Final Cut Studio 2

After initial wows, occasional muttered grumblings were heard from users of Final Cut Studio 1. The updated editing tool Final Cut Pro 5 (Studio’s major component) was a step forward, but fell short of a professional workflow in a number of areas. So there was plenty of scope to make Final Cut Studio 2 something special. For the most part, Apple has done just that. However – as we’ll see later – there are still some areas where it falls short.

Ringing the changes
But first, the good news: criticisms have been addressed. The two biggest changes in Final Cut Pro 6 are a multiformat SD/ HD timeline and an improved virtual Steadycam. You can now mix footage from any source at any framerate on the same timeline without transcoding first (a boon to anyone who has to combine stock with live footage). Camera and format support has also been expanded, and it’s more or less true that if a camera can capture video, Final Cut Pro 6 can edit it. Flash import (without audio) is included, but WMA and RealMedia formats aren’t – and likewise for output.

Both HD capture and editing are quicker with the new ProRes422 codec, which zips and unzips video on the fly at a cracking rate. This makes it possible to preview HD video on a laptop, using much less disk space. On slower machines the resolution is halved, but you can still put together an edit list on a MacBook Pro and then apply it at full res to source footage later. And on faster desktop machines, you can preview between two and four simultaneous 1,080i streams and up to ten 720p streams.

Other additions include the new wobble-zapping tool, which kills camera shake. This isn’t fast, but you can leave it analysing a file in the background while you get on with other things. And it’s clever enough to follow a pan while removing jitter. LiveType has also been upgraded and now offers better titling, with two DVDs of templates and effects. So there’s no longer any excuse for just slapping on a bit of Helvetica.

Elsewhere Apple has blitzed the features list. Motion 3, which is a midway mix of After Effects and Autodesk’s Combustion, includes mountains of programmable eye candy. It’s ideal for idents and trailers (the templates cover a wide range) and also for adding sparkle and glitter effects. 3D animation has been added so you can make your footage swoop and spin. There’s also built-in audio support, so you can link animation effects to sounds quickly without having to keyframe them.

Soundtrack Pro now includes surround support and fast conform to video edits, which means that dialogue will follow video with a minimum of hand editing. Soundtrack Pro’s editing is particularly intuitive – it’s much more responsive than Adobe’s Audition – and it also includes noise print removal and noise print copying, so you can copy ambient sounds from one recording to another for that location wildtrack feel.

Upgraded tools
Other elements in the package include Compressor and Color. Compressor is the business end, rendering output to a format that’s ready for distribution. If you also buy the optional Final Cut Server tool – £1,999 for an unlimited seat licence – you can offload this part of the process to a remote render farm. Color, meanwhile, is a grading tool, similar in functionality but very different in approach to Red Giant’s Magic Bullet. Colour in video and film is often heavily stylised, especially in ads and promos. With Color you can recreate any of those intense blue or orange-tinted, supersaturated looks. But while it’s a powerful tool, it’s not easy to work with. The interface and filing system are partly Unix-based, so expect some head scratching. It also works best with colour-calibrated monitoring to guarantee that what you see is what you get. If you can climb the learning curve you’ll be rewarded with the ability to do selective grading of individual areas, create grading presets and grade with up to 32-bit float resolution, which is far more than anyone needs but a good guarantee of video smoothness.

Bringing up the rear of Studio 2 is DVD Studio Pro. This has barely changed. There’s support for HD content on DVD, but it’s not possible to burn your own blue-laser discs – you have to spool them out to tape or save as a file. This is an odd omission and is bound to cause frustration. Expect a fix in the next version, which will be at least a year away. It’s also hard to understand how a professional video-editing tool can be missing a fast file preview feature. It’s much more productive to be able to view files before you load them. But you can’t – still.

An industry standard?
In spite of the shortcomings, this is a significant upgrade that deals with existing issues and adds some powerful new features. It takes Avid Xpress Pro to the woodshed and gives Premier and After Effects cause for thought. Only the PC-exclusive Sony Vegas package beats Studio for cost and ease of editing. But it lacks almost all of Studio’s advanced features and professional format support.

While Studio isn’t perfect, it’s very close to the sweet spot between cost and performance, which could make it an industry standard. There’s a huge amount to like, and while the price may seem high, it’s lower than most of the competition. Considering that Final Cut Studio 2 is packed with features and will take you all the way from editing DV output to preparing a telecine edit list (and much more besides), it’s actually something of a bargain.