobs. The tighter integration and shared rendering with Motion is also another big hit. “The fact we can have lots of graphics artists working [simultaneously] on lots of Motion templates, that can then be directly accessed from Final Cut Pro X, for us is really important, ” says Keller.
So what does Keller believe is the very best aspect of the new version, at least as Hogarth Worldwide is concerned? “The fact it is brand new and has been completely rewritten. It lays the foundation for the environment we’re going to be working in for the next five or 10 years.”
Mark Keller, CTO, Hogarth Worldwide
As chief technology officer for Hogarth Worldwide, Keller is tasked with the design and operation of the technology systems for the company
Formerly head of post production at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, Keller was responsible for the architecture of the Digital Lab, the world’s first in-Agency digital, tapeless, post production facility.
A certified Apple solutions expert consultant, Mark advises on workflow techniques, hardware specification, systems integration and the physical layout of production environments, drawing on 10 years experience as an online editor using Apple desktop systems
It’s clear [Final Cut Pro X] isn’t an evolution of Final Cut Pro 7, but a brand new paradigm for editing
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