Having returned to FCPx with its third update I'm glad to say it's really working out for me now.  Eleven years as an FCPclassic editor the new everything really threw me off balance and learning to adapt hasn't simpy been a few different keyboard shortcuts.  Apple really made a paradigm shift here, and short of a couple of aspects I'd now argue that we've got a professinal tool for the future.

We're still missing OMF so multilayered audio post in another app is not a reality, and the key missing workflow for me is the ability to export a range from the project - say a 5 second shot in the middle of your 30min edit, that you want in AE for a bit of whatever.  Previously we did this using I/O to make a new Quicktime, not possible in FCPx.  My own workaround for now is to copy the shot, make a new project, paste it, and share that project.  Work on that asset, import to X and replace the original in the master project, ugggh.

One cool button that I've just come across, perhaps the most important for all our futures as editors is under the Final Cut Pro menu: "Provide Final Cut Pro Feedback" and bosh, you can tell the team at Infinity Loop just exactly what you'd like to develop in the program.  When you think about the firmware updates that Canon made available to the 5DmkII because of user comments then this is to be taken seriously, get posting your comments today.

This will be my longest ever post, if you’re not an editor you might want to look away now as it gets pretty technical.  I wanted to do justice to the biggest thing to hit my world since the 5DmkII.  Apple have reinvented editing from the ground up, wahooo.

Having edited on all the versions of FCP for eleven years I was so excited by this year’s great leap forward and bought my download on release day.  Sneak previews looked amazing, and the promise of new tools and easier ingest for solid state cameras had me chucking my cash towards Cupertino with the faith that it would unquestionably be an advance in video post.

This is no meagre upgrade, Apple are trying to develop the practices of editing.  They’ve hidden away confusing stuff to prevent you from making dumb user errors like moving audio out of sync. And there’s new stuff, lots of original features to make our workflow simpler.

The interface is superb.  Entirely redesigned, working well on either single or dual-monitor workstations.  I’m running last year’s 17” MBP and 23” Cinema Display and the various palettes and windows fit together very naturally.  Stuff like the Property Inspector moves out of the way neatly when you don’t need it, and feels just right when it’s open.  Video scopes and audio meters look awesome and have great detail.  There’s just the one video display which soon feels natural.  This really surprised me as Viewer/Canvas is one of those core concepts that all video editing is based around.

Features added to FCPx include the tagging of keywords familiar from iPhoto.  It works effortlessly and makes your initial edit prep more powerful, with the ability to make smart collections from keywords, so for example all your exteriors would be easy to find, or all your graphics.  Media can be rated as ‘good’ or ‘reject’, then a filter toggled on/off to show you only what you’ve decided is worth editing.  This is great and something I’ve done manually for years, cutting my rushes and lifting the good stuff to V2.  Anything that’s left on V1 I know I’ve decided to reject.  I’d say this is evidence that Apple have worked with editors to introduce tools that aid workflow.

There’s a new trim tool which incorporates all of slip / slide / ripple / roll.  It’s really intuitive to use and a well designed improvement.  Markers have also been developed with a new To Do function, which can then be ticked off as Done.  These are accessible from a Timeline Index which is searchable and has filters.  This is useful if you’re doing some editing, notice something that needs attention later, make it a To Do marker, and at some point you’d go through your To Dos and tick them off, love it.

This week I ran a test exercise re-cutting a promo that I made last week in FCPclassic.  I wanted to see how different it felt to use X, what was easier, and what if anything was harder to achieve.  When I output the result using the new Share / Apple Devices / iPad option I’m pleased to say the video looked just as good.  In fact on one fade from black shot there was noticeably less banding.  Previous FCP output settings are a locked down AppleTV preset, whereas now you can go in and configure parameters.  There’s also dedicated sharing options for Vimeo, Youtube and Facebook.  I tested the Vimeo preset and the results are decent at fullscreen HD, so the route from timeline to global distribution is simplified.  Outputing, (sorry ‘Sharing’ as Apple have renamed it) at the highest available resolution is ProRes4444 which looks great fullscreen on 23” Cinema Display and the file size I acheived was 1gb as opposed to 7gb using Animation codec from FCPclassic, so perhaps this could be considered this as a suitable mastering format?

