Final Cut Studio Update Due in Late April?

[bagelche]

And how often do you do this?

I work at a public access TV station. We run a couple of FCP edit stations (FCP Studio 1). Users bring in their own drives to store their projects. It would be great to simplify this process as it is done multiple times per day.

In the larger scheme of things, it's a fairly small tweak, but it's those small things that can affect workflow so significantly.

 

[MysterMac]

If they do this and close down Logic, while keeping the price of FCP about the same, I will be blown away.

close down Logic ?

surely Logic is due an update soon, Cubase is starting to look quite shiny

 

[nuckinfutz]

close down Logic ?

surely Logic is due an update soon, Cubase is starting to look quite shiny

Final Cut will never have the audio features that Logic Pro does. No worries there.

Logic Studio is due for an update as well.

 

[Digital Skunk]

But my point on Compressor still stands as I've used it plenty and gave up on it. If Apple would allow greater control over your formatting and speed the damn thing up a bit, that would be something. Ever tried formatting a video for iPod on it? What an utter joke. And while you can export to H.264 for BluRay, you still can't author or properly burn BluRay from FCS2. It needs real support, not rudimentary roundabouts.

I agree that the Adobe Suite is a dream to cut on and use, but saying that Compressor is slow is utter nonsense. It was the first of the suite apps to be core aware, and if you are cutting on a macbook then sure, it'll be slow.

Macpro, not so much. It's the fastest it's been in YEARS.

As for the update to FCS, I would seriously just want the app to be more like the Adobe Suite, which in terms of the user base is a much better option then even Avid..... given the user base...... USER BASE. Avid is still king, but when it comes to cheap editing suites Adobe smashes FCS right now, especially DVD Studio Pro, Motion, and even the coding of the app. It's much faster and much more user friendly.

 

[AidenShaw]

I figured that they probably would. I guess we'll see how OpenCL stacks up against CUDA, but OpenCL has the advantage of running on more than just Nvidia cards and, if I'm not mistaken, is compatible with a wider range of Nvidia cards to varying degrees, ie, 7x00 line or earlier.

OpenCL needs support routines for each card - there's a software layer to map the OpenCL abstraction to the underlying hardware APIs. This layer has to deal with both ATI and Nvidia APIs, and with different capabilities of different cards.

The CS4/CUDA/QuadroCX package, though, is a lower-level interface to the hardware acceleration.

It's somewhat like the difference between writing in C++ and assembler. While you gain portability with C++, you can often get better performance or more features with assembler.

OpenCL is a good idea, but I think that a lot of people are going to be disappointed when it shows up - mainly because of unrealistic hype. They'll be disappointed when it fails to "nuke" everything in sight - especially on some of the less powerful supported graphics cards.

Edit:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.173441

I'd hope that an $1800 graphics card would get good CUDA performance on CUDA...

 

[sdp]

See, this is what I think is the inherent problem with FCP's media management. In order to keep everything organized, and especially when I'm working with multiple projects at the same time, I make a new folder on my hard drive PER PROJECT where I keep all my music, sfx, gfx, etc. and make a folder called FCP PROJECT. This is where I keep the Scratch Disk, Autosave Vault—everything from the System Settings.

It's easier organization, and it's much easier to find the things that pertain ONLY to your project than having to go into FCP Documents on your system hard drive and try to find exactly what you're looking for when you're working on eight projects at the same time.

Granted, this is how we do it because I'm a full service post house that runs Avids, FCP systems for offline and online editing—so the level of organization must be greater when handling that volume.

Obviously, for a prosumer user it shouldn't have to be the same. It's just something that my Avid has that makes things much more streamlined and easier to organize for high volume. But it's a good practice to get in the habit of doing, especially when working with FCP.

Couldn't agree more. I really hope Apple re-works both file management "logic" AND their media manager. It's the thing that Avid has over FCP in a huge way.

To a prosumer this is inconsequential. for say a full service post house it comes close to a deal breaker.

I'm hoping that this version of FCP is a full re-write for snow leopard and they've overhauled their media management system while they were doing whatever is that they do....

 

[swatchpost]

Avid is still king, but when it comes to cheap editing suites Adobe smashes FCS right now, especially DVD Studio Pro, Motion, and even the coding of the app. It's much faster and much more user friendly.

Ok...faster and more user friendly—cool. But does that beat out functionality and getting what you pay for when you purchase an Avid?

Frankly, I'd rather pay thousands of dollars more on the front end for an Avid that I know can make accurate film cutlists, make a frame-accurate edit to tape, track metadata accurately for a DI, and has a working flexible trim mode rather than spending thousands of dollars on the back-end trying to fix or find work-arounds for software problems inherent in buying a prosumer application.

