blog.noetech.com

The Next Final Cut Pro

Here is what I want to see from Final Cut Pro 5.0.

They need project sharing desperately. Avid has a great solution with Unity. It may be over priced, but it allows seamless collaboration between editors. But it can be improved. I would like Apple to approach project sharing a little differently. I would like them to create a FCP server that hosts projects.

I imagine it working like this: The editor would open Final Cut and select Open Remote from the file menu. They would sign in with a username and password. A list of projects would appear listing all the ones that the user has access to. When they picked the project, all the Xsan volumes that were needed for the project would be mounted automatically.

An administrator could set up different permission sets for each user, limiting different settings and items the user could change. For example, you could set it so only admin users could changed the digitize directory and sequence settings, etc.

Multiple editors could work off the same projects, open the same bins etc. Admins could also link certain bins with certain projects. Say for example, you have a project for each episode and one for digitizing. Each episode project would have a link to the media folder in the dig project, so anytime that those bins are updated, they are automatically updated in the main edit projects.

Then to make the collaboration complete, there would be a viewer application that producers, APs, etc, could use to view the cuts over a normal ethernet connection. These users would sign in with just read only permissions and see a list of sequences in the project, or possibly specific ones set by editors. When the user went to play them, the server would automatically stream the sequence to the computer over ethernet, because these systems obviously would not be on the fibre network. With offlineRT, this should not be a problem.

Imagine a system were producers could be watching a cut as the editor is making it. No more making outputs at 6pm after the editor leaves and watching them in the morning after the dubs have been made. I'm sure editors wouldn't be big fans, but I know a few producers who would cream their pants.

There would also be a way for these users to leave notes on the cuts. Marking a transition that they want changed, a clip they want swapped out, etc. If they could also view all the digitized clips, they could even pull out the exact clips they wanted, instead of editors searching through the tapes to find a clip that the producer already found.

Tie it all in with Quicktime streaming server for network deliveries, and we would have complete collaboration, end to end.

That is how I picture the perfect post system.

Of course there are other things the FCP needs. It needs to handle large amounts of media much better. FCP 4.5 is a dog when you have 1,000 hours of footage. And don't tell me that too much, Avid handles it with flying colors. They also need a really solid I/O box. I've yet to find one that everyone is happy with.

If Apple makes something like this happen, I would switch our facility over in a minute and never look back.