(fast upbeat band music) (audience applause) - Hello, hello. First of all, before I
get goin' I just wanna say thank you to Patrick
Southern and the gang at LumaForge for inviting me out here. It's really, it's really good to be here. I promised myself I'd never
come back to Las Vegas, and the fact that I'm
standing here right now is a testament to how
excited I am by a lot of the thinking coming out of this community. There are few things
that could get me here. I don't really have a demo
to show you exactly today. I just was gonna talk a
little about Final Cut Pro X and why I think it's
important, in my view, and where it kinda currently fits or doesn't into Hollywood cutting rooms, and specifically scripted TV dramas, which is the world that I work in. These are some of the credits. Just a disclaimer for
the sake of this talk. When I say editors I'm gonna
mean my immediate peers. There are lot of different
editors out there, but I'm gonna be talking
about people who worked in scripted TV series or features produced by studios in the United States, because that does make a difference. I think Final Cut's a little more widely used outside of this country. I'm not a Hollywood heavyweight, right? I'm a long, long way from a Walter Murch. But I am a working TV editor, and there are painfully
few of us out there who seem interested in exploring and advocating for new tools like Final Cut. And I would love to see that change, both for selfish reasons and also because I genuinely think Final
Cut is a unique tool that has a lot to offer,
but, unfortunately, despite a few exceptions,
Hollywood's view of Final Cut is more or less frozen in time. Specifically, I would
say it is stuck somewhere around April 12th, 2011, which
is when I think it came out. That's kinda where my peers see it. For a variety of reasons, they remain largely apathetic to it. Because I work in the Hollywood system, that means I use Avid
Media Composer primarily. It is the unquestioned king there, as most of you probably know. If another platform's gonna
come along and make a play for editors' attention in Hollywood,
Avid's the one to beat. I think it's important
to acknowledge that Avid holds this king title for a
variety of very good reasons. I think a lot of people
in the Final Cut community might sort of look at Avid
as an archaic player in the NLE game these days, and
there's some truth there, but the fact remains it's
an insanely capable system. The argument for its
continued dominance in Hollywood is a really good one. I just think it's an
argument that is important to challenge and one that I
think is beginning to erode. Despite the welcome
announcements and developments that Avid continues to
make, I'm just not convinced it's actually gonna turn out to be a platform built for the future. Anyone remember this one? I saw it in the theater
and it was the first one cut on Avid, I think, and
if we think about where technology was at in 1993,
that's the near Apple shipped its first Newton
and the PowerBook Duo was kinda the height
of portable computing. And just to stick the knife in and twist it a little further, for
any 40-somethings out there, that is also the year
Ariana Grande was born. Found that out through my Googling. At it's core, Avid hasn't really changed. To say it hasn't evolved
and totally improved over the years, that's not remotely true, 'cause it has quite a bit. It's just that the underlying metaphor for its use remains the same. This is something that
could be said for all the other NLEs out there these days. All of them, of course, except one. Final Cut just kinda has
rethought the problem. (audience laughter) And so, as a creative professional, I want the tools I use to
improve beyond incremental little tweaks to a long-existing tool set. I think after 25 years, we're
due to rethink our metaphors. And Apple is seemingly
the only company with the resources or the
willingness to do that. Now most of my peers are
perfectly happy with Avid. They're really fast on it. We've worked on it for decades and we know what to do with it. We don't have to think about it. And critically, we know
it's a system that isn't gonna buckle under the demands
we'll be putting on it. So, why the hell am I talking about metaphors and why would an editor be interested in using any other tool? It's not fun learning new
software lots of times, and moreover, we don't have the time. Or at least we feel we don't. I love this quote, just read it yesterday in an Art of the Cut episode. Benjamin Mercer is a
feature editor in Europe who just cut a huge film in Finland, in case you haven't read about it already. So the short answer to
the question of why, is that working in Final Cut's faster. And that's a common enough refrain that you hear from a lot of people, but to really understand what makes it faster and why I think that's important, we kinda have to think about what editors do in the first place. Then kinda look at what Final
Cut is doing in that space. I think it's really
interesting, because I don't think faster is always
about hitting deadlines or going home earlier,
