iPhonewhat? Apple’s Pro Apps division unleashed an enormous upgrade to its Final Cut suite in May, and Macworld.com put up the full reviews on its site last week, just before the deluge of coverage of a certain consumer multifunction device. There’s a lot in Final Cut Studio 2: ProRes codec in Final Cut Pro, 3D and painting in Motion, HD in DVD Studio, conforming in Soundtrack, and a “new” (acquired) app called Color.

The reviewers for Macworld are people worth paying attention to. HD consultant and writer of one of our all-time favorite blogs, HD For Indies, Mike Curtis, wrote the review of flagship Final Cut Pro. The Color app was reviewed by none other than the technical chairman for HD Postproduction for the National Association of Broadcasters, Gary Adcock (who’s also a consultant out of Chicago). I’m humbled just to get my byline among people of this caliber. (I did the Motion and Soundtrack Pro reviews). Online is the only place you can read our full, detailed reviews, so while there are still great reasons to pick up the print rag, you’ll definitely want to go online for the Final Cut reviews.

The Reviews

The apps are all reviewed one by one. As of Final Cut Studio 2, you can’t purchase them a la carte, but they’re certainly worth looking through in detail individually, as they retain some standalone character.

Final Cut Pro 6

In terms of bang for the buck, the Final Cut Studio 2 package offers many more features and capabilities than previous versions of the suite … Apple has also made a slew of improvements and fixes to existing features: FCP 6 is better, easier to use, and faster than previous versions. -Mike Curtis

Motion 3

With Motion 3, Apple has focused on the major capabilities previous versions lacked: motion tracking and stabilization, painting tools, and a true 3-D graphical environment to augment speed and easy, improvisational control. Motion may not become your only motion-graphics program, but it could easily become your favorite tool for quickly creating visuals. -Peter Kirn

Color 1.0

Color 1.0 is a solid, best-in-class addition to the Final Cut Studio 2 suite, offering one of the most powerful color-correction tools available in video production … However, its complex, less-than-familiar interface will take some getting used to. And its lack of support for third-party codecs will likely deter some video pros. -Gary Adcock

Soundtrack Pro 2

Sound editors and video editors—the humans, not the software—often seem to live in different worlds. … Soundtrack Pro … seeks to bridge some of those divisions, at least within the suite’s workflows. Enhanced recording tools aid dialogue and Foley recording (which includes sound effects and incidental sound), and a new audio Conform facility promises to make reconciling video and audio edits easier. -Peter Kirn

While we’re on the subject of animated pieces of paper: Switchfoot’s “Awakening” has been treated to a similar workflow (frames printed and photographed) with a very different result.

StudioDaily has an interview with Brandon Dickerson, on the workflow required to put this piece together.

Audio, relying primarily on the CPU, can do fine on the non-pro MacBook: a fast CPU and FireWire 400 can be all you need. But for visualists, the GPU has become more and more vital. The integrated Intel GPU on the MacBooks is surprisingly capable, and certainly gets through basic video mixing. But throw enough shaders at it (even just processing video, without any 3D modeling or gaming), and it can’t keep up. That’s the reason Apple requires the MacBook Pro for Final Cut Studio; with Motion, at least, they’re absolutely right.

You’d be wise to postpone a MacBook Pro purchase over recent months, though, with Intel’s new Santa Rosa architecture coming and NVIDIA working on taking their 8000-series GPUs mobile. Apple today announced they’ve got the new machines with both — and better displays, too.

MacBook Pro [Apple]

For more on the music and CPU side of this, see our sister site, Create Digital Music:
MacBook Pro Revision: Big Santa Rosa Performance Boost, 4GB RAM Option, More

The short version: better displays, finally a 1920px option, the latest-and-greatest NVIDIA GPU for faster performance in Motion and OpenGL goodness for geeks, faster CPUs, more RAM — just generally fewer ways your wallet can avoid buying one of these silver surfers. I got some additional performance details from Apple, and hope to follow up with my own benchmarks.

Editblog has responded to Anton’s SmoothCam tests with some tests of their own:

SmoothCam is smooth, but slow [Scottsimmons.tv]

Scott’s tests run even slower than Anton’s, regardless of codec. I asked Anton about this, and his take was that the technology was really intended for short takes, not long chunks of footage, and that you’ll want to make big use of subclips. (Hope I’m getting that right, Anton, but I’ll say I certainly agree with that statement.)

Nonetheless, Scott did an even more interesting comparison with other systems. I think it’s always worth having at least a couple of tools in your arsenal for different tasks, so this is all the more helpful:

SmoothCam vs. Some Others

We’re going to keep on testing. It’s also worth noting that SmoothCam isn’t the only technology that seems to benefit from Apple’s Shake team and their intellectual resources in video analysis. There are other match move capabilities built into Final Cut Pro. There are also some really compelling match move-related techniques in Motion, and, in contrast to these render-based algorithms, those operate in real-time. (I haven’t yet been able to find out whether those are also related to the underlying processing algorithms from Shake; if anyone knows, speak up.)

Real-time analysis I think will ultimately be the future, not only for correction tasks but all sorts of creative purposes and motion control.

Got more thoughts, blog entries? Send them our way!

Click To Play

View video directly on blip.tv

Final Cut Studio 2 HD SmoothCam Tests [blip.tv]

Shoot jittery footage with your HDV/DV cam? While on a taxi ride? On a bumpy street, zoomed in, while being run off the road by the Hungarian mafia?* I know I do. While shooting freehand is great for that “Reality TV” look, sometimes you want to look like a pro while keeping your budget - and this is where Final Cut Studio 2’s new SmoothCam feature comes in.
(*It’s a long story, but yes, this happened. No, this is not that particular footage.)

SmoothCam is a technology borrowed from Apple’s high-end, node-based compositing system Shake that was ported to Final Cut Pro 6.0 as an easy-to-use effect filter. The basic idea is that SmoothCam tracks the motion vectors of the pixels in your footage and tries to make them as stable as possible, resulting in a smooth and bump-free shot. Sounds awesome, and as usual with Apple, it’s hyped to no end. But how good is it in the real world?