Mike Jones Digital Basin
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Apple finally, at long last, let FCS3 out of the bag

Well it damn well took them long enough! At long last Apple got their act together and have FCS3/FCP7 ready to roll. It's no secret i have been highly critical of Apple over the past few years for not making FCS as good as it should or could be. Releases 5 and 6 were profoundly disappointing simply because they brought nothing new to the editing table that didn't already exist in competing applications.

I wrote about about this some time ago in a long post entitled 'FCP6, Where did al the newness go?'

More recently, speculating on what we might hope for in FCP7, I offered up a list of hoped-for additions. How many of them were fulfilled...?

- A real-time engine that can actually scale decoding resolution.
Result - Umm... seemingly not. Whilst RT performance should be improved and ProRes performance is very good, it doesn't appear that Apple have addressed this issue in the way that most other NLE's have.

- Actual 4k 4096px support
It seems so. A major failing of the QT engine overcome and FCP now reports to suppourt 4k 4096 res.   

- Project files able to be fully exchanged with Motion/Colour/DVDSP
Nope. Apple still havnt engaged integration in a more comprehensive way. XML is the right idea, Send-To commands such as that from FCP to STP are good but none of these is as a well rounded system as that which Adobe have shown is possible whereby projects files from After Effects, Premiere, Soundbooth can all be freely moved around. Despite the rhetoric Applee are still very much behind in regard to the fully integrated suite.

- GPU acceleration (used for much more than page-twirl transitions)
Nope. It seems the GPU remains an untapped resource.

- Greatly improved audio tools in FCP (this is a VERY long list that starts with the ability to playback a bloody MP3 files without RENDERING!!!!)
Nope. It seems Apple have failed to see the forest on this one. I don't have FCP7 to test yet but there seems no mention at all of improving the horrendously bad audio tools in FCP. Of course they would contend that this is SoundTrack Pro's job but by forcing the user to move to a different application for any kind of sound work they force the user to work in a specific, traditional manner. And I dont like begin told 'how' i should work by the software. What if i want to mix and edit sound as I edit rather than AFTER i edit? A new age of production demands that I as the user choose my workflow rather than have the software dictate it. Premiere, Vegas, Edius all have very comprehensive audio tools right on the NLE timeline including surround sound, bus to bus routing and wet-dry monitor/record. This more forward thinking approach that Apple seem not interested in, simply makes for a much more open and non-dictatorial tool that allows the user to work they want to.... And if FCP still cant play an Mp3 files without rendering than the guys at Apple truly have their head screwed on backwards!

- Metadata management
Ummm, nope. It seems that Apple really havnt put any work into advancing the idea of managing, creating, annotation media assets with metadata. This is the frontier of new thinking about digital production - on one hand its simply  good media management (an area FCP has been notoriously poor in comparison to say, Avid) but on the other Metadata management evokes all sorts of new worklow concepts and processes. Witness the way Adobe have started to implement Metadata into tools like the auto-transcrbing of audio files from Soundbooth or the direct to disk shooting metadata annotation of On-Location. Apple appear to have left this unexplored. They have the system in place in the form of their XML structure but to date this is very under exploited.

-'Real' native format suppourt rather than compulsory re-wrapping to MOV.
NOPE. Once again Apple claim the 'no transcoding' 'native' workflow tag lines when in truth Apple is almost completely restricted to QuickTime MOV files. Almost every non-MOV file has to be re-wrapped to MOV in order to be used. This isnt transcoding, there isnt quality loss but it is a manipulation that shouldn't be necessary. it means files like R3D's and XDCAMEX have to be duplicated. And worse that such files are often not usable or give poor performance) when opened in non-Apple/FCS applications. Either this is a deliberate protectionist policy by Apple to protect its own Quicktime product from competition or else FCP's underlying engine is so flawed that it simply cant cope effectively with non QT wrappers.


That said, what we did get outside of this wish list was a form of background rendering such as Adobe CS4 have with Media Encoder working in the background while you work. This is nothing new but it is good and I hope it works as well and efficiently as it will need to.

