Final Cut dominant among Oscar documentary nominees

I wouldn't laugh at the director of Pixar's Toy Story 3 editing on a laptop - with Avid MC :)

http://www.cultofmac.com/made-on-a-mac-toy-story-3/30330

Up was edited on MC, don't know if with a laptop or not.

Hi, I'm editing a feature length HD documentary destined for both theaters and NBC. Doing it in Final Cut Pro. The differences between Avid and FCP have nothing to do with picture quality, but features and workflow. Final Cut Pro can do something either of cheesy quality, or the highest quality HD possible. It depends on the hardware you hook up to it.

Here is a piece I cut for the NRDC last year, shot with the Red Camera and some great IMAX footage. Final Cut Pro was great with it. http://vimeo.com/9431503

Oh, and as far as narrative fiction films: The famous editor of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Walter Murch, cuts on Final Cut Pro. He used it for both Cold Mountain and Jarhead.

Editing is an iterative process, often done by several people at once (ingest, logging, selects, sub-assembly, etc.). It is quite possible, if not advantageous, to do it on laptops. In the final assembly and color correction, however, it's better to use full gear and a pro monitor. I use a MBP with 3 monitors, graphics tablet and several FW800 drives - no big deal.

I'd love to see FCP and Logic Studio get a UI overhaul. No need to replace buttons or confuse long time users with massive changes but some areas of these two apps are looking really long in the tooth.

I keep wondeing if Apple's waiting for a Cocoa rewrite to do this.

Why not, they already shot an entire music video using the iPhone 3GS: http://www.iphonealley.com/things-we-like/new-music-video-shot-entirely-on-iphone-3gs?

7 years ago our ad agency collaborated with a few other agencies that were using Final Cut. At the time we thought it was a cheaper/inferior product compared to the SD only resolution dependent Avid Symphony we paid $700 a day to use. Two years later Avid didn't really have any decent products for under 80k, so I took a chance and bought our first mac. We had been working with a symphony that was stuck on Windows 2k, couldn't connect to the internet, and was cranky as hell. Suddenly I was able to check email on the same machine we edited with - and it cost us less than $10k. Our income has quadrupled since switching. We're faster, more capable, and almost all of the agencies we work with are Final Cut now. The initial hurdle was finding experienced, talented editors. Avid editors were the last to switch because when you know a tool well, you don't always want to learn a new one. Now even the most entrenched Avid editors in the agency world have switched. The people who lost out are the ones who spent 80k on Avid systems that are almost worthless now. Avid may have the lock on film editing for now, but many of our television clients are giving up Avid for FCP, most notably abc network. It's only a matter of time before film editing gets eaten away by the FCP monster. As more and more film editors retire and more and more younger FCP trained editors replace them, it will become more apparent. Avid has been completely blindsighted in the last 5 years and is now a niche where it used to be a standard. Switching to mac/fcp was the most dramatic and fantastic change I could have ever made, and has paid off in spades.

More and more film schools are moving to FCP over the Avid. Soon an entire film generation will be use to to FCP over Avid's Media Composer. And its cheaper too.

some interesting reading here
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/in-action/archive.html

actually it probably was. remember they said documentaries. not the huge stuff like Avatar. which is probably a combo of various commercial editing, video graphics etc software and home grown stuff.

Docus tend to go for a more 'low budget' look and editing on a laptop fits with that.

You're postulating that Steve Jobs was at the Oscars to show his support to the 10 or so documentary filmmakers who use the software that Apple didn't even design, but actually bought from another company? You think he showed up partly to support the 2% of people there who use a piece of software that represents probably 3% of their revenues at most?

No, I don't think this gives us "an even clearer picture of Steve's motivation for showing up." Sorry.

He's there for Pixar, period. I can guarantee you Steve doesn't give a flip about Final Cut's 2% market share at the Oscars.

Pulling theories out of your butt doesn't make them true.