Looking at the timeline in Avid and Final Cut Pro
by The Editblog
The most startling difference between the Avid and FCP timeline is the basic paradigm in which you work with clips in the timeline.
FCP opts for a totally interactive approach where the editor uses the cursor and/or any number of tools to click and drag directly in the timeline to do certain tasks. If you want to move a clip you just click and drag it anywhere. If you want to extend an edit you can click the end of a clip and drag it longer. In Avid, if you click in the timeline, the current time maker, or playhead, jumps to the click point and you are then able to scrub around just by dragging. It is a startling difference if you are unaware. I once was called on a job to fix an edit for a new FCP owner. The user had only edited on Avid and for a couple of days he was constantly clicking and dragging in the FCP timeline to move around. Needless to say every time he did this he changed something. It was total chaos to say the least.
In Avid, if you want to move a clip around the timeline you must enter ‘segment mode.’ Choosing the insert arrow (yellow) or the overwrite arrow (red) and clicking and dragging a clip produces different results. The overwrite arrow does just what it says, overwrites the clip you are moving intoo the space where that clip is placed. The insert arrow will insert the clip (or clips) and move everything in the track or the whole timeline down, depending on what is selected. When done moving a clip, you must then exit segment mode to return to regular edit mode. The Avid “mode” paradigm is something that many FCP editors do not like. And indeed it has been a marketing point for Apple as they have sold FCP as “mode free editing” since version 1.0. It is much easier and faster to grab a clip in the timeline and manipulate it directly. My guess is that when Avid was conceived it was built as an edit box and an edit box only. Effects were almost non-existent. This concept allows for very fast and very efficient editing. To this day I am still able to do basic cuts, dissolves and paper edit conforming on much faster on Avid than FCP.
The other big difference in the two timelines is in the track selection for edit operations. FCP employs track selectors to select or unselect tracks for edit operations. The Avid equivalent is that the Avid operates on the idea that tracks have to be armed, or turned on, to have source material edited in the timeline. If you have source media with video and 2 channels of audio, you patch where you want the sources to go and then you can turn off a track if you do not want the material edited there.
Audio 1 & 2 patched Audio 1 & 2 unpatched
In FCP, you patch in the same way and then disconnect the patch.
Audio 1 & 2 patched Audio 1 & 2 unpatched
Selection in the timeline is another thing that both pieces of software do differently. In FCP, there are tiny little 'auto select' toggles that denote which tracks are selected when you mark a clip IN to OUT, mark to markers or select anything IN to OUT.

As you can see in the graphic above, V1 and A1 is selected and you can see the selection range as the clip in the timeline is just a little bit lighter than A2 which is has auto select turned off.

In Avid, you just turn the track indicator on and off just as if you were turning the track on or off for patching. The selection is then highlighted in Avid purple.
For muting and soloing of audio tracks, FCP has one extra panel that Avid does not have.

You must first open the Audio Control by clicking on the little speakers icon in the bottom left corner of the timeline. That opens separate audio controls for each track. Click the head phones and the track is soloed. Click the speaker icon and a track is muted. The faint yellow speaker icon on track 3 tells you that another track is soloed. This can also be achieved in the audio mixer.

In Avid there is not an extra panel to open. Control + click on the little speaker icon, it turns bright green and the track is soloed. You can also solo a video track in the same way. Click the speaker icon and the speaker goes away. That's muted.

The little yellow speaker icons are the selected tracks for audio scrubbing which is toggled on and off via the CAPS LOCK key. They also appear in the record side icons but are turned off in the image above because one track is muted. You can click and toggle the scrub tracks in Avid were as in FCP all audio tracks are scrubbed.
One last difference to point out is the different approaches to the inserting of media into a timeline. While both apps allow you to patch where the source audio and video tracks will go, the behavior of an insert is different. For example, in Avid, if you have one audio track turned off and you insert video and audio media you will push everything on the selected tracks down, throwing the unselected audio out of sync.

You can see this by the appearance of the out-of-sync indicator in the timeline above. Little white numbers in the audio track to tell you have far the item is out of sync. This can be a very frustrating thing of you have a timeline with many audio tracks. And it is especially frustrating when you are just learning Avid and you look down and see the out-of-sync indictors all over the timeline. This can be avoided by turning on Sync Lock in the timeline.

This can be toggled on a per track basis or all at once. Avid will then insert black to fill in the space of a track that is not turned on when new media is inserted. On the flip side, if you are deleting or extracting an item, Avid will then delete all the media on all the tracks within your IN and OUT point in order to maintain sync whether the tracks are turned on or not. I usually always edit with the sync locks turned on.
FCP on the other hand, is always in "Sync Lock" mode ... if you will. The only way to lose sync when inserting is to actually lock a track.

And FCP even gives you a nice warning you are about to move media out of sync.

And speaking of locking tracks....

FCP provides tiny little padlocks in the timeline where in Avid you must right + click on a track and choose 'lock track' or lock all selected tracks at once under the CLIP menu.
Is this all the differences between the Final Cut Pro timeline and an Avid timeline? By all means no! I am using Avid Xpress Pro 5.5 for this comparison and there are timeline differences between this version and Avid Media Composer! But the basic operations are the same as are these subtle and not so subtle differences between FCP and Avid.

There are also a lot of tools available for each, different ways to play and navigate, different ways to mark clips and make notes as well as other ways to manipulate the media. There really is way to much to cover in one article. I will try to cover more in future articles.

In the meantime, have a look at the Avid timeline more closely here.

Do the same with a Final Cut Pro timeline here.
Want to know which I prefer?

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