Games - Final Cut Pro

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	Games - Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro is a non-linear editing system created by Apple Computer that allows users to edit video. The latest releases are for Mac OS X only. From the early 2000s, it came to be accepted as a high-end professional editorial tool and has become a competitor to the former main force in the industry, Avid. While some speculate that Final Cut has a larger user base than Avid, Avid remains an established product for professionals working in realtime and high-end production.

Used on Macintosh computers, it is a resolution-independent software editing front-end to a user-configurable hardware architecture. It can be used to edit material ranging from FireWire-attached MiniDV video from a consumer digital video camera in the home environment to High-Definition (HD) material in a full professional studio environment. The software loads the video onto the Mac, where it can be edited and processed.

History

Randy Ubillos and other members of his team originally created Adobe Premiere. They were then hired by Macromedia to create KeyGrip, built from the ground up as a more professional video editing program based on QuickTime. Macromedia made a decision to be a web company instead of competing head-on with Adobe in every category and decided to find a buyer for their non-web applications, including KeyGrip, by this time (1998) renamed as Final Cut. Final Cut was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) exposition in 1998 after Macromedia pulled out of the main show floor. At the demonstration both Mac and Windows versions were shown. The Mac version was working with a Truevision RTX dual stream real time card with limited real time effects. When no purchaser could be found Apple purchased the team as a defensive move. When Apple could not find a buyer in turn, it continued development work, focusing on adding FireWire/DV support and at NAB 1999 Apple introduced Final Cut Pro.

With the introduction of FCP, Adobe Premiere market share plummented, since its ancient codebase had neither the features nor the design flair to compete. In 2003, Adobe introduced Premiere Pro as a Windows-only product with an entirely new codebase and many FCP-like features.

In late 2001, the studio motion picture "The Rules of Attraction" was edited on beta versions of FCP 3, proving to the film industry that successful 3:2 pulldown matchback to 24fps could be achieved with a consumer off-the-shelf product and that high-priced Avids were no longer necessary. Roger Avary, the film's director became the spokesperson for FCP, appearing in print ads worldwide. His advocacy of the product gave confidence to mainstream editors like Walter Murch that the product was ready for "prime time."

In April 2004, version 4.5 of Final Cut Pro was introduced, and rebranded by Apple as "Final Cut Pro HD" (even though the software has been capable of HD editing since version 3.0). Final Cut Pro HD did not support the burgeoning HDV format, however. Ironically enough, its "scaled-down" cousin, Final Cut Express, gained support for HDV shortly after the release of FCP HD. Native HDV support was later added with the release of Final Cut Pro 5.0 in May 2005. Apple announced Final Cut Pro 5 at a pre-NAB event in April 2005.

In January 2006 Apple stopped selling Final Cut Pro as a stand-alone product.

See also a release history in context with the rest of Final Cut Studio.

Feature Films edited with FCP

Many feature films have been edited with Final Cut Pro, including:

Cold Mountain
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Intolerable Cruelty
Napoleon Dynamite
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Open Water
The Rules of Attraction
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
The Ladykillers
Corpse Bride
Jarhead
Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story

Features

The latest version of Final Cut Pro (5) claims better integration with Apple's other Pro applications and improved codec support for editing HD, DV and SD video formats, along with Panasonic's new solid-state recording technology, P2. A new technology called DynamicRT built on the RT Extreme technology released with Final Cut Pro 4. DynamicRT allows a real-time multistream effects architecture, which can be set to automatically adjust image quality and frame rate automatically during playback to maintain real time effects. For example, when there are a large number of video streams playing simultaneously, it will change, on the fly, to a mode that reduces the quality of the playback so that all of them can be seen in real time; when the computer is capable of it, it will automatically return playback to native quality (that is, when there are fewer simultaneous video streams).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Final Cut Pro ]

Games - Final Cut Pro

History

Feature Films edited with FCP

Features

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