The Changeover Challenge:
From Avid to Final Cut Pro

Today, FCP enjoys roughly 50% market penetration across most domains, from broadcast to Hollywood to educational– and all serious editors should be familiar with it.

This is intended as a “Transition Tour” for you, the Avid user, which surveys some interface and operating differences - and similarities - between the two systems to help you get going in FCP as rapidly as possible and without too many surprises. I’ve written this in a fairly balanced manner, because I like and use both systems a lot, for different clients and workflows, and rant or rave over both tools from time to time. Avid editors will know what features and operations I’m talking about and should follow right along in their open FCP workstations to begin reworking body memory.

Please note: this overview is no substitute for professional FCP training! Even pro editors return to the classroom for solid grounding. You can now achieve real certification in FCP as you can in Avid, and they’re both worth every penny.

The keyboard

Those coming from Avid are very grateful for the J-K-L “Steenbeck keys.” Any Avid user who captures or navigates the timeline using J-K-L, plus I-O to mark, will have no issues here. E and R have other functions, however, and all other keys are different.

If you are keyboard-sensitive you’ll discover a far richer key control structure in FCP. It is generally two levels deeper than Avid, and like Avid allows you to map not only keys to different keys, but also menu commands to keys or clickable toolbar buttons.

In FCP you can completely remap the keyboard to work more like your Avid keyset. For example, you can map E and R as well as I and O to In and Out should you desire. Unfortunately, importing settings directly from Avid won’t work– you’ll have to spend a rainy Saturday doing remapping by hand. While you’ll discover some wonderful new flexibility in FCP, you won’t find exact matches for many functions like Trim Sides, or switching to Segment Mode (because FCP is always in Segment Mode.)

Shameless plug: to help in remapping or just learning the rich default set, look into getting my FCP KeyGuide™ to get you right up to speed. (Visit KeyGuide™ Central for more info.)

Project, Windows, Settings, Browser and Bins

Avid editors coming to FCP will enjoy the same benefits from the Window>Arrange menu as Avid editors get from Workspaces and Toolsets. Very customizable and saveable.

The Project Browser window is similar to the Avid Project window, except that more than one whole project can be loaded in FCP at a time. This allows you to drag/copy sequences, clips, stored effects or titles, from one project pane right to another, a real liberation. (Avid’s one-at-a-time design is of course part of its secret for predictable media management.)

You may miss Avid’s comprehensive Settings pane; be ready for that! Settings are easily accessed but are scattered in two or three different areas of FCP, depending upon your needs. If you need to start, the Easy Setup function simplifies matters. In FCP there are two major areas for preferences: System Settings and User Preferences dialogs. If you need to adjust editing settings, User Preferences is the ticket. To specify where media gets stored (Scratch Disks) you’ll use System Settings. (FCP, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t yet give you the kind of fine control over button shadows and shades of teal Avid offers. If this is a dealbreaker for you, get back on bottled water.)

Avid users coming to FCP can expect a bin to hold the same sorts of material: video and audio clips, subclips, sequences, graphic imports, saved effects and titles.

Avid editors can actually play each clip frame right in the bin, in Frames view, using J-K-L, sort of a “mini-movie.” In FCP you drag the mouse to scrub over the selected clip frame in Large Icon view, with Shift-Control held down, to see any action and without audio. Still very useful for checking content.

If you’re still heavily mouse-dependent, you’ll find each window, including Bin windows, sports a Toolbar area, which can be stuffed with a button representing any desired mappable command.

Record / Capture

FCP’s Log and Capture window is nearly identical to Avid’s Record/Digitize tool, and should present little changeover challenge.

Like Avid, the Log and Capture window lets you either log, then Batch Capture, or to Capture Now, which like Avid deposits the capture into your selected Logging Bin. In FCP6 you’ll also find a Log and Transfer window for media from P2 cards and Sony VDUs.

Pay particular attention to your Scratch Disks– there’s an access pane in the Log and Capture window as well as in the System Settings window. Certain housekeeping actions such as zapping the PRAM or unplugging a FireWire drive can reset your Scratch Disks to your system disk and you’ll wonder why you’re suddenly dropping frames!

