Final Cut Sudio 2

[mrhappyballoon]

[davebl@dircon.c]

Quite so, it looks very good. The colour grading tools are excelent, Ive used these in the previous Final Touch programme by Silicon Color. They are as good as anything else available.

Id be interested to see how Sound track pro has developed. Any one see it yet and can comment on ease of use for editing ?

[T_R_S]

SoundTrack Pro now has Surround Mixing, recording mulitplue takes it's pretty a rework of the interface.

[jdjustice]

so there has been no update to DVD Studio Pro? huh?

[davebl@dircon.c]

Nope, theye have all been busy making a phone.........

[thebri]

THe Soundtrack Pro does indeed look nice. But then again so did the last one until I actually tried to use it...

If they fixed the crashy problem, and the driver problem, I may give it another show. The auto conforming demo I saw was cool as hell. Noise reduction looked excellent, and a take manager looks quite useful. I don't do surround much anymore, but it looks like a very easy way to get into surround, maybe not the most flexible, but quite useable.

For post type people this will be a very serious alternative to PT LE by virtue of conforming, noise reduction and multiple video tracks simply cost too much money on LE, or with the case of surround and multiple video tracks are simply not available.

The workflow automation features in STP have always been excellent, and better than any other app I've used. STP supports automator, applescript and can do faster than real time multiple bounces.

ANyway, we'll see if the bloody thing doesn't crash.

[hmurchison]

Agreed

If the features work as described then STP2 is a killer upgrade. I think they will work as they are supposed.

I'm impressed with this update. The weak links have all been addressed.

Compressor 3- watch the video on apple.com/finalcutpro . The new user interface looks great. There is much more flexiblility and it now accepts plugins for adding more output options. Telestream has a nice one that outputs Flash, VC-1 and a bunch of other stuff.

Motion 3- phenomenal upgrade. Love the 3D stuff and the vector painting tools. It should be much faster too.

Soundtrack Pro 2- The Conform feature is killer for video pros. The Take Management is damn cool as well for comping from multiple tracks. Definitely looking at seeing this feature working in the next Logic Pro. Love the surround sound panner (you'll see this feature in most of the Apple apps in Leopard). Dialogue/Podcasting stuff is nice.

Final Cut Pro- The Swiss Army knife of DV editing. Nuff said the only complaint I have is the outdate user interface.

Color- Have you ever seen a $25 thousand dollar app get reduced to 0 dollars any faster? I expect to see some horrid uses of Color initially (it makes it really easy to add extreme coloring effects) but this is a solid pickup

The bad

DVD Studio Pro 4 was not updated. Likely because the only ugrade people wanted was full authoring support for HD DVD and Blu-ray. Since Tiger doesn't support the DRM and Encrypted connections that these require for packaged media playback it looks like Apple will wait until Leopard ships to add these features. That's my guess.

Disjointed User Interface- Ok Motion, STP, DVD SP, Compressor all look alike but what's up with the funky Final Cut Server UI and Color and outdated FCP 6. Apple needs to align these UIs a bit better.