I’ve been reading a lot about the new Final Cut Pro X and how managing source files and projects can be a bit of a pain. Most notably, that there’s no (logical/easy) way to reconnect media that’s been moved to another drive. It turns out that’s not entirely true.
Say you have an event called Brian Visits Brooklyn on your computer’s internal hard drive, and an associated project called The Moon. The event is huge and you’d like to reclaim the space for your collection of 2011 WWDC session videos. So you connect an external hard drive and drag your source files (your event) to the new hard drive.
Do the same with the project, dragging it to the drive you want and selecting just the project and render files.
Uh-oh, the project is still pointing to the event on your internal drive. That’s no good. So what to do?
Access the project’s properties by choosing File –> Project Properties… from the menu bar, or by pressing Command + J. A new inspector-style window appears with two tabs, Properties and Sharing. Under Properties click the big Modify Event References button. You should see the referenced events on both drives, with the option to drag to the top whichever event you want the project associated with. Click OK and you’re done.
I realize it’s not as robust as it used to be, but it’s a bit more than the nothing I keep reading about.
As Apple throws all caution to the wind by skipping two full versions between iterations 7 and 10, I can’t help but wonder what QuickTime X — and Snow Leopard — means for the future of Final Cut Studio.
For now the only information I can find is the bit about ColorSync that was mentioned in the WWDC Keynote on Monday, and the small section under Snow Leopard’s New Technologies heading. ColorSync is Apple’s system for maintaining consistency across imaging devices like displays, printers, scanners, and digital cameras so that the color viewed on screen is the same as the color printed out.
Maybe this means an end to those tricky gamma-shift issues that occurred when exporting to specific formats in Compressor.
Snow Leopard is due out in September, so it would be great to hear something about Final Cut Studio around then, but I won’t get my hopes up. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it’s April before we hear any mention of Final Cut Studio 3. But holy cow, that would have to be some upgrade, right? It will have been three years since the last major release, and I expect the Final Cut team have been keeping themselves busy since 2007 — especially with all those new Snow Leopard goodies like Grand Central Dispatch to play with.
John August, screenwriter, blogger, and somebody I have great respect for, had this to say about the new iMovie,
“Among the products Apple announced today is iMovie 09, an update to their entry-level video editor that I currently find completely unusable. They have demo videos up showing some of the new features, which range from very helpful (stabilization) to fairly gimmicky (the animated maps).
What’s most clear, however, is that they’re sticking with the bizarre and unfortunate editing interface.”
I disagree. When I look at iMovie in its current state I don’t see a “bizarre and unfortunate editing interface.” I see the future of what digital editing could be.
If we’re talking about bizarre and unfortunate look no further than Final Cut Pro’s familiar, but relentlessly unchanged, UI. It’s a time capsule, showing off all the worst parts of digital editing. It’s clunky, chunky and crowded. It’s also extremely uninviting. If you sit a novice in front of Final Cut Pro and tell them to get to it, you’re going to get that same stunned silence usually reserved for grandparents and cell phones.
On the other hand, anybody can open iMovie and immediately see how skimming a clip initiates playback. Or how dragging a clip onto another will give you options after you’ve dropped it — not like that moment of what-just-happened panic that occurs after dragging a clip from FCP’s browser to the canvas for the first time.
iMovie ’09 brings with it an entirely visual process, and that’s exactly what editing should be. I’m excited, and hopeful, that these changes will be the basis for tools and features in future versions of Final Cut Pro.
The initial benchmarks for the new MacBook Pro models are about what you’d expect — they’re good. I haven’t seen any testing done with the 2.8GHz chips, though I imagine those numbers will look even better.
But probably not out-of-the-park better.
Today I saw this post from Engadget, which provides a few answers about the new Nvidia chips, straight from the source. Apparently the new chipsets really are capable of on-the-fly switching, simultaneous processing, and provide support for up to 8GB of RAM.
8GB of RAM. In a notebook. That blows my mind.
It’s up to Apple to write support for these technologies, however, and it’s unclear whether that’s in the cards for the notebooks in the immediate future. It certainly seems possible that those kind of enhancements could be delivered through Software Update, although I can’t recall another time when such a massive performance upgrade was delivered in such a way.
It’s going to be exciting to see what happens here, and whether or not we’re going to see the kind of processing home run we know these machines are (at least on paper) capable of.
