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.
