Release Scope

So, this isn’t the huge rewrite some have been expecting. As noted here, this doesn’t even seem to be Final Cut Studio 3; Apple is just calling it “The new Final Cut Studio” everywhere.

Update: Hmm… except in a couple of the screencasts they do call if FCS3. Which suggests this branding decision may have been last-minute.

That major rewire is undoubtably still coming; when Apple axed 64-bit Carbon they implicitly committed themselves to eventually rewriting Final Cut (their last major mostly-Carbon app, other than iTunes), but it looks like that will have to wait for the next version. The good news is, the fact that Apple isn’t calling this FCS3 might very well mean that we won’t have to wait two full years for that next release. I’d assume that, if this is just an interim update, they’ve been working on the larger release in parallel with it. Perhaps next year?

Notable Features

As I see it, there are basically five features of major significance to Red users here.

ProRes 4444 – A new 320 Mb (40 MB/s) variant of ProRes that supports 4:4:4 chroma sampling and full-resolution alpha channels. You can sort of think of this as being to DPX what ProRes 4:2:2 was to uncompressed HD: a format that makes minor compromises to quality, when compared with uncompressed material, in exchange for footage that’s vastly easier to work with. Testing will, of course, be required, but it’s possible this might be a plausible — and very convenient — finishing format for indie projects, perhaps even indie features.

4K support in Color — Not much explanation required here.

Better R3D Support — Final Cut still can’t (as far as I can tell) edit R3D files natively. But it looks like you can now use CinemaTools to manage the relationship between ProRes proxies and R3D files, and more easily move from a Final Cut timeline using the former to a Color project using the latter.

Generally better Color/Final Cut integration — Not applicable solely to Red workflow, of course, but it looks like a lot of work has been done to make Color smarter about dealing with complex Final Cut timelines. It should no longer get confused with speed changes, stills, and other things that currently confuse the hell out of Color.

Automatic importing of file-based recording media — It looks like Final Cut can now detect when a drive or card is mounted, and start automatically importing media from it. There also seem to be some new features for retaining more metadata from imported file-based media, but it’s not clear if that applies to R3D files.

Cheaper Color control surface options — Again, not Red-specific, but Color now supports the ~$1800 Tangent Wave control surface, among others, lowering the price barrier to using a control surface to about 1/5th of of where it was previously.

Blu-ray & the future

Apparently, DVD Studio Pro still doesn’t support actual Blu-ray authoring. What we have instead is sort of strange and, I think, rather telling. Compressor can encode Blu-ray compatable H.264 now, and create Blu-ray discs using pre-built Apple menu templates. These templates are apparently in some sort of XML format, so anyone comfortable with a bit of XML slinging can build their own. I have a sneaking suspicion that what we’re looking at here is an early version of the file format of a new application that will eventually replace DVD Studio Pro.

More as I discover it.