Editing on FCPX with George Abbott Clark
Manhattan Edit Workshop, Interview, Apple By Elizabeth Belsky
George Abbott Clark knows that Final Cut Pro X has a cloudy reputation in the editing business. “When it first came out, it was a nightmare,” he says on a phone call from Los Angeles. “But the new updates are remarkable. It’s like power steering - you would never go back to making it more complicated and cumbersome.”
In editing the feature film Jim Shoe, from writer-director Pete Sutton, Clark faced pushback from post-production and industry peers in his choice to cut in FCPX. Amid a series of major studio releases also cut with the controversial program — Focus and Whiskey Foxtrot Tango among them — Clark remains steadfast in his adherence to FCPX, citing the ease of working with the system.
“[FCPX] has a rep for being simplified and dumbed-down,” Clark says. “But it’s not. It’s sophisticated, and advanced. There’s a misconception in the community.”
In the transition from FCP7 to X, Clark knew the new program was being built on a 64-bit platform from the ground up, making it much more stable than 32-bit based FCP7. While 7 was known for being unstable and prone to crashing with larger projects, he says that X nearly never crashes, even while editing natively in
4K. “You still must use proxy files for multi-cam, even with my high-end Mac Pro,” he says. “Time lapse can drop frames in 4k. But not if you use .MOV files and avoid Apple Pro Res 422 ‘optimized’ files on import.”
It’s worth pointing out that Clark is no stranger to doing things the hard way. His goal was to become an anthropologist in order to become a filmmaker. As a bio-archaeologist, as well as bio-cultural developmental and evolutionary anthropologist, he earned a PhD at UMASS, Amherst. He was invited to do his predoctoral research at Yale Medical School.
Clark discovered a revolutionary, and crucial, biological link between poor early growth and adult lifespan in the immune and neural systems. It helps explain why people age at different rates. He received a Smithsonian Institute Fellowship Award, a Rockefeller Award, among many prestigious awards and trained in International nutrition at MIT. Then, he was the lead anthropologist for The Normative Aging Study, one of largest studies of aging in the world, begun by Harvard Medical School and the Veteran's Administration.
He segued into writing screenplays, earning a master’s degree in screenwriting from The AFI, and eventually also went into cinematography and editing . As one of a minority of editors working primarily on FCPX, his work has spanned both documentary and narrative projects, but he sees few major dissimilarities between the two genres.
“With a documentary, the main difference is that you sometimes don’t see what the story is until you’ve finished shooting,” he says. “You see the thread come together right in front of your eyes.” Clark served as the show runner, writer, director, producer, supervising editor, and was a cinematographer on the television docuseries Hooked on the Fly. The series followed fly-fishers and conservationists all over the world, from Alaska to New Zealand. Clark oversaw five editors and helped cut all of the multi award-winning nature, adventure, and conservation series.
With the advent of FCPX, Clark cites the program’s organizational capacity, magnetic timeline, and the ease of its many shortcuts as upsides. “They take some getting used to,” he says. “It does have automated features, but you do have manual control as well.” He finds the FCPX interface and process to be faster, more stable, and intuitive, than other editing programs.
With Jim Shoe, Clark worked with two 12-terabyte drives to organize his footage on his Mac Pro, as well as two 40-inch 4K displays. The film, which follows four attorneys competing for a partner slot through assigned, competitive pro bono work, clocked in at nearly nine terabytes as a finished project.
“The workflow did offer some challenges initially, because the post house didn’t know Final Cut X,” Clark admits. “They were all on Avid and Resolve, of course. We had to go back and forth between L.A. and Chicago, and it took hours to upload and download footage between us.” The film was colored and sound- mixed at Periscope Studios in Chicago, which was working on Premiere, Avid, and Resolve. Periscope needed OMF files for sound mix in ProTools, but because there is currently no direct way to export OMF files in FCPX, the challenge demanded a workaround. Instead, Clark used the app X2Pro to export AAF files from FCPX for use in ProTools. Clark then ran delivery tests with Periscope via DropBox, using 300 mbps Internet speed to quickly upload and share files with the post house. According to Clark, “the test went perfectly.”
Another challenge presented itself during the coloring process, which was done in Da Vinci Resolve, by an Avid-trained colorist. “Importing went well, but we lost some stabilization,” Clark points out. Resolve has translated some elements of FCPX, but the process is currently far from complete. “Any time you rebuild a timeline from one editing platform to another, some things that were perfected get lost,” he says. “I hope Resolve and FCP keep closing the gap and talk to each other as Resolve continues to build out their editing functions.”
Through editing the film, Clark didn’t use keyword collections. “You have to come up with a much more intuitive way of organizing material,” he says. “I used keywords on a few things, to make sure I didn’t bypass certain formulas, but realized I really don’t need it.” Instead, he organized files by scene, by take, and
by camera angle, then created multiple projects for each scene to provide options for the director. “One of the things I find helpful is having an MFA in screenwriting,” he says. “The editor isn’t just thinking about the cut, but you’re also thinking about story in a very deep way.” His background as both an editor and a serious writer gave him insight into editing alongside writer-director Pete Sutton, whose attachment to the material required some negotiation on certain cuts.
“Sight, sound, and story is what it’s about,” he says. “At the end of the day, you’re telling a story. You can’t let a lot of fancy editing get in the way. Form follows function.”
Tagged: FCP, Final Cut Pro, Apple, interview
