By now anyone who has ever heard of Final Cut Pro has heard that Apple shipped Final Cut Pro 7 as part of the new Final Cut Studio on July 23. It wasn’t the total FCP reboot that many had hoped and consists mainly tacked on new features. The early word was that it probably should have been called Final Cut Pro 6.5 (and I agree) but you can’t make a splashy new release with only half a number advancement can you? I had some time over the weekend to kick the tires on FCP 7 there are some very nice features that have been added to this release. The true test will come when I install at the office and pound it hard for days on end (which won’t be for a while as I won’t be between projects for a couple of weeks) but for the little project I’m working on at home it’s working well thus far. Here’s an early observation on some select features where I was able to kick the tires.
The first thing I wanted to check out were the new Markers. There’s 8 different colored markers and they can be added in the timeline ruler as well as to clips edited into the timeline (and of course in the Viewer):
When you open the Marker dialog box you can click and choose different colors or they may be added via keyboard shortcuts. The new keyboard shortcuts for the marker colors are shift+ the number keys 1-8 so if you’re using the Keyboard Manifesto keyboard layout they’ll have to be mapped elsewhere. There’s also a really handy ability to add a marker and edit it without stopping playback. For that ability you have to use the Add and Edit Marker command:
As you can see from the above image they default to shift+option then numbers 1-8 but I mapped both to the keypad on my custom keyboard layout. Apple also added the ability for the timeline markers to ripple with an edit. If you ripple delete a 2 second clip from the timeline then all markers after will ripple and move 2 seconds earlier in the edit. There is also the ability to turn this off under Sequence > Ripple Sequence Markers:
That’s what we like when new features are added ... the ability to turn the feature off if we don’t want to use it. The markers also ripple when you trim an edit as well. It is also possible to finally move markers in an easy way. You can move the playhead to a desired point and use the Mark > Markers > Reposition command for a timeline marker or a clip marker or you can just command+click and drag a timeline maker to move it. But beware, if you drag out of the timecode ribbon (which you can easily do) the marker will disappear without a trash can icon or any kind of warning.
I love the new colored bin tabs. If you select a bin and color it via Modify > Label (or right+click on a bin and label) then when you open the bin the tab will reflect that color. And bins can now be rearranged and torn off by dragging their tabs. This is a simple interface enhancement but a very nice one indeed. Plus they added a little project icon in the tab of the actual project tab. Yea that should have been there all along.
There were new quality levels of ProRes introduced which is a welcome addition as more choices is always better than less. As a creative offline (or craft editing as Apple calls it) editor many of my edits go to finishing on other systems so the addition of the proxy and LT sizes make for some quality video at small file sizes and low bandwidth. Not that you would ever use the new ultra-high-quality ProRes 4444 for an HDV source but as a comparison I converted an HDV clip to all the ProRes sizes and they are all quite speedy with the Proxy version being very fast to render and work with.
It’s easy to see the compression in the top example but it’s quite acceptable when offline editing. You can also see compression in the ProRes 4444 frame but that’s HDV compression, not the codec. Garbage in, garbage out. Oh, ProRes 4444 does support alpha channels.
Making speed changes has been radically advanced in FCP7. The Change Speed command now has the option to Ripple Sequence when making a constant speed change:
Someone pointed me at this link before, which details the workflows for various formats:
http://documentation.apple.com/en/finalcutpro/professionalformatsandworkflows/
(Only works in Firefox or Safari)
I glanced through it. Looks like the same Log and Transfer workflow for everything really. Granted it will handle everything, but you won’t be editing ‘right away’.
I heard of some spectacular nightmares at the Olympics with FCP, Log & Transfer and P2 - so, yeah, when push comes to shove…
Posted by Dylan Reeve on 07/26 at 10:27 PM
Hi Scott
The “Render Management” improvements are a bit hard to find, and I don’t know how deep or how far it goes, but one example of where it does show is when appying Apple’s Time Code Reader & Generator filters ... when trimming/extending/blading such clips the renders are not invalidated in part or in whole quite as easily or as often as before. I’d test more of teh same but I don’t have FCP available to me at the mo.
