Cyrus Sutton is a surfer. And he’s reviewing Final Cut Pro X for Gizmodo. Why? Because he’s one of the best surf flick directors in decades. His movies exude a summertime vibe I wish I could bottle up for winter.
You see, most surfers are inherent detail oriented gear heads. You’re talking about a culture where a quiver of 6-12 boards isn’t excessive, each with minute differences in shape and contour and material that turn out to cause varying rides on bumps of energy that happen to be passing through the water for a few fleeting seconds at a time. Waves. And Cyrus likes waves. Before he ran a site dedicated to a low-key DIY surfer lifestyle, korduroy.tv, he was a pro surfer representing some of the most commercialized big name surf brands out there.
But Cyrus’s gearhead-ness comes in a form more relevant to us, as seen when he starts talking about his cameras, computer and the software that he uses to make his movies. And yet, Cyrus is one of those digital pros that has enough going on outside of the internet to be able to keep in touch with the needs of those of us who aren’t pros, too. Which reminds me a lot of what this version of Final Cut Pro stands for.
The new Final Cut is giving up a lot of the workflow tools critical to many professional movie makers. In exchange it becomes more approachable to people like you and me—serious amateurs—by adopting a lot of the niceties that we’ve seen in iMovie like the ability to directly grab audio files from iTunes and skim-able timelines illustrated by thumbnails, for example. It’s breaking from the past, in order to make a run for the future.
As a final aside, I wanted Cyrus to review Final Cut Pro for Gizmodo simply because everything he works on turns out unbelievably stylish and I wanted to introduce you to his body of work. This will become evident to you when you watch his reel below…
P.S. This summer, Cyrus’s new movie, Under the Sun is due to hit the theatres. Check out that trailer and this documentary he did on Tarp Surfing, as well as his website Korduroy.tv.
