Review: Apple Final Cut Pro fights on

— -- In June, Apple stunned the video community with a dramatic overhaul of its beloved Final Cut Pro editing software. The company basically started over again with an all-new interface that many longtime users said resembled the entry-level video program iMovie.

The noise was loud as many pro editors threatened to stop using Apple software to edit video and to move to rival Adobe and its Premiere Pro instead.

Apple, which says FCP X has found many fans, is continuing to push forward with the software, today offering an update — 10.0.3 — one with two major revisions:

— Multi-camera editing. The videographer can shoot the same scene on many different cameras, for multiple views, and put them all together really easily . Like a TV director, the video editor can choose which scene to use by clicking through, for instance, to camera #1, camera #2 and camera #3. This was possible, sort of, in previous editions of Final Cut, but not like now. This is major.

— Improved chroma-key ("green screen") support. You can shoot your scene in front of a green or blue screen, knock out the background in Final Cut Pro and replace it with something else in seconds, with a swiftness and precision that wasn't there before.

Despite the controversy, I happen to be a big fan of FCP X. It's perfect for what I do — short journalism videos. FCP X's big advantage over the previous version — Final Cut Pro 7 — is its speed. Most times, during editing, FCP 7 would slow down to "render," seemingly forever.

The big problem, usually, was mixing and matching footage from different cameras. FCP 7 demanded footage to be in similar formats — or at least processed that way before entering FCP.

In FCP X, I can mix and match footage from cameras as diverse as Canon's 5D Mark II and 60D digital SLRs to the iPhone and the compact mirrorless Samsung NX 200 with no slowdown whatsoever. Even if the interface looks like iMovie, I don't care —FCP X does the job for me, and quite well.

We generally shoot most Talking Tech and Talking Your Tech USA TODAY videos with a minimum of three cameras, because it offers so much more than the standard "talking head" interview. Three cameras give us a good shot of the subject, the interviewer, and the two of us talking. Watch any good TV news/interview program, like 60 Minutes or Nightline, and their pieces tend to be shot the same way — except they usually add in another camera or two as well.

In the past, the wonderful $149 Plural Eyes plug-in from Singular Software enabled editors to easily "sync" the three cameras together by using cues from the audio tracks.

In launching FCP X, Apple added a similar tool — a "synchronize clips" tab that worked sometimes, other times not as well.

What you couldn't do with either is get a visual window of your various camera shots in one place or switch back and forth, like a TV director, into the project.

In my limited tests of FCP X 10.0.3 over the last two days I've used the "Multicamera" option several times. It takes a good deal of trial and error, and some knowledge of the workarounds, but the end result is wonderful.

Here's what you've got to know to make it work as advertised.

—Begin by importing the footage, and clicking "Multicamera clip" in the file menu.