Final Cut Studio 2 Announced

Apple announced Final Cut Studio 2 at NAB. Here's my wrapup of the features that impress me.

Final Cut Pro 6
-"Open Format Timeline" easier to mix different codecs, frame rates, resolutions in the same timeline. Apple says "Freely edit a combination of HD and SD, including NTSC and PAL, all in real time." Now there must be some rendering, especially on older systems. But this is great, I'm very happy to see this feature.

-Motion templates. Create a Motion template with text fields that can be edited directly in FCP. So I could design a lower-third and an editor who doesn't know Motion can update the lower-third without ever leaving FCP. Also you can drop in video into a Motion template in FCP.

-Monitor 5.1. channels of audio.

-I love things that make it easier to mix audio qiuckly (I consider audio a chore.) This sounds good: "New Soft Normalize and Gain controls can be applied to single or multiple clips to automatically raise the level of any clip to its maximum without distortion. "

-Smooth cam. Smoothes out shaky video. In the past with other tools, this has never looked good on standard-definition stuff, especially if its interlaced. The video ends up soft. But for high-def sourced stuff this could be good. Apparently this came from Shake, which Apple discontinued.

-Apple ProRes 422. I don't know all the specifics on this, but they basically wanted to squeeze HD signal through firewire. Like what Avid did with DNxHD. Mainly seems to work with the AJA IO HD which will hook up to Macs through firewire 800 to capture and output from just about any kind signal

[swiped from Final Cut Pro 6: What's New"]

Color
-"Color grading" this means color correction. But I guess grading sounds more creative, and this application looks like it packs a punch. As long as it isn't as buggy as Motion 1 (and 2) were, it could be big. AFAIK, this is Apple's Version of an application they bought called Final Touch HD. This is aimed at a very high-end market. This is a separate app, and I personally wish that they had put some of these features in Final Cut Pro. You have to "round-trip" this stuff, which I'm not too thrilled about doing.

-Very sophisticated tools for tweaking color. Secondary color correction includes masks and vignettes. Great, but I'd love to see this in FCP too.

-Optical image flow--very fancy slow-mo/fast-mo. Also in Motion. Why can't we have this in FCP? (Maybe in FCP, HD4ND's mentions optical image flow in FCP, but is that part of Smoothcam or for Motion FX's?)

-Pre-built looks to make your stuff look like some sexy commercial or a music-video.

-This is a new app and Apple didn't raise the price for Studio (still $1299). On the other hand, they haven't upgraded DVD Studio Pro.

DVD Studio Pro 4 (Again)
-Huh? No updates to DVD Studio Pro. No real HD-DVD. No Blu-Ray authoring? Is Apple dropping the ball or maybe waiting for the new OS X? I don't really care because I don't do any HD stuff yet, but it does make me worry about Final Cut if it is not staying competitive on this point.

Motion 3
-Nice upgrade here.

-3D space. Cool-el. Check out the videos here. Cameras, lights. Pre-built camera moves, so no more awkward keyframing in x-y-z axis, as in After Effects. Throw is 3-D.

-Text behavior animation is 3-D. Again, check out the videos here.

-Particle generators are 3-D. Replicators are 3-D. This stuff is all really cool. Again, check out the videos here to see this in action.

-Vector drawing. I'm going to be adding drawn-on squiggly lines to everything I do now--that will never get old.

-Point tracking and match moving. Pretty high-end feature. I think this came from Shake.

-Image stabilization and Smoothcam. Smoothcam is also in FCP. Fix the shaky camera shots.

-Optical image flow with retiming animation. Apple says this was adapted from Shake. Fancy looking slow-mos and fast-mos. I wish this was in FCP.

-Motion 3 Master Templates. Allows editing text in FCP. Also video drop zone, where shots can be dropped into a Motion animation within FCP. Nice.

-More free stock footage and graphics.

Compressor 3
-Closed captioing. Says that it will insert closed-captioning information into movies. Need to do more research on this.

-Upscaling. Does it do anything special that FCP won't do? I don't know.

-Optical image flow. Is this new? Wasn't this in Compressor 2?

-Support for iPod. Wow, the video iPod has only been out for 18 months, and Apple has already delivered professional encoding for it! (Yeah I'm bitter about the long period where neither Apple or Cleaner support encoding for iPod video.)

-Chapter support for iPod. That's handy for podcasts.

-5.1 audio encoding.

-MPEG-2 Broadcast Streams encoding, e.g., for playout servers. Will it work with our station's? Need to research this too.

-Integration with Telestream's Episode Pro for all kind of formats "Output files in VC-1, WMV, GXF, High Profile H.264, and FLV formats. Or output proprietary broadcast server formats such as Omneon, Quantel, Avid, Grass Valley, and Leitch"

-Time code overlays. Nice way to make a window-dub of a show or raw footage.

-HD4ND's says that the H.264 encoding is much faster.

Soundtrack Pro 2
-Mosf of the new features are way too high-end for what I do with sound.

-e.g., 5.1 mix. I'm not going to do a 5.1 mix.

-Automatic audio conform. This seems cool. If you are round-tripping from FCP, it can keep track of changes to the FCP timeline and then change the Soundtrack Pro timeline.

-More free sound effects.

Final Cut Studio 2 is available "next month". Same price $1299. $499 upgrade from Final Cut Studio 1. $699 upgrade if you don't have FCS 1.

I think this is a very good package of updates. Hopefully, the Media Manager is improved--they didn't say anything about improvements to it. And I'm hoping that Motion is stable as it has always been buggy for me. Keeping my fingers crossed that the other apps aren't buggy, especially the new Color.