...and yes, I would LOVE for Avid to be scriptable and have them open their architecture up so WE the user could make our own tools. But that seems way down the line of possibility at the moment.

 

[Durendal]

I agree that the Adobe Suite is a dream to cut on and use, but saying that Compressor is slow is utter nonsense. It was the first of the suite apps to be core aware, and if you are cutting on a macbook then sure, it'll be slow.

Macpro, not so much. It's the fastest it's been in YEARS.

As for the update to FCS, I would seriously just want the app to be more like the Adobe Suite, which in terms of the user base is a much better option then even Avid..... given the user base...... USER BASE. Avid is still king, but when it comes to cheap editing suites Adobe smashes FCS right now, especially DVD Studio Pro, Motion, and even the coding of the app. It's much faster and much more user friendly.

Compressor is certainly slow on a dual core, at least compared to what the final product is. FFMPEG produces superior quality in less time. It's pretty sad when that kind of thing happens. I can't say how well FFMPEG would scale across cores, but it's still something that Apple should address. And frame controls...holy HELL, those are slow on anything. Great quality deinterlacing (when it works right), but unless you have a cluster with major horsepower, it may not be worth the wait.

 

[Durendal]

OpenCL needs support routines for each card - there's a software layer to map the OpenCL abstraction to the underlying hardware APIs. This layer has to deal with both ATI and Nvidia APIs, and with different capabilities of different cards.

The CS4/CUDA/QuadroCX package, though, is a lower-level interface to the hardware acceleration.

It's somewhat like the difference between writing in C++ and assembler. While you gain portability with C++, you can often get better performance or more features with assembler.

OpenCL is a good idea, but I think that a lot of people are going to be disappointed when it shows up - mainly because of unrealistic hype. They'll be disappointed when it fails to "nuke" everything in sight - especially on some of the less powerful supported graphics cards.

Oh, there's plenty of hype surrounding OpenCL that is likely unfounded. CUDA will doubtlessly still have advantages, but look at it this way: An OpenCL app vs a non OpenCL app will, in the right circumstances, make one hell of a difference. I can imagine that multimedia will benefit greatly from it. Sure, older video cards may not fare as well as newer ones, but even if it's only a 30% boost, that's still 30%. Better than nothing. Like I said, it'll be interesting to see Adobe and Apple pitted against each other when FCS3 comes out.

 

[nuckinfutz]

It's understandable that Adobe's apps are easier

Adobe has innate advantages with their lineup.

1. They moved to a suite format for their apps a long time ago. This allows them to unify the apps along common pipeline.

2. They don't have to develop an OS so their strictly focused on working with their apps on the two high volume OS.

Apple could be moving to more of a suite packaging for their apps. Final Cut Studio is a suit of apps but it's slowly becoming more than just a bundle of apps and into becoming a workflow.

Apple has advantages in developing their OS but it's a disadvantage as well because they are likely always looking to target the newest OS features but have to wait until the market has seen some penetration of the newest OS.

I expect that we see a much more heavily integrated Final Cut Studio 3. People want extensible workflows with good media mgtmt and roundtripping.

Is there any wonder we haven't seen

A new Logic Studio
A new Aperture
A Shake replacement

Apple could be ensuring that these apps finally work in concert together. Make'em all 64-bit and make managing each asset efficient so that duplication of assets is rarely needed unless requested.

 

[swatchpost]

A Shake replacement

I doubt there will be a Shake replacement now that Nuke is gaining so much ground. It's almost like what would have been Shake 5.

 

[nuckinfutz]

I doubt there will be a Shake replacement now that Nuke is gaining so much ground. It's almost like what would have been Shake 5.

It's a prayer. This comment speaks volumes from Ron Brinkmann formerly of Nothing Real and now with the Nuke team.

I really can’t say much about where Apple may or may not be going with future products. Although the fact that I decided it was time to move on might be a reasonable clue as to my confidence level that any alleged ‘next generation’ tool will be focused on the market (high end vfx and animation) that I’m interested in… And why I’m now working with The Foundry on Nuke…


OUCH

Truthfully though I had my doubts from jump that Apple could deliver a Shake replacement from the ground up. I don't think it's in Apple's DNA to do such high end software without acquiring much the app. They do well at improving apps to work in Mac workflows but ground up creation isn't their thing.

 

[twoodcc]

yeah i don't see much happening on march 24, but i hope i'm wrong

 

[Digital Skunk]

Ok...faster and more user friendly—cool. But does that beat out functionality and getting what you pay for when you purchase an Avid?

