The new Final Cut Studio

Digitalfilms by Oliver Peters

With little fanfare, Apple simply announced the new Final Cut Studio on their website, ending months of speculation in the online communities. Apple had prepped for this moment, however, with ready-made, free Ripple Training and Lynda.com tutorials, online documentation (no more paper manuals) and a number of extra downloads.

The new Final Cut Studio (not version 3 or the 2009 edition) contains Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, Color, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, Cinema Tools and Qmaster. Noticeably absent is LiveType, which didn’t make the cut., because Apple is shifting its text animation efforts totally to Motion. If you prefer LiveType, upgrading a previous version of Final Cut Studio won’t overwrite LiveType and you can continue to use it.

The macro view

The big highlights of this release are Blu-ray support and expanding the ProRes codec family. Blu-ray support is handled through a new Share function in Final Cut Pro 7 or the Job Action window in Compressor 3.5. These are both essentially the same thing. Blu-ray is just one of the choices, along with DVD, MobileMe, YouTube and others. read more...