Fortunately, there is a watchdog at work. When you establish Scratch Disks and then launch FCP with one or more disks offline, you are warned the required disks are missing and asked to find them, reset them to something FCP can live with, or Quit- a very no-nonsense feature.

Batch Capture behaves virtually identically to Avid, it just presents source tape requests differently, in a list window, which provides a handy history of the entire batch session and what’s left to be done, by source reel.

In FCP, just as in Avid, you can set a preference to create new clips at timecode breaks. If your tape has “iffy” timecode which drops in and out, you’re not going to get much usability here — FCP will break a logged clip into shreds based upon each break. While there’s a higher regard for good timecode in FCP5 and 6, in my opinion, recent Avid software such as Media Composer 2.7 (with options for Control Track preroll) performs this task much more smoothly than FCP, which takes forever to parse a timecode break, store it and continue capturing. Both systems support DV Scene Detection

Media Manipulation and Management

In FCP as in Avid, media management begins with a properly captured clip, and the clip architecture gives you the kind of linkage you’re used to in Avid. In FCP projects, the first captured clip is the Master Clip, and edited instances of it are Affiliate Clips, all linked to the Master. As in Avid, change the name of the Master Clip and any Affiliate Clips in the timeline obediently follow suit. As you’d expect, this also works in reverse.

If you desire different behavior, break the link by making a clip a new Master Clip. Subclips are created as new Master Clips, which is a good thing; they consolidate properly and do not mistakenly instruct a capture of the entire Master for each derivative subclip, which could happen in earlier versions if your Consolidate settings were off.

Nevertheless, if you employ subclipping, simple operations like trimming a sequence of unused media remains a bit more byzantine in FCP than a similar operation in Avid. This will only be important if you intend to cut in an offline format and go somewhere else to online. There’s plenty of literature advising how to effect this workflow. Because I work this way on HD projects and the like, I don’t subclip on FCP.

Avid users coming to FCP will be surprised to see how easy it is to manipulate timecode for a captured clip. In Avid, one must explicitly access the Modify command to change any important clip info: timecode, code format, source reel number. In an FCP bin these are instantly changeable, and yes, this can be a double-edged sword, so use it carefully, because you are changing the information stored in your underlying QuickTime media file.

An accidentally deleted Browser clip is easily restored either by re-importing or just dragging the file from a media drive right to the Browser window from the desktop, which establishes a file pointer. This will strike a familiar chord with Avid users who restore accidentally deleted clips back to a bin from their Media Tool “total universe” window, but in FCP it’s on steroids. There’s no Media Tool window in FCP. Your “Media Tool” is any repository window — your desktop, external drives, a network disk. You can drag any acceptable format media file into the Browser: video, audio, graphic, photo scans. FCP never converts and creates new media for imported files so you’re advised to keep all such source files on high speed drives for best playback.

In Avid, deletion of any media object always occurs through a checkoff dialog with plenty of warning messages, because in some places like its Media Tool window, you can check to delete actual underlying media files. In FCP you can unceremoniously delete anything you select from the Browser with the Delete key. For clips it doesn’t matter, you restore them by re-importing or simply dragging in, but delete a sequence without Autosave on and you may get a delicious sinking feeling—that’s a record of your cutting! You can easily delete underlying captured media through a Media Manager operation, from the Make Offline dialog, or from the Finder.

FCP Reconnect works pretty darn well these days, similar to Avid Relinking, and it is semi-automatic. When bored, I often move whole groups of clips from one drive to another right at the Finder level, and when I relaunch FCP (and sometimes when it’s already running, just to challenge it) FCP goes looking and finds the clips or alerts me with the Reconnect dialog that they’re suddenly offline and asks me if I want to reconnect. You’ll like that, along with useful search parameters like Skip File, Match Name, etc. Note that FCP reconnects to media using only the file name rather than the source reel and timecode as Avid does.

FCP’s Match Frame works precisely the same as Avid. But perform a Reveal Master Clip command on any timeline clip and you might get lucky– it’ll usually reach right in and find the Master Clip, no matter how many sub-bins in which it’s stored in the Browser—sort of like Avid’s Find Bin. It will Match Frame master originals for speed changed clips as well– a neat trick. It’s wonderful when it works.

