Final Cut Pro can mix and match different video formats and framerates on the same Timeline without rendering. Not all video formats can coexist, but major ones (DV, HDV, DVCPRO, and others) can.

 

Apple’s Final Cut software began as a friend of the little guy working with a DV camera and a FireWire hard drive. Now, many of the new features in Final Cut Studio 2 are aimed at production professionals whose needs go way beyond those of your average indie filmmaker. Also, the Studio’s system requirements aren’t lightweight: Even fast, new MacBooks won’t run some of its applications well (if at all), and some new features won’t even work on G5 tower Macs. You may also need a new, roomier hard drive to accommodate the suite’s 59GB of applications and other media. But despite these beefy requirements, Final Cut Studio 2 is an awesome collection of pro-level applications, wrapped for the most part in a relatively easy-to-use and familiar interface, at a cost that no competitor can match. In this review, we’ll cover Final Cut Studio’s major applications.

 

Final Cut Pro 6. This is the linchpin in the whole Studio, but it’s also the most mature application of the group. Its new features tend to be a little more specialized.

 

The new Open Format Timeline is a big help if you edit footage in different video formats, letting you easily mix and match popular standard-definition and high-definition video formats together without having to render them first. You can put an SD DV video clip next to a DVCPRO HD clip next to an HDV clip, and Final Cut knows to scale the clips up or down to fit the frame properly and can throttle through their different framerates as they play. It generally works smoothly, although we very occasionally noticed small framerate stutters when playing back our test clips.

 

Another new addition is ProRes 422, which is an Apple-developed codec (short for compressor/decompressor or coder/decoder) that makes it much easier to edit the high-quality HD footage used in broadcast TV and film, without the pricey RAID storage systems and other add-on cards that high-end HD usually requires. The beauty of ProRes is that it takes a full-blown HD image and compresses it to fraction of its native size without losing an iota of visual quality. This is great for editors who want to go after higher-end HD projects without paying the usual associated costs for storage. ProRes also offers some lower-quality settings that look shockingly good but take up even less space and support more real-time streams and effects (and even work smoothly on MacBook Pros). And unlike HDV or AVCHD video (highly compressed formats used in low-end HD cameras), ProRes loses very little visual quality as you render in layers of other effects, so you could convert that footage to ProRes for better results.

 

The only hitch: Capturing video to ProRes in real time requires a Mac Pro (no G5 will do), or a dedicated hardware add-on like AJA’s IoHD ($3,699). But any Final Cut Studio 2-compatible Mac can use Compressor or Final Cut itself to convert existing digital video to ProRes.

 

Our favorite new upgrade is Final Cut’s SmoothCam feature, which takes unwanted camera shake out of any shot. Select a clip, and Final Cut will analyze it, automatically scale it up while losing little to no sharpness, and steady it for you, depending on the parameters you set (in case some movement is intentional). The gotcha is that Final Cut analyzes your entire clip, not just the portion that you edited into the Timeline, which can take several minutes depending on clip length and resolution (but you can work in the background during the one-time analysis). Also, if your media is a highly compressed format like HDV video, the analysis can take hours, so just convert clips to a format like ProRes first.

 

Final Cut offers many other tweaks, such as new effects plug-ins and the ability to play 5.1 surround-sound audio. But its biggest features are a flexible Timeline, a new HD codec, and a cure for sloppy camerawork. Your particular projects and needs will determine whether these are must-haves.

 

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Soundtrack Pro 2. The original Soundtrack Pro gave video editors some powerful mojo for doing their own audio work, such as easy noise-reduction tools, nondestructive waveform editing, and solid multitrack management. But it didn’t quite offer everything an intermediate and advanced project might need, which is where Soundtrack Pro 2 comes in. It fills those gaps and can put together a sophisticated audio project quickly and capably.

 

One of the biggest additions in Soundtrack Pro 2 is the new Conform tool, which lets you quickly resync your audio with changes in your video edits. In the past, changing your video edit meant going back to Soundtrack and manually moving each affected sound back into place. The more changes required, the more tedious the process could be. Now, Soundtrack automatically does much of this work itself by comparing your earlier soundtrack with the new video edit and then creating a third project that shows you all of the sound clips that need to be resynced. You can see this all in a color-coded Timeline and quickly accept or reject Soundtrack’s proposed changes with a quick mouse-click. The process isn’t always perfect, but it does solve many sync issues immediately and lets you focus on the trickier cases.

