Professional and amateur videographers were on the edges of their seats yesterday at Apple's product announcement at the NAB show in Las Vegas as the company unveiled details about its latest video production suite. Final Cut Studio 2 is a full-featured suite based around Final Cut Pro 6, the new version of Apple's powerhouse video editing app.
The two hottest features in the new Final Cut are the ability to mix and match video formats and framerates on a single timeline without rendering (saving gobs of time and preventing conversion headaches) and the introduction of the new ProRes 422 video format. It's a proprietary post-production format that is supposed to ease the pain of editing HD video by compressing it down to SD video file sizes. Apple claims that ProRes 422 will offer "uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes," which we suppose is a bit like saying that 128k AAC offers CD quality sound. In other words, take that claim with a grain of salt.
There are a heap of new features in the suite, including an improved version of Motion 3, Apple's motion graphics app that competes with Adobe After Effects and a new color correction tool called Color (so your home videos can look like Lord of the Rings). There's also a new version of Soundtrack and a new version of Compressor with, of course, beefed up support for H.264, Apple's chosen video format for the iPod and Apple TV.
While most of us can get away with using iMovie HD or Final Cut Express for our amateur video projects like home movies or travel videos, this release is exciting for anyone who wants to take their moviemaking a little further. Its definitely worth looking into if you're shooting HD or if you're doing music-heavy projects.
Pricing is set at $1300 ($400 for an upgrade), which is a bargain as far as video editing suites go. Also, some pretty robust hardware is required. You'll need an AGP or PCI Express Quartz Extreme graphics card, and you can't use those embedded Intel graphics processors. So, MacBook users and Mac Mini folks, you'll need to upgrade if you want all that FCP power. Octocore Mac Pro anyone?
Absent from the announcement was any support for AVCHD, Sony and Panasonic's HD format for their fancy new hard disk video cameras.
