Product Reviews

For ambitious filmmakers, the free upgrade from Final Cut Pro 4 `

to Final Cut Pro HD announced at NAB will change the world, allowing them to enter into the arena of High Definition production with little or no addition to their Mac hardware. For other users, the upgrade may register as simply a smattering of performance and interface enhancements. But, although Final Cut Pro HD introduces several nice tweaks to functionality and performance, the HD support indicated by the new name is the major addition.

For the consumer public and, frankly, even a large cross-section of the professional video editing community, HDTV is still largely a mystery. There are several different, incompatible standards, and the prohibitive cost of the necessary HD cameras, decks and capture cards has limited the number of people who can even experiment with the fantastic quality HD is capable of delivering.

In typical egalitarian fashion, Apple and strategic partner Panasonic are doing their part to reduce the costs involved in working with HD. Prior to Final Cut Pro HD, editing HD footage required an expensive third-party capture card and expensive RAID storage solutions. To remedy this, Apple and Panasonic developed a QuickTime video codec for the Mac OS that allows Firewire capture and mastering of DVCPRO100 content, the 100-megabit compression scheme (roughly a 13 megabyte-per-second stream, once you factor in audio) used by the popular Panasonic Varicam HD Camera.

The DVCPRO100 codec is part of Panasonic's line of camera recording codecs, which also includes DVCPRO25, familiar to most DV editors as the common DV codec used in Firewire DV editing. DVCPRO25 has always been available for use in Final Cut Pro. Support for DVCPRO50, a higher-quality Standard Definition codec, was added last year. Finally with Final Cut Pro HD, DVCPRO100 High Definition support has been introduced. For the first time, you can capture High Definition footage into Final Cut Pro through Firewire connections as simply as you would capture regular old DV from a DV camera. This is truly a revolution.

The 'Desktop 2' option, missing since Final Cut Pro 2, has returned, chiefly to allow you to preview your HD content on a second computer monitor. This is yet another way of skirting the need for an expensive capture card to work with HD content, since you can now simply plug a computer monitor into that second output of your video card rather than purchase an extremely expensive SDI-based production monitor.

There are a few limitations that aren't altogether clear in the relatively obtuse documentation accompanying the update. First, HD support is specifically for Panasonic cameras and decks using this particular DVCPRO100 compression. This doesn't include the Sony high-end HDCAM cameras, nor the cheap, consumer HDV cameras, such as the JVC GR-HD1, which uses an incompatible MPEG-2 compression system.

In short, this limits you to the expensive Panasonic Varicam camera to generate footage for Final Cut Pro HD editing. And it doesn't stop there. In order to take advantage of Firewire capture of HD, you'll have to use a DVCPRO100 HD deck with a Firewire interface Final Cut Pro can take advantage of. Those aren't cheap. The new Panasonic AJ-HD1200A VTR deck also announced at NAB carries a price tag of $25,000. The Varicam itself is pricey enough to make most professionals opt for rental over purchase.

Final Cut Pro's new HD functionality is decidedly aimed at the professional market. To be fair, Apple has also signed onto the HDV consortium

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and promises to implement compatibility with cheaper HDV cameras soon, which will bring HD into the price range of the vast majority of FCP editors presently editing with more modestly priced DV PAL and NTSC. In the meantime, professional editors already in love with the amazing image control and resolution of the Varicam will now be able to simplify their edit bays with Firewire drives and cheap HD decks and fall even further in love with HD production.

All this aside, HD in Final Cut Pro wasn't the upgrade's only new feature. Apple took the opportunity to implement a few heavily requested modifications. First, is the re-instatement of intuitive copy-and-paste behaviour. When you copy and paste in a sequence, FCP now pastes clips into the tracks they were copied from unless you specify otherwise using Auto-Select. Other assorted annoyances have been addressed, such as the unnecessary re-render of sequence items when Editing or Printing to Tape.

Capture and import processes also now automatically optimise media files to allow more realtime effects over more simultaneous video streams. Several compositing filters such as Difference and Image Mask have been added to the list that will work in Extreme RT if your Mac has the necessary horsepower. The overly cluttered General tab of the User Preferences has been broken down, with some of its entries moving to a new, dedicated Editing tab. Compressor has a few improvements, including MPEG-1 capability and the ability to embed true timecode tracks in QuickTime movies.

One surprising and welcome change is in LiveType functionality. Prior to Final Cut Pro HD, editors had to render their LiveType projects just to get a look at them in Final Cut Pro, wasting time and drive space. Now Final Cut Pro can directly import a LiveType project as a complete composited clip. While you'll still have to render it once in the sequence, Final Cut Pro treats LiveType project files as if they were rendered movie files. Want to check your animation in your Final Cut Pro sequence? Just save it, import the project file directly into Final Cut Pro and have a look.

Final Cut Pro HD also adds a new 'Creator' column to the project tab's list view, allowing you to view a clip's originating application. LiveType projects imported into Final Cut Pro are automatically tagged as 'LiveType' in this Creator column. If you need to change something in a LiveType clip/project you've already imported, just choose Open in Editor and Final Cut Pro will open it back up in LiveType. Make changes, save, return to Final Cut Pro and see them reflected in the Timeline. The silence that you hear is thousands of Final Cut Pro editors rethinking their relationship with LiveType.

No release of any software package is perfect, and Final Cut Pro HD is no exception. Early users have uncovered a bug relating to keyframe pasting behaviour. There are the usual grumblings about sluggish performance after updating, although we haven't heard this from users who were smart enough to repair their permissions and trash their old preferences after the installation. In a few cases, switching between HD Desktop Preview and Firewire video output yielded a General Error or two, though this was also resolved with a fast refresh of the Final Cut Pro preferences.

One issue that may throw some users off is that the updater documentation seems a little thin for users unfamiliar with HD production. However, consumer HDV, when Final Cut Pro implements it, will have a different, technically less adept user base, and one hopes Apple will address the problem.

In all, Final Cut Pro HD is a strange bird, one whose value and excitement depends entirely on the user that installs it. While professional HD editors and those aspiring to the trade will be thrilled with the upgrade, others will only notice that a few interface issues have been addressed. Either way, as a free, stable, upgrade, Final Cut Pro HD is a real winner for everybody simply by adding the potential of all that HD functionality.

Needs: PowerPC G4 or G5 1GHz + 1GB RAM + AGP graphics card + Mac OS X 10.3.2 or later + QuickTime 6.5 or later