nice as that can be. I think more importantly
it can positively affect the process of creating in and of itself. As editors, we're storytellers, but we typically aren't
telling our own stories, and in the end we're
facilitating and helping someone else's ideas come to fruition. We're like sorta the mediums
between a creative idea and the materialization
of that idea on screen. It has to travel this distance
from wherever it originates, be the show runner or
whoever, through your brain, through your NLE, before it
becomes something tangible. Anything that can tighten this distance, even a little, I think is to be embraced. This principle isn't new, right? It's probably been in
play ever since people have been collaborating with each other, because the majority of
this process, of course, has nothing to do with
the software we use. A good editor is hired
precisely because as a personality they're able to
already minimize this gap. They can understand their
collaborators' intent. They can understand the intent of the material and of the story. They can translate those ideas into effective moments on the screen. So a good editor can
demonstrate their value regardless of what they're cutting on, but the tools they use
do matter, I would argue. And they do have a degree of influence on this translation
process, and if they didn't, we'd probably still be cutting
with scissors and tape. Imagine if it were
possible to edit an episode of TV or a feature film with no consideration for technical questions. No need to consider how
to make something happen in the timeline, all you
had to do is just answer the creative questions of
what do we see and hear, and when do we see and hear it. I think that NLE would be fairly amazing, and at that point, I'm
not sure anyone would be particularly concerned whether or not it had tracks or dynamic trimming, although, I wouldn't
mind dynamic trimming. I'm not suggesting that Final Cut is this fantasy edit system,
'cause it totally isn't. It has its own host of issues. But it is interesting to
know what Apple's up to here. They seem to be focusing
on democratizing and simplifying the editing process. And I gotta say, I think that's great. I think accessibility and
simplification is exciting. I mean, yes, I want the
creative control and organization that a complicated
app typically suggests, but at the same time, I
long for the simplicity of a single reel of film spliced together. And that right there is where my interest in Final Cut really enters the picture, because it's the thing
that can cozy up the closest to that fantasy, in my opinion. I think this mindset
of simplification while simultaneously amplifying
creative control is the future. I think it's the reason
Apple remains a relevant player in this space
and also why a company like LumaForge is of interest to me. So if this is what Final Cut Pro X is up to, I'd kinda flip that question
of why around and ask, why would an editor not be at least interested in this tool? But that's me. And in the end, ideally,
the tools an editor uses should come down to personal
preference whenever possible. I have zero interest in trying to force anyone to use a tool
that they don't want to. The relationship between
an artist and their tool is a personal preference,
it's a personal thing, but I do think we would do
well to be more open-minded. I'd probably say that if we were to cull potential Final Cut users
from the Avid user herd, we probably could do worse than to find a marker like Avid's Smart Tool, I think would probably be
the marker I'd look for. Because if you are an
Avid user and you like the Smart Tool, it means
that you are looking for quick and direct manipulation of your footage in the timelane. This is an area where
Final Cut really excels. Every other NLE has this kind of a thing, but for a long time Avid
didn't really work this way. When they did introduce this tool, partly in response to Final Cut 7's popularity awhile back, it came along, it was actually pretty divisive. There are a group of editors out there who just don't think this way, and so it's probably never
gonna appeal to them. So if you're an Avid user and you, anything I've said so far
has got you mildly curious, be warned, there's a solid
chance you'll initially think this application was
spawned by Satan himself, (audience laughter) and just there to drive you into madness. (audience laughter) It's a common experience that often gets mentioned among Final Cut users. You're gonna feel like
a professional athlete who's suddenly and tragically
been hit by a bus and become a quadriplegic, because
you can't do a damn thing that you used to always be really good at. And that's frustrating. I know it was for me. It's simply a different
way of thinking about things and the mechanics of editing. Be persistent, be patient, and yield, kinda, to the way the app is trying to get you to think different. I think it will have a lot to offer. Real quick here I'll
just say, there are ways, potentially, of exploring
Final Cut in an Avid workflow. If you're interested in
