The Shape of Days

Final Cut Pro 6 — also known as Final Cut Studio 2; thanks, Apple marketing, for confusing things up over here — is a huge and fantastic upgrade over Final Cut Pro 5. While the core functions are exactly the same, there are a couple of nearly hidden improvements that take Final Cut Pro from being a good editing platform to a great one.

The first is what’s called an open-format timeline, and the second is ProRes 422.

They’re actually related, in a way that I’ll explain in a minute. But for now, let me talk about just what, exactly, an open-format timeline is.

Let’s say you’re doing a show. All your footage has been shot on HDV, using a Canon XL H1 camera. The show’s going to be simplicity itself: Production logo, opening titles, thirty minutes of edited footage, closing credits. Easy.

Your production logo is a 20-second clip that comes out of After Effects as a QuickTime movie in the lossless Animation codec; this is usually how motion graphics come out. You’re going to do your opening titles in Motion, and they’ll also be rendered out with the Animation codec. Same with your closing titles.

But the footage on your tapes is all in HDV. So right off the bat, we have a format mismatch. The logo and titles are lossless, while the footage is HDV (which is actually a specific form of MPEG-2 with MP3 audio).

Can we mix-and-match these in Final Cut? If you were still using Final Cut Pro 5, the answer would be no. You can’t mix-and-match these formats on the same timeline, at least not without rendering one of the formats into the other format. You’d either have to run your logo and titles through Compressor and convert them to HDV first (which would make them look awful), or you’d have to run all your HDV footage through and convert it to the Animation codec, which would make it impractically huge. In real life, you probably would have settled on a compromise, converting both sets of footage to some intermediate, lossy-but-not-too-lossy format so you could cut them together with as few visible compromises as possible.

In Final Cut Pro 6, it’s not like that. In Final Cut Pro 6, you just throw all that crap onto your timeline and go.

But there’s still a catch. You can edit with multiple formats in Final Cut Pro 6, but when you’re done and it’s time to export your reference movie for Compressor, Final Cut will render everything into the format of your timeline. So it’s really the same set of steps as before; either the graphics will get converted to HDV, or the HDV footage will get converted to Animation, or both will get converted to something else.

The difference is that you don’t have to decide up front what your output format will be. At any point in the editorial process, you can hit ⌘-0 to bring up your timeline settings and change the codec to something else. (You can’t change everything, though; your editing timebase is locked as soon as you make your first edit. Also, changing your frame size or pixel aspect ratio will make you want to kill yourself, as every clip’s Motion-tab settings will have to be reset. By hand. So don’t do that.)

So let’s revisit our example. You start your project by capturing the footage off your camera. To do this, you first select an appropriate Easy Setup — say, HDV 1080p24. You capture and capture, until finally all your footage is on your framestore and you can start doing your first assembly edit.

At this point, Final Cut will assume, since you’re cutting HDV footage in 1080p24 format, that you want an HDV timeline at 23.98 frames per second. When you start your assembly edit, that’s the kind of timeline you’ll be cutting into.

Later, when you’ve locked picture and you put on your logo and titles, you’ll just drop the Animation-encoded clips onto your timeline, and Final Cut will play them. No muss, no fuss.

But when you’re truly finished and you export your reference movie, Final Cut will convert all your graphics to HDV for you.

Now, this might be exactly what you want. If you’re going back to HDV tape, for instance, obviously you want your whole show to be in HDV format. But seriously, who the hell ever goes back to HDV? It just never happens. So what’s the point of mastering in HDV?

There’s only one situation in which you’d ever want to master in HDV format: When you’re cutting nothing but HDV footage.

It’s hard to imagine a production scenario in which that’d happen, but in fact I ran into a non-production scenario just like that last Tuesday. I’d done a location shoot on Monday, and shot a metric assload of B-roll, spread across several tapes. Because HDV footage is so small, only about 20 Mbps at 24 frames per second, I decided to capture all the B-roll, do a quick assemble edit and store the resulting QuickTime file on my server. That way, going back to it will be faster than pulling tapes out of the vault and re-capturing.

I was literally cutting nothing but HDV footage. So I just threw my footage into an HDV timeline and exported what’s called a “self-contained” movie. That is, Final Cut wrote out all the movie data to a fresh file on my framestore. It didn’t recompress anything; it just wrote the existing HDV data. I was then able to copy the whole shebang to the server and forget about it, and send the tapes to the vault.

But you’re never going to do that when you’re cutting a show. Shows always have chyrons, or effects, or color correction, or hell, even just titles or a slate. There’s always something that has to get mixed in with your source footage.

