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New Final Cut Studio


Tenolian Bell

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fcp-090723-1.jpg

 

"With 1.4 million users and 50 percent of the market, Final Cut Pro is the number one professional video editing application," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The new Final Cut Studio includes more than 100 new features and dramatically expands Apple's ProRes family of codecs so editors can work in the studio with the highest quality video or on location at low bandwidths."

 

The New Final Cut Studio is $999.

 

 

Final Cut Pro 7

  • Expands Apple's ProRes codec family to support virtually any workflow. ProRes Proxy allows offline and mobile editing at low bandwidth; ProRes LT allows general purpose editing; and ProRes 4444 is for editing and visual effects at the highest quality possible.
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  • Easy Export allows users to continue working on projects while encoding is done in the background and the sequence is exported to YouTube, MobileMe, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, DVD or Blu-ray.
     
  • iChat Theater support allows real time collaboration by sharing Final Cut® timelines or individual source clips with iChat users anywhere in the world, even if they don't have a copy of Final Cut Pro.
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    iChat
     
     
  • New speed tools to change clip speed with ease.
  • Alpha transitions to create dramatic effects using moving mattes.
  • Native AVC-Intra support for the latest high quality Panasonic cameras.

 

 

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/

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Ah OK.

 

I'm sure that 1.4 million users number are the number of people who paid. I know a lot of people with bootleg copies of Final Cut Pro. I bet the actual number of FCP users is two or three times the official number.

 

It's not. I was just fishing for yuks and giggles. Nothing personal.
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  • 4 months later...

I'm thinking seriously of replacing my Windows laptop and Vegas with a MacBook Pro and FCP. Realistically, is the Macbook Pro with the 3.06 GHhz Core Two duo and 8gb of memory enough to run FCP with a dozen or more audio tracks and assorted special effects, etc. (Vegas on my HP/Vista Laptop with an AMD Turion X2 and 3gb memory chokes on it).

Edited by Rob Gordon
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I'm thinking seriously of replacing my Windows laptop and Vegas with a MacBook Pro and FCP. Realistically, is the Macbook Pro with the 3.06 GHhz Core Two duo and 8gb of memory enough to run FCP with a dozen or more audio tracks and assorted special effects, etc. (Vegas on my HP/Vista Laptop with an AMD Turion X2 and 3gb memory chokes on it).

 

Yes, no problem that's what I'm running FCP Studio 7 on, the MacBook Pro 17".

 

I've yet to have a problem with slow processing or crashes. I don't do any VFX work though. I'm sure a desktop with boards added would be faster. Phil Rhodes is the world expert on these questions.

 

You mean there are people out there that don't edit video on a Mac? Weird :blink:

 

R,

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Go MacPro. Better long term investment as you can upgrade components (HD/RAM) and eventually branch out with PCI cards (Kona for example) if you get deeper into editing. Now I have a MBP core duo 2.4 with 4gb of ram and it's just fine for my little cutting (nothing over prores) in Studio 2.

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I did consider getting the fastest Mac Pro with dual quad cores and 16gb memory, etc. But I sometimes find myself bringing my laptop to meetings at coffee houses to do rough cuts on the spot with the director and producer. Thus, I'd really prefer to have a portable computer. I have no aversion to giving up Vegas and SoundForge and am very much looking forward to using FCP and Soundtrack Pro. Vegas is not a bad editing tool - I'm not bashing it. But my associates who use FCP tell me it's better - and has become the industry standard (for non-Hollywood feature productions) and it's not all just elitist hype. I figure it is a skill I need to have. And since my current aged laptop is not cutting it (pun intended) anymore, I've decided to make the transition to the Mac/FCP world. I'm tired of having to render and wait ten minutes (or more) to see if a picture cut matches a sound cut. I've mainly been doing short instructional videos and documentaries, but am starting to work on narrative pieces for some locals and don't want to struggle with the lack of horsepower I currently have. My primary specialty has been doing the soundtracks for picture locks someone else does, but I have started doing more and more picture editing lately. From the promotional info I've read, FCP has splendid tools for dialog editing and excellent plug in support.

 

I basically don't want to find at some point that the fastest Macbook Pro sags under the weight of feature-length work with lots of sound tracks and lots of effects and proceesors. Believe me - if I was a rich man I'd get both a Macbook and a fully-configured Macdesktop. But alas, I'm living in the real world - with rent and car payments and other expenses staring me down. :huh:

 

One other question - while I'm making the transition, how much would I be able to move back and forth between Vegas and FCP until I'm fully comfortable with the new environment?

 

Oh - I lied - one more question. I now have an iPhone and have transferred several short videos over to it so I can show scenes over lunch without schlepping the laptop. I've tried 1mbps Quicktime and MPEG-4 and the Qucktime movies freeze every few seconds and then start again - totally out of sync, while the MPEG-4 shows horrible motion artifacts. So what's the best format to put videos onto your iPhone?

 

Cheers

 

- Rob

Edited by Rob Gordon
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As a FCP current user and Premiere former user, I have to say Premiere is really a powerful and versatile app, so much so I am thinking of switching back, or at least using the two instead of just one. Premiere boasts native support for AVCHD, P2 DVCPRO HD, XDCAM and RED, etc. Try outdoing that, Apple.

 

 

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/supportedformats.html

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. But I sometimes find myself bringing my laptop to meetings at coffee houses ....

 

In that case, you need this:

 

http://www.carbonite.com/

 

The value of the physical machine is trivial compared with the value of the work you have stored on it. This is extremely cost-effective insurance.

 

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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In that case, you need this:

 

http://www.carbonite.com/

 

The value of the physical machine is trivial compared with the value of the work you have stored on it. This is extremely cost-effective insurance.

 

 

-- J.S.

 

I have a 1TB Maxtor USB drive set to automatically back up my entire laptop disk every night. I also make copies of all my projects (including all video and sound files) to a Western Digital Passport portable drive - not to mention copying key work-in-progress files onto a USB flash drive I keep on a keychain in my pocket, so even if I don't have my laptop with me, if someone else has one, I can play stuff for them. I'm covered pretty well in this respect. If I get a desktop machine, I'll probably go with a RAID5 array. Once burned, twice shy!

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  • 2 weeks later...
I basically don't want to find at some point that the fastest Macbook Pro sags under the weight of feature-length work with lots of sound tracks and lots of effects and proceesors.

 

Its a notebook. By its very nature its hardware and abilities are a trade off for its size and weight. So at some point you are going to exhaust its resources. Too many demanding processes running at the same time will slow it down.

 

The Core 2 Duo processors and NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics card used in the MacBook Pro are as powerful as a desktop from a couple of years ago. But it still has its limits.

 

 

Oh - I lied - one more question. I now have an iPhone and have transferred several short videos over to it so I can show scenes over lunch without schlepping the laptop. I've tried 1mbps Quicktime and MPEG-4 and the Qucktime movies freeze every few seconds and then start again - totally out of sync, while the MPEG-4 shows horrible motion artifacts. So what's the best format to put videos onto your iPhone?

 

I'm not sure why your video is freezing, the iPhone can handle 1Mbps. As far as the sync and motion artifacts that sounds like its from the compression software. With the motion artifacts its a balance between file size and data rate. The best compression software will apply the most compression to scenes with the least amount of transition in an attempt to keep the file at its designated size.

 

MPEG-4 is the only video codec the iPhone will play. Quickime is the media framework the iPhone uses to play MPEG-4.

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That is a performance beast. It also would be a beast to carry around.

 

It weighs nearly 9 pounds and is nearly an inch and a half thick. The battery life at best is probably 3 hours.

 

 

Oh, and if per chance I decided to stay with Windows and maybe switch to Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer, I'd probably go for a Dell M6400 Covet. Pricey - but desktop performance in a laptop for sure.
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Guest Glen Alexander

Right, why would anyone buy this when it DOESN'T support fully 16-bit images or codecs? Go over to Doom9 forum and get better codecs than Adobe.

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