The Find dialog in FCP is rich– you can search for “unused effects,” by project and also find used media for selected sequences. Finds can also be cumulative, adding results of each search, for a more complete tailored result.

FCP’s Media Manager has had its fair share of critics over the years. It still has quirks but for the most part, works as expected, allowing you to copy, move, recompress (transcode) and uprez clips, sequences or entire projects. Lately, because like many I capture in online resolutions from logged clips, trimming of unused media hasn’t been as necessary. Still—it should be made bulletproof and as predictable as Avid systems.

The TimeLine, Targeting and Trimming

Avid’s Blue Position Indicator becomes– ready? The PLAYHEAD! In FCP it’s a thin grey line, crowned with a yellow triangle which disappears during play.

You can drag a clip from a Browser bin right to the timeline. You can open a clip in a Viewer—mark it up, and then drag to the Timeline. Or you can drag to the Canvas—a heads-up-display with edit choices appears. Or cut in at the Playhead using F9 and F10 for Insert and Overwrite edit, respectively. There’s also a Replace Edit function, identical to Avid’s.

Avid users snap clips to Head or Tail while dragging with Command or Command-Option, respectively. The Snap feature in FCP is a simple toggle which settles the Playhead at “the cut,” period—technically a Head Snap. The effect is the same — snapping helps overcome flashframe-itus. If Snap is on it can be temporarily overridden on the fly, and vice versa. It snaps to clip edit points, the Playhead and markers (Locators).

An FCP Nest is kind of a hybrid between an Avid Submaster Effect and a Mixdown– but it’s always editable. When you step in and trim clips inside, the Nest should properly ripple its overall duration in the master timeline. When it doesn’t “wake it up” by lowering and raising the opacity line.

Track patching is similar to Avid but only connected source tracks affect edit operations to the timeline and there’s no need for an autopatch feature.

If you’re feeling adventurous, it’s also possible to use a two-key process to patch source and destination tracks from the keyboard. The “base targeting” keys are F6, F7 and F8. You must rapidly add a track number to F6 to retarget video, and to F7 and F8 to retarget an audio pair. After many years of using FCP, I still can’t acquire the kinaesthetic for fast targeting– landing a small plane might be easier. I often drag the stuff into the timeline. The systems share a similar track locking feature.

Avid editors will notice trimming in FCP differs because there is no Trim mode, only a special Trim Edit window for many operations which can also be accomplished in the timeline itself.

In FCP’s Trim Edit window, (similar to Big Trim Edit in Avid systems) however, you have JKL Dynamic Trimming, similar to Media Composer’s “live play trim.” I’ve seen many users work it well. Give this a try.

Although self-contained Loop/Trim Play doesn’t yet exist in FCP, you can Play Around Current Frame, and with the Playhead parked at a selected edit point, you can trim on the fly, using center roll or side ripple edit– with plus or minus keypad values– just like Avid –while auditing a cut for change. There is a healthy keyboard command set for trimming, looping, selecting edit points and cycling trim sides which in many ways surpasses Avid. There is as yet no ability to choose to audit outgoing or incoming trim sides in FCP, so don’t waste time looking for it. There is no Media Composer-like Top or Tail trim macro command either (although you could probably achieve this with a 3rd party macro software.)

To describe how liberating FCP’s timeline operations can be, let me describe what I had to do in a recent Avid Media Composer 2.7 assignment to move two audio track segments from 3-4 to 5-6. Simple, right? I tried two methods. First picture me in Segment Overwrite mode, Shift-selecting both clips and trying to drag the pair down two tracks. Wouldn’t budge! I had to select one at a time and drag each to its appropriate track. Second, I tried copy, retarget tracks, and paste. Nope, pasted right back from where I cut! Amazed me how autistic Avid can seem sometimes. In FCP I Shift-select each segment, hold Shift to keep the segments in synch and drag down to 5-6– end of story.

Add Edit during playback, which one uses on the fly when following musical or other beats, works just like Avid — it won’t redraw the timeline and reveal the slices till you stop playback.