I’m being open-minded in the leap from classic to X, and hopefully you can see above that there are improvements.  I don’t want to join the camp of naysayers who reacted straight out of the gate slagging this version off entirely.  However after one exercise of cutting with it I can see some major flaws.  One huge issue being the incompatibility between X and classic.  You simply cannot open a legacy project file, and of course an X project can’t be opened in classic.  I’ve maintained an archive of all my FCP work since day one and it all opens in FCP7.  in the future I will always need a copy of the classic and the new software on my system.  Imagine not being able to open an After Effects project from five years ago in the latest CS5 version you just bought, this is daft.

Apple are trying to change the whole video post paradigm I feel, which might be why they’re renaming things that are essentially the same (Timeline = Storyline / Nested Sequence = Compound Clip / Grading = Color Adjustment).  Your project now only contains one sequence, if you want more sequences - perhaps an alternate cut - then you make a new project altogether.  This sucks I’m afraid.  Much of my work has been on productions leading to a main edit and a series of standalone talking head packages.  These naturally work as different sequences contained within one project.  You hand back to your client the final project file containing every edit decision, neat and tidy.  Now you’ll be handing back a bunch of project files.  I guess archiving our work just got a whole lot messier.

Tracks are the basis of all editing software.  Not just video, but audio and motion graphics too.  I guess Apple think tracks are a bit daunting for the amateur home user, a bit complicated.  So they’ve done away with them in FCPx.  In my opinion this makes it hard to manually organise your timeline.  I kind of think in horizontal visual streams.  The one on the bottom that’s the main shots right?  Then above it cutaways, above that overlay graphics to composite etc.  It works, you can lock them.  No more,  it’s a primary storyline (think V1) and connected clips.  I’ll reserve judgement until I tackle a difficult assembly but from my work so far I’m not a fan.

Did you hear the one about ‘Save’?  You know, command-S, you’ve worn keyboards out over the years with that thumb and forefinger shortcut.  I can’t remember when Apple gave us the Autosave Vault, but I’m glad they did.  I could stop saving manually and keep a whole folder of versions across time to revert back to, sweet.  Never lost any work since.  FCPx also autosaves for you.  In fact it’s so automatic that there is no such thing as ‘Save‘ anymore, look in the File Menu it’s gone.  But what FCPx does not have is an Autosave Vault of versions, all you get is the very latest.  In practice - and I’ve only cut one edit so far - when I quit the app it lost my last hour of editing for some reason.  When reopened the next day loads of editing had disappeared and there’s no vault of time-staggered versions to revert to.  This is bad.  A workaround could be to save your project file to the Mac rather than an external drive and use Time Machine to dig out old copies.  Except that FCPx forces you to render files to the same drive as the project file, you cannot manually tell it where to send stuff, so if your rushes and the whole project assets are on an external drive then your renders won’t be in the same place.

Final Cut was never a single solution to video post.  I have always spent my time flitting between it and After Effects and Soundtrack Pro.  Sending little bits of media to other apps for working on, then importing a rendered result to go into the FCP timeline.  Not no more.  FCPx has one output (sorry ‘Share’) and that is THE WHOLE TIMELINE.  It is impossible to render out individual assets or between a range defined by In/Out.  This one is pretty much a deal-breaker as so much of my work goes through AE at some point.  You can make a framegrabbed still from the timeline, although it’s time for a cup of tea as this takes ages to render out.

My whole blog came about because of the DSLR revolution in shooting video.  Final Cut was never built for these new cameras, so the promise of background transcoding upon ingest while you edit really attracted me to FCPx.  The feature does work, but performance is rubbish.  The keyboard and mouse become unresponsive as you see your processors being sucked into transcoding duties.  Next time I cut DSLR footage on FCPx I’d ingest the day before the edit, let it transcode overnight and get to cutting when all background processes are complete.  I’m running last year’s MBP with core i7 and 8gb of ram, so would expect the hardware to be able to handle the task.  In fact the old way of transcoding in MPEGstreamclip could be done while cutting in FCPclassic so I’m afraid this is a step backwards.  Also worth noting is that three of a batch of 120 clips failed to ingest in FCPx so I had to do them in MPEGstreamclip, which had no problem.

As with many DSLR shooters I’ve been working dual-system, recording audio to a separate device.  I was syncing manually using clapper slates for reference until I came across Pluraleyes which takes all the pain away and does it for you.  At the time of writing Singular Software have not released Pluraleyes for FCPx, so it’s back to manual.  There is a Synchronize Clips function within FCPx but it’s based on markers or in-points as opposed to being automatically calculated from the waveforms.

