What’s Wrong With Final Cut Pro?

Recently I’ve been coming to terms with Final Cut Pro. Up until recently I’ve pretty much had no need or desire to learn FCP, at least not since learning Avid. But that has changed, the fact is now that for basic HD broadcast finishing FCP outclasses Avid hugely (especially in a cost/benefit factor). But FCP isn’t all it could be, and it frustrates me.

Of course, given that I’ve been cutting almost everyday in Avid Media Composer or Xpress for the last 5 years or so it is hard to get out of the Avid mindset - but I do really try. That said, in my opinion Avid really is the king in very many respects when it comes to non-linear editing, and they have really nailed some things.

So, what is wrong with FCP?

I first used FCP in 2001, at Version 1.0 I think. I cut an independent DV feature (that was screened twice as far as I know). At that stage in my editing career, FCP suited me - I didn’t really understand the offline/online process, I was a drag-and-drop editor, it all made sense. Thankfully with the input of a few better editors I made a few good choices (tape labelling especially, helpful when we lost a drive).

But things have changed for me, and my needs as an editor have changed. Now I am onlining drama in HD for broadcast. I’ve onlined hundreds of hours of TV in the past 5 years. Frankly, I am fast in Avid - I know exactly what I need to do, and the best way to do it; I know how to fix the common problems. I can breeze through it, and I can do that because Avid’s tools for this sort of work are rock solid.

The same is not true in FCP. Let me vent a little, in no particular order…

• Title Tool
  When I first used Avid’s Title Tool I thought something along the lines of ‘this is crap, oh god’ but it didn’t take long to adjust. It’s simple but actually deceptively powerful. The same can not be said about FCP’s text tools - the default text tools offer almost no flexability - no positioning, only one font, size and weight per title, only one colour. And by default you can’t even see what you’re making in context at all. It’s absolutely terrible. Now, Final Cut Studio does also include Motion, which is a lot more flexible, but it’s also ridiculous overkill for a simple title card (like an ID board for example).
• Capture Tool
  The FCP capture tool hasn’t changed in the last 7 years. What it does well is offering the opportunity to add more descriptive data at capture time, but that’s where the benefits end. Things that are lacking from FCP capture tool include - ability to change capture device (instead you have to change system settings), audio monitors. But the biggest issue (and this is a huge thing for online conforming) is that there is no display of what timecode is being captured - more on this later perhaps.
• Effect Editor
  The Avid effects paradigm can seem pretty weird when you first encounter it, and perhaps it is - but one thing I think it does better is the editing of existing effects. By parking the playhead over a clip or selecting it and entering the Effect Editor you can change the parameters of an effect in context on the timeline. In FCP you have to load that clip into the Viewer/Source monitor, and then select the Filters tab (meaning you can’t even see the video itself) and then make changes. This is especially frustrating if you’re trying to keep another clip in the Viewer.  More on that too.
• Render Management
  Okay, this one really seems mental to me. Imagine I have a few tracks of video on a timeline and on the top level (V4 we’ll say) I have a copy of the offline as a reference track. I build an effect a lower video level, switch off V4 (I’ll be deleting it before the final output anyway) and I render my effects to review. Then I switch V4 back on to continue my reference checking… FCP warns me that my renders will be lost - makes sense, I’m changing the layering by switching V4 on - but if I turn V4 off again, then the render is still gone - despite the setup being exactly the same as when the effect was rendered, the render is lost. Gone. Although I bet it’s still on the drive taking up space.
• Media Management
  If you haven’t used Avid, this tends to make no sense, but the way Avid manages it’s media is brilliant. Not totally perfect, but much much much more useful than FCP’s file-based system. One thing that I couldn’t get my head around in FCP initially was the lack of a relink ability. Say I have a clip in a sequence from Tape 103 from 03:20:11:10 to 03:20:15:12, and I have a clip in a bin somewhere from Tape 103 from 03:15:00:00 to 03:25:00:00 - there is no way in FCP to have the offline clip in the sequence automatically relinked to the existing footage.  In situations where there may still be changes made to the edit in offline after the online process has started this functionality is invaluable - in Avid, I can take any sequence and have it automatically relink to any media already available in the system, so if I have an earlier version digitised then most of the new version will relink and only missing clips have to be redigitised. This is impossible to achieve automatically in FCP.
• Trim Tools
  There have been huge amounts written about FCP trim tools vs. Avid trim tools. I won’t rehash it all, but there are some scenarios that I struggle with in FCP. Now to be fair, I haven’t fully explored this stuff yet, so I may be missing a better one. In online it’s not uncommon for a clip for be a few frames out of sync (I wrote a few years ago about one of the reasons this happens). In Avid I position the playhead over the clip and press the trim buttons (M,<,> and ? by default) and the clip gets slipped as commanded. I can just go tap-tap-tap and have slipped the shot three frames. In FCP I have to select the Slip tool (I can use keyboard shortcut to select the tool) but then I have to click on the shot and drag it left or right to adjust the slip - and let go (applying the slip) before I can preview it. It is difficult to keep track of how much and in what direction I’ve slipped it.

This is not my exhaustive list of issues. And to be fair, I’m still fairly new to FCP for this sort of work. However it is clear to me that Apple just hasn’t focused on some of the more fundamental features in Final Cut, instead investing in what I would term fluff.

So, about a couple of things…

Capturing

In an online redigitise it’s not uncommon for the deck to get confused about the timecode it’s trying to hit, especially in time-of-day code, or where there are timecode breaks. It is usually relatively easy to figure these problems out and fix them once you know what timecode it is looking for. In Avid this information is always displayed, and you can see quickly if it’s going wrong. You can flick the deck to Local mode and cue it to around the right timecode manually, then flick it back to Remote and Avid will take over and carry on. In FCP you can’t see the timecode. There’s no way to know what timecode FCP is looking for. Also, if you do flick the deck into Local to cue, FCP will complain that it has lost communication and won’t talk to the deck again until you exit entirely out of the Capture tool and come back in.

Effect Editing

When onlining in Avid I have a method that works pretty well. I load an offline reference video into the Source (Viewer) and gang it to the Record (Canvas) monitor. I can then skip from edit-to-edit down the timeline and toggle between the Source and record monitor on the client monitor by pressing Esc (I believe Q does the same in FCP). This way I can easily check sync and effects references.

I can do the same thing in FCP, to some extent. However when I come to a clip that I want to apply an effect (filter) to, I have to double click on that clip and load it into the Viewer, which then means I lose my offline reference and also the ganged sync. Meaning that once I’m done I have to load my offline again, and find the a sync point and re-gang the Viewer and Canvas. It is slow and inefficient. Instead I have take to putting the offline on an upper video layer and using a Crop to split the screen - it’s a reasonable reference for some things, but need to be changed often to see different parts of the picture.