Apple firmly lobbed several bombshells into the post production world yesterday with the announcements it made at NAB in las Vegas. Color and ProRes422 are big enough announcements by themselves but there was a wealth of other details in the revised editing suite. So in no particular order, here are some of the things that I found interesting and important from the announcements.
Color
The announcement of Color is earth shattering. Not because of what it does, but because of the fact that they included it in the Suite. Color is based on an Application called Final Touch, which apple bought when they acquired silicon color recently. Final Touch was a revolutionary product in itself because it offered the ability to do realtime digital intermediates and color grading on a previously unheard of budget of $5k. So to bring the price down to effectively free, is going to send ripples through the industry in much the same way as final cut pro did when it was initially released. I can’t overstate this enough. A colorist is a highly paid specialist (some would say elitist) job which required expensive hardware and software. Jobs can be won or lost depending on the quality and reputation of the colorist, or the ability of a facility to provide the kind of advanced color correction that Apple’s color now enables anyone to do. Apple have just removed the barriers from anyone getting into this field. I am sure there are a lot of Colorists out there this morning that are suddenly seriously nervous.
Final Touch was a fantastic application, and hopefully Apple will have improved on it. We use it where I work, and while it has some issues, it can hold its own against more advanced systems. If you think anyone is going to be able to provide film quality color grading on their macbook though be prepared for a let down. To get full performance out of Color you will need some serious horsepower, a proper calibrated monitoring solution, and Ideally a control surface. But still, it’s fantastic that they have done this, although, like I said, there are going to be a lot of pissed off people in the post production industry this morning.
ProRes 422
The new ProRes422 codec is also going to be a game changer, although there are several questions left unanswered about this new format. One of the biggest challenges in doing online quality HD at the moment is disk space. If apple’s claims are true and this does allow you to do uncompressed quality HD at SD file sizes and bit rates, this is going to open up the world of Hi-Def to many more people. You will no longer need expensive fiber channel or SATA raid systems. The ability to edit Uncompressed quality HD on a laptop is truly staggering.
As I said earlier though, there are many unanswered questions. For a start, is the AA IOHD the only way to get material into the system in realtime using this codec ? How long does it take to transcode? Can you transcode in realtime from other capture cards (highly doubtful)? How good is it when used for effects and color correcting? Can you use it at SD resolutions for compression or does it just work at HD? Time will tell I suppose. It is still a pretty big announcement though.
Open Format Timeline
This is pretty cool too. You can now mix (a limited set) codecs, formats, resolutions and frame rates on the timeline without rendering. You could always put pretty much anything on the FCP timeline before, but it would have to render it, but now, it will playback realtime, which is pretty impressive.
RedCode Support
This is another big one. If you don’t know anything about the red camera then check out their website. Red is a revolutionary company offering a 4K camera capable of matching and surpassing virtually every HD camera out there for a fraction of the price. It has been the talk of the industry since it was first announced, and there’s just too much about it to go into here. One of the important things though, is that it’s tapeless workflow, recording onto a variety of mediums including hard drives and featuring a revolutionary new codec called redcode, which it seems you will be able to take directly into final cut pro and edit with on the timeline without any conversion. Again, this is seriously going to shake up the industry. The quality form the red camera far exceeds any other HD camera on the market, and now you have the ability to edit 4k cinema quality files directly in final cut. Amazing
Motion Templates in FCP
This may seem like a gimmick, but…Oh My GOd this is going to be so useful. For doing things like animated name supers (or as Apple refers to them – Lower thirds) will just make life so easy. This is the kind of thing that I have to do frequently as a designer, and it always ends up being complicated when sending these kind of things to the finishing suite. I can now design the whole thing as a template, and have them just change the details when they are finishing it. Excellent. This will make life so much easier for both editors and designers.
Motion 3
They seem to have addressed many of the issues I had with motion (aside from stability, which I can’t judge from the online info) The way they have implemented 3d looks flexible and powerful, especially the new 3d particles. But what was really missing from earlier versions of motion was any kind of tracking tools. The new tracking options look amazing, but I will reserve judgement until I get to try them. The paint system looks impressive too, and is another thing that was badly missing from motion previously. Over all motion seems to have had the biggest upgrade to all the applications. I will go into this in more detail when I get the chance.
Other Bits and Pieces
Compressor seems to have had a nice and much needed overhaul. The claimed speed improvements are much needed. Notably absent was DVD Studio Pro, which remains at the current version. This is a shame as many were hoping for blu-ray support, but as the format is not really finished yet (supposedly) then I guess we’ll just have to wait a bit longer. There are lots more details, and this is just a quick digest for now. Visit Apple’s site and check out some of the videos that they have posted about all this stuff.
Technorati Tags: Apple, NAB, Final Cut, Final Cut Studio
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