4. Final Cut Pro 6: The provenance of ProRes 422. Apple introduced what it's calling a "new post-production format offering uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes" called ProRes 422 (or, at times 4:2:2 - but I digress), and it's capable of providing truly gorgeous output in truly highly compressed file sizes. In response to my questions, Townhill said that, yes, it was developed by Apple, but since it's a QuickTime codec it's freely available - and if third-party developers want to license it, Apple's all ears. For example, AJA Video Systems licensed ProRes 422 to put into silicon as the heart and soul of it's new HD I/O system named - take a wild guess? - the IO HD. So ProRes 422 is software that can be housed in silicon for snappy performance. Simple.
5. Final Cut Pro 6: Motion integration. Apple announced yesterday that templates created in Motion 3 would be accessible from directly within Final Cut Pro 6, but it didn't make it clear exactly how. According to Townhill, the answer is simplicity itself. When you launch Final Cut Pro for the first time, you're provided with a setup option that asks whether you'd like Final Cut Pro to display a Motion Templates menu option. If you tell Final Cut Pro that you'd like that addition, it'll display Motion's templates, including a QuickTime preview of each. If and when you create your own Motion templates, you'll be able to access them from Final Cut Pro, as well.
6. Motion 3: More details. You can now apply Motion's Behaviors to the new vector-based paint strokes simply by slipping and sliding them in the timeline - no keyframes, no cry. Townhill could give me no hard and fast number of multiple cameras and light sources that you can have, because you will, of course, be constrained by the horsepower and hard-drive bandwidth of your system. The slick new Audio Behaviors capability, in which your soundtrack controls an animation, is triggered by a combination of the soundtrack's frequency and amplitude, which Audio Behaviors can interpret rhythmically - what's more, when tuning an Audio Behavior, you can choose the frequency spectrum to which you want the animation to respond. Killer flexibility.
7. Compressor 3: Batchability. Okay, so "batchability" isn't a word. So sue me - but after hearing Townhill give me a quick rundown on all the batch-processing and job-chaining options built into Compressor 3, batchability might just make it past the watchdogs of the MLA. You can essentially set up a broad range of different jobs, job types, and job sequences, assign them to different cores, and also chain jobs so that processes that would be required for each iteration of an output file will be performed first. For example, let's say you're outputting your file to six different types of encoding, but you want to speed up or slow down a portion of a clip; with job-chaining, you merely use a simple chain icon to link together all the jobs' sequences so that the speeding/slowing effects happen first, before Compressor splits the project up into multiple encoding jobs.
Andy Coon
April 20, 2007 at 11:22am
By any chance do you know if FCP 6 has support for AVCHD codec that is recorded to the Sony HDR-SR1 Hard Drive? This is a question many of my readers have asked me and I can't figure it out. I don't blame Apple if they don't have support it seems like another blunder by Sony. Pushing a product onto the marketplace without getting feedback from other suppliers.
Thanks
curiously enticed
April 17, 2007 at 5:01pm
ok so the word is that this 422 thing will compress HD video to SD file sizes. has it occured to anyone else that this would be exceptionally benefitial to getting hd movies from the itunes store?particualrily for the nice high def apple tv's? (now if there was only someway to get them to sell to CANADIAN customers
Frank
April 17, 2007 at 10:02am
Did you mean to say that Final Cut Server has Compressor Pro 3 built in? It seems silly that they wouldn't include the latest version since you had mentioned earlier how much faster it was.
Frank
