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 Final Cut Server:

Imagining the Possibilities

Jason Osder

Jason is the author of Final Cut Pro Workflows (9780240810058, $29.95)

As a Final Cut Pro teacher and instructional author who specializes in issues of workflow, organization, and media management, I’ve been excited about Final Cut Server for a while. Now that I’ve had a chance to tour the software, my first impression is that it represents something huge but so far we have only seen a fraction of it’s potential.

So first, what does Final Cut Server do? Why it is so important? The functionality of the software can be broken down into six main areas:

1. Media Asset Cataloguing: classification of project assets, automatic creation of proxies and thumbnails, control of access to assets, previewing of assets, and sophisticated metadata control

2. Searching and Organization: rapid search of large collections of assets, retrieval of files, and virtual “productions” to group and organize assets

3. Workflow Automation: easy automation of common tasks and customization of processes for your project or shop

4. Collaboration: version management, review and approval, check in/check out of files, and automated notifications

5. Delivery: batch processing of compression and transcoding, distributed encoding, and file-based electronic delivery

6. Configurability: scalable server software, cross platform client software, and customizable automations, metadata, and administrative tools

Out of the box, Final Cut Server is a powerful collection of tools. The release of this software by Apple provides many useful features, as well as several sample configurations that suggest ways to implement the software.

This alone gives us a tantalizing glimpse at the future of postproduction, but Final Cut Server is undoubtedly going to grow and morph as new implementations are designed and more third-party plug-ins are invented for its extensible architecture. It is with these future customizations and extensions that the full potential for the software as well as decentralized postproduction workflows in general will be realized.

Ultimately, I see this shift as potentially as large as the change from linear to non-linear (at least for larger projects and organizations) but there is a chicken-and-egg problem for this change to really take root. Because Final Cut Server is so customizable, so powerful, and so new, it is going to take some time for postproduction professionals to learn enough to imagine what is possible, create those implementations, and then continue to iterate the solutions for improvement.

It is in this vein that I have taken my first forays into the software as impetus for designing a grand project and imagining from my own perspective what could be possible with Final Cut Server.

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When I’m not writing about or teaching Final Cut Pro, I like to make documentaries. For the last several years, I have been working on one about a violent incident that happened in 1985. These were the early days of round-the-clock news coverage and several stations covered the events live for the better part of the day. After the incident, there were three weeks of televised hearings, and there are countless other sources of photographs and video assets that flesh out the history and aftermath of the event. In some ways, this kind of audio-visual archive is a documentary filmmaker’s dream, but it is also an organizational nightmare.

Enter Final Cut Server. One way to think about the software is as an additional layer of metadata that supports the searching, tracking, and organization of assets in new and versatile ways. Information (such as originating format, copyright holder, and locations of physical asset) that is not necessarily important to the editorial process can be stored in the Final Cut Server metadata in order to facilitate the research and logistics of the entire process.

If you know anything about FCS, this comes as no shock, and doesn’t even really count as imagining something new. This sort of organization of a larger project with a lot of assets (as well as high-volume shops like news stations) is what the software is designed for. Besides the organization of assets, my film (like many historical docs) has another challenge. We comb through these hours (in fact days) of footage to understand the events and cut our film – but so much gets left out! This is a necessity for filmmakers. We make choices. Some details make the cut, but a ton of good stuff gets left on the cutting room floor.

The goal is to make a film, so these are necessary sacrifices, but what of all that material that has been meticulously archived and organized? Surely there will be some viewers of the film (especially one with tons of characters, subplots and details) who would like to learn more. The highly organized archive of media that we need to create anyway to cut the film would be a great way for these motivated viewers to dig deeper, if we could make it accessible for them.

A common solution to this problem is to create ancillary products to accompany the film. This may be a book, DVD(s) with additional features, and almost always an extensive website. All of these are good ideas for this film, and all of them could be facilitated through Final Cut Server. None of them, however, can contain the full depth of material that will be digitized and organized in the process of making the film.

To access this deep archive, I imagine a kiosk-based system located in a library or museum. (There are other physical forms that the project could take, but at them moment, a museum-style kiosk is the one that will make the idea most readily imaginable.) I imagine the kiosk containing all of the media that we catalogued and digitized to make the film, much like the browser of the FCP project where we actually edit it.

Users could search by name or date or keyword, and create custom Boolean searches. Each piece of media wouldbe available at full quality. So a photo that appeared for a few seconds on screen in the film (or a photo that did not make the cut) would be available in high resolution, and with a (virtual) magnifying tool a user could comb over every minute detail. Perhaps the kiosk would even have a feature for users to cut their own version of a scene – a great way to illustrate the power of the editorial hand.

I imagine using Final Cut Server to devise organizational schema that will support this project through its entire lifecycle when viewed with the widest possible lens. The starting point is the archival research and digitization of the footage. (We will be digitizing magnetic tapes that contain a visual record of a tragic incident and are deteriorating. Regardless of the likelihood of using any particular clip in the film, we intend to digitize everything we can at the highest possible resolution for the purpose of preservation.) In this formulation, the creation of the film actually comes in the middle of the process. Final Cut Server also will also facilitate the creation of all of the ancillary products, including the envisioned media archive kiosk.

Final Cut Server (once configured for this purpose) is completely capable of tracking the vital information around each media asset through its whole journey: from it’s discovery on a tape in the basement of a university library, through the editorial and finishing processes of a film, to editing and reproduction as part of various ancillary media products, and finally to the deep-dive experience of the museum-style kiosk.

Two less-often noted aspects of the software make me confident that FCS is the tool for this grand integration: it’s capacity to handle all files types and it’s XML framework. The first feature is pretty straightforward: FCS can easily handle non-Final Cut Studio and media files. Production documents like scripts, schedules and budgets can be tracked and versioned. So can documents with text and other elements that will be needed for developing the ancillary products.

If you are not familiar with XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language), then the power of this feature may not be apparent. XML is designed to be a way of formatting data so that it can be extended to other platforms. So, even if we don’t know totally exactly what platform would power our future kiosk-based archive, we can be confident that FCS’s XML data will be usable there.

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There is no question that Final Cut Server is a powerful piece of software with a ton of potential. With its release, Apple has put the ball firmly in the court of creative professional that strive to invent new media experiences and production workflows. Sure, FCS can be a benefit to managing a news station, an ad agency, or the production of a historical documentary. A more interesting question is: what else can it do? What is the real potential of the intersection of data processing and digital media? How can Final Cut Server lead to new ways of thinking about media production and consumption? What can we make with this tool that can help communicate and understand the world in deeper and more meaningful ways?

Jason Osder is Assistant Professor of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. He is partners with Robbie Carman in Amigo Media, a consulting and postproduction firm with the motto “Relate, Educate, Create.” Jason and Robbie also co-wrote Final Cut Pro Workflows: The Independent Studio Handbook, available through Focal Press. The working title of Jason’s film has the working title “Let the Fire Burn” and he expects to complete the film in 2010.

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