A rave from the grave..!
Not something I thought I’d see again. I first used Apple Final Cut Pro with version 2.0.1 back in 2000 and I vaguely remember paying around £1600 UK for it. Over the following years, I upgraded and finally ended up with version 7 with the upgrade from 6 to 7 costing me £150.
In 2011, I was never comfortable with the ‘new’ as it was then, FCPX, the magnetic timeline vs track-based editing didn’t suit me but I used it from around 2015 to 2019. At that time COVID-19 was in full swing and the UK was ‘locked down’. A local church, where I had many contacts, was trying to get online services running on a Sunday morning on YouTube with little success, I offered to loan them a tripod as theirs had broken....., the Pastor then said “Dave, how easy would it be for you to.....”
5 days later I was receiving video clips shot mainly on phones from many of the congregation to compile into a ‘service’ that could be scheduled to go out at 10.30 on a Sunday. I went on to produce 83 weekly services, editing anything from footage sent via WhatsApp (in upright format!) to 4k iPhone footage that was as near to broadcast quality as you could get, and from many different people each week. Around halfway through the 83 services, I downloaded Davinci Resolve Free and immediately felt at home with it.
Soon after discussing FCP(X) vs Resolve with my son, a broadcast video engineer, a package arrived containing the full studio version of Resolve along with the Speed Editor as a gift from my son, and I’ve been using it ever since.
Where am I going with this?
If you look back on my posts in this blog, you’ll see I purchased an old Blackmagic Decklink card for a silly cheap price but then had to find an older Mac Pro desktop to run it, it now serves me very well for digitising old VHS and DV tapes. The Mac Pro is a dual 3.2, 32Gb RAM and with an SSD, it actually runs very well and I can still use my full studio package of Adobe including Photoshop CS6 (I refuse to jump on their subscription model!).
Browsing eBay recently, I spotted someone selling a full unopened genuine copy of Final Cut Pro version 7 with a legal serial number for £29.99 - I couldn’t resist as I knew it would run perfectly on my old Mac Pro.
It is surprising how quickly you can forget how to use a program you spent the best part of 15 years using but I don’t think I’m going to be using it for any serious work, it does open some old FCP archive edits I have and it will import/export an XML so I might be able to help someone out who might have old projects that need converting, but I’ve got to say it’s fun messing about with it after all this time.
One final thought on this, FCP7 came with DVDStudio Pro, one of the best DVD authoring packages ever produced, OK I know DVDs are technically ‘dead’ but I produce stuff for an older section of the population who don’t have a clue what an mp4 is or even a USB stick. During the pandemic, several of the church members were in a home or sheltered accommodation and only had a TV and DVD player in their room with no internet access so, I produced DVD’s for them and even now I’m still being asked to transfer old family VHS tapes to DVD.
