David Condolora

“You maniacs! You blew it up!”

– George Taylor, Planet of the Apes

Well, sort of.

In the last two days there has been a deluge of writings about the new Final Cut Pro X (FCPX). Two of the best are here and here, and you can watch a video of the event here. They do a great job of highlighting what’s new, so give them a read! Rather than duplicate their work, I want to take a step back and try to look at this from a broader perspective.

I’ve never read Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter, but I’ve seen the Wishbone episode. The twist of the story is that the titular letter was not hidden, but in plain view the entire time. After years of working in secret, on Tuesday evening Apple finally showed the video editing world the future of Final Cut Pro – and surprisingly, the future has been sitting in our Applications folder all along! We just never noticed.

I am, of course, talking about iMovie.

Once I took a closer look at the screenshots, I knew that if I wanted to better understand FCPX the first thing I needed to do was fire up iMovie ‘11 and edit a video. Here’s a screenshot of the home movie I just started cutting:

Apple has clearly been using iMovie as a test bed for the future of non-linear editing, and because of that starting an edit in iMovie can be a bit frustrating. It doesn’t behave the way we’re used to: my mind doesn’t immediately recognize a long strip of images as a clip the way it recognizes a single thumbnail, and making cuts is initially hampered by the playhead that constantly tracks my mouse while the canvas smoothly follows. But once I did away with my preconceptions, I started to enjoy it!

It may be simplified, but I’ve found a lot of similarities between iMovie and FCPX: scrubbing, clip appearance, media organization, the toolbar, window layout, the share menu – FCPX probably has more in common with iMovie than with Final Cut Pro! This has caused some to dismiss it as ‘iMovie Pro,’ a prosumer product not fit for hard work.

I say yes, FCPX is iMovie Pro. And that’s a good thing.

Just as those who decried the iPad as ‘just a big iPod Touch’ were shown to be shortsighted, those who dismiss FCPX for its family resemblance do so at their peril. That a tool simplifies a job does not preclude it’s quality or utility. In some areas, iMovie eclipses the current Final Cut Pro:

• The filmstrip view calls your attention to moments within a clip that you otherwise might not have noticed, and the juxtaposition of clip filmstrips helps you see things from a different perspective, opening up new storytelling ideas.
• Waveforms display instantly and don’t seem to slow down the timeline. They also change shape in accordance with audio fades and level changes.
• Beat markers make cutting to music more fun.
• The Ken Burns effect is a FANTASTIC way to add a basic camera move to both stills and video.
• The Crop tool is fast and intuitive, a far cry from the Crop sliders in FCP.
• The Marker List makes it easy to navigate through a large project.
• The Precision Editor handily combines trim mode and several tools while simplifying them.
• The Share menu makes uploading to Vimeo a one-step process.
• Using keywords for media organization has potential to do away with painstaking clip filing.

FCPX has most or all of these features, and they’re likely more powerful and refined. Of course, there are also things I haven’t liked about iMovie, and there are still a multitude of questions to be answered about FCPX. But there is a lot of promise in this new approach. 

While I won’t pass judgment on the new Final Cut right now, I can’t help but be excited. This is a paradigm shift in the way we edit because unlike Avid and Adobe, Apple has chosen to ask a different question. They’ve decided to find out what we editors have to do and what we want to do. We have to do a whole host of mundane tasks like removing background noise, stabilizing shaky shots, and making cameras match. But what we want to do is tell stories.

That’s what FCPX is all about.