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Some surprising things have happened since Final Cut Pro appeared on the scene. Adobe opted out of a Mac version of the latest Premiere release and brought out a pair of audio and DVD products that are Windows-only. On the other hand, Avid returned to the fold in a big way with a line of products clearly designed to go head-to-head with Apple in the Mac market. But, interest in Final Cut Pro continues to grow with an enthusiastic user base that ranges from big-budget Hollywood studios to cost-conscious corporate shops.

In its fourth incarnation, Final Cut Pro continues to shake up the market with innovations that show Apple's understanding of video professionals' needs. The application itself has been substantially expanded, accelerated and enhanced. However, the biggest change is the bundle you're buying. The once-pricey Cinema Tools option is now a standard feature. And three totally new programs, LiveType, Soundtrack and Compressor, should make the upgrade well worth the price of admission.

Got Space?

One of the first things you'll notice is that the bundle and their associated data files have a voracious appetite for disk space. The installation package spans four DVD-ROMs and a CD for Peak 3 Express. Final Cut itself has quadrupled in size to over 100 MB, even though it boots up just as quickly as the previous version.

If you want to install all the content files for Soundtrack and LiveType, you'll have to come up with another 14 GB of space (the 9 GB of LiveType content needs to reside on your System volume). Fortunately, if you're running a slimmed-down System partition, the basic LiveType installation includes previews of all the media and the application makes it easy to pull in the files you need for an effect from the DVD. The 5 GB of soundtrack loops can be stored anywhere. You can expect a full installation to take about 45 minutes. That should give you a chance to skim through the 1,600+ pages of documentation.

Final Cut 4 opens with a default window layout we found to be quite practical. The timeline spans the bottom half of the screen, with the browser, viewer and canvas along the top. On closer inspection, you'll see some fairly significant changes to the Timeline's control iconography. Somewhat confusing at first, these open up some very useful options for monitoring and playback, particularly on the audio side. As you would expect from Apple, the interface elements of Final Cut, Soundtrack and LiveType are consistent in appearance and function.

The update features a very impressive, all-around performance boost. It's not only noticeable in rendering speeds and the increased number of real time effects, but in the responsiveness of the interface. According to Apple, the program loves dual-processor machines. Our test system, with a single, 1 GHz CPU, performed quite respectably. We could immediately see the impact of the all-new rendering engine. Using some of the new RT Extreme controls to reduce our playback quality, we were able to get a taste of some of the program's multi-stream, real time capabilities. If you have the processor power to support it, RT Extreme can handle nearly all of Final Cut's 200 effects, transitions and filters in real time. So, once again Final Cut is breaking new ground in the software-only editing market.

In terms of both performance and special effects, one of the most impressive enhancements is in the area of speed changes and time remapping. Time has become a relative concept in Final Cut 4. All speed changes are now real time effects and a new "dynamic trimming" tool will expand or contract a clip's time base to fit between an in- and out-point. For those of you experiencing Matrix-envy, FCP 4's time remapping can speed up and/or slow down or even reverse the movement of a clip from keyframe to keyframe. Thanks to Bezier curves, the changes can be as smooth or abrupt as you wish. (We can't help but wonder if this will make an appearance in iMovie as the "Wachowski Effect.")

One of the chronic complaints we've heard about earlier versions of Final Cut is that editors coming from different systems need to relearn their entire keyboard. This is hard enough to do once, but if you're a freelancer bouncing between Final Cut, Avid, and Media 100, it can be pretty aggravating. As is often the case, the Final Cut development team took something that was a weak point, and turned it into a strength. Final Cut 4 lets you remap a key or key-combination to any of the program's 600 commands. Going a step further, you have the ability to store layouts in files that can be transported between Final Cut systems, saved as printable text, or exported as a tab-delimited file to a spreadsheet to create your own quick-reference card.

Final Cut Pro's audio now supports up to 99 tracks with a much-enhanced onscreen mixer. Trying to do a real-time mix with a mouse has always been a challenge. It leaves you with zillions of keyframes that are nearly impossible to fine-tune later. Apple solved this problem with an optional mode called "keyframe thinning." It uses an algorithm that we found to be very intelligent to translate the level changes into a small handful of easily adjusted Bezier keyframes. The new timeline tools now let you quickly solo or mute a track.

The three new bundled applications could easily be the subjects of their own review. Soundtrack is the most fun (to a point approaching addictive). It is a remarkably intuitive system for building custom scores from layers of loops. The program's interface is, not coincidentally, very similar to Final Cut 4 and provides keyframe-based tools for editing and mixing. The program comes with a huge and well-indexed library and you can record your own loops, if you're so inclined. We'd like to have seen some more stings, hits and accents included, but we expect there will be a growing after-market to plug some of the library's holes.

Automatically adjusting tempo and key, Soundtrack does everything it can to musically idiot-proof the process. A menu option in Final Cut lets you export a sequence into Soundtrack is looking with your markers intact. On the flip side, Soundtrack will export your completed score back into your sequence. The program won't exactly turn a tin ear into a Hans Zimmer, but if you need a music track and a production library is out of your budget, this is a great solution.

LiveType performs a similar service for folks who can't afford an After Effects guru. It uses a new Apple animated font technology to assemble titles, backgrounds and textures. The library it includes is extensive enough to satisfy most needs, but good enough to add polish to a production. Like Soundtrack, a Final Cut menu command lets you export a clip as a temporary background in LiveType and import the finished product back in as an alpha-channel graphic.

Compressor is a new transcoding tool designed specifically for Final Cut Pro 4. You can export an unrendered project file directly to Compressor and it will spin it through any of a variety of audio and video codecs as a batch process. There are a variety of presets and a split-screen preview capability, but the program still requires some knowledge of codecs and compression.

Help and Documentation

Even journeyman editors need to look things up from time to time, and this is an area where Final Cut 4 has taken a couple of steps backwards. The three-volume manual now contains only one index (located in volume III). We found it a bit tiresome shuffling from book to book. The biggest mystery is Apple's decision to forego its standard online help in favor of an extensively hyperlinked PDF version of the manual. Gone is the ability to select from a list of possible answers with a smart search. You either go to the hypertext index or use the Acrobat Find command to sequentially sift through all the occurrences of your keyword or phrase in the 1,600-page document. Combined with the lack of an uninstaller, these issues are significant enough to give a five-star application a four-star rating.

Conclusion

In spite of the aforementioned drawbacks, Final Cut Pro 4 remains one of the most remarkable non-linear edit systems ever created. It is as intuitive as its remarkable power and flexibility can permit and it's constantly growing and improving in both features and design.

Final Cut Pro 4, Apple Computer. Full version: $999. Updates from Final Cut 1, 2, or 3: $399; from Final Cut Express: $699. > Minimum system requirements: Mac OS X v10.2.5, 350 Mhz G4 processor, QuickTime 6.1, 384 MB RAM (512 MB for Soundtrack and RT Extreme), 1 GB disk space for applications (14 GB additional space for Soundtrack and LiveType content), DVD drive required for installation