I went into downtown Seattle today to attend a free “Production Value of HD” session put on by Apple and IrisInk. For the most part, if was a good overview of what Final Cut Studio can do, though it did include some material I’d seen before (such as this video of Walter Murch and Soundtrack Pro). But in addition to seeing Final Cut Pro 5, Soundtrack Pro, and Motion 2 in action, I learned a few other things. Nothing that can’t be found in the Web descriptions and documentation, but new to me:
- QuickTime 7 Pro can do concurrent exports, which means you don’t have to wait for something to finish exporting before you export something else, or export the same movie using a different codec.
- Soundtrack Pro is AppleScriptable. Let’s say you’re in Final Cut Pro and your footage has some camera noise behind it – all of your footage. Soundtrack Pro’s new Find & Fix feature can remove that camera noise. So, you could create an AppleScript that sends your footage’s audio out of Final Cut Pro into Soundtrack Pro, fixes the noise problem, and brings it back into Final Cut automatically.
- Since this session was really geared toward professionals, the presenter didn’t hide his thoughts about the HDV format… HDV is not HD, basically. HDV is the gateway that will attract consumers to HD video, especially as the prices of HD televisions come down (he said that HDTVs will likely be a hot item at Christmas, as models will hit below $1,000; as he put it, someone who’s looking at a 32-inch TV for $400 is likely to instead buy a 32-inch HDTV for $700). HDV is fine for things that don’t require high image quality, but it’s nowhere near what you can get with uncompressed HD.
Overall, I’d say I didn’t learn much that was new, but it wasn’t a waste of two hours.
Also noteworthy: a new Seattle Final Cut Pro User Group is starting up, with a first meeting on June 1 at 7 pm in the dBUG Resource Center.
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 