Final Cut Pro vs. Avid

Final Cut Pro VS Avid from Jill DiBiase on Vimeo.

Cable wrapping

Ok, so in post maybe we don’t usually deal with 100′ cords. But we do have our fair share of cables. I saw this and thought, I may never “over-under” again. Now to practice it…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaEv9wm6gy0

My NAB review

This was my first trip to NAB and it was a great experience. I learned a lot and picked up a bunch of new tips and trick from the classes and then there were the toys… The show floor was massive. On the post side there were a lot of large and shared storage options. A few people had some Thunderbolt interface stuff up for demo (I/O boxes, drive arrays) but nobody was shipping before this summer. Looks like the interface is going to take off soon and it has a lot of promise.

One cool gadget I feel I should mention is the Atomos Samurai and Ninja. These are cool little full color touchscreen external recording devices for your camera. The interface is simple and useful. The touchscreen doubles as a full color monitor. You can use any 2.5 inch drive in their chassis and it records direct to Apple’s ProRes.

Let me say that again, ANY DRIVE YOU WANT. SSD for a non-spinning solution for run-n-gun? Ok. 1TB laptop hard drive for FOURTEEN HOURS OF RECORD TIME? Sure.

The Samurai takes HD-SDI in and the Ninja HDMI and they are about $1500 and $1000, respectively. But that price gets you a nice Pelican-type case, batteries, charger, and more. I saw boxes that were displays only that cost more.

Final Cut Pro X

A few weeks ago, during NAB, Apple announced the new version of Final Cut. I was there and got to see the demo. There were things that got me excited and things that made me wary. It looks like a completely new application and I think it will be a big shift in the way you actually edit in the timeline. Overall I can see how this new interface could improve the process but to me there are elements in it that feel “pro-sumer”. It’s still too early to tell. I am cautiously optimistic.

Here are some of the features they released:

• 64-bit Application
• No more 4GB memory limit
• Built on Cocoa
• New color management, WYSIWUG
• Higher quality effects
• Resolution independent playback system
• Can use all cores in your machine, including GPUs
• “Render bars are gone” background rendering for everything using idle time (similar to SmoothCam processing)
• Can edit while ingesting footage. Background ingesting.
• Automatic media detection, image stabilization, color balancing (nondestructive), audio cleanup (nondestructive) available on ingest
• Adding people detection-automatic metadata on shot type (wide, medium, etc.)
• Range based keywording. Like the old marker system but expanded
• Ability to create smart-bins based on metadata (think smart iTunes playlists)
• BIG one- “Magnetic timeline“, tracks dynamically rearrange in the timeline to avoid intersections and overwrites.
• “Compound Clips” – A much improved and dynamic nesting system allowing for both linking of multiple clips together as well as creating different versions of cuts right in the timeline.
• New trim mode in the timeline
• Intra-frame audio editing in the timeline
• Dynamic waveform displays, change with mix levels & effects
• No need to keyframe for audio dissolves, click & drag
• Improved dynamic speed effects. Bye time-remap tool.
• Automatic color match tool for scene-to-scene color correction
• Work with footage natively in the timeline. Support for h264
• Shape based secondary color correction tool
• Improved keyframe editing in the timeline

That’s a quick list of what I saw. It was impressive. $299 for sale, standalone, in the Apple App store this June.

There was no mention of tape based media, ingest or output. Also no mention of the other pro apps, but in talking with some people before and after the event, they are in development and I expect to see announcements on them before the end of the year.