FCP’s Auto Select buttons play a similar role to the record track lights on Avid. These allow you to establish track control for major timeline operations– including match frame and Add Edit. So you can actually slice selected tracks– or all tracks– on the fly.

The long-awaited Multicam feature arrived in FCP5, and it works a peach. You can select angles from the split Viewer display or using keyboard commands, just like Avid MultiCamera — although the keys are different; in FCP you use Command-1-9 on the numeric keypad. Just like Avid, if you notice you’re dropping frames in Multicam view, reduce the size of the Viewer and Canvas windows until playback is smooth, and like Avid, avoid overlapping windows.

With Media Composer 2.7 installed on a similar G5 2.5 Ghz tower, the BPI (Playhead) often sticks in MultiCamera mode and won’t run smoothly. Needless to say, this is awful. Now that Avid is producing for Intel Macs we may see parity performance from each system.

Neither system guarantees stopping the playhead on a dime in complex or long sequences. But that’s why we have live cutting on the fly. Don’t look for a “playlength” type look-ahead adjustment in FCP, however. Just get the fastest engine available.

Typing Numbers

Avid editors may recall the ability to convert a large typed value such as 300 from seconds and frames to just frames by adding “f” after the value and before pressing enter/return. FCP doesn’t offer this; it treats large numbers like 300 literally by integer position, in this case to three seconds and zero frames, not ten seconds. However, as in Avid, you can easily switch your sequence timeline master count to frames. Such keypad values will be honored, and you can use the keypad to move the playhead, a selected clip or any selected group, including the entire timeline.

The underlying timecode carryover function is pretty smart, too. Type 455 and FCP knows darn well you don’t mean 4 seconds and 55 frames—it’ll advance the Playhead (or a clip, or an edit point) five seconds and 25 frames.

Effects and Filter Editing

What will impress Avid editors most about Effects mode in FCP is that there is none! The nearest equivalent to the Effects Palette is the Effects bin window (Command-5) and the nearest match to the Effects Editor window is the Filters and Motion parameter tabs and Keyframe Graph areas sported in every clip Viewer window. Video Generator clips get an extra Controls tab.

The whole Effects model in FCP is different. You use the Canvas for basic image moves on any timeline-selected clip, such as scaling, cropping, distortion or rotation. Sensible! FCP’s highly liquid clip manipulation model lies well beyond Avid’s current rigid modal operation. For instance, any timeline clip can have its opacity changed by dragging its Levels overlay line much like an audio rubberbanding control, and unlimited keyframes can be applied. Same goes for clip rotation, scaling, and filter effects– all keyframeable, à la After Effects, in dedicated special Keyframe Graph Areas which extend from each source Viewer pane.

Keyframes can also be manipulated directly in the timeline. This is especially useful with the built-in Time Remapping tool. As in Avid, any effect, title, color correction or transition can be dragged to the Browser to be archived and later applied to any clip or group, or Nest.

There is as yet no way to explicitly park on the second video field of a clip, not without deinterlacing those legacy video captures for repair as you can with higher-end Avids. But with Digital Heaven’s DH_Dropout filter, which becomes available in your Effects menu, repairs are swift and good quality. I’ve often used it “out of the box” on dropouts and they just go away.

Going back to earliest FCP versions, at 100% Canvas playback, both fields of interlaced video formats are displayed as they would be on an interlaced monitor, rather than interpolated into frames for computer playback. Stepping through interlaced fields one field at a time, however, remains an Avid feature.

Simple frame-painting tools you might be familiar with in higher end Avids don’t exist yet in FCP—for these, go to Motion! All Final Cut Studio users have Motion, that can create effects by applying behaviors or keyframe control… part of an impressive bundle of support apps that’s very strong competition for Big Purple. Today, for instance, I would recommend photo-animation in Motion, not FCP.

Working with multiple clips and transitions

As with Avid, you can “broadcast” one effect to many selected clips at once, including preset color correction and any other filter or transition, although the method in FCP for applying the same transition to multiple clips is not immediately obvious:

In Avid, while Edit mode is active, you remember, you intuitively Shift-select the multiple edit points you wish to dissolve, and then double-click the desired Transition icon in the Effect Editor, or for plain dissolves call up the Quick Dissolve function dialog, to select edits and broadcast the effect.

