Final Cut Studio 3 First Look: Apple Ignores DVD Studio Pro Again, but Debuts (Modest) Blu-ray Support, New HD Codecs

eMedia by Jan Ozer

By now you've heard that there's a new version of Final Cut Studio shipping from Apple, aptly called "the New Final Cut Studio." What's new? Well, it starts with a new price of $999, $300 less than Final Cut Studio 2. You can upgrade to the new suite from any previous version, even Final Cut Pro 1.0, for $299. All suite components were upgraded (to varying degrees) except for DVD Studio Pro—which, as you may recall, wasn't upgraded in the previous suite either. Fear not, however (are you sitting down?): The suite upgrade does enable a modest level of Blu-ray Disc authoring. More on that later.

There are more than 100 new features spread over the suite, but here I'll focus on Final Cut Pro and Compressor. Although I had a 2-hour product briefing from Apple, I couldn't actually test the product before submitting this column, so I'm simply reporting what I saw and heard.

The first key thing to note about Final Cut Pro is that the interface is unchanged. As for new features, the most significant is a Share option that lets you produce a new range of outputs right from the timeline, including Blu-ray Discs, various quality levels of YouTube and MobileMe output, as well as any setting created in Compressor. You can batch your outputs, but what's really neat is that all rendering occurs in the background so you can keep working in Final Cut Pro after you share the timeline. No more creating QuickTime reference movies and loading them separately into Compressor. read more...