Geez Apple! What Have You Done?

I’ve been working with musicians on video projects for a very long time. For the majority of that time I have used the Adobe Creative Suite and other versions of Adobe editing software that have come prior to the Creative Suite. Even though I’ve been using Adobe for my video editing process, many people are fans of Apple’s Final Cut program. Final Cut and Adobe were almost the same program with just a few little differences. The key word here is “were”. Many online video producers and editors have been making the change from Final Cut to Adobe lately. I wondered why that was. I don’t wonder about that anymore.

Over the last month I started working with a company called SoundPure which is located in Durham, NC. This company is a music studio that sells guitars and other various instruments. I have worked on filming many local artists who work at this company as they showcase different instruments that they have for sale. We have used multiple cameras for these for these shoots and I have had to edit all the different angles together to make one video. Before I started working at SoundPure, I used Adobe Premeire to work with files such as these. Now that I have used Final Cut X, I understand why other filmmakers have made the move to Adobe.

Final Cut X is the upgrade to Final Cut 7 which many filmmakers have used over the last few years. With this “upgrade”, Apple has taken what was a user friendly program and turned the program into the user itself. Final Cut X has been turned into a program that guesses how you, the user, would like to edit your videos. If you want to add a clip in-between two videos, Final Cut will do this for you but not necessarily in the way that you would prefer. It looks at your footage and tries to guess what you are trying to do instead of it doing what you’d like it to do.

First off, if you want to add another timeline to a video that you have already started on, it won’t let you do it. In order to circumvent this problem, you have to add a blank timeline, pretty much a black screen, and stretch the timeline out to where you believe it will end. This is okay in itself, but this adds so much more work for editing your final product. Once you have finished editing your content, you have to cut the beginning and ending of this blank timeline that you inserted in order that the video doesn’t run longer than anticipated.

Another problem you run into is working with audio. In Adobe, when you import your video, there is automatically a separate audio timeline that is present for that video. In Final Cut X, you have to manually detach the audio and if you don’t have your settings set correctly, the audio doesn’t stay in sync with the video.

Now it may look as I’m being nitpicky about this program but in actuality I’m not. It does work and I have been able to adjust my workflow accordingly, but because of the way the program is designed, it just makes your workflow slow down and in turn this forces you, the editor to take more time to develop videos. And if you’re on a strict timeline, this can be a problem.

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