Doing simple audio tasks like a fade is now easier in the FCPx storyline, there’s a handle always present to be dragged making an auto curve.  This takes a couple of clicks away from the old toolset which is good.  However one simple audio task which an editor does frequently of course is to add a cross fade transition between two adjoining clips.  For example a series of vox pops, if you don’t cross fade there’s a horrible little digital click on the cut.  To cross fade in FCPx you have got to detach the audio and video which are seen as one asset in the timeline.  Then select the two audio clips and make them into a compound clip, open that then add your cross dissolve.  This is so convoluted for something an editor’s doing all the time, hopefully it can be fixed in future updates.

FCPx does not communicate with the other pro apps from Final Cut Studio.  When it comes to grading you’re now limited to the internal toolset, you cannot send to Color.  So Apple have reinvented the wheel yet again, this time the colour wheel.  An industry standard has been done away with.  The new tool feels ok to use though I’d say there’s no room for precision as everything is done by dragging dots around a graph.  This results in numerical values, but you can’t edit those numbers for fine control.  There’s no buttons to nudge values in small increments either.  For example I’ll often crush greys ever so slightly using the FCPclassic colour wheel sliders which have a triangle for 1% increments.  Now it’s a bit like finger painting, there’s no granularity to your control.

The white balance pipette has gone too which is a real shame as that often gives a good starting point for a primary grade.  What we do have are a load of pre-baked looks to chose from though.  Every cat-playing-a-piano video can now have one of the FCPx pre-defined grades at a click.  Wether they’ll be white balanced is another matter.  

The Match Color tool looks interesting - make one shot have the same chrominance and luminance characteristic as another.  However having tried to use it I’d say the results are universally rubbish and I wouldn’t bother.  If you want to try it you can’t miss it, the icon is a multicoloured wand complete with sparkles!  I’m a pro, I’ve got pro gear, I charge for my services, this is my career.  Don’t make me use a multicoloured wand, it’s one small step away from dancing paperclips.

Exporting the finished edit is limited to a handful of the common codecs, but crucially Animation isn’t one of them.  I’m not an animator but have been mastering to that codec for years as it has always given the greatest visual quality.  Yes the file is massive but from that one perfect master you can happily compress all the versions your client demands.  Crucially it’s a cross platform codec so I can give the Quicktime to Mr.PC who can use it too.  I doubt he’ll be able to open AppleProRes4444 anytime soon.  I find that exporting really bogs down all the cores on my processor and trying to use the Mac for other tasks simultaneously causes spinning beachballs and another cup of tea.

My overall feeling is that Apple are taking away options, forcing an editor into one way to work.  You cannot decide which root folder to send your files to, only which drive.  It’s as if we’re too stupid to make that decision so Apple are protecting us from mucking things up.  It feels like being guided by an autopilot rather than having manual control, and just like using a camera we like manual control, right?

So I’m going to continue editing with FCPclassic for a while, monitoring the updates for X.  If Apple address the biggest issues which many editors are complaining about then it’s gonna be a great environment to work in.

One of my recent video shoots was in central London for an app company based in Carnaby Street.  With a W1 postcode it’s right in the heart of the capital, making me plan the logistics of moving video kit quite differently.  Usually I’d rock up on site with an estate car chock full of gear, more options than you’d ever need for the scenes slated for that day.

The client on this production advised that traveling on the tube is their easiest access so I slimmed down equipment to an absolute minimum, squeezing it into four bags.  With a two man crew moving between trains and tube stops this was our limit as packhorses.  We used a Kata camera rucksack for the lenses and slider head, and Sachtler tripod bag with both the tripod and a dismantled slider in it.  Third bag was a classic Billingham with 5DmkII body, a few prime lenses, cleaning kit and an iPad.  Finally our Cinebags Camera Daddy bag was packed with a Redrock handheld grip.  This one proved too wide to carry through the turnstiles of the underground, and we eventually learnt that the wheelchair access gate was the one for us!

Having done a reccee at the location I knew the interior scenes have loads of big windows on two sides so I planned the lighting around what nature gave us, taking along just a single hard light source that I could sculpt when a composition needed it.  The Dedolight DLH4 is my favorite for this task: small head, focusable beam, compact barn doors, dimmable, and best of all packs down really small.  I chose to run it tungsten without colour correction gels, with the camera set to daylight white balance.  The result being a flattering golden accent light that really enhances skin tone on the shots where it was used as a rim light.

