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February 29
Final Cut Pro 6

I've dropped hints in a few places about this, but I have been getting back into video. The main reason is that I've been starting to do some stuff with my YouTube channel. As of right now, most of the video I'm working with is screencasts, which I'm recording on my Mac because it's easy and free.

I did the first of my "Let's Play SharePoint 2013 Installation" videos in the current version of iMovie. I'm editing them on my Mac because I recorded them there, and I don't presently have any video editing software installed on any of my Windows systems. I'd been presuming that it would be a pretty simple matter of dropping the videos in order on a timeline, perhaps chopping out irrelevant bits, and so on.

Unfortunately, iMovie has big performance problems. It's probably related to storing the iMovie library in an encrypted DMG file on an external drive connected to a USB 2.0 port, which didn't occur to me at the time. The other big problem was that my videos are at 1440x900 resolution, and iMovie chopped off the bottom and top and then scaled it down to fit in a 1366x768 frame.

And so I decided to investigate something I've had on hand for a long time. A few years ago, I picked up a boxed copy of Final Cut Studio 2. At the time, I had just gotten my Mac mini, but FCS was already really old and had been reported to work poorly on Mac OS X 10.7, so I never tried it. I also rarely have an optical drive connected to the Mac, and over the years, I never figured that it might actually work well.

I finally got around to imaging the disks, with an eye toward building a task-specific retro Hackintosh running Mac OS X 10.6. As I prepared for that, I ended up mounting the disk images on my Mac mini and looking at the installer. Just for fun, I tried to install it, and lo and behold, it works perfectly. I've found only one thing that's problematic in any way at all, which is that the percentage counter on progress bars visually glitches, stacking each number on top of the other, instead of changing the displayed number.

This is really impressive, because Final Cut Studio 2 (Featuring Final Cut Pro 6) was new in 2007 and required Mac OS X 10.3 or 10.4. It runs on many PowerPC G4 systems that were modern in 2005. And here I am using it on hardware from 2011 and the operating system version from 2015.

Editing in Final Cut Pro 6 is basically the same as it has ever been. You import clips, in this particular case I'm just grabbing a folder full of them off my hard disk, trim them or make sub-clips as necessary, drop them on the timeline along with titles and any appropriate music, and then render and export. I don't want to trivialize the process, but it's honestly really easy for me. I'm not an advanced editor by any means, but I learned video content using training books for Final Cut Pro 2 and 3 back in the time before I had access to iMovie, and at that point I was importing DV tapes from the family DV camcorder.

Final Cut Pro is so obviously meant for tape-centric workflow. Everything is referenced in terms of SMPTE timecode, and the whole program is set up not to need to render DV or HDV, which can cause problems if your source material is h.264 out of a modern camcorder or screencasts.

What this means for me is that, at least with settings I've discovered, nothing happens in real-time. It's not a very big deal because the process is so easy to approximate and because of what I'm editing, usually a pretty rough cut is fine. I've been relearning techniques like markers to make placing things like title cards, overlays, and sound easier. This is important because rendering a whole 30-90 minute video with a few different things going on appears to take anywhere from six to twelve hours.

And perhaps that's the real trouble. It's not like back on my blue-and-white Power Macintosh G3 where rendering a title onto DV video just takes a few minutes. For whatever reason, rendering video on this is really slow. I suspect that two things are behind this in one way or another. The first is that I'm cutting on highly compressed, key-framed formats like h.264. I'd reduce my CPU usage a lot if I could transcode those into something easier like ProRes, Apple Intermediate Codec, or even Motion JPEG. The other probable contributor to this is that My Mac mini is the 2011 model with USB 2.0 ports.

I can easily either get a Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 adapter, pick up a Thunderbolt disk or switch over to using TECT as my editing disk (which Final Cut, but not Lightroom/Aperture/Photos, will support), but the other question is whether or not converting my source material ahead of time will have an appreciable positive impact on editing, rendering, or exporting speed, especially given that I'll need to convert back into a streamable compressed format so I can then upload to YouTube.

I might eventually start looking at the rest of the suite. I have access to SoundTrack Pro, Motion, Color, DVD Studio Pro, and about a hundred gigs of content for those apps. I don't specifically need any of them (except perhaps Motion if I wanted to build crazy title sequences) for the work I'm doing. It may be nice to build a backing track or some sort of sonic introduction. I would like to have a better title sequence, but I think the real focus I need to work on is better editing and perhaps starting/stopping the recording at better intervals.

I'll keep playing with it, but with everything as I have it set up right now, the actual editing goes faster and I can just render overnight. Final Cut Pro's default handling of oddly proportioned media is better for my needs and I end up exporting a 1080p video with 1440x900 footage that has been scaled up.

Eventually I will start to capture video at a better resolution, but I'd like not to switch down to 1366x768, as that makes managing the virtual machines really painful, and the whole point of the screencasts is that I am managing virtual machines.

I'll be looking into the render performance problem. I don't know if it's just because the hardware is so different from what was available in 2007, or if there really is a bottleneck. Unfortunately, I'm not easily able to discover bottlenecks in Mac OS X, because it doesn't measure or show the performance and i/o rate on external disks.

I would be interested in how Final Cut performs on better hardware than what I've got. It would be particularly interesting to see how the other components in the suite, many of which require a discrete GPU, work on the HD3000 or something new like IRIS Pro P6200 in the 4k iMacs. If I continue doing a lot of stuff with video, I may go ahead and put a newer Mac of some sort on the computing priority list. I'll have to look around and see if Final Cut Pro 6 works well on that hardware.

Eventually, I'd like to try Final Cut Pro X. I suspect that it works better with both Apple's current hardware and newer releases of Mac OS X. It should still work well with how I want to edit, and if I had to guess, it will work a lot better with the files I'm using, and may even (without needing to get more hardware for the mini) resolve some of the problems related to the slow USB 2.0 disk I am using. The USB 2.0 thing is especially mystifying because I don't remember it being a problem with my old iMac, but that is probably because I was editing standard definition stuff, and once converted to Final Cut 6's preferred formats, high definition video is just going to need more throughput than USB 2.0 has.

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