It’s only been on the Mac App Store for a few days, but Final Cut Pro X has already stirred up a whole messy pot of controversy. Despite its status as the top paid and top grossing app in the store, the program has dropped to a measly two-and-a-half star user rating, with more than 200 one-star reviews. Professional editors by and large have mixed feelings on the software, and for good reason: Many key features from Final Cut Pro 7 are missing. You can’t import projects from previous versions. There’s no way (without paying a hefty sum on third-party plugins) to export audio to ProTools.
And yet, I couldn’t be happier about the new version of Final Cut.
Once again, Apple has stripped every non-essential bit from the video editing process and reinvented it from the ground up. The company did it in 1999 with the original Final Cut Pro, when the film industry believed a non-linear editor had to involve software and bulky hardware in a package that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Apple employee Randy Ubillos did it in 2007 with iMovie ’08, wanting a faster way to edit home movies. And now, Apple has taken a decade’s worth of knowledge and again asked the question: “How can we make this better?”
With the release of its hotly anticipated Final Cut Pro X (FCP X), Apple breaks new ground—not just with its flagship video editor's interface and underlying infrastructure—but with the whole mindset of what it means to be a working professional video editor.
Apple has revamped Final Cut Pro's hands-on user experience in three major areas: Editing, media organization, and post-production workflow. New tools such as the