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Final Cut Pro is a non-linear editing system created by Apple Computer that allows users to edit video. The latest releases are for Mac OS X only. From the early 2000s, it came to be accepted as a high-end professional editorial tool and has become a competitor to the former main force in the industry, Avid. While some speculate that Final Cut has a larger user base than Avid, Avid remains an established product for professionals working in realtime and high-end production.
Used on Macintosh computers, it is a resolution-independent software editing front-end to a user-configurable hardware architecture. It can be used to edit material ranging from FireWire-attached MiniDV video from a consumer digital video camera in the home environment to High-Definition (HD) material in a full professional studio environment. The software loads the video onto the Mac, where it can be edited and processed.
History
Randy Ubillos and other members of his team originally created Adobe Premiere *. They were then hired by Macromedia to create KeyGrip, built from the ground up as a more professional video editing program based on QuickTime. Macromedia made a decision to be a web company instead of competing head-on with Adobe in every category and decided to find a buyer for their non-web applications, including KeyGrip, by this time (1998) renamed as Final Cut. Final Cut was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exposition in 1998 after Macromedia pulled out of the main show floor. At the demonstration both Mac and Windows versions were shown. The Mac version was working with a Truevision RTX dual stream real time card with limited real time effects. When no purchaser could be found Apple purchased the team as a defensive move. When Apple could not find a buyer in turn, it continued development work, focusing on adding FireWire/DV support and at NAB 1999 Apple introduced Final Cut Pro.
With the introduction of FCP, Adobe Premiere market share plummeted, since its ancient codebase had neither the features nor the design flair to compete. In 2003, Apple announced a program for Premiere users to trade in their discs for a free copy of Final Cut Express or a $500 discount on Final Cut Pro *. Later that year, Adobe introduced Premiere Pro as a Windows-only product with an entirely new codebase and many FCP-like features.
In late 2001, the studio motion picture "The Rules of Attraction" was edited on beta versions of FCP 3, proving to the film industry that successful 2 pulldown matchback to 24fps could be achieved with a consumer off-the-shelf product and that high-priced Avids were no longer necessary. Roger Avary, the film's director became the spokesperson for FCP, appearing in print ads worldwide. His advocacy of the product gave confidence to mainstream editors like Walter Murch that the product was ready for "prime time."
In 2002, the application won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award * for its impact on the television industry.
Version 4 of the application was announced in April 2003. It included three new applications: Compressor, used for the transcoding between video formats; LiveType for advanced titling (such as the creation of animated lower thirds); and Soundtrack, for royalty-free music soundtrack creation. It also bundled Cinema Tools, which was previously sold separately for filmmakers working with telecine.
In April 2004, version 4.5 of Final Cut Pro was introduced, and rebranded by Apple as "Final Cut Pro HD" (even though the software has been capable of HD editing since version 3.0). Final Cut Pro HD did not support the burgeoning HDV format, however. Its "scaled-down" cousin, Final Cut Express, gained support for HDV 9 months after the release of FCP HD. Native HDV support was later added with the release of Final Cut Pro 5.0 in May 2005 (which was first announced at a pre-NAB event in April).
In January 2006 Apple stopped selling Final Cut Pro as a stand-alone product. In March 2006 the Universal Binary version was released as part of Final Cut Studio 5.1. The upgrade was performed by sending the original source discs back to Apple with a fee. One noticeable difference is that the Intel versions of Final Cut and Motion no longer recognise After Effects plug-ins.
See also a release history in context with the rest of Final Cut Studio.
Feature Films edited with FCP
Final Cut Pro has been used to edit many feature films, including Cold Mountain, Corpse Bride, Jarhead, Napoleon Dynamite, and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. For a more extensive listing, see the list of feature films edited with Final Cut Pro.Features
Final Cut Pro provides non-linear, non-destructive editing of any QuickTime compatible video format. It supports an unlimited number of simultaneously composited video tracks; up to 99 audio tracks; multi-cam editing, for cutting video from multiple camera sources; as well as standard ripple, roll, slip, slide, scrub, razor blade and time remapping edit functions. It comes with a range of dissolve, iris, distortion and basic 3D transitions and a range of video and audio filters such as keying tools, mattes and vocal de-poppers and de-essers. It also has a manual 3-way color correction filter, videoscopes and a selection of generators, such as slugs, test cards and noise.
The latest version of Final Cut Pro (version 5) claims better integration with Apple's other Pro applications and improved codec support for editing HD, DV and SD video formats, along with Panasonic's new solid-state recording technology, P2. A new technology called DynamicRT built on the RT Extreme technology released with Final Cut Pro 4. DynamicRT allows a real-time multistream effects architecture, which can be set to automatically adjust image quality and frame rate during playback to maintain real time effects. For example, when there are a large number of video streams playing simultaneously, it will change, on the fly, to a mode that reduces the quality of the playback so that all of them can be seen in real time; when the computer is capable of it, it will automatically return playback to native quality (that is, when there are fewer simultaneous video streams). Major limitations of the program include the inability to edit SD and HD on the same timline, and the lack of automatic color correction.
