July 23, 2009

The 'new' Final Cut Studio: v3 the Anticlimax

Apple released a "new" Final Cut Studio for $999 and new versions of Logic and Final Cut Server, and posted a bunch of movies to explain the updates. Motion does get reflections, shadows, and depth. Compressor 3.5 gets DVD and Blu-ray burning -- and there's lots of other nice touches.

Mike Curtis of HD4NDs and PVC has reviews on FCP 7, Motion 4, Color 1.5, etc at Macworld, and there's already free video tutorials.

Lynda.com has a free Final Cut Studio Overview containing 3 hours of video training by Damian Allen, and Ripple Training has 19 free tutorial movies on the new features. Also, Peachpit Press has free new samples for their popular FCS books.

Update: A quick way to get continuing updates on this release is to follow Final Cut User on the web and Twitter (Filmbot; follow Editblog too).

Update 2: Among the ProRes options is 4:4:4 12-bit plus alpha channel, which seems to be poised to finish of the Animation codec (except to those without access). There's a Apple ProRes Whitepaper (PDF) via FilmBot.

3 comments:

Joost said...

FCS3 does exports to Blu-ray... but that is only using pre-canned menu’s. DVD Studio Pro is not upgraded to do Blu-ray...

Rich said...

Apple does pretty good templates, esp compared to the other end of The Valley. And Compressor uses an XML-based template format, so there's some customization possible.

It's just one less reason to pay more for Production Premium, especially if you're based on the Mac.

Rich said...

Someone had it right, they have Blu-ray burning not authoring.