Let's Get Digital

Vicki Parks, Final Cut Pro trainer for Filmbase, looks at the virtues of the widely-used postproduction package and compares it to other products on the market.

In '99 I was working as an assistant editor in a post house in Chicago using avid, playing around with flame and generally having a great time with some really expensive computer equipment. A co-worker came in one day with a cd of some editing software that none of us had heard of. We threw it on the Mac in reception and started playing around. We had discovered Final Cut Pro and it was like some great secret that no one else had. For only $1,000 we could edit stuff at home on our personal computers, and have it turn out looking okay, maybe even sometimes better than okay.

Secrets stay secret for about a micro-second in the land of tech, and soon the whole film world was playing around with this cool 'toy' that could pretend to be a major editing tool. The problem with the earlier versions of Final Cut Pro was that it never had aspirations of competing with the likes of avid and Media 100. It was a home user product - something to cut your kid's graduation on. Then the techie-middle-geeks got hold of it. You know, the guys that know everything about everything. The people that can take an electric razor, load it with film and have it shoot pictures. The ones that aren't in anyway involved in the 'credible' world of film-making, but inhabit the dark underworld of the indies. Fueled by a minimal cash flow and loaded with a heavy dose of insomnia, the techie-middle-geeks have a deep urge to take everything apart and figure out how it works. Caught in limbo between really good ideas and no common sense, they're the ones responsible for souping up Final Cut Pro and announcing to the world that it could compete with the big boys. So thinking back to that clunky beige g3 running fcp version 1.1 back in Chicago, to my sleek, g4 Titanium laptop, which runs Final Cut Four like a dream; I can't help but think that maybe those geeks were right.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 94