First impression of Final Cut Studio

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I’ve been using Final Cut Pro since it had version number 1.25. It came on a CD in a small package. The years have passed, machines have gotten more advanced, Final Cut Pro is now a studio suite and comes in a big suitcase-like package. The installation takes a good hour.

Final Cut Pro

Has the same good look. Now with a smooth cam filter, that allows de-shaking of footage. This could be done earlier, but now you can do it from within FCP. Nice touch.

Color

This was the main reason I was excited about the update. A powerful (and previously prohibitively expensive) tool for colour correction, and selective colour correction.When you first open Color you understand that it has been only a short half year since Apple bought the company behind Color. The interface feels very un-Apple. Most values cannot be changed by mouse, but have to be entered. When you want to try out a couple of different values, you have to re-type them each and every time. (You can connect third-party dedicated colour correction hardware to your mac; and I am looking forward to the hardware producers coming up with more affordable designs.)Another downer was finding out that Color does not support viewing your material on an external monitor in DV. This makes Color as it is useless for a big part of the FCP user base, as you cannot use a tool for colour correction that disallows the proper display of colours in the first place.When roundtripping from FCP, you will also get annoyed by Colors inability to take layers into account. If you do multi-layered video, Color will only display the highest one.I haven’t used Color a lot, but it already crashed on me three times.Obviously, still some work to be done. But Final Cut 1.0 was also unrefined, and look what it has become. And thanks, Apple, for including this powerful tool without an extra price-tag!

DVD Studio Pro

In none of the presentations I’ve seen, has anyone mentioned DVD Studio Pro with more than a side-sentence. Well, I haven’t noticed any changes from the previous version.

Compressor

This lovely compression tool has received a great overhaul of its UI. Very smooth now. Easier to do repetitive tasks. Presets are arranged in a more logical, easier to find order. Clusters are easier to set up. When you shell out an extra 179 bucks, you can buy Flip4mac and transcode to wma and flash (or you might need Episode for $495; neither Apple nor Telestream are very clear about this).One, for me very annoying, bug I’ve noticed is that Compressor no longer supports all of QuickTime’s flags. In my case I use a lot of telecined 8mm films that need to be turned into the right direction. In Quicktime you can change the properties of a movie, without having to re-render. Which worked fine in the previous version of Compressor, but now the output will be upside down again.Am looking forward to Apple fixing this one soon. Please!

Soundtrack

As a cameraman, I have so far concentrated on the visual sides of FCS. But in the presentation I saw I was blown by the simplicity of adding surround sound. You can create space feeling in real-time, just by moving the mouse. Also, Soundtrack comes with tons of sound effects, which alone would cost a small fortune.Soundtrack is now more integrated into FCP. Before, you couldn’t change a cut after you had committed a project to Soundtrack, but now the smart people from Apple have come up with a Conform tool, that will save many hours, and make sound editors much more friendly to picture editors coming in with that one last change.

Motion

Before I start that new version of Motion, I have to be sure to have a couple of uninterrupted hours. This has not happened in the past two weeks, so there will be a while before I can give it a try. But from the demo I learned that Motion is now 3D, and once you’ve mastered the steep learning curve around this, it looks like a powerful, yet easy to use tool for advanced animation. I am looking forward to animating stills in 3D space.