So you need a mastering format.

This is where ProRes 422 comes in.

The ins and outs of ProRes 422 is a subject for another day. The difference between the 140 Mbps and the 220 Mbps codecs, the difference between 8-bit and 10-bit rendering … that’s all fine, but it’s off the point right now. The point is, with Final Cut Pro 6’s open-format timeline, we can use ProRes 422 as our mastering format without having to go through the incredibly time-consuming process of converting all our footage before we can start editing.

It works like this: Create a ProRes 422 timeline, 1920×1080, 23.98 frames per second. Start assembling your HDV footage into it. Oops! The first time you try to do an edit, Final Cut will throw up a dialog box: “For best performance your sequence and External Video should be set to the format of the clips you are editing. Change sequence settings to match the clip settings?”

See, what Final Cut Pro is doing here is noticing that you’re trying to edit HDV footage into a ProRes 422 timeline, and double-checking that that’s what you really mean to do. Wouldn’t you rather edit HDV footage into an HDV timeline like a sane person? It’s nice of Final Cut to ask, but in this case, no, we really want to put our HDV footage into a ProRes 422 timeline. Seriously. (If you mess with your preferences, you can tell Final Cut not to ask any more, and just let you edit whatever into whatever. I don’t do this. I like being reminded that my sequence is set up differently from my footage, just in case that’s the one time I don’t want that.)

Anyway, tell Final Cut “No thanks, I really mean to do this,” and start editing. Notice something interesting: You don’t have to render anything. You can play back HDV footage on a ProRes 422 timeline without rendering. Even without turning Unlimited RT on. And it plays perfectly, at full resolution, without dropping a single frame. Hell, you can even do this on a MacBook. Not even a MacBook Pro; a plain old MacBook can pull off this trick. It can scale and distort HDV footage (which has a native 1440×1080 frame size and a non-square pixel aspect ration) into a 1920×1080 timeline with no trouble whatsoever. It’s awesome.

So what happens when you lock picture and decide to put on your logo and credits? Same thing. You just edit them in. Final Cut doesn’t care. It’ll just play the footage back when you mash play.

But when you go to export, that’s when the magic happens. On export, Final Cut will convert your whole show to the format of your timeline. It’ll render out all those scale-and-distorts, and encode the whole show into ProRes 422, writing it out to your framestore.

The good news is that encoding ProRes 422 is incredibly fast, and it’s optimized for multiple processors. So a decent editing workstation will be able to write the movie out to disk as fast as your framestore can keep up. Which means on your laptop it’ll take for-freakin’-ever. But hey, that’s what you get for trying to finish a show on your laptop.

Now, I’ll be the first person to say here that it’d be nice if Final Cut were a little more clever about writing out reference movies from mixed timelines. It’d be great if the reference movie of our hypothetical show here consisted of a minute of Animation footage and half an hour of HDV footage and three more minutes of Animation footage. That’d be fantastic. But it doesn’t work that way. Exporting a movie from Final Cut gives you a movie in the format of your timeline, not just a reference movie that points to movies in different formats on your framestore. Maybe that’s a limitation of QuickTime, I dunno. But the point is, it doesn’t quite work like that.

But what it does do is move all the processing time from the front end of the editing process to the back end. You don’t have to convert all your footage to your mastering format before you can start editing, or live with the horror of having to render every damn slip and roll on your timeline. You can just pick a mastering format with your Easy Setup, then get to work. Only when you’re done and it’s time to export will Final Cut have to run all your footage through processing. And even then, it only processes the frames you actually used in your show. You aren’t converting six hours of raw footage to your mastering format; you’re only converting the thirty minutes you actually used in your final edit.

So it’s definitely a workflow improvement, and a big one. It’s not magic, but it’s still pretty amazing.

One last note about ProRes 422: Traditionally, motion graphics are always, repeat always, rendered out to an uncompressed or lossless format. Either to an image sequence or a QuickTime movie with no lossy compression on it. That’s because graphics, much more so than live footage, suffer mightily with each compression hit.

But it seems to me that if you’re mastering in ProRes 422 anyway, and all your uncompressed graphics will be converted to ProRes 422 by Final Cut Pro during the export process when you’re finished with your show, then why not skip the intermediate step and render your graphics right out to ProRes 422? That’s what I’ve been doing for a while now, including some pretty intricate full-screen sequences in 1080p24. The results have been visually perfect, which is all anybody can ask for. And the resulting ProRes 422 sequences play back without rendering in my timeline, and are written out during export without any processing, saving me both time and storage space.

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