Final Cut Pro 7 wishlist

What would you like to see in the next (or future) version of FCP?

For the sake of brevity, I'm restricting my wishlist to FCP and not including the other Studio apps.

1. Better text tools

I hate Boris Title3D and the FCP text tools. FCP deserves nothing less than a truly integrated text generator with realtime onscreen previewing for interactive feedback.

2. UI widget overhaul

The UI widgets in FCP are pretty long in the tooth, and were designed at a time in which huge high-res, high-ppi monitors were a rarity. As a result, many UI elements in FCP look tiny. While FCP currently allows you to save your own window layouts, the actual window elements (window buttons, tool palette objects, etc.) are not scalable. The ability to customize the UI color would also be fantastic. Compared to Motion, Soundtrack Pro or Logic Studio, FCP is way behind the curve on this.

3. Media Manager overhaul

'Nuff said.

4. Background rendering

The ability to continue cutting while unrendered elements are processed would be an immense time saver. Smoothcam background processing is a good start, now just expand the concept.

5. Distributed rendering

Logic and Compressor take full advantage of any available CPUs in a cluster. FCP should too.

6. Masking tools

FCP should incorporate all of the masking tools available in Motion - i.e. animatable bezier or B-spline masks and motion tracking. An "8-point Garbage Matte" just doesn't cut it anymore, nor does manually keyframing a matte to follow an object in a shot. Bring FCP into the 21st century already and integrate the new technologies already present in Motion.

7. Keyframe animation overhaul

Round-tripping to Motion just to get still pan & zooms that don't suck is inexcusable. The motion tab should inherit Motion's functionality.

8. Improved speed change behavior

The ability to change clip speed without altering the position of everything else that follows on the same video track would be brilliant - i.e. keep the clip in and out points in the same place on the timeline. Also, adding Shake's optical flow technology for smooth slow motion with interpolated frames would be a much-appreciated addition to the simple frame blending that FCP currently uses.

9. Improved Browser functionality

It would be nice to have more sorting options for files and clips appearing in the browser, i.e. sort by type, sort by file size, sort by date, etc. Infinitely scalable icons would be an improvement over the stock small, medium and large presets. Right-clicking on a clip or file could offer an option to "find clip in timeline" in addition to the current options. Some type of indication whether or not a clip or file is currently being used in any sequences would also be great. DVD Studio Pro has this feature for assets, why not FCP?

Well, this is just a start. I'm sure more ideas will come to me, but I just wanted to get the ball rolling. Join in the fun!