Switcher Stories: Martin Baker

April 1998. Las Vegas. I was at NAB and making my way to one of the stuffy rooms on the lower floor of the Sands Convention Center. The event was a preview of Macromedia’s Final Cut, not long before the app was purchased by Apple (who also added “Pro” to the name). Throughout my editing career, I’ve always had a strong interest in graphics and Final Cut immediately struck me as a combination of Avid and After Effects. The possibility of having that editing and effects integration in a single package was an attractive one.

At the time, I was offlining and onlining on Avid Media Composer as a freelancer and at the BBC. Avid certainly did the job but always felt clunky and inflexible to me. Its lack of effects and compositing finesse was sometimes akin to editing with boxing gloves on. In Autumn 1999, I was well on the way to opening my new post production facility, Digital Heaven, and it was time to specify the systems. We considered Discreet Edit but decided on a Softimage DS with the addition of an Avid Symphony a few months later.

The DS Years

I remember being blown away by DS from the first demo. It was a breath of fresh air and I worked on it for 3 years, mainly cutting on-air BBC promos. The timeline was modern. I could grab any clip and trim it without having to go into trim mode. Playback wouldn’t stop when I clicked somewhere on the interface with the mouse and the way it handled layered effects and audio made it a fantastically creative system to use. Every now and again I’d have to work on the Symphony but for anything other than multicam, I found it even more frustrating, having now acquired a taste for a slicker way of working.

The problem with DS and Avids in general was that they were expensive. I started to play around with FCP v2 and v3 on a Matrox RTMac card. It was clear that this software was maturing fast and Avid should probably be worried. Our existing clients were starting to baulk at paying DS rates for often basic editing. We had two incompatible systems which didn’t give enough flexibility. It was crunch time. Do we stick with DS and Symphony or make a move to FCP and aim to be ahead of the pack?

We decided to wait for NAB 2003 to see what Avid and Apple came up with. That year, Avid launched their DNA range and Apple launched Final Cut Studio with FCP v4. It was a no brainer to go with FCP. We sold the DS and Symphony (for pitiful amounts!), bought some G4s, an Xserve RAID, three SDI capture cards and became the first facility in London to switch from Avid to FCP.

Jumping In

The transition was a relatively easy one, made easier by coming from DS because there are many similarities. Stackable video filters, transfer modes, better audio mixing, direct trimming and moving of clips in the timeline. All good features that made me a faster editor. I’ve always been self-taught so I tend to just play around with software and search the manual when I get stuck. I found FCP very intuitive. The manuals may be the size of phone directories but they’re actually very good.

FCP was also one of the main reasons why we moved sideways into software development. Its built-in scripting language, FXScript allowed me to create plug-ins to “fill in the gaps”. This is a gift for anyone who doesn’t come from a programming background and as a result there are a wide range of free or low cost FCP plug-ins on the market.

Straight in at Number One…

In November 2003, we took on the editing for Top of the Pops, the BBC’s iconic chart music programme which was on air for 42 years. FCP made a big difference to the workflow for this show. In my 10 or so years of non-linear editing, I’ve never got over my boredom of the capturing process. Now we had a system in the machine room dedicated to capturing from Digibeta and DV. Once the first tape for a story had been captured, I could start editing and the remaining tapes were being captured in MCR. Bliss. We used DVCPRO50 codec from start to finish and copied movies to the Xserve RAID across gigabit ethernet. There was no offline/online process. Clients were happy and it all worked great. Apart from one teensy weensy problem…Multicam.

Top of the Pops was predominantly a studio based show. We would get a cut feed and usually three or four iso feeds for each performance. Symphony had a great multicam feature but FCP v4.5 did not and it was probably the most requested feature on every poll I’d seen. So we decided to do the bravest/craziest thing and write our own multicam app. The inspired introduction of XML import/export in v4.1 made this technically possible and Multicam Lite, the first multicam solution for FCP, was officially released in January 2005.

Timing is Everything

Three months later, Apple announced FCP v5.0 with not four, not nine but up to 16 cameras playing simultaneously. We shelved development plans for Multicam Pro (which we’d been using internally for TOTP) and switched over to the new version. Apple may have been late to the party with multicam but they did a great job. One of the last show-stoppers for not buying FCP had been smashed.

At the end of 2005, I decided that after 13 years of editing, it was time to move on. The facilities side of the company were closed as I concentrated on software development and training.

The Future Looks Bright

The first Avid arrived on the scene in 1989 and was consciously designed to make film editors feel comfortable editing on a computer (hence terms like “bins” and “splice in”). Ten years later, FCP v1.0 was released, using familiar computer concepts like cut/copy/paste. Value for money may attract most people to FCP but its accessibility is Apple’s real jewel. Many of my students comment on the fact that FCP seems very logical and in a time where more part-time editors than full-time editors are using these systems, FCP’s ease of use has clearly played a big part in its success.

Apple are in a unique position with Final Cut Pro. No other editing system manufacturer controls the computer hardware, the operating system, the media format and all the cool GPU stuff that could play a big part in FCP’s future. My hunch is that the real fun has yet to begin and you can count me in for the long haul!

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