The Final Cut Tipping Point

Edit Geek by Dylan Reeve

Ten years ago there were few options for professional non-linear editing. Avid had the lion’s share with their Media Composer and Film Composer products, and for the slightly lower budget there was Avid MCXpress (distinct from Xpress DV), then the rest of the market was split across products from Media 100, Sony and a few others. All were expensive, complicated and difficult to get.

Then Apple’s Final Cut Pro started to make a big impact – at first it was a DV-only system (capitalising on Apple’s new widespread use of Firewire on their computers) but with third party hardware it was soon quickly extended to support more I/O options and a greater number of formats. FCP’s low cost, high flexibility and agile adoption of new formats won it a lot of fans and it quickly surpassed other systems to make a big dent on Avid’s pro market. But has it done enough lately?

It’s impossible to deny that FCP is a solid product and has made massive leaps and bounds since it first entered the market – but is it keeping up? While FCP once had great support for file-based media (compared to clunky imports with Avid’s products) it is now nowhere near as versatile with the new file formats, requiring either long ‘Log and Transfer’ imports at the start, or forcing users to sit though heavy renders to play the timeline.

The most recent version of FCP added very little in the way of features or improvements, and with no sign of a new version on the horizon many FCP users are starting to look at other systems. Avid’s new version Media Composer offers a lot of features designed to appeal to Final Cut users but there’s another, possibly stronger, competitor too… read more...