In FCP you first set your desired default transition and duration, then park the Playhead at the head of the group of clips to be dissolved or otherwise affected. You select all the clips in the group and physically drag them to the Overwrite with Transition heads-up display box in the Canvas, which redeposits the same group right back in the timeline track (assuming you’ve properly targeted it) with the default transition attached! It does have its “Think Different” kind of logic. The keyboard command for this action won’t work; you cannot highlight the desired clips and go Shift-F10.

Avid users will discover real-time preview of effects and transitions to be about on par, some working better in Avid, some better in FCP. In either system, much depends on your engine and layer load. On Adrenaline models of Avid, or from the Mojo box on Xpress Pro, you’re accustomed to real-time going out for live video review. In FCP, you get DynamicRT (Safe or Unlimited), which does much the same thing. The dynamic option cleverly scales quality and/or frame rate on the fly to maximize performance with effects and transitions.

Keyframing Details

The model here is closer to After Effects, especially in the Viewer’s Keyframe Graphs for Controls, Filters and Motion.

Avid editors merely zoom out or in (Command K or L) to magnify a work area in a clip’s Filters timeline window. This avoids “keyframe pileups” which make it impossible to select and edit keyframes. In FCP, use Command-Plus or Minus to visually stretch out a clip timeline. Timecode is displayed above the Keyframe Graph area as a guide to keyframe placement.

In Avid, you copy whole effects from one clip to another by applying one saved in a bin, or by parking on an effected clip in Effects mode and “broadcasting” it to other selected clips from the Editor palette. In FCP, you can broadcast individual bin-saved effects to many clips, and also copy effect attributes from one clip to another, using Copy, followed by Paste Attributes, which offers checkbox selection of effects you want duplicated. This copies all existing keyframes for each effect you select.

You can Remove Attibutes to remove some or all whole effects in the same way. This is similar to Avid’s Remove Effect. But like FCP’s Paste Attributes, you can select which attributes get removed. It’s when you get to the level of intra-clip keyframe editing that capabilities diverge.

In Avid’s effect ruler you’ll remember you can select, then copy, paste, reposition or delete a clip’s keyframes– each containing all your set subparameters for that effect. In the Effect mode window ruler, you merely highlight a master keyframe and when it goes pink, you can tap Delete to remove it, or invoke Copy, then move the playhead to a new point in the ruler, and Paste to create a duplicate– an instant Hold effect. In addition, you can easily slide an existing keyframe by holding down Option and dragging it to a new position.

In FCP’s Keyframe Graphs there’s no quick way do any of these INTRA-clip operations to adjust Motion or Filter effect keyframes. There is no way to reposition a set group of keyframe parameters for, let’s say, the Crop effect, from one point to another in one drag operation — you must go in and slide each and every subparameter keyframe (Left, Right, Top, Bottom) to reposition all parts of a customized effect. Delivering mail might be easier. You have a big blue dot riding above each keyframe effect set– which *should* be a master keyframe– but be aware, it’s only a passive indicator. You cannot copy, reposition or delete this blue master for a given effect. Your only option is to slide each subparameter, or click the red X to completely reset the effect and rebuild its parameters.

That’s in the Viewer Keyframe Graph, however you can also manipulate selectable master Motion and Filter keyframes for any clip in the Timeline. Use Option-T to display Clip Keyframes and right-click on either the green Filters bar or blue Motion effect bar displayed under the clip.

You can call up the specific effect, enable Show All to activate the subparameter keyframes you want to change and then easily slide the master to a new position. Keyframes can be deleted with the Pen tool. You can even place your cursor right on either effect bar and drag to reposition the entire group of keyframes in time! While you still cannot Copy/Paste from one keyframe to another, these subtle capabilities dramatically make up for some shortcomings in the Viewer’s Keyframe Graph.

Audio Tools

When it comes to audio, FCP certainly strides ahead on the numbers game with the option to capture up to 24 channels of audio in a clip (assuming your capture hardware can support it!) and up to 99 audio tracks in a sequence.