Final Cut Pro 5 uses the included application, Cinema Tools, to keep track of original film sources through the telecine editing processes. Calligraphy 2 from BorisFX - a plug-in that works natively in Final Cut Pro - is included for higher quality titling and is a subset of the Boris Graffiti titling technology.
Final Cut Pro 5 is part of the Final Cut Studio suite.
Final Cut Express
Main article: Final Cut Express
In 2001, Apple launched Final Cut Express, an inexpensive version of Final Cut. It uses the same interface as Final Cut Pro, but it lacks all of the film-specific tools and other advanced options, pruning the feature set for amateur and professional digital video producers.
In January 2005, Soundtrack and Live Type, previously only available with Final Cut Pro, were added to Express, and features were added to edit HDV video.
Interface
The Final Cut (Pro and Express) interface has four main windows: the Browser, where source media files are listed; the Viewer, where individual media files can be previewed and trimmed; the Timeline, where media can be cut together into a sequence; and the Canvas, where the edited production in the timeline can be viewed. The positions and sizes of these windows can be changed, but by default, the Browser is at the top left, with the Viewer and Canvas to its right, in that order, and the Timeline below. There is also a small Toolbox window and two audio level indicators for the left and right audio channels.
Both the Viewer and Canvas have a shuttle interface (for variable-speed scanning through a clip, forwards or backwards) and a jogging interface (for frame-by-frame advancing). The standard J, K and L keys can be used to play the video at full speed backwards, to pause the video, and to play it at full speed in a forward direction, respectively. The I and O keys can be used to set in and out points for a clip, or for the entire sequence.
Browser
The Browser is not an interface to the computer's filesystem. It is an entirely virtual space in which references to clips (aliases) are placed, for easy access, and arranged in folders called 'bins'. Since they are only references to clips that are on the media drive of the computer, moving or deleting a source file on the media hard drive destroys the link between the entry in the Browser and the actual media. This results in a 'media offline' situation, and the media must be 'reconnected'. Final Cut Pro can search for the media itself, or the user can do this manually. If multiple clips are offline at the same time, Final Cut can reconnect all the offline media clips that are in the relative directory path as the first offline media clips that is reconnected.The browser has an 'effects' tab in which video transitions and filters can be browsed and dragged onto or between clips.
Canvas
The canvas outputs the contents of the Timeline. To add clips to the Timeline, besides dragging them there, it is possible to drag clips from the Browser or Viewer onto the Canvas, whereupon the so-called 'edit overlay' appears. The edit overlay has seven drop zones, into which clips can be dragged in order to perform different edits. The default is the 'overwrite' edit, which overwrites at an in point or the space occupied after the playhead with the incoming clip. The 'insert' edit slots a clip into the sequence at the in point or playhead's position, keeping the rest of the video intact, but moving it all aside so that the new clip fits. There are also drop zones to have the application automatically insert transitions. The 'replace' edit replaces a clip in the Timeline with an incoming clip, and the 'fit to fill' edit does the same thing, but at the same time, it adjusts the playback speed of the incoming clip so that all of it will fit into the required space the Timeline. Finally there is the 'superimpose' edit, which automatically places the dropped clip on the track above the clip in the Timeline, with a duration equal to the clip below it. Unless an in or out point are set, all edits occur from the position of the playhead in the Timeline.Using the wireframe view on the canvas, the clip can be manipulated directly - dragging it around in the canvas to change its position, for example, or resizing it. Precise adjustment controls for these things are in the viewer.
Viewer
The viewer has tabs for each channel of the selected clip's audio, in which the waveform for the audio can be viewed and scrubbed, and where its volume can be keyframed. The filters tab is where effects for the clip appear and where their parameters can be adjusted and keyframed. If the clip selected is a generator (such as an oval shape), a control tab appears for changing its geometrical properties. Finally, the viewer's motion tab contains tools to adjust the scale, opacity, cropping, rotation, distortion, drop shadow, motion blur and time remapping properties of the clip. Mini-timelines to the right of each parameter allow the property to be keyframed.Compositing
Clips can be edited together in sections called sequences. Sequences can be nested inside other sequences, so that a filter or transition can be applied to the grouped clips.The timeline in Final Cut Pro allows 99 video tracks to be placed on top of each other. If a clip is higher in the timeline than another, then it obscures whatever is below it. The size of a video clip can be altered, and the clips can be cropped. Opacity levels can also be altered, as well as animated over the course of the clip using keyframes, defined either on a graphical overlay, or in the Viewer's 'motion' tab, where precise percentage opacity values can be entered. Final Cut also has a number of different compositing modes available that change the way a clip is displayed in combination with a clip below it. These are:
- Addition
- Subtraction
- Multiplication
- Difference
- Screen
- Overlay
- Hard light
- Soft light
- Darken
- Lighten
- Travel matte luma
- Travel matte alpha.
For more advanced compositing Final Cut Pro roundtrips with Apple's Shake software.
See also
External links
Mac OS-only software made by Apple Computer | Video editing software
Final Cut Pro | Final Cut Pro | Final Cut Pro HD | Final Cut Pro | Final Cut Pro | Final Cut Pro | Final Cut Pro
"Final Cut Pro"