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MillimeterReview: Apple Final Cut Studio 2
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By D. W. Leitner
Juggling a juggernaut.
Apple Final Cut Pro 6 allows you to edit in ProRes 422, the company's new full-raster, visually lossless postproduction codec. Shown above is uncompressed 1920x1080 HDMI captured to ProRes 422, imported via Blackmagic Design's Intensity card using the Capture Now button.
Let's hope Apple never becomes an ordinary company. Few companies set out, after all, to smash the dystopian future as famously depicted in Apple's defiant 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh (by Ridley Scott, fresh off Blade Runner). Whether or not present-day iPods and iPhones advance the utopian cause, this much is certain: There's a little bit of Apple's disruptive DNA in every product it introduces.
Take, for example, Final Cut Studio 2, introduced in April at NAB. In the ancient days of 2002, I reviewed Final Cut Pro (FCP) 3 with its debut of primary and secondary color correction along with waveform and vectorscope diagnostics. I called it a “post house in a box.” (It's fun to look back: “Say what you will, that a Mac with FCP 3 is not an Avid Symphony — Da Vinci colorists, in turn, belittle Symphony's color correction tools — it sure feels like empowerment to me.”)
Well, with the release of Final Cut Studio 2, the box has gotten way bigger — figuratively and literally. Inside are four hefty volumes of the Final Cut Pro 6 user manual (exemplary in clarity and comprehensiveness) and a slim volume on Color (more below), as well as installation discs for six full-blown applications: FCP 6, Color, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3, and DVD Studio Pro 4. You can heat your oven and cook that Thanksgiving turkey in the time it takes to load these installation discs.
Examining six applications in clinical detail in this brief space is impossible. These are large, sprawling, complex programs with countless setups, plug-ins, and possibilities of “round-tripping” clips. With the exception of Color, they're not fledgling versions either. What's already well-established is that FCP is terribly popular among amateurs and professionals alike, from teenaged Spielbergs to aspiring indie filmmakers to Hollywood legends. So instead, I'll focus mainly on my impressions of FCP 6 and Color, having worked with them for several months.
What's soon apparent upon installing the full suite of Final Cut Studio 2 apps is that Apple's “one-size-fits-all” approach has been compromised, if not retired, by technology itself. Where Avid has traditionally tiered its NLE products into price/feature categories by use of dongles and whatnot, Apple has prided itself on a single, democratic version of FCP delivering full functionality and running on most Macs (Final Cut Express HD notwithstanding). The switchover to Intel in early 2006, however, caused a leap in performance that opened new possibilities for processor-intensive software such as advanced codecs. It created a technology gap between older PowerPC heavy lifters such as G5 towers (state-of-the-art months earlier) and the new Intel screamers. Apple, never one to shy away from disruptive products, had disrupted itself.
The fallout: Although there remains a single pro edition of the latest Final Cut Studio 2, not all its apps can run on aging iBook G4s, PowerBook G4s, and Power Mac G5s. Even iMacs, MacBooks, and MacBook Pros based on the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors are not on a par with the quad-core and eight-core “octo” Mac Pros featuring the speediest Intel Xeon processors.
Apple, to its credit, has been diligent in posting detailed system requirements on its website, along with tech notes specifying which systems are up to demanding tasks such as capturing HD directly to ProRes 422, its new full-raster, visually lossless postproduction codec. (1920×1080 or 1280×720, I-frame DCT, 4:2:2, 10-bit sampling, variable bit-rate, 145Mbps to 220Mbps. For details, see images.apple.com/finalcutstudio/resources/white_papers/L342568A_ProRes_WP.pdf.) But in addition to Apple's guidelines and the collective insights available online at forums such as Creative Cow, dvinfo.net, and 2-pop — often inflected by opinion, caveat emptor — experience and testing remain critical.
