Final Cut Studio 4 Review

My full and complete review of Final Cut Studio 4 and Final Cut Pro 8.

First of all I want to say that I’m very happy to have been asked to review the new Final Cut Pro (total lie) and I look forward to sharing with you some of the awesome new feature and tweaks to the application that we have grown to love over the last 13 years.

Speed
We are all tired of rendering. Those pesky blue bars are driving us crazy even if they do offer us a walk away from the client to have a smoke outside. However, lets face it, they ARE a pain. I’m glad to be able to tell you that now, Motion tab moves can be done as smooth and fast as you can lay out “keyframes” in ScreenFlow. For the past couple of years those of us that do screen captures have been blown away by this amazing little $100 tool, so much so that many people are actually EDITING video inside ScreenFlow. I’m happy to tell you that the new “playback engine” inside Final Cut Pro works as fast and smooth as ScreenFlow (OK, wouldn’t this be cool)
Also, everything is GPU accelerated and things work as fast as they do in Motion but you never have the AWEFUL SLOW renders that usually occur when you bring things back into your timeline.  Yea… in FCS 3 composing your animation was fun in Motion but face it, eventually you gotta render that pig, and it aint pretty. (Good point, Motion stuff DOES have to render huh??? Oh well, it DEMOs well)

Color
Now that “Color” is a social networking photo app, it OBVIOUSLY can’t be a color correction tool. So all the functionality of Color has been moved from the application to a new Color MODE. You now get all the power of the primaries and secondaries, and all the other stuff you don’t use now because the workflow sucks so bad, in an easier to use filter metaphor instead of the old XML timeline metaphor. (This is one thing I REALLY would like.)

DVD Studio Pro becomes Web Studio Pro
You thought you were done with DVDs? Almost. Imagine now you can take all of the interactivity you know from DVD Studio Pro but now you can author interactive HTML 5 environments. Cool huh? (How come they haven’t done THIS yet?)

Gamma
Apple finally heard us and have fixed all the gamma issues in the Final Cut Suite… (honestly, I don’t know if they even realize they exist, but lets dream for a moment of a future…) No longer do we have gamma shifts between Apple Apps and Adobe Apps and for that matter… between Apple Apps and ANYTHING ELSE. (Fingers crossed?)

Keynote Integration
OK… although not a broadcast tool, lets face it, Keynote has some crazy cool features and animation presets built in like “Magic Move” and even Steve Jobs style Refections.  All of the great features of Keynote are now in Final Cut Pro 8 and make it a very powerful tool for us Corporate Video makers. (SERIOUSLY, this would be VERY COOL)

Keyframing
Here is something we have ALL been wanting… in the MOTION tab, PLEASE let me lasso a bunch of keyframes at a time, like in AE… PLEASE???? (Do we REALLY need to still be asking for this?)

Audio Capabilities
Soundtrack Pro and Logic Studio have been melded together to give us the very best of each… and then, all that has been put into a new Audio Tab inside FCP. Lets face it, Send to Soundtrack was cool… but on board kick ass audio is WAY COOLER. Oh, and can we get rid of the stupid FCP1 UI and use the COOL UI from Logic? (Seriously, who likes the current Soundtrack.)

Hardware Use
FCP8 now actually uses all the power of the bad ass hardware you have been spending thousands of dollars on.  Imagine setting up your hardware delegation to set aside a few processors for true background renders. Any region of your timeline you are not working on it will render on a predetermined number of processors truly in the background. Or, you can give everything to your realtime playback of your GPU accelerated effects. FCP8 now REALLY uses all your hardware. (Oh please, oh please, oh please!!!)

In summary, FCP 8 or FCS 4, what ever you want to call it, could be the dream application we have been waiting for, since Final Cut Studio 1. The last couple of releases have been kind of anemic, so lets hope they’ve been working hard in “The Loop” and Christmas 2011 is coming early this year.

Leave a Comment below, what do YOU want to see in the new Final Cut Pro?



Comments

[DC Reels]

Loved the dialogue search tool, say goodbye to logging! And handling h.264 natively means less transcoding and more time with my new iPhone5 which now shoots 1080p w/Zeiss glass. :)

[Alex]

Totally right about soundtrack pro and logic... Just what I am waiting for.. :)

[Sam Brown]

You forgot: "Runs on an iPad"

[Visually CREATIVE Video]

I too would love to see some of the features get incorporated into FCP. Would be nice to stop some of the Round Tripping. (or should I just say Tripping?) I must admit that I am nervous that Apple is going to under deliver but I'm also hopefully optimistic that they will deliver above and beyond expectations and promises. It's hard for me to believe Steve Jobbs knows the functions of a good NLE so his words carry no weight. I'd much rather hear it from an editor that explains & shows their workflow. Hopefully FCS will be amazing even if for no other reason than to make the next inception of the other NLE's push the boundaries even more by including more options. I'm not wanting the Pro NLE's to go Consumer as there are already many Consumer NLE's. iMovie is iMovie. We need Pro NLE's to remain Pro.

http://www.VisuallyCreativeVideo.com

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