In FCP, you will discover pretty much the same Audio Mixdown tool you left in Avid, minus some extras. As with Avid Gain Automation, it’s live when you enable keyframe recording (Command-Shift-K), so you can dynamically ride the volume over a track to deposit level keyframes to perform useful scratch mixes. As with Add Edit or Multicam editing, the results appear when your pass is complete. FCP supports MIDI control surfaces to make this even more fun by controlling multiple channels at the same time.

Avid’s Gang tracks for identical gain treatment isn’t yet happening in FCP6’s Mixer Tool. The closest workaround will be to create a Stereo Pair for L-R keyframe manipulation, then release the Stereo link after a gain automation pass– the keyframes remain, independently adjustable.

Avid’s AudioSuite and EQ tools are currently far more interactive than FCP’s; the filters are more responsive and their operation more intuitive. This reflects some leveraging of Avid’s Pro Tools^® division toolset. But then, FCP leverages Soundtrack Pro as part of the Studio, and which is highly interactive and fast becoming a real live sound design tool. (More below.)

In FCP, timeline audio level manipulation is virtually identical to Avid– rubberband and ramp to your heart’s content in FCP—but unlike Avid, your video opacity is manipulated the same way, and you can choose between linear or smooth ramps on video.

Avid users will discover a familiar relative/absolute gain dialog (Command-Option-L) is available in FCP– which allows wholesale adjustments to any selected tracks or groups of audio clips. The digital meters are accurate.

Avid’s Audio Punch-In becomes FCP’s Voice Over Tool. FCP has a nice countdown cue feature which facilitates easy live scratch narration or dialog replacement. As in Avid, it appears within the desired In-Out range you specify, and as you fill one range, you merely mute the audio, and FCP lays the next take on the track beneath. I’ve used this very successfully for emergency ADR and scratch narration recording—from a FireWire iSight camera mike! It’s immediately recognized.

There is however, no equivalent in Avid for Soundtrack Pro, the effects and music application of Final Cut Studio enabling some very elaborate loop orchestrations ideal for extreme sports videos, those hard-to-score craft process, cop chase and trade show montages. It’s great for creating rhythm beds for live instruments, and it’s an excellent temptrack tool for your chosen composer, helping establish a desired rhythm and even ideas for instrumentation, saving tons of time communicating musical preferences. And while several professional composers I know complain this product is stepping on their skill area, I think it simply protects them from those clients who don’t need better.

Soundtrack Pro now offers true soundtrack tools such as spot sound effects for real multitrack sound design and nifty audio file repair. Yes, you can remove difficult intertwined background noise from an interview using the spectrum analysis display and special selection tools.

Title Tool

Avid editors coming to FCP will miss some of the finer controls in the Avid Title Tool, such as the ability to work right in the frame window and see how the title interacts with the clip background without leaving the tool. Avid users can vary line leading, kerning and character height right over the image, and are able to handle Postscript fonts without added plug-in support.

In FCP, they are advised to ignore the native title tools, and will enjoy only slightly less interactive controls and way more design choices found in the bundled Boris Calligraphy plug-ins, Title 3D and Title Crawl, which more than make up for the lean built-in FCP titler. You can build a very decent credit roll in Boris Title Crawl and it will automatically key over any background action or color– invariably you must render these on older, slower machines, no different than Avid, but they’re realtime on newer hardware. It’s been bundled with FCP almost from the start, and may remind you Avid folks of Marquee (brought to Avid by the makers of Elastic Reality).

When a title in the Avid timeline is double-clicked it invokes the Title Tool in Effect mode, ready for editing. In FCP, when you double-click a title it brings up the clip instance in the Viewer. You access the text editing component– either FCP’s native generator or an applied Boris title generator– from the Viewer’s Controls tab. When you hit the Apply button in the Boris product your changes show up in the Canvas (Composer) window, and the title is usually real-time playback.

Then there’s LiveType (brought to FCP by the folks who made India Titler Pro). There’s no equivalent in Avid for a system which enables you to spell out “Fun With Clay” in an animated font which shows two white-gloved hands forming every letter out of clay. Just no such thing. But in FCP6 much of these visual stunts have been absorbed into Motion and FCP itself, and I suspect LiveType may be less relevant soon. I don’t know many editors composing title crawls (sorry– rolls, scrolling lists) in LiveType but it can be done.

