Apple's moviemaking revolution

Its cheap, fast Final Cut Pro software makes film editing affordable -- and threatens industry leader Avid.

By Damien Cave

Jun 5, 2001 | Charles Wachter spent last summer looking for one thing: the cheapest, quickest possible way to edit his fourth film. "Broken Ocean," a 10-minute short about a skeleton crew trapped on an abandoned oil rig in the North Atlantic, had already run over its $20,000 budget. Wachter's professors at New York University's graduate film school wanted a final version pronto, but Wachter couldn't get Adobe's Premiere editing software to stop adding white pixels to every scene. Even worse, he wasn't sure that borrowed footage of a French oil rig would mesh with the scenes he shot on 16 mm film in an old ship near Hudson Bay.

Desperate, he turned to his classmate, Savvas Paritsis, who agreed to help by cutting the film with Apple's Final Cut Pro. The program had only been out for a year, but it already had a reputation for being far more stable than Premiere and other PC-based systems. And unlike Avid, the gold standard of editing suites in cost and capability, Final Cut was cheap. Free, pirated versions could be found relatively easily online, while with student discounts, the program could be bought for about $250. That's one-seventh the price of Avid's low-end XPress DV and about 300 times cheaper than a standard Hollywood workstation like Media Composer, which retails for about $80,000 and combines hardware and software in a single unit. "I believe that Final Cut is going to rival Avid in a serious way in the next 10 years," says Wachter. "It has everything that's needed to slay the giant: cheapness, affordability and power."

Apple vs. Avid: The battle lines for the future of digital film editing have been drawn. Hollywood, a town not known for its geek quotient, now finds itself in the throes of a passionate technology debate, a discussion about interface design, processing speed, price points and upgrade flexibility. For now, Apple seems to have the low-end momentum while Avid, which pioneered nonlinear, cut-and-paste editing more than a decade ago, maintains a loyal following among high-end commercial and feature film editors, who say that it does a better job than Final Cut with raw film and with file storage.

But it's not just market share that matters. With its laptop-ready software, low prices and fervent following, Final Cut Pro has reignited the dream of filmmaking for the masses. First, digital video and inexpensive cameras made it possible to shoot a professional feature for a fraction of what Hollywood considers standard operating procedure. Then the Internet made distribution easier than ever, and now, many Final Cut fans are saying that Apple has upended the film's final high-cost component: editing.

"One person can take a show from idea to shoot, to cutting, to color-correcting, all the way through production," says Evan Shechtman, president of Outpost Digital, a post-production house that beta-tested Final Cut and now uses it to edit several projects, including "The Life," a 32-episode series for ESPN. "You don't have to be a super-editing scientist to complete a feature."

"Cheap editing is key for young filmmakers," says Wachter. "Broken Ocean" will be completed within weeks and "if it weren't for Savvas' [Apple] G4 and Final Cut, there is no way I could have pulled off a movie set in the North Atlantic, but shot on the Hudson," he says. "Final Cut is the last component needed to fully democratize film."

Next Page: "It's helped us bring new talent along"

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