trying to learn the app or whatever and are
looking for opportunities to do that, I have a couple ideas. One would be try using it for recaps. I did on the first season of Counterpart, and I felt like it was great. It's the perfect tool to
do this because of the way in which it, you can work
with very long clips, so you can bring in your
finished locked shows. You can tag them up based
on character or story beats. And as you get deeper
into your episode count, and you're having to do your
recaps for the later shows, and you have all this
material to go through, you can cull through it very quickly, and you can find the portions of the story that you're looking for very fast. Not only that, it's very
quick to be rearranging them. Typically, studio notes
and whatever are a matter of adding things without adding length, or rearranging the pieces
that are already there. There's not an easier app
to do it in than this, even when I have to factor
in overcutting it in Avid after the fact, I believe
I still come out ahead. And a little known fact
that not everybody knows, I don't think, at least
it doesn't seem like it, is you can work with Avid
MXF Media in Final Cut. You import it, you can sync
it up to your production, audio with Sync-N-link or whatever, and you can start building a library, and you can begin working with
material that's Avid-based. Not only that, but there's
a way of using a free version of Resolve to round trip it, so you can bring it back
into Avid and you can actually relink back up to
your Avid clips in your bins, and get your picture cut back in to Avid. It's my hope to perhaps
experience with this a bit more on an episode of Counterpart this season. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, I think it's an exciting thing and it might be a way for Final Cut to sort of wiggle its way into Avid world. Another use I found is
for dialogue cheats. You found that perfect read,
but it doesn't quite fit. Final Cut's a great
option, it's the best tool I've found to time stretch audio. I'll constantly bring
dialogue cheats into Final Cut and then spit 'em back out
and put 'em in my Avid. It's a great way to
avoid having every other person who sees the cut go out
say, hey, that looks rubbery. I'm like, yes, I know, the sound guys are gonna fix it later. Well, hopefully that kinda
goes away with tools like this. It's very fast, it's very intuitive. I've been working on
Avid since 1997 and never have I figured out how to time stretch a damn thing in that application (laughs). (audience laughter) It's the most unintuitive
thing, I can't use it. Another great thing is,
I'm not the only one to talk about this, I stole
this from somebody else. One of the other Final Cut masters in this room, maybe, I don't know. Browsing music and sound effects. I just keep it open and
I bring all my sound effects and music in there
and it's great because it provides a visual means
of looking for things. It negates the repetitive
business of double-clicking, loading into the source, playing it, flipping over to your source, timeline, looking for the wave forms. I can see all of my library. I have a huge overview,
and with the skimmer I can just go right over stuff
and very quickly find the things that, the
cues that I might want. Then finally, I would say
needle drop auditions. Needle drops have a tendency
to change frequently. People are always saying,
what about this song? Oh, what about this song? We can't get the rights to this one. Okay, here's an alternate. If you're dealing with
a music cue in your show that might have a lot
of complicated mixing or EQs between diegetic and
nondiegetic sounds, say, between like in a bar,
out of a bar, whatever, Final Cut's Compound Clips
are your friend because they can save you the
time of having to redo all of that work when
you swap out a new cue. And I can tell you that this
literally saved me hours, that's not an exaggeration, hours of work on an episode last season. So anyway, my enthusiasm for
Final Cut, it doesn't stem from cultish loyalty to
some giant tech company. It's because I believe
it's currently the most forward-looking NLE on the market. If we as an industry continue
to sort of thoughtlessly dismiss bold moves like
this by products like Final Cut Pro X, I fear we're
always gonna be the last to have the tools that
significantly move us forward and make our jobs easier, more
fun, and remove old barriers. Regardless of your interest
level in Final Cut, I believe we're probably
coming into a time as professional editors where
we'll be increasingly asked and expected to be at ease with a variety of different software. It's not always gonna be this one tool. I think a lot of the old
infrastructure surrounding post-production is gonna
continue to collapse and change, putting more
creative control and responsibility for the end
product in our cutting rooms. We'll do well to stay loose
in the knees, I would say. In the future, I think,
this is gonna be a big part of what being a professional means. Thank you very much. (audience cheering and applause) (upbeat band music)