 

You can also create 5.1 surround-sound mixes. Thanks to a slick visual interface, you can drag a sound’s directional quality around, easily seeing how much of it will play on any particular speaker. It’s very intuitive, but remember that you’ll need a surround-sound controller hooked to your Mac to make this work. When you’re done with your mix, you can also turn it into an old-school stereo mix with a quick menu selection.

 

Soundtrack is also much better at recording different takes of the same sound and then letting you choose the best version, like when you’re choosing the best Foley sound effect for an actor fumbling with her keys, or the best take of some Automatic Dialog Replacement (ADR) audio (actors record ADR lines in a studio, trying to sync their speech to their on-camera performance). All your recorded versions automatically go into a new MultiTake Editor, where you can quickly solo each take and audition it to your video. A blade tool lets you cut up the takes, and you can quickly combine different segments into a hybrid, slipping the segments in time and applying cross fades to smooth them into a seamless whole.

 

Soundtrack sports plenty of other refinements too. You can easily lift and stamp (that is, copy and paste) audio properties from one clip to another, automatically matching EQ levels between clips and carrying over other effects. You can clean up sounds in a new spectrum view, which lets you clearly see the frequencies carrying unwanted noise (like a mobile phone over dialogue) and then cut them out. You can import/export OMF and AFF files, giving Soundtrack much better integration with other audio tools. You’ll find more than 1,000 new sound effects (in surround sound) with a focus on environmental and ambient effects. Plus, you can use JKL controls to zip through the Timeline, and a context-sensitive cursor makes it easier to apply quick fades and cross fades.

 

Soundtrack’s new tools can handle sophisticated projects from start to finish. It won’t replace dedicated multitrack editors for some specialized work, but for many jobs, it’s all you need.

 

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Apple recommends running Color on a two-monitor Mac, thanks to all the doodads in Color’s interface. On a single screen, things get a little cramped.

 

Color. Color is a brand-new member of the Studio family, dedicated solely to the job of perfecting your video’s color. Color is supposed to democratize the deep science and high art of color correction, giving everyday video editors the same (or similar) high-powered tools that professional colorists use, but for a fraction of the price. And from a pure feature standpoint, Color doesn’t disappoint.

 

In most cases, you’ll use Final Cut’s Send To Color command to move your video edit into Color. Once there, you’ll see that Color is organized around the concept of “rooms” (represented by tabs along the top of the interface), and you’ll move sequentially from one room to another as you work.

 

Between the rooms, there’s little you can’t do. Naturally, you can quickly make primary color corrections to the entire picture. More importantly - and this where Final Cut’s built-in color tools pale in comparison - you can make precise color changes to parts of an image, either by creating color keys that isolate only a certain color range, such as someone’s aqua shirt, or by drawing custom Bézier masks (you can use a four-point motion tracker or manual keyframes to keep those selections in place as they move).

 

You can also build unique looks by combining a wide variety of color effects into node trees (à la Apple’s Shake compositor), easily rearranging the nodes for different looks. When you’ve got a look you like, you can save it and quickly reapply it to other video clips on Color’s Timeline.

 

As you work, you’ll see real-time previews of many of the adjustments you make in standard-definiton, HD, and even 2K resolutions (provided you have powerful enough hardware). Eventually, you may add enough effects to make real-time previews impossible, at which point you can see them at a reduced framerate or render them out.

 

Color isn’t perfect. Its interface isn’t exactly Mac-like and doesn’t always use the same conventions of other Studio apps (in fact, Apple purchased a high-end program called Final Touch from a third-party developer and turned it into Color). Expect a steeper learning curve than usual.

 

Color also won’t work with some of the footage you may have in your Final Cut Timeline, including Motion and LiveType elements you’ve imported, footage that’s been retimed in Final Cut, and even lowly ol’ still photographs that you’ve animated (we can hear Ken Burns’s heart breaking right about now). Of course, you can always render these elements into QuickTime movies and then reimport them into Final Cut before going to Color, but that’s a pain.

 

The biggest “problem” with Color is that having a professional color tool won’t automatically make you a good colorist. You also need to know a fair amount about color theory, and how to use Color’s subtle, sophisticated tools to get quality, original results. That means learning a new and potentially deep skill set, which can take a fair amount of time. We almost wish that Color had been a little less high-powered but a little more accessible for busy editors who want to get great results without developing a whole new expertise.

