The next Final Cut Pro

A number of people have been posting/tweeting rumors about when the next version of Apple's Final Cut Studio will come out, but there's been little talk about what will actually be in it. Will it be a major upgrade or just enough of a change to warrant a whole new version number?

Scott Simmons wrote up some of the things he'd like to see addressed, and a couple of them are my major hopes. Simply FCP should NOT open the previous project, at least not in a multi-user, multi-edit suite environment like a post house. If Apple truly thinks its product is making major penetration in to post houses across this country, and is NOT simply being used by one editor/producer on one long project, then they need to get serious about the way its software handles projects and users settings.

A Project and User Prompt

Yeah, like Avid, but who cares? There should be two modes you could put FCP in to and this can be asked when you install the product for the first time. You could edit in the traditional FCP way which would be to always load the previously opened project and the previously used user settings. However, we should have the option of a "post house" style with a window prompt asking us which project we want to open and which user settings. I have clients where one machine might have two editors working on it on the same day. And three different projects might be worked on. It would be nice to know from the start which project you're opening and who's settings are going to be loaded. And about the user settings - they should be consolidated under one global user setting name. Give us more things to tweak and all of those things that are listed under the User Preferences menu item? That's absolutely silly to call it that if one user can change something deep down inside that menu structure and it affects EVERY user who comes after him. Make those settings customizable to a particular user's name. So when I select my project and my name at the beginning, then I'll record EVERY keyframe when I ride the audio mixers. You might not want to do that, so you change that under your user setting name and you'll know from the start what FCP's behavior will be.

Capture/Render Scratch Settings

Another pet peeve of mine that FCP does is how it treats capture scratch settings (where you digitize and render to) as a global setting and not something that's a project-level setting. I think it should be the latter. Apple gives us editors a lot of rope to hang ourselves, especially in multi-user and/or multi-project environments. For example: have you ever worked on multiple projects in one day? Do each of those projects live on separate drives? So do you remember to change the capture scratch EVERY time you open a different project? Or when you take a seat for the first time in a few days at a busy edit suite, do you always remember to check the capture scratch settings before you proceed? If you do, you're awesome. I bet most of us forget every now and then and sometimes this can be a critical mistake. Like what if the producer wants to view a project you've been working on in another room. They load that partition, open the project and there's media and/or render files missing. D'oh!

Apple could cure us of some of these ills by simply making the capture scratch a setting for that project. So when you open that project, FCP will automatically make the appropriate partition set as the capture scratch. If for some reason that partition is not mounted on the desktop, you'll get a warning prompt to do so. Easy right? Maybe there's an obvious reason why Apple shouldn't do this, but it seems to make sense to me.

I can think of further things that would help with media management, like having the ability to import music/graphic files/photos from within FCP, and FCP knowing what to do with the files. For example: you load a music CD, import some tracks and FCP automatically saves it to a MUSIC folder on the appropriate scratch disk, imports the music to the drive as 48K AIFF AND imports those tracks in to your project.

We'll see what the next version holds, but I'm hoping it's something like the above.