The brief for this commission didn’t require any talking heads and the edit was storyboarded to a piece of original music, so I gladly left the sound gear behind.  If we’d needed sound or a fuller lighting rig then a third crew member would have come along to get us there with arms the same length as when we set off.

I recorded one timelapse sequence of the exterior of the company headquarters on Carnaby Street.  The weather was kind with lots of small clouds against a bright blue sky and a strong wind.  The clouds whizzed past over the fifteen minutes it took to record 300 frames, and the sharp shadows are flickering on and off giving dramatic changes within the shot.  The lens used here was 18mm Nikkor prime allowing me to get the whole of the building in frame from just across the street.  The intervalometer used was Meike MKMC36, calculations of how long to shoot the correct number of frames for the edit was done using a great iPhone app called Timelapse Helper.

Many of the interior shots were planned around using subtle camera movement to add dynamics into scenes where the talent are sat at tables or computers.  The Sachtler FSB8 tripod has a great fluid head for controlling pan and tilt moves.  My other essential tool in the motion control arsenal is Glidetrack’s HD slider.  A different aesthetic has become affordable in the last few years since DSLR cameras stormed into video production.  Previously tracking shots for shoulder mounted heavy cameras required laying tracks and running a tripod along them, or sitting on a dolly and being pushed along tracks while riding on a stool - time consuming to rig and manpower heavy.  This is why you used to see tracking shots only in high end drama or the movies.  When we shoot video on DSLR we can now achieve a short tracking shot with a lightweight slider that packs down smaller than a tripod.  It's so important as a smoothly controlled camera motion adds production value to a scene, brings it to life, and because of parallax the image recorded gains depth.  So when packing down the kit to a bare minimum for this shoot I knew we just had to take that slider.

For years I’ve calibrated CRT monitors using colour bars generated by the Mac.  When editing we can perform accurate grading knowing that what we see on the external monitor is exactly what the audience will see on broadcast, or when they play the DVD.  Providing of course that their telly is set up correctly.  We’ve no control over that, but at least we can work as editors to an objective standard with a calibrated video monitor.

Most of my recent projects have been destined for web distribution which got me thinking wouldn’t it be great to achieve a similar benchmark: the end user watches on their computer what I saw when cutting the programme.

Previously I’ve always used System Preferences to alter my display settings.  You look at a number of Apple test images and make adjustments manually based on how they look to your eye.  This is a very subjective judgement of chrominance and luminance, effected by everything from your background decor to how tired you feel.  Working once in a telecine suite at ITV I asked the operator why he had grey curtains beyond his workstation.  He told me they are deliberately colour neutral, so that the judgements made by his eyes looking at the screen were not influenced by his peripheral vision of the room.

After a little research I came across this tool which photographers use for their post-production.  It allows them to accurately match what they see on screen to what is finally printed on paper.  It seemed to me that it could also be useful for an editor to create a standard for video editing based on objective parameters that have been judged by a sensor rather than by human eye.

The calibration process takes about 15mins to complete with set-by-step instructions which the bundled software leads you through.  Initially you set the ambient light levels in the room to how they will be when you’re working.  You hang the sensor over the centre of your monitor with it’s USB cable plugged into the Mac.  There’s a small counterweight which slides on the lead so that you can easily achieve balance for the device.  The software then goes through a series of test images to calculate how greyscale and chrominance are being displayed on your screen.  As the software controls precisely the values that are being generated it can interpolate the difference from what it senses off the screen, and adjust your display settings to compensate.

At the end of the procedure you get a before/after button with a set of sample photos so that you see just how much adjustment has been made.  My current workstation is a 17” MacBook Pro with 23” Cinema Display and they required distinctly different settings from how they were originally, with a noticeable hue shift.  The two screens don’t look 100% equal to each other, which I suspect is down to their different nature.  The laptop viewing angle hugely effects its luminance, whereas the Cinema Display looks quite similar when viewed off-axis.  For this reason I’d never choose to grade for web directly on the laptop if at all possible.

It’s worth noting that all monitors will change their characteristics over time.  So the settings I have today for a perfectly calibrated screen should be updated in the future.

Being a video editor means long days stuck in front of a computer.  Those days soon become months and years, culminating in some unnatural stresses on the body.  We're simply not designed to sit in one position staring straight ahead for a third of our time.

