Creative Cow on Apple ProRes 422

"The Wisdom of the Cow: Apple's ProRes 422 Codec"

This is a good article that summarizes insights on the ProRes 422 codec gleamed from posts on Creative Cow's boards. Nice to get some real user feedback on this new feature of FCP 6.

One thing that has come out is that if you want to transcode HD to ProRes 422, you need an Intel MacPro or an AJA I/O HD. It's too processor intensive to be done while capturing, even by a Quad G5. The AJA IO HD handles the transcoding itself, but with other hardware from AJA and Blackmagic the CPU has to handle the transcoding. However, slower computers can still render HD video to ProRes 422. Nothing definitive on transcoding to SD while capturing, but this should be much less processor-intensive than HD footage.

What's New in FCP 6

Final Cut Studio 2 is now shipping. I don't know when I'll get my hands on it, but Apple has posted many of the manuals online. I took a look at the manual What's New in FCP 6. I've written before about my thoughts on FCS2 and FCP6, and here's some new things that jumped out at me after reading that manual.

SmoothCam Filter
This borrows Shake technology to steady shaky footage. This seems to be the only implementation of Shake in FCP according to the "What's New" manual. If so, then no great slo-mo's in FCP. Looks like you'll have to go to Motion for those.

Bloom FX
More FX's from Motion are coming to FCP. I like the Bloom filter and there are a few more.

Rendering Native HDV and XDCAM HD Sequences to the Apple ProRes 422 Codec
This is a new sequence preset. So as I discussed before here, it makes less and less sense to transcode HDV to another codec, like uncompressed, when capturing. With the Open Format Timeline you can load and cut your native HDV footage and then render in whatever codec you like (uncompressed, ProRes 422) when you want to filter or composite.

External Video Monitoring
This is very cool. I don't remember hearing about this capability when the new version was announced. Here's something I pulled from the manual:

You can now output to external video interfaces whose settings don’t match those of your sequence. Here are some examples of some of the possibilities:
-A DV or HDV sequence output to an SDI signal on a third-party interface
-An uncompressed NTSC or PAL sequence output to a DV FireWire output
-An HDV sequence output to a DV FireWire output

Before you had to rely on hardware from AJA or Kona to do stuff like this. Now FCP and your Mac's CPU will handle this. Of course, if you are throwing an Open Format Timeline and down-conversion at the CPU that's a fair amount of work. The better the chips you have, the more luck you'll have with this type of stuff. But I pretty much got a DeckLink card because I wanted the option of seeing HDV downconverted to SD (the Kona LS wouldn't do that.) Now Kona LS users will get this capability with FCP 6 if their computer is fast enough.

For more on the new manuals for Final Cut Studio, check out this post at HDforIndies.com.