Color Correction Tools

Avid editors coming to Final Cut Studio 2 will find the 3-way Color Corrector filter easy to use and sufficient for most projects but they may notice the lack of curves.

A FrameView option (similar to Symphony) allows you to compare previous or next clips with the one you’re working on, which otherwise places the two systems on near parity.

If the built-in color correction is not enough then there is the option to send the edited sequence to Color (a standalone app brought to Final Cut Studio by the folks who made Final Touch). This is a powerful tool with tree-node based filters that take it way beyond the capabilities of Symphony.

Before you get too excited, the tradeoffs include extra time needed to properly prepare the sequence before sending to Color as well as the inability to view FCP filters and multiple layer composites. To be fair, Color is only a version 1 release so we can assume that the integration with FCP will be improved in future versions.

Codecs and File formats

With the arrival of FCP6, Apple introduced ProRes 422, their answer to Avid’s DNxHD codec. ProRes422 is a visually lossless codec available in standard and high quality (HQ) flavors. Unlike DNxHD, ProRes 422 takes advantage of FCP’s resolution independence and works in SD as well as up to 1080p HD. A quad G5 or Intel system is required for capturing to ProRes 422 but playback is less demanding.

Most Avid users will be happy to use DV codec for offline workflows but if you really must edit your miniseries at the beach then FCP’s selectable compression OfflineRT P-JPEG codec is the low data rate option. For export choices using QuickTime, Avid users should feel right at home. There is tighter integration with export of chapter markers for DVD Studio Pro from FCP as well.

Avid has a 5000 pixels square limit for graphics imported into its Pan & Zoom effect. FCP will comfortably handle similar sized images and allows a photo scan rich enough to support up to a 5:1 zoom without softening. For new SD widescreen and true HD formats you’ll want to animate even deeper scans. Very large images will slow FCP down so the streamlined MovingPicture™ plug-in (8000 pixel limit) or After Effects^® (which supports a really big workspace) are good choices.

Moving Bins and Sequences to FCP

FCP supports various text import formats, including tab-delimited ASCII text batch lists, EDL’s and the like. It is easy to import a properly exported Avid Bin into FCP– there is even a third party free application from Peter Reventlow, Sebsky Tools, to help facilitate ALE-to-FCP functions (it can also transfer the other way). You should expect all re-capturable elements in the bin to show up in your FCP timeline. Offline sequences go into the timeline like butter. All you do is recapture from your original sources, because as you probably realize, the two systems encode captured media differently. Graphic imports and audio which has been converted can also be relinked.

Apple made a big deal about the introduction of XML import and export in FCP4 and for good reason. XML is a flexible text-based file format that can contain any element from a single clip to a bin of sequences or even an entire project. This brings the possibility of interchanging project elements between editors working in teams and also enables transfer of projects to earlier versions of FCP. Unlike OMF, XML only contains project data rather than media files.

XML has been a positive move for many third party developers as it makes it possible to integrate their apps with FCP. One of the most popular is Automatic Duck, whose quackerjack transfer tool offers a slick path between Avid and FCP for about US$500.00.

Output

Digital Cut in Avid amounts to the same operation embodied in FCP’s Print to Video/Edit to Tape operations.

Print to Video in particular is FCP’s answer to an Avid “crash assemble edit” but it offers lots of pro options for head/tail black, slating, custom countdown, you name it.

Edit to Tape is closest to an Avid’s device-controlled, frame accurate Digital Cut and is used only with a video subsystem add-on, such as AJA’s Kona and BlackMagic Decklink capture cards, and utilizes control drivers licensed from Pipeline Inc, a bunch of surfers in Hawaii who do nothing else, which work exceedingly well with RS422-connected Beta analog and SDI decks. You can even repurpose your Avid RS422 cable.

The only problem is the same one on current Avid systems: you’ll need a serial-to-USB adapter to connect that cable to your new Mac. I use an authentic Avid control cable to my DSR-40 deck.