As for the “native camera codec” support, well Apple’s meaning is that the audio/video essence of the camera codecs is supported ie no transcode is needed ... but yes, that essence still needs to be rewrapped in a Quicktime container for FCP to recognize them. Yeah, I know it seems a bit tenuous but its just marketing. It’s native support for the codec (as stated) but NOT native support for the container.
Cheers
Andy
Posted by Andy on 07/26 at 11:11 PM
“It’s native support for the codec (as stated) but NOT native support for the container.”
This IMHO it’s not native. If it can drop into the timeline in that same format that comes off of the camera then it isn’t native. Sure we may just be talking semantics here but I think it’s important that someone takes them to task on this because it’s really bending the truth at best.
More than that it bugs me when the marketing says “you can start editing right away” which you clearly can’t. Rewrapping and/or even copying to a new media drive isn’t editing right away. Avid’s Avid Media Access allows you to edit right away, this doesn’t. Shame on Apple for marketing it like this.
Posted by Scott Simmons on 07/27 at 04:44 AM
True, it’s only marketing - but what does it matter?
Every editor knows immediately that this is BS, even if it was possible to edit all the recording formats natively.
To “start editing right away” you’d have to record DIRECTLY onto a hard drive which you then take to your editing bay to do the editing. That simply isn’t easily possible at the moment when working in the field. Even with dedicated devices like the AJA KI Pro which records in ProRes422, you’d have to transfer the files to another hard drive first. And if the transfer takes as long as the transcoding - what does it really matter?
I personally think that’s not even desirable, because then some people would start working with the native recording without any kind of backup, at least on the recording media you just copied it from.
Posted by Nino on 07/27 at 07:31 AM
I think it matter quite a bit, especially when you market and sell a tool as having a feature it doesn’t really have. Say you have a P2 card and you need to slap and edit together ASAP before you strike the set. With true native editing you can slam that cut together right off of the P2 card. Or say you have a day’s worth of P2 media that has been backed up to a hard drive and the director wants to sit down and plow through the footage before you quite for the night. It’s going to take a while to import all that through Log and Transfer where if there was true “native” editing you could load up that media instantly and being to work. And any camera that is recording to a hard drive, in theory, should be capable of native editing of some kind (providing the bandwidth requirement meet the connection) but with FCP it ain’t gonna happen, no matter what marketing says.
Posted by Scott Simmons on 07/27 at 07:42 AM
Posted this to one of the other FCP articles, but this seems like a better place:
I just have a few questions about the new FCP(to which I’m pretty sure I already know the answer). These are pretty much the only things I look for in each new FCP:
Is the QT gamma bug fixed?
Is the >8 bit RGB bug fixed?
Is the >100 IRE (or <0 IRE) to RGB bug fixed?
Is output the same through media manager as other export options?
Any word on these longstanding, hair-wrenching bugs?
Posted by Charles Angus on 07/27 at 01:02 PM
Hey Scott,
Any word on adding markers diretly to multi-clips? We do a ton of multi-camera work on our reality shows, and the wonky disappearing markers made us crazy. When you add a marker to a multi-clip (after it’s been made) do they, in fact, stick?
Thanks,
Biagio
Posted by Biagio of JokeAndBiagio on 07/27 at 01:17 PM
Just discovered one MAJOR bug when migrating projects from the Final Cut Pro 6 to 7:
When you have variable framerate clips in your projects, the new version will of course apply the new speed tools to your clips, but this results in a completely different timing and therefore different clips with different in- and outpoints!
Apple should really do something about this! I know it’s not a good idea to change programme versions mid-project, but even if you open up old projects at a later date this will happen. They need to fix this, many projects consist of dozens of variable framerate clips.
