Editors tend to get in a groove with a system they're comfortable with and stay there for decades. For most, it was a slow and painful transition from mechanical splicers to the computerized, nonlinear systems of which Avid has become something of a de facto standard. In the past year or two, however, Avid has been fending off parries from the low-cost challenger Final Cut Pro, which actually has gained some ground in the areas of television, commercials and trailers.

Now it has cleared another major hurdle -- its first big-league feature. Esteemed editor Walter Murch sent ripples of surprise through the editing community when he decided to use the system to cut Anthony Minghella's "Cold Mountain," due out Christmas 2003, for Miramax. That decision has prompted some in the feature community to take a closer look at Apple's desktop-based system.

Final Cut Pro started out as an off-the-shelf consumer product and was long regarded as an also-ran for students and digital video buffs -- basically, anybody who couldn't afford an Avid.

But since acquiring the software from Macromedia in 1998, Apple has devoted impressive resources to making the package competitive. It received a major boost when Apple purchased Film Logic, a software plug-in that facilitates the 24-frame-per-second editing native to film. Renamed Cinema Tools, Apple last year began bundling the program with Final Cut Pro 3.0.

But Murch is no slouch. He has won three Academy Awards in eight at bats, most recently in 1997, when he won for picture editing and best sound on "The English Patient." In 1980, he earned an Oscar for best sound and a nomination for picture cutting on "Apocalypse Now."

Clearly, he can use any editing system he wants. The fact that he chose to try Final Cut -- a system with which he was largely unfamiliar -- to edit a $100 million film lensing on location in Romania is somewhat startling. "I've always been interested in taking plunges," Murch says. "I guess it is just something that is part of my personality: to get interested in a certain approach and take off in that direction without waiting for everything to be bolted down, trusting that somehow things will work out."

The main incentive, Murch admits, was economic. He says he was able to procure four Final Cut systems for what it would cost him to rent a single Avid Film Composer station. The beauty of that is he can do four things at once: one for picture editing, one for file management, one for digitizing footage and another for burning DVD dailies.

Murch's last film, the summer submarine epic "K-19: The Widowmaker," was edited using two Avids. "So (we) were always juggling," he says. With this setup, "we can multitask," Murch continues. "For half the outlay, we've got four systems."

But Murch didn't jump into the project cold. He and his assistant editor, Sean Cullen, talked about a switch to Final Cut for years. Finally, the duo approached Apple and Digital Film Tree, a Los Angeles training and sales facility.

"We said, 'This is what we think. Do you agree it's a feasible thing? And Digital Film Tree got very excited because this was something that they had wanted to happen. They wanted a big film to take the plunge and start using Final Cut. So, we met with Apple and told them about what we were doing, where we felt the strengths and what some of our concerns were with Final Cut. The meeting ended very well, and we took the plunge. So here we are. We've been shooting for three months with two months to go. It's a long shoot, and everything has been working great."

To prepare, Murch and Cullen queried colleagues on workflow scenarios and technical specs, then underwent three days of hands-on training at DFT, which trains and outfits students, editors and directors (and also is known for having developed Film Logic).

With their training complete, Murch and Cullen flew to Bucharest with technician Jim Foreman from Aurora Video Systems to set up shop at Kodak Cinelabs Romania.

'COLD' CUTTERS: (from left) Walter Murch and Sean Cullen with their Cinelabs Romania team; Cullen at his editing workstation.

The custom-designed editorial package they took with them is, according to DFT founder and CEO Ramy Katrib, the first large-scale motion picture digital editing system based on Final Cut software (which has previously been used to cut many independent films, including Roger Avary's "The Rules of Attraction").

The backbone of Murch's system consists of four Apple PowerMac G4 dual gigahertz computers running Final Cut, Film Logic/Cinema Tools and DVD Studio Pro. Four Aurora Video Systems IgniterRT 311 video-capture cards have been installed to handle real-time, 24-frame-per-second digitizing. Murch and his staff are viewing their imagery on six 22-inch Mitsubishi Diamond Series monitors. A Rorke Galaxy 60 fiber-channel SAN (shared area network) links up the whole system, accessing 1.2 terabytes of storage through a fiber-channel switch. The setup is designed to handle an average of 10 daily rolls per day at 800 feet apiece. Over the course of five months, Murch anticipates digitizing more than 500,000 feet of film broken down into 4,500 clips -- no small task for a budding desktop video system. The sound has been put into sync using Final Cut, and the resulting digital sound files are stored on narrow drives running on an Akai digital dubber.

Once Murch has screened the film dailies, they are sent back to be screened for Minghella, cinematographer John Seale and producers William Horberg and Albert Berger. Location projection is provided by an Arri LocPro linked to an Akai digital dubber. Dailies come back to Kodak, where they are telecined to Beta SP tapes.

Unlike typical Final Cut scenarios, "Mountain" is not using DV. Murch and Cullen opted instead to use the Aurora Igniter Card to digitize with the Aurora MPJEG-A codec. Murch prefers the Aurora image because he says it preserves an "online look," despite the fact that the picture is compressed. Other conveniences are its compatibility with 24-frame-per-second editing and the fact that the format is QuickTime compatible, which allows them to save the files as QuickTime movies.

When telecine is complete, Cullen digitizes complete tapes and then reunites the picture with its corresponding digital sound using Final Cut. The media is exported as individual takes, which allows it to have integrated picture and sound. That, in turn, makes the media easier to handle and more "robust," Murch says. Once picture and sound are synced together, the Final Cut clips are transferred to Murch's desktop, where they are then ready for editing.

While the setup can, in practice, be used to simultaneously execute four different functions, Murch's preferred configuration is to use one setup as his edit station and another as his assistant's. The third is the digitizing station, where dailies are put in sync, and the last is used as the "system" station, where the media is consolidated and exported. (The last two stations also are used for exporting MPEG2 and for burning DVDs.)

These duties also can be interchanged depending upon the workload and task at hand since each of the G4s is equipped with the same hardware and software.

Now four months into production, with more than 400,000 feet of dailies and three hours of material assembled, Murch says, "Our setup has swallowed that load uncomplainingly. We've had very few crashes, and the more I learn the system, the fewer we have. All four stations have been very stable and solid, which has been great, considering that we are quite far from the nearest service station."

Including increased memory, Murch says his complete Final Cut system runs about a third of the cost of a comparable Avid setup. DFT billed $110,000 for its four Final Cut/Aurora equipped G4's, 1.2 terabytes of storage and fiber-channel system. Rates for a comparable Avid setup run between $250,000-$350,000, based on price quotes from three leading Los Angeles edit rental firms gathered by Cullen this fall.

Phoned at random, one facility said a comparable, four-station Avid Film Composer system would cost $200,000-$250,000. An entry-level Avid Xpress DV system could definitely be assembled in the $110,000 range, though this source questioned whether the FilmScribe plug-in that allows the 30-frame cutter Xpress DV to cut at 24 frames was robust enough to handle the demands of a large feature.

While Murch admits the reasons he elected to try Final Cut were largely practical and economic, not aesthetic, of the interface itself, he says, "It's like playing on a different piano. If you were a pianist and you'd been playing on a certain brand and then suddenly, somebody said, 'Play on this other kind of piano,' it would take you a while to learn the touch. So it's kind of an equivalent system. But I am very comfortable with it."