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FINAL CUT Pro 5 is not a monumental upgrade, but its biggest additions—multi-camera editing, support for HDV and other new formats and good integration with the Final Cut Studio suite—make it worth considering for many Final Cut Pro veterans. The update also distances the Pro version from Final Cut Express HD, whose users may see FCP5's detailed keyframing and video capture support as reasons to upgrade. FCP5 is a powerful editor that's also included in the Final Cut Studio bundle ($1,300; www.apple.com/finalcutstudio), along with Apple's impressive Motion 2 motion graphics program, Soundtrack Pro audio editor and DVD Studio Pro 4. If you use only a few features from each of those applications, we think the value, as well as the integration with FCP5 make the bundle worth the considerable investment.
After orienting ourselves with a well-produced DVD tutorial and the extensive printed documentation, we began making videos by importing footage over FireWire. FCP5's batch capture interface logged each clip on a tape and transferred them all to the Mac in one swoop; Final Cut Express only lets you log one clip at a time. Also, FCP5 let us import and work with a variety of formats; several new advanced high-definition formats are supported in addition to the touted HDV.
You can edit the HDV format natively, which has about four times the resolution of DV; Final Cut Express HD and other editors, such as iMovie HD, typically reformat HDV to an intermediate codec for editing and then export HDV at the end. This means that you can marginally lose some image quality in that conversion; plus, it's a slightly more complicated process. This may be enough reason already for people with HDV cameras to choose FCP5 over Final Cut Express HD.
The editing interface worked well, although complicated HDV sequences can slow down even a high-end G5 unless fully rendered. We delighted in FCP5's intuitive editing style that let us mark in- and out-points of a clip and drag it to the Timeline or Canvas to make an edit. We were generally pleased with the real-time effects, which didn't require any rendering, although we occasionally reached points where we had too many layers and effects, causing playback to stutter. When this happened, FCP5 could scale back the preview quality, frame rate or both, so we still had an approximate idea of how the video looked without having to wait for a full render.
FCP5's other main addition is multi-camera editing (multicam). While you can't switch live video inputs from multiple sources as with a live TV studio, this simulates that process by showing a window with up to 128 captured clips running together. We synced several video streams by timecode and date information; in other cases we simply synced the beginning of the clips. Once aligned, we could play them all and switch between them with mouse clicks. Then we went back to the Timeline to make fine edits from this rough cut.
The Final Cut Studio bundle includes additional effects and compositing, DVD production tools, and audio effects and mixing. While FCP5's video effects and audio production should be strong enough for many users, we were impressed with the quality and integration of the Studio bundle applications. For example, when we control-clicked a video clip to open the shot in Motion 2 and create an effect, FCP5 automatically updated the sequence when we altered the Motion 2 version. Soundtrack Pro works the same way for single audio track alterations, although it has to mix down multitrack editing to export back into FCP5.
Final Cut Pro 5 may not be a vital update for people who don't need high-definition or multicam editing. However, its robust footage capture process may be reason enough to upgrade from Final Cut Express. The extra power and integration of the Studio applications for a fractional increase in price is also a great reason for Final Cut users to upgrade to that bundle.
–ZACK STERN
Final Cut Pro 5: 
Apple | www.apple.com | 800-692-7735 | $1,000; $400 upgrade from Final Cut Pro; $700 upgrade from Final Cut Express
Pros: Native HDV and advanced codec support, multicam editing, integration with Final Cut Studio apps, strong capture tool.
Cons: Takes as much Mac power as you can throw at it.
Requires: OS 10.3.9 or higher, G4 500MHz or faster (1GHz or faster for HDV), Quartz Extreme graphics card, 512MB RAM (1GB RAM for HDV), 13GB disk space for full installation
macHOME recommends: Dual 2GHz G5, 1.5GB RAM, a large hard drive
Issue reviewed: September 2005
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