Posted by Nino on 07/27 at 02:16 PM
Hey Biagio
According to the release docs on the topic of Markers in Multicam:
“You can now prepare multicam projects faster thanks to new support for markers. Retain markers on multiclips when you switch angles, and add marker notes to make multicam projects more efficient when you’re working with multiple editors.”
... so it does sound as if that one is addressed.
Cheers
Andy
Posted by Andy on 07/27 at 04:22 PM
Has anyone used the ichat theatre feature?
We are just capturing a project in FCP6 and thinking about switching to FCP7 before editing for this feature alone. We’re in Canada and our co producers are on the other side of the country. They want daily FTP uploads up the edits and wondering if/how this works and if this may be worth the almost mid project upgrade (gulp).
Any suggestions on this???
Thanks
Posted by mikedub on 07/28 at 09:24 AM
The reason you may be running into that crash is that exporting from FCP directly to a virtual cluster is not supported:
http://documentation.apple.com/en/compressor/usermanual/index.html#chapter=B&section=3a
and for FCS2:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1099
Posted by on 07/28 at 12:38 PM
A short update:
I was contacted by an Apple Sr. Product Manager for Final Cut Pro regarding the bug I mentioned in an earlier comment.
As requested, I sent him copies of my Final Cut Pro projects and pointed him to the areas that changed in the projects.
I hope to get feedback on whether or not this is a bug.
One way or another, we can be sure they are working on a solution IF indeed it is a bug.
Thanks for listening, Apple!
Posted by Nino on 07/30 at 10:57 AM
FCP7 works just like fcp6 for xdcam footage: it needs to wrap the mp4 files with mov wrappers.
That said, the Log & Transfer has been greatly improved, so much so that I’m using it now instead of Sony’s XDCAM transfer. It gives you the ability to rename clips, number them sequentially, AND keep the original clip name. Would have been nice to assign it to other columns than NAME in fcp, but still a big help.
Posted by on 07/31 at 04:01 PM
Another huge fail is that Master Templates are displaying as white screens in FCP 7. Our workflows here revolve around the use of Motion templates, that was one of the biggest selling points for us when we upgraded to FCS 2. Templates open fine in Motion 4, but even Apple’s prebuilt templates fail to display in FCP 7.
From my very limited testing before I had to revert my workstation to a backup in order to bring it back online (the template bug was enough to do that), background exporting did cause FCP to take a performance hit. While the sharing window does give the option to select a cluster for encoding, clusters still don’t work when exporting via FCP. That to me is an other fail.
I do like the colored tabs and the new markers, but overall, I’m not convinced this would be a worthy upgrade for our entire production facility.
I’ve got some pretty big gripes about Soundtrack Pro 3, which still has interface problems with external video/audio playback ... the same issues that were present with STP2. I’m not impressed.
Posted by on 08/10 at 05:45 AM
I need to post a follow-up.
I passed on my initial report regarding the white screen/master template issue on to our Apple Enterprise representative, who passed it on to Apple Engineering. They were unable to replicate the issue, so I began further testing. There was a problem where FCP wasn’t recognizing custom templates that were saved to the main library, instead of the user library. A system reinstall was necessary to clear this issue.
FCP 7 is currently up and running on my machine with master templates displaying properly. So, that “fail” has been resolved.
Posted by on 08/11 at 12:53 PM
Magic Bullet Colorista was the culprit. A system reinstall probably wasn’t necessary. That was a plugin I forgot I had installed.
Posted by on 08/12 at 06:10 AM
I have a couple of questions about the new final cut release. With markers, can you now see clip markers in the canvas or still just in the viewer. For timecode markers, when you rearrange clips, do the markers follow. Can you now subclip multicam clips? and do the timecode markers move with the subclip?
Posted by on 08/12 at 10:42 AM
This will save a lot of the moving a clip to its own track, locking all other tracks, moving clip back down dance that we had to do before. Plus for the new user it will save a lot of headache trying to make the speed changes work when a clip is already edited into the timeline. Variable speed changes are now much easier to achieve as well. 
