MinistryMedia.org

Apple invited me to a preview and demo of Final Cut Server early in May at SMU.

Could the wizards of Apple come up with another magical tool to make all of our lives better? It seems as if they have tried.

Final Cut Server is Apple’s response to the industry’s cries over asset management. The press release given by apple was:

…powerful software solution for media asset management and workflow automation. A scaleable server application, Final Cut Server automatically catalogs large collections of assets, allows searching across multiple disks and SAN volumes, and enables viewing, annotation and approval of content from anywhere using a PC or Mac. “With the introduction of Final Cut Server, collaboration just got a whole lot easier for millions of editors, producers and clients who work with Final Cut Studio,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing

Anyone who works with multiple Final Cut projects deals with the management of assets. From offline files, to missing assets, red areas in your timeline - FCS tries to alleviate this by doing the work for you. It allows you to catalog and search your assets via meta data and drag resources from project to project. The interface is separate from Final Cut Studio (not really integrated) - which is a plus and a minus.

In a production workflow where number individuals might work on the same project,FCS tries to bridge the gap between editor, producer and reviewer through it’s online interface for reviewing, commenting and management.

The demo was performed at a distance. It was installed on a laptop and running on a machine that we couldn’t actually touch. The interface was shown to us on a project - we couldn’t login and play with it ourselves(like NAB - back when Apple did NAB). I don’t think that we would have actually wanted to touch it - since the Apple rep kept saying “that button is supposed to do this - but it keeps crashing on me”.

From a philosophical standpoint, it looks like a great idea. But as I look at the backend, it looks like iTunes/iPhoto library for my video assets. This isn’t a bad thing, unless you need to find the files by using finder. iTunes and iPhoto work because they use meta data. Meta data (descriptive information) is used to describe content. If I place a picture of a chicken in iPhoto - it doesn’t know it’s a picture of a chicken unless somewhere I have typed the name “chicken”. The same applied to assets in Final Cut Server. Unless someone painstakingly adds meta data descriptions to all of your assets - you will not have a clue which video is of a car and which video is of - my chicken.

Final Cut Server resolves this by its “Automatic Asset Cataloging”. This process is supposed to scour your server (or servers in our case) and import all assets that it finds. If a piece of media is associated with a final cut project and sequence - it is supposed to be able to import the meta data from your project files. All of those descriptions that you have placed on subclips and captures - will be added into your assets when they are imported into FCS. This sounds great!

The client (the application that you actually use on your computer) is built in java. It is cross-platform - so it runs on both Mac and PC. It supports drag and drop with asset and all of the index information is stored on the final cut server.

Cataloging - all assets - even files that it doesn’t understand - are supposed to be cataloged. One problem that we ran into during our demo was trying to get FCS to ackowledge non Final Cut Studio files. It will import them, but you can’t access them through the java client. We often master our audio in Apple Logic. This is one (of many) file formats that FCS does not regnize. It knows it is file - but doesn’t connect it with logic. Hence the problem - you often have to return to finder and find the files that you are working with. And if you have to spend so much time in finder - how is this helpful? We discovered during the demo that it wouldn’t recognize files from Logic, Photoshop, Apperature, After Effects and Shake. It knows they are files - but doesn’t associate it with the applications that use them. Thus - you must find those files in finder to actually work with them.

Also, if you move a file or rename it in finder or create a version2 - does this automagically show up in FCS? Or does it cause another level of “offline files”?

FCS does help with automation. You can setup watch folders like in Sorenson or Episode for encoding. Drop a file into a folder and it can automatically encode and FTP it to your server. The interface is another GUI for Automator or Applescript - but it is ran from the server level.

Some of the key features:

• Search all of your assets and projects - asset cataloging
• Project check/check out: - and moving a project off of the server to a laptop - then checking it back in to the server. (copies assets or proxies)
• Project review and approve: let a producer or client watch your project over the web and comment
• Automation: Watch for the presence of a file (watch folder) or watching the change of the meta data on a project. Once a file is moved into a watch folder, or the meta data is changed (meta data) it can fire off automated responses. (encode, status emails, move/copy assets, etc…

I know I don’t sound overly positive about it - but I was impressed. I think the transition to FCS for larger production teams - will be a painful learning curve. Would you want to drop your 20 Terabytes of assets into an application - let it rename, move and reorganize all of your files? I guess I’m gonna need that LTO backup sooner than later.

Final Cut Server looks like an early product - it looks like a beta release application. I might want to install it on a test server - maybe run a small project or two through it before I commit our entire post department to this beast.