That said - there is curiosity and skepticism mixed with FCP’s decade-plus worth of history in independent film productions. Hence why I feel it deserves the attention of a blog diary such as this.
That’s all I’ve heard since Apple unveiled a re-imagining of their flagship editing program. Hell, even I said it after I sat down for five minutes looking at version 1.0...er... 10.0.
“This looks like iMovie.”
“What the hell is a magnetic timeline?”
“What do you mean no tracks?”
Two years later, skepticism remains high and rampant. When I attended the Sundance Doc Labs this summer, the wise veterans of the doc world declared over and over that Final Cut was dead and we had better learn Avid if we hadn’t already. (For the record, I have cut on Avid... though not nearly as much as I've cut on Final Cut.)
Final Cut Pro was the first professional NLE I came in contact with. My high school film teacher handed me v.1.2 and said, “Here, learn this.” Neither of us knew what kind of impact it would have on my future or my career.
I edited shorts and eventually features on Final Cut Pro. Over the course of a decade, I came to know it inside and out.
So... though even I had written off Final Cut Pro X (is that a number or a letter?) upon its initial release, I'm also one of the faithful deep inside. I had grown up with this program. It shaped my filmmaking career. Like I said: I’ve worked on Avid. I could (and should and will) learn Adobe Premiere. I still firmly believe each program is just a separate hammer for your creative toolbox.
For me, Final Cut Pro had become the trusty old wooden hammer with the rusted-over head on the top. I’m sure many editors feel this way about Avid. Maybe a few feel this way about Premiere. Or even Sony Vegas (anyone?). Whatever. This is how I felt about Final Cut.
I kept track of X's updates and development without actually using it. I knew significant improvements had been made. I continued to bad mouth it despite having not cut anything “real” with it. I felt a little guilty about this. I felt like: How can we, as an editing community, dismiss a program outright because it attempts a new way of doing things? Possibly a new way that better fits how people (pros and amateurs alike) shoot their movies now and in the future?
So in the spring I decided to shoot a project specifically to use for Final Cut Pro X. It was a short doc style project I shot myself and edited in version 10.0.8. There were bugs and head aches along the way (some caused by me doing things the wrong way), but in short, I saw immense potential, especially for a documentary project.
This short video follows the efforts of one of my now former students (I teach filmmaking part time at a private school) to teach students and faculty compression only CPR:
The way the program uses metadata to organize footage is where its true powers lie. And the magnetic timeline has its pros and cons.
Something significant happened though: I was finding a way to use it without hating it.
This summer I was hired to edit my first feature documentary, a story about a working musician (more on that in a future post). My producer and director apparently like to take chances. After much discussion and research, we decided to take a roll with Final Cut Pro X on a project that will have the following elements:
- 135 hours of footage (with more to come) spanning more than two years of shooting
- Interviews
- Multicam Verite scenes
- Multicam Concerts
- VHS archival footage
- Photos? Graphics? Wait and see!
I’ve been researching the extent to which others are using FCPX, so I know we’re not the first to edit long form with it. The more I read up on X the more I find professional and broadcast-level productions relying and utilizing X without the stigma it carried when it first arrived. We’re also certainly not the first independent production to use X. I’ve read of plenty of folks in Creative Cow forums using X on narrative and documentary features.
So then why blog about this process when I'm already so late to the party?
Partly because I feel like the party is still in somebody's mother's basement and it'd be nice to change venues. The stigma still exists even though it's a viable editing program (no, really). Other editors look at me like I’m crazy when I say I’m cutting a feature on X.
The question should no longer be its viability; the question right now is: What are its limits? If it proves to be as reliable as any other NLE on the market, then the next question is: How does it advance the craft of editing?
More and more editors have to test it (and embrace it) in order for more pros to be open to taking it seriously. Even if this blog is only read by my peers (or people who want to proclaim my idiocy either anonymously or in the comments section) I think there will be a benefit to them seeing someone try and discover what the workflow is on a project of this scope.
The other reason to track our progress on this blog is workflow. I continue to tweak my workflow as I go forward and find myself combining old and new methods in FCP X. I think some of the organizational ideas we have developed and the 3rd party tools that we use will be useful for filmmakers curious about the strengths and weaknesses of this program on a feature project. No matter how much I read, there are still a variety of approaches to how to handle events, keywords, and projects in FCPX. This blog will show the evolution of just one such approach.
I also hope other FCPX users will follow our work so that they might help me steer clear of problems or offer solutions that I have not yet thought of. I don’t have all the answers and would love to hear from other editors using the program.
Finally, this is not a blog to necessarily champion Final Cut Pro X. If midway through the project we discover we have to go back to FCP7, then we’ll document that process, too. This is about putting X to the test and all the good and the bad and the ugly that may follow. (Though I will say this much: I think X has quite a few advancements in both media management and interface that give me hope for its future). I will do my best to update at a regular pace, but tending to the feature itself is my first priority.
So I hope you check in now and again for periodic updates on editing a documentary feature with Final Cut Pro X. But the end of this process I'll be either considered crazy but brave... or crazy and sad, since turning back would be very, very costly.
About Me
Since making poorly conceived movies on my dad's Hi8 video camera when I was around 13 years old, I had a sense early on that filmmaking would be my pursuit in life. I attended the University of Texas at Austin and graduated in 2005. I spent a year in LA as a post production assistant at NBC/Universal, learning from a great crew of producers and editors on shows like Surface and Friday Night Lights.
In 2006, I took the opportunity to edit my first feature film for director Spencer Parsons, called I’ll Come Running. This project brought me back to Austin and I’ve been working here as a freelance editor ever since. I’ve worked on shorts and features that have premiered at festivals internationally including Cannes, Sundance, SXSW, LAFF, Toronto, and Austin Film Festival.
Beyond editing I’ve also worked as an on set media manager and as a post production supervisor.
My experience is mostly in narrative film, but I’ve been flirting with documentary for years. I was an assistant on two films by director Margaret Brown. I have also served as an assistant editing fellow at the Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab twice in the last three years.
All the features I’ve worked on have had high profile premieres and have been distributed either in theaters or on VOD.
I have also directed two award winning short films, “Test Day” and most recently, “Do Over.”
This bio is to provide context to anyone not familiar with my work. I feel like if you’re reading a blog about some random editor cutting a feature in FCPX, knowing his level of experience and expertise will help you gauge how seriously to take this endeavor. I hope that you do, because I’m dead serious about determining how far we can go with Apple’s latest incarnation of its flagship editing program.
Post-Note... Note: FCP, Avid, and Premiere are not the only NLEs out there. There’s also Sony Vegas along with several open-source editing programs including Lightworks and Nova Cut. I know Ive' left others off this list. I wanted to make a note here to acknowledge that Final Cut is not the end all, be all of editing programs. None of these programs are. None of these programs make you a better editor. None of them make you a better storyteller. If I use any one of these programs I still live and die by my creative decisions, not so much my technical prowess.
Well, unless I'm on deadline.
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