My first concession to long stints of After Effects and Final Cut was a Wacom tablet about nine years ago.  I'd just done a month's post on a music video and the repetitive clicking in After Efftects masks was killing my wrist every night.  The Wacom pen takes a bit of getting used to, but it eliminates all those clicks so is worth the effort.  Pretty soon I was using it universally across the Mac for every navigation and pointing task and what might have become RSI was eliminated.

In the past couple of years I've been getting some discomfort in one shoulder.  Not a major backache but something that needs monthly massage to get rid of it.  The pain is always in the same spot of the right shoulder - the arm that operates the Wacom pen.  The build up of this muscular knot is caused by long periods of a repeated action, and most likely a result of how I sit at work.

Search for computer ergonomics and there's plenty of advice on how to sort your workstation out.  I've bought a couple of things in the last few months, moved some of my gear around, and I no longer get any pain whatsoever.  I found that my naturally assumed position at the desk was all wrong.  Leaning forward and stretching to type with keyboard at the far end of my Wacom.  My right arm was often crossing all the way over to a position roughly above my left knee as this is where the Apple menu strip is, as well as where the red / amber / green dots are top left of windows.

The position our bodies should be in is with the elbows in line with the body, forearms at around 90º or even sloping slightly down.  The wrists when using a keyboard should also be flat or sloping down.  Now look at the design of your desk and the keyboard you work at.  It's pretty much impossible to achieve this ergonomic position.  The keyboard essentially needs to be in your lap which means either a primary school table or a very tall chair.  Probably not what you imagine as your dreamy workstation.

Thankfully there's a solution to work with all your existing gear, that being a keyboard tray.  Not the junk they sell at Ikea that rolls on bearings, but something that adjusts up and down  and can be locked into a range of angles on a sturdy arm.  I came across this one from 3M and I'm over the moon with it.  As strong as the proverbial ox, it looks good too.  At £200 it's not cheap, but then again neither is twelve massages a year.  There are other brands of course if you can't afford it, but consider that it's a long term investment, because if you decide to change desks you simply unscrew it and add it to the next.  Could last a lifetime I suppose.

The biggest other change I've made is my chair.  There's no right answer here of course, and what works perfectly for one person might be torture for another.  But a quality chair will definitely go up and down - your feet should be flat on the floor.  It will have adjustable arm rests so you can choose to support your elbows for some tasks like a Skype call, and move them out of the way for other actions like typing.  Lumbar support is best if you can dial in your preferred amount, essentially you're aiming to follow the natural curve of your spine.  I've gone for a 2nd hand Steelcase Leap which has all these features and cost me £160, lots of people also rate the Aeron.  The goal here is that we should be sat at our desk with a slight lean backwards to reduce pressure on the base of the spine.

For pointing the cursor I've started using the Apple Magic Trackpad instead of my trusty old Wacom.  It allows my arms to stay within a smaller arc of motion.  If you loosely hold your elbows by your sides then pivot the forearms left and right that's pretty much the area where you want your hands to be, with the majority of tasks with the hands straight ahead.  Most keyboard layouts have the main body of keys in the left portion, then a bunch of arrows, then on the right a numberpad.  As we want our hands in front rather than to one side for most of the time this means ideally the space bar will be in front of your belly button.  

However, I'm right-handed and that means my pointing device would be exactly where the numberpad is.  I've tried two solutions to this, first the Apple bluetooth keyboard.  This is laid out like a laptop and only 28cm wide, compared to 43cm for a full size keyboard so it's 1/3 narrower.  This is perfect unless you need to input a lot of numbers, and I use numeric zero a lot as an After Effects shortcut.

Another solution I've tried is full-size keyboard with Trackpad on the left.  Takes a bit of getting used to using your other hand, but as you're pointing rather than physically holding anything it's proved easier than trying to operate a mouse with my left hand.  This is working out OK for now, but I do find the Trackpad less accurate than either Wacom or Magic Mouse.  Gestures are handy, though for some reason I can't make them stick as part of my workflow and I fallback on shortcuts like Cmd-tab.

My perfect keyboard would actually have the arrows and numbers on the left, letters in the middle, and a trackpad on the right, but I've yet to find such a thing.

The best advice above all of this is to take short regular breaks away from your computer.  A little neck stretch every time you make a cup of tea really does help.