Update for Avid Media Composer 5.0 Users

Directly inspired by FCP, Avid MC 5.0 users now enjoy “direct timeline manipulation” of media, the way FCP has employed it from the beginning. Those of you who use Smart Tools in Avid enjoy this function, which includes “magic line” insert/overwrite functions in each track (although the reverse of FCP’s), and if so, your transition to FCP is next to effortless– except you won’t need a Smart Tools toggle.

Other MC manipulations in the Timeline and Canvas, such as opacity changes, image scaling, rotation and distortion, which are also direct manipulations in FCP, have not yet crossed over from Avid Effects Mode.

Avid Trim Tools remain superior in many ways, now adding double-edit trimming. Basic “transition preservation” behavior during cut/paste segment operations has always been a part of FCP, but in FCP requires closing a paste gap between clips.

Avid’s evolving Avid Media Access (AMA) capability of reading card-based HD media, supported by camera vendor plug-ins, has its equivalent in FCP’s Open Timeline with multiformat realtime playback. For realtime playback, Avid chooses the plug-in route; FCP chooses dynamic playback quality scaling.

Here’s a current reality check: AMA is cool, it demos well, but its best use is fast single-track television-news-style cutting, where media has to be edited quickly. Avid gurus like to demo how quickly AMA links card-based media to a bin and allows editing– right from a card. But in either system, nobody should edit from a camera card. Always back up the media to a hard drive– Avid calls these “virtual volumes”. FCP calls them Scratch Disks.

The existing AMA limitations are clear: Avid’s own documentation will tell you Multicamera grouped clips are challenged under AMA ingest. You cannot achieve smooth playback of more than one or two streams of AMA-based native HD media without a hardware boost, such as a $15,000 Nitris DX box.

Veteran Avid editor Steve Cohen, in his very good, just-released book Avid Agility, will tell you, “You can edit directly off a memory card, but it’s likely that timeline performance will suffer. For better results, you’ll probably want to transcode your media into a standard Avid format, typically DNxHD.” DNxHD formats are equivalent to FCP’s five ProRes codecs. Editors employing the classic workflow for file-based media in Avid will have no problem transitioning to the same workflow in FCP.

Conclusion

Avid users coming to FCP will discover fewer dividing lines between operations but a few modes are still there.

In FCP, Capture mode is a generally separate activity, as it is in Avid. The Trim Edit window provides enough disruption to timeline editing that it could be called a mode, and some find it valuable just as they do “Big Trim” mode in Avid.

Segment mode? FCP is always in Segment mode!

While Apple continues to respond to the needs of professionals in every domain, FCP still doesn’t yet have something like Script Integration/ScriptSync– so don’t bother looking for ways to link clips to an imported script or transcript pages for instant viewing.

On the other hand, Avid doesn’t yet have something like Apple’s built-in iChat Theater review and approval system incorporating IChat and QuickTime playback, complete with easy-to-read timecode window for your growing list of remote clients– so don’t look for that in Avid, nor the tightly integrated component system of Studio applications which promote smooth roundtripping, rather than a bloatware approach.

Avid’s broadcast-quality desktop systems were first introduced around 1995; they were tardy in entering the DV marketplace, while Apple introduced an affordable DV editing solution and was slow in providing a competing high-end desktop compositing/finishing solution featuring uncompressed video. Today, Final Cut Studio offers an extremely impressive, scalable system of related applications which work together, and with third party products– several specifically optimized for FCP, such as AJA’s Kona Io HD box, sporting anything-to-anything flexibility and a built-in ProRes 422 hardware codec developed by Apple.

Avid users coming to FCP will truly love the more flexible effects possibilities, the 99 video and audio tracks, and larger variety of import and export options, and thus enjoy choice and expanded skill sets.

Welcome!

Loren Miller (lormiller@mindspring.com) has been a documentary and dramatic editor for over two decades, beginning in motion picture film, with a short documentary Oscar winner and two nominees to his credit. He first trained on Avid in 1994 and in 1999 expanded his skillset to include Final Cut Pro.

He originally wrote this article for the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group. It has been carefully updated with nifty screen snaps, workflow updates and comments about Color by Martin Baker, with gratitude. Comments welcome.

©2007 L.S. Miller / NeoTron Design