 

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Motion 3. Of all of the applications in Studio 2, Motion takes the biggest leap forward. Thanks to several big, meaty new features, it can finally stand as a genuine alternative to Adobe After Effects, the 800-pound gorilla.

 

Motion now works in 3D, letting you position elements in 3D space, set up lights, and animate a camera through the world with behaviors or keyframes (imagine a camera slowly pushing in on a 2D photograph, but the elements in the photograph all seem to separate from each other in 3D space). You can set up 3D elements, lights, and cameras with a handful of menu choices, and we found the work in 3D more intuitive than in After Effects, because Motion let us change our 3D views while simultaneously giving us an inset view of what the camera is seeing. Another bonus: Motion’s particle systems and type elements can exist and even interact with behaviors in 3D.

 

 

Motion tracking is another big-ticket addition to Motion’s repertoire, letting you set multiple track points in a video clip, and then attach another object to those points so the two move in sync (for example, you might attach a billboard to the side of a moving bus, or a piece of text to someone as they run through a crowd).

 

New retiming behaviors let you slow down and speed up footage, which is something that Final Cut has done for years, but Motion’s take is vastly improved. First, it’s much easier to experiment with the retiming effects (just drag a few sliders around, instead of scrutinizing weird graphs). Secondly, Motion uses “optical flow technology” to create new and unique frames that make up the effect (translation: the effect just looks more natural, less doctored). Motion also includes several preset behaviors that let you quickly apply common retiming, like flash frames, hold frames, instant replays, strobes, and stutters.

 

And there’s more. Motion sports a paint system now, letting you pick from a vast array of brush styles and then animate paint strokes in infinitely customizable ways (although you can’t do precise frame-by-frame paint work for retouching). You can also design animated templates with drop zones for type and graphics (like a lower-third element featuring a person’s name and company logo), and then import that template into Final Cut. From Final Cut, you can reuse the element again and again, but conveniently change the drop-zoned text and graphics for each instance.

 

Motion is out of its awkward stage and ready for the real world. It doesn’t match After Effects feature for feature, but it can finally handle a good share of the motion graphics work you see on TV every day.

 

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DVD Studio Pro. The strangest thing about Final Cut Studio 2 is that one of its most popular applications - DVD Studio Pro - remains virtually unchanged, stuck at version 4-point-whatever. Apple won’t say why, but our guess is that the company has more work to do in supporting one or both of the high-definition DVD standards that are duking it out these days (HD-DVD and Blu-ray). But with high-def disc formats picking up steam, we think Apple will offer a DVDSP update sooner rather than later. Hope springs eternal.

 

Compressor 3. Compressor lets you convert video and audio from one format to another (for example, take an uncompressed HD movie and compress it to a smaller size that’s ready for the Internet or the iPod). Compressor gets a new interface that shows you all of its components together (settings, previews, batch progress), so you don’t have to call them up separately. But Compressor should really be easier to use. We wish it automatically preserved the aspect ratio of our source material so we didn’t need a calculator to do the math ourselves. We wish it could name different versions of the same encode sequentially (mymovie1.mov, mymovie2.mov) instead of asking us to manually rename each instance. And we wish Apple would finally solve the dreaded “Cannot submit to batch” error, which seems to occur randomly and stops the app in its tracks.

 

The bottom line. Without a doubt, no other video/film production software suite can offer as much as Final Cut Studio 2. Avid’s software is less an integrated suite and more a confederation of independent apps that still manage to miss key functions (such as DVD authoring). Not even Adobe’s new Production Suite, which launches in the fall, can quite match Final Cut’s tools when it comes to pure video production.

 

COMPANY: Apple

CONTACT: www.apple.com

PRICE: $1,299; upgrades from $499

REQUIREMENTS: 1.25GHz G4 or faster or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4.9 or later, 1GB RAM (2GB recommended for compressed HD or uncompressed SD video; 4GB for uncompressed HD), Quartz Extreme graphics card (top-tier cards highly recommended for Motion and Color; no integrated Intel graphics of MacBooks)

Offers a pro-level app for each step of the production and distribution process. Includes a host of new features that save time and improve output. Apps work seamlessly together. Competitive price.

Beefy requirements for some apps. DVD Studio Pro unchanged (no Blu-ray support). Color application features a different interface.