Rotophonic

As predicted, Apple released Final Cut Studio 2 on Sunday, April 15th and while many others have covered the major features, I thought I’d share a few hidden gems gleaned from pouring over the documentation and demo videos.

Final Cut Studio No Longer Runs with Built-In Intel Graphics
Sorry, MacBook and Intel Mac Mini users. Apple has apparently removed support for your graphics cards. While the Intel graphics chips supported Quartz Extreme (albeit much more slowly) and Final Cut Studio v1 works just fine on my Intel Mac Mini, I think Apple would prefer that its “Pro” users use their higher-end computers, even if budgets sometimes don’t allow it.

Includes a Wicked New Feature: Match Moving and Tracking
In the past “blurring” of unreleased faces consumed a huge amount of any non-fiction film/television project’s post-production budget because the face tracking had to be done manually. As some may know, any television or film production requires a signed legal release for any person or product that appears in the footage and those without releases get blurred.

Now with Motion, just add a blur over your clip and attach it to a tracking target on your footage (the middle of the person’s face, for example) and render. While this is not new technology to most who have used Shake or other motion tracking tools, it is the first time such technology will be available on such a wide scale and at such an affordable price.

I’m guessing that they bought the technology from The Pixel Farm given the conspicuous promotion of The Pixel Farm on the Motion 3 product page with no mention of Final Cut Studio on The Pixel Farm’s web site.

Makes 5.1 Surround Easy
Besides being able to work with a 5.1 audio track as a single unit in the timeline in Soundtrack, you can apply 5.1-aware audio effects like reverb directly to your production audio. Simply convert your stereo audio to a 5.1 surround track (one click) and then apply the Space Designer plug-in to generate true surround, including sound cross reflection. Soundtrack even comes with 1000 royalty-free music beds and sound effects (like the sound of an airport) that you can drop onto clip.

Adds Simple AutoCluster in Compressor 3
Two things: Compressor hasn’t exactly been a speedster in rendering exports in the past and distributing the rendering out to other computers on your network wasn’t exactly easy or trouble-free. With Compressor 3, you can now quickly set up computers on your network to share rendering responsibility.

Runner up feature in Compressor: Retiming. Want your 31.2 second commercial to fit in your 30 second slot? Compressor will handle retiming using technology from Shake that analyzes the frames and assures smooth clean motion. Compressor even handles adjusting the audio for you.

Includes Adaptive Cadence Removal in Compressor
As someone who is working with a lot of 24PA footage, Final Cut Pro 5 is sometimes a temperamental beast when it comes to removing the “Advanced Pulldown” during capture. With the 24PA DVCPROHD footage we’ve been shooting, a 2:3:3:2 pulldown is added to the video and those extra video fields are supposed to be removed during capture. But sometimes if your in-point falls in the middle of the pulldown cadence, Final Cut doesn’t notice, requiring you to watch the capture window like a hawk and sometimes retry capturing multiple times.

Compressor will now analyze and discover pulldown cadence and remove it automatically. Haven’t seen this work yet, obviously, but if it does it’s going to be sweet.

Final Cut Studio’s new Color application used to cost between $5,000-$25,000 from Silicon Color
When Apple announced that Color would be included in the Final Cut Studio 2 box for the same price as the previous Final Cut Studio, audience members gasped and then cheered. This former Silicon Color tool’s inclusion in the Final Cut Studio package really puts the pressure on Avid. I mean, it costs $5000 just for Avid’s standalone editing product, Media Composer. And now for $1,299 you can get everything. Amazing.

[image credit: Apple Inc.]