Exploring Creativity and Technology

I just completed this music video for the song New Day Way from my album, Find My Way, and I used Apple’s Final Cut Express 4 for editing, effects and compositing. Really awesome program. I actually have old versions of Adobe After Effects and Premiere, which I’m pretty adept at, however they were a bit glitchy at this point running on my new iMac. And I’ve wanted to learn Final Cut Pro for some time, but the pro version is just not affordable to me right now – and probably more than I require for my editing needs – so I picked up a $200 copy of the latest FCE. If you’re not looking to produce a broadcast TV show or feature film, than FCE may be a good choice for your mid-level video production.

I spent a few days studying the pdf manual and tooling around with some of the features before just diving in full bore to put together my video. For the most part, once I decoded what all of the buttons are, I really like the interface. Just seems easier to navigate than AfterEffects or Premiere. My favorite thing about FCE is that it effectively replaces both AE and Premiere, as you can composite endless layers and add a diverse range of effects, while simultaneously editing the entire project all in one program. No exporting clips to AE for effects and compositing, and then importing back into Premiere for the final editing and transitions, etc. Saves a lot of time and organizational effort.

Also, the real-time preview works really well, though I had to set it to the lowest quality in order to not get dropped frame errors during playback. Only in the most effects-heavy scenes did the preview stall out, and even then, I could at least view one frame at a time to get an idea of how it will look. It’s also great how FCE is a non-destructive editor, so your original clips are only referenced by the software and are never actually modified.

Pretty much any type of effect that you have in AE exists in similar fashion in FCE. Plus transitions such as those you have in Premiere. And you can add third-party stuff, too. One third party addition I’m considering is a DV chroma key enhancer, as the built-in chroma key doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to with DV format video. In my own video, I used a glow around myself anyway (kind of going for a cheesy 80s Xanadu look… just for fun), so that sort of hid the green key remnants around me, especially at the smaller web size video I outputted to. But in the future I may want a cleaner key, so I may drop the hundred bucks for the better DV keying. They say the chroma key works perfectly for higher-quality video, it’s just that consumer-level DV isn’t clean enough for a perfect key. There are a lot of nice matte effects – 4 point and 8 point garbage mattes – to hide extra junk that doesn’t get keyed out nicely.

As far as animation, I was going for a minimal, retro approach in my video, so all I basically did was move some center points around and keyframe them, and also playing with scale and rotation a bit. You can pretty much keyframe just about any property of any layer or effect. I didn’t get into using the pen tools too much for refining and smoothing the keyframes and motion paths, as I didn’t catch on to this until well into my editing (I wish the motion paths were more apparent in the initial Canvas view, as you have to click on a wireframe view to see them). But it’s good to know that FCE has most of the same capability as AE when it comes to spline-based motion and keyframe paths.

All in all, I was quite impressed with the high-quality effects, especially the lens flares, slit scan, and blurs. Lots of options for experimentation and precision. I had some trouble figuring out how to work the transitions – mainly because I probably should have produced some of my scenes as separate “sequences” and then added them to the final project, in order for the transition to work more smoothly. In my case I had many compositied layers in one overall sequence, and had to double-up on transitions on a couple occasions so that two layers would transition simultaneously.

Rendering final output did take some time, mainly when compressing into a smaller format for the web. I rendered to MPEG4 at 320×240 in order to upload to YouTube. After a few tests, I did some research and realized that I’d need to up the frame rate and keyframe amount, so I set it to 30 frames per second with a keyframe every 30 frames. This really increased the quality and lessened the amount of blurry artifacts. It did, however, take about 15 hours to render. In comparison, my final, uncompressed DV output only took about an hour. I guess the compression process really eats up cycles. Final DV suffered from some interlacing jaggies on the 2D animated artwork, so I wound up having to add some Gaussian blur to those layers. This helped out a lot, though it added another hour to render.

So I highly recommend Final Cut Express for those of you who need something a lot more capable than Apple’s iMovie, but without all of the bells and whistles of Final Cut Pro. Or just to wet your feet if you’re planning on eventually upgrading to the pro version.