The iChat theatre system in FCS3 is the one glimmer of Apple the Innovator of old. This is a very interesting idea that goes a step further than Adobe's clip-notes system for review and collaboration by going into a real-time landscape. It sounds very good and I look forward to kicking it around.

Velocity controls for clip speed. This is the classic Apple/FCP that I have previously complained about. Premiere and Avid have had comprehensive speed controls, ramping and enveloping of speed for, literally, YEARS. Thank you for catching up FCP.

Improved marker system. The previous marker tools in FCP were a cruel and pointless joke and so it appears Apple have finally joined to 21st century with a (seemingly) much improved set of marker tools.  Sony's Vegas has nothing less than 5 different types of markers that are completely customizable, namable, individual or paired regions and can trigger events and captions - will FCP's be up to this standard? Probably not but any improvement is good.

The interface of FCP it seems missed out completely. Whilst cosmetic this is one area no one seems happy with. The overly bright, bitsy, cluttered GUI filled with microscopically small icons really needs a re-think.

ProRes got the big bump that everyone was expecting. A 444 with Alpha mode was just what everyone was looking for to make effects heavy and higher-end post a bit more viable than just working with the clumsiness of Uncompressed 10bit. ProRes is a great codec and it just got better. But again there's nothing new about this. Cineform have had a lossless intermediate 10 and 12 bit 444 and 422 format available for a long time and even go further with RAW capabilities and a real-time, non-destructive, metadata colour correction system. So ProRes 4444 is nothing new, nothing innovative, nothing we havnt seen before expect for the fact that it comes as part of FCS3 and FCS3 is very cheap! Apple as bargain basement bundle!

I wont go into much detail on the other FCS applications in this post. Motion has been boosted and thats good but it is still a very far cry from After Effects. Some users will love it for its price point in the FCS bundle and for some of the great and easy to execute tricks up its sleeve. But its not even close yet to competing with After Effects.

Color is an enormously powerful colour correction system but it seems Apple still havnt had the time to "Appleise" it, it still doesn't look or feel like a true FCS app and is arguably still more complex to use than it should or needs to be. Anyone who has used Magic Bullet Looks knows how fluid and elegant a colour system can be and if MBL only had secondary CC an Motion Tracking masks then Apple Color would look very clumsy indeed.

SoundTrack Pro, from the beginning, has been the great DAW that ISN'T. STP could have been great but so far it has very much not been great. Modeled off Sony's superb Acid Pro but lacking both the power and flexibility of Acid, STP has been plagued with stability issues and a host of strange quirks - not the least being that it can import but Not export an OMF. The Apple press release speaks of a number of improvements to STP but largely they seem simplistic (voice level match) or long over due remedies to previous failings (channel re-ordering) I was, in many ways, hoping that STP would be the shining light in FCS3 but it seems disappointment is coming my way.

The FCS3 package may be great value and cover almost all the bases of production, but there's really no arguing that STP and Motion are anything but second-rate to where the market is at. Acid Pro, Audition, ProTools, Cubase, Reaper, Sonar are all superior DAW's. Some of these are expensive (PT, Sonar) other are inexpensive (Reaper, Acid) but for SoundTrack pro cheap can be a big price to pay for second rate.

And as for DVD Studio Pro.... My god, has it been left out of the upgrade cycle altogether? The great authoring system  that once was had fallen so far behind the curve that it was getting a bit ridiculous. And now it seems Apple are just ashamed of it.

Now, dont get me wrong. Im very happy to have the improvements that are there, as will my students who are daily frustrated with FCP. But for all its niceties this release is much like FCP5 and FCP6, it keeps Apple in the game with a strong toolset but it does not put them ahead of it. There is no real innovation here, nothing that we havnt seen before. They may have 50% of the market now but without going one-better than the competition they are likely to see their market share substantially whittle away over the next few years.

Heres the FCS3 press release

Heres the Apple Whats New list

Posted at 09:11AM Jul 24, 2009 by Mike Jones in general  |  Comments[8]