It's been quite a busy week. Haven't been any posts this week because blogging is the first thing to be neglected.
Anyway, I received and installed Final Cut Studio 2 at work yesterday and thought I'd provide my initial impressions. I've only spent about 6 hours with it, so there will be more to come later.
First, packaging is about 15-20% smaller, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that they still ship actual manuals in book format.. So that's a nice.
Next, installation. If you install everything in FCS2 - and that includes Final Cut Pro, LiveType, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, Color, DVD Studio Pro, and all the additional content files such as loops and clips, be prepared to chew threw 20-30 gigs of hard drive space. It takes a long time for your DVD burner to read and cop that much data, but at least the installer is better than previous versions. It lets you pick and choose which components to install and select their target locations. Note that if you alreay have one of the older versions installed, you cannot deselect its newer replacement in the new installer - you have to replace it. So, be sure to remove any older components for which you do not want new versions.
Now, on to actual program use. I've only used the Final Cut Pro editor (it's version 6) at this point, not needing the other stuff yet for my current project. After backing up my project, a 10-minute documentary with about four hours of raw footage and hundreds of photos, I opened it in FCP6 not sure what to expect. But it launched with no problem whatsoever, and the entire application is definitely much more responsive. Menus and dialogs are faster, and working with video just seems snappier overall. It didn't have any problems using a few custom plug-ins such as SoundSoap and FCE Counter.
One of the main reasons I wanted FCS2 was its new SmoothCam feature, which will reduce the effect of camera shake. I tested it on some clips, and it does in fact work as advertised. However, there is one caveat which I wish I'd known before capturing this footage from tape: It has to analyze footage first, which is fine and understandable, but it analyzes an entire piece of media. Not individually selected clips. So if you have a half-hour import file, and from that you select a 30 second clip for SmoothCam filtering, FCP6 will want to look at the entire file. My system reported that it would take 8 hours to analyze one hour. The workaround is to do all your edits and get your content finalized, then export problematic clips as full-quality, self-contained Quicktimes. Then pull those Quicktimes into your timeline, either replacing the original clip or perhaps using it in a layer above the original thereby masking the original clip. Then you can analyze the Quicktime with SmoothCam and apply your anti-shake effect. This workaround is not ideal, but if your footage is in decent shape overall you can be selective about where to use Smoothcam and it can be a real lifesaver.
Well, off to work. I've got two more hours of raw footage to sift through, and some preview exports to run, and then I'll be messing around with Soundtrack Pro. Hopefully it has good noise reducing filters, because we've got a few scenes that need fixin.' And I'll probably launch into Color next week to see if I can fix a color shift that mysteriously infiltrated one particular scene.
Sometimes I wonder if Final Cut has become the Photoshop of video. With digital photos, I'm always hearing "Aw, we can fix that later in Photoshop, right?" It is to a certain degree - but it takes a whole lot longer and requires a whole lot more patience. We'll see how much more FCS2 helps out this week...
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