Frankly, I'd rather pay thousands of dollars more on the front end for an Avid that I know can make accurate film cutlists, make a frame-accurate edit to tape, track metadata accurately for a DI, and has a working flexible trim mode rather than spending thousands of dollars on the back-end trying to fix or find work-arounds for software problems inherent in buying a prosumer application.

...and yes, I would LOVE for Avid to be scriptable and have them open their architecture up so WE the user could make our own tools. But that seems way down the line of possibility at the moment.

I was comparing FCS to Adobe Production. Avid is still king, and when I say "the market for FCS/Adobe" I mean those that can't drop the cash on the front end. I learned to cut on Avid and if I had a say in my newsrooms purchases I wouldn't have wasted their time with FCP (that's a whole nother story). But personally, when I have those quick edits for freelance, I turn to FCS for now. When I re-up my hardware and software, I may switch to Adobe ProdSuite CS4/5.

Compressor is certainly slow on a dual core, at least compared to what the final product is. FFMPEG produces superior quality in less time. It's pretty sad when that kind of thing happens. I can't say how well FFMPEG would scale across cores, but it's still something that Apple should address. And frame controls...holy HELL, those are slow on anything. Great quality deinterlacing (when it works right), but unless you have a cluster with major horsepower, it may not be worth the wait.

I would still say it depends on the machine. If you are encoding/compressing 10bit HD footage on a Macbook Pro it WILL take a while. On a Mac Pro, not so much. On a quad core Mac Pro with 8GB and FCS2 then not so much etc. etc.

I use MPEG Streamclip for quick compresses and conversions, and it's just a little faster than Compressor depending on the frame rate, de-interlaceing, etc. I wouldn't downright call Compressor an epic fail. DVD Studio Pro is more of an example of that than compressor ever will be.

 

[SHOlover]

It all depends on what you cut and for whom.

Edit on Premiere if you want to produce skateboard and birthday party videos. Edit on Final Cut if you want to produce serious broadcast content or indie films.

CS4 fans drive me nuts! I always ask "name five features cut with premiere"
or "name five post houses that use CS4" hmmm...

Granted, both photoshop and AE are great programs, but premiere is a joke. Also the new transcription add-on is just terrible.

I hope that this next iteration of FCS will blow CS4 out of the water and end the comparisons between Premiere and Final Cut.

/rant

Here is the hierarchy of NLEs based on quality (from collective opinion AND from first hand experience)

iMovie
Vegas
Premiere
Avid Media Composer
Final Cut
Avid Nitris
Smoke


Also, the people that expect mid-to-high end editing software to run on a underpowered computer make me laugh. "Why can't I run Final cut on my eMac???" You start to sound like premiere users. "I'll just buy a 600 dollar dell and run CS4 no prob"Learn the craft, then buy the system appropriate for you. It all depends on what you cut.

Okay now the rant is over.

 

[Durendal]

I would still say it depends on the machine. If you are encoding/compressing 10bit HD footage on a Macbook Pro it WILL take a while. On a Mac Pro, not so much. On a quad core Mac Pro with 8GB and FCS2 then not so much etc. etc.

I use MPEG Streamclip for quick compresses and conversions, and it's just a little faster than Compressor depending on the frame rate, de-interlaceing, etc. I wouldn't downright call Compressor an epic fail. DVD Studio Pro is more of an example of that than compressor ever will be.

I haven't even done much HD editing and compression. It's mostly SD content and frame controls are still glacial. The epic fail comes in when frame controls don't even work properly, like the blocks of combing I mentioned earlier on short clips. Inexcusable. Also, there is the bit with Compressor not giving pros enough encoding options, ie, the staggering lack of options for iPod encodes. I also use MPEG Streamclip and IT has more options for iPods than Compressor! Extra options often comes out to mean higher quality as you can tweak and adjust. FFMPEG has the best options (and speed, and quality of the encode) of the free encoders that I've tried thus far, but you do need to know what you're doing.

Compressor isn't exactly epic fail, but as a pro app, it's pretty piss poor in many regards. Distributed encoding is hella nice, but it's not much help if you either need more options or don't have a cluster.

 

[iMacmatician]

Delays in the pro apps are due to complete rewrites for Cocoa. They will 64 bit, and ready to take advantage of OpenCL and Grand Central when Snow Leopard arrives.

These delays were obvious and necessary, and certainly, if you have been following the Adobe Photoshop CS4 mini-debacle and Shake's rebuild, you would have been aware of this.

I believe you, and it fits in with AppleInsider's rumor.

I wonder if there will still be some sort of "Pro event," just in April instead of the originally rumored March. That rumor did say a possible delay too.

It is very bothersome that they went to all the trouble of designing new iMac internals and never recognized the need to actually deliver better performance. Yes I mean better CPU performance. It wasn't something they needed to deliver across the board but the medium and top ends needed more that they got. Apple has very much painted themselves into a corner with the exclusive use of mobile processors.

10 more watts (than the 55 W 3.07 GHz in the last revision) for 65 W quad-core. I'm still surprised at why Apple didn't go that route and improve the iMac's cooling. The result of staying at mobile quad-core is a small speed bump for half the iMac line after nearly a year.

a user needs choice and the ability to meet cost and performance requirements

Even if 10 W was too much, Apple could still have given the mobile (45 W) quad-core as an option, that would likely perform better than fast dual-cores in multithreaded applications. But since they haven't, it looks like the iMac may stay dual-core for another year or two.

 

[thevofl]

Edu Discounts

I just hope that it is reasonably priced. I got FCS1 for $699 (edu discount). I then got CS3 Master Collection for $525 (again with edu discount). When they updated Logic, the edu discount pretty much disappeared ($449 nearly the amount that I got the Master Collection for).

 

[LethalWolfe]

I just hope that it is reasonably priced. I got FCS1 for $699 (edu discount). I then got CS3 Master Collection for $525 (again with edu discount). When they updated Logic, the edu discount pretty much disappeared ($449 nearly the amount that I got the Master Collection for).

It's over $30k worth of software for $1300. I think that's reasonably priced.


Lethal

 

[CBlakeston]

FCP works perfectly for DV content editing on a 2 year old macbook with puny GMA950, and a MBP works fine on HD content

I just had to agree. I produced a few short videos every week, editing in 1080i HDV for around 2 years on a black macbook and everything worked beautifully. I've always thought compressor was an elegant and easy to use solution after coming from Pro-Coder on the windows side of things before making the switch to mac.

And now I have a unibody Macbook Pro, it's not that much faster when I come to think of it. Maybe I'm missing out and an octo-core Mac Pro would blow me away. But its totally unfair to say FCP can't cut it on a mobile system.

 

[snarton]

wish list

My wish list for FCS3:
1) Blu-ray support
2) Phenomenon/ successor to Shake
3) direct-to-hard drive recorder with scopes and buffer like DV Rack/ OnLocation

Not holding my breath, though.

 

[FF_productions]

I have mixed feelings about it. It's great that they're releasing a new update of FCS, but I just finished studying to take the FCP6 certification test. Guess I'll have to wait for the new test for FCP7.

I have the book and everything to get certified, but I waited too long like a moron, by the time I'd ready for the exam, FCS3 will be out.

And for anybody to complain about the price, you gotta be kidding me. I just started diving into Motion 3, I'm stunned that Apple can price it that low and make a good enough profit to support all these pro apps! Shame on the people who pirate these apps and BITCH and COMPLAIN that Apple is not doing a good job with FCS. You sure aint helping! -RANT OVER-

 

[jpine]

Apple has given every indication that they are not interested in optical media. The pro app is embarrassingly long in the tooth. iDVD did not receive an update. If DVDSP does not get a major overhaul, surpassing Encore, I will abandon the Final Cut Studio and move to Adobe.

 

[bki122689]

new interphase to motion please
and possibly final cut pro

 

[Digital Skunk]

I haven't even done much HD editing and compression. It's mostly SD content and frame controls are still glacial. The epic fail comes in when frame controls don't even work properly, like the blocks of combing I mentioned earlier on short clips. Inexcusable. Also, there is the bit with Compressor not giving pros enough encoding options, ie, the staggering lack of options for iPod encodes. I also use MPEG Streamclip and IT has more options for iPods than Compressor! Extra options often comes out to mean higher quality as you can tweak and adjust. FFMPEG has the best options (and speed, and quality of the encode) of the free encoders that I've tried thus far, but you do need to know what you're doing.

Compressor isn't exactly epic fail, but as a pro app, it's pretty piss poor in many regards. Distributed encoding is hella nice, but it's not much help if you either need more options or don't have a cluster.

I can agree about the lack of compression and encoding options for Compressor.

There may be an issue somewhere else on your system with the slow encodes of Compressor. Not that I am supporting the app that much, but I've recently been having WAY TOO MANY app crashes with FCP and Motion. It may be related to that GFX card issue that the Penryn books have, but it just pisses me off.