Preview: Final Cut Studio 2
PC Authority gets a first look at Apple's newly released video editing, animating, DVD authoring, audio editing, video compressing and colour grading suite.
At this year's SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers) conference we were given some hands on time with Apple's newly revised Final Cut Studio 2. On the whole it's a fantastic piece of software, however we'll reserve final judgment until we have spent some weeks working with it.
Final Cut Studio 2 (FCS2) comprises several applications that have been tightly integrated with each another. It revolves around the non-linear editor Final Cut Pro, including the animation program Motion; the prosumer audio editor Soundtrack Pro; Compressor and DVD studio which respectively compress video to various formats and author DVDs. FCS2 has also introduced a new colour grading tool; the aptly named Color.
Final Cut Pro (FCP) itself is mostly unchanged in appearance, however it's equipped with a new post production codec named Pro Res 4:2:2. It's a lossless, variable bitrate codec that can compress 10-bit 1080p footage into 220Mb/s, or 145Mb/s at 8-bit. Another interesting addition is that when you start a new project its settings will automatically conform to the first clip you drag into the timeline, with other format clips automatically scaling to the same resolution as the first clip. Adjustments can be made from the clip's individual motion tab.
However, FCP still does not natively support MXF files generated by Panasonic's P2 system. Like the previous version, it can still work with the footage after removing the MXF wrapper and replacing it with a Quicktime wrapper, but this renders the footage incompatible with PCs and disregards the extensive metadata originally attached to the footage by the camera. Until Apple addresses these issues, we recommend anyone who wants to overcome these issues use the Raylight series of plugins.
Many of the new extra options in Final Cut Pro rely on Motion's engine. For instance a new camera stabilisation function can be invoked from FCP, which uses Motion to look for anchor points by analysing the footage on a frame-by-frame basis. Correction options are then provided and clips are automatically updated in the FCP timeline.
Motion projects now have preset fields, which can be addressed and edited from within FCP. In practice this means that text in an animated title overlay can be changed from within a Final Cut Pro tab, so the animation doesn't have to be edited from within Motion according to who is on screen.
The same integration philosophy applies to Color, Apple's new grading software which grades footage on a clip-by-clip basis. The process is non-destructive, which means that the corrected footage is rewritten as a new file, and FCP's timeline is updated accordingly. Color renders from the in points to the out points of a clip in a FCP timeline, so if you decide on another round of editing after the post production stage, any frames that were added to the timeline that were originally outside color's work area will have to be rendered. It also gives you a 3D colour scope that lets newcomers come to terms with the colorimetry of a shot as well as how it is being altered.
Soundtrack's revision has focused on speed. It will default to the same timecode base as the FCP project you are working on in an effort to keep editors in a familiar environment. Surround panning is done by dragging a marker around a circle, and audio restoration can be done by selecting regions from a spectrum analyser. Most impressive is the conform tools which will automatically manage the audio according to edits made to the video.
Compressor now supports H.264 high profile, which in short adds support for HD-DVD. You can also use macros to encode once clip to multiple output formats and use the autocluster tool to farm out tasks to idle machines on your network.
Overall, and from the outset, the significant new features and plethora of evolutionary changes in FCS2 make it a very compelling video production suite. At a mere $1698 for the standalone version (which is significantly cheaper than other suites and in some cases standalone editors of equal capability to FCP) or $649 for owners of Final Cut Studio (which is game console money), it has every right to have had the Mac users clustered around Apple's SMPTE stand frothing at the mouth.
Keep reading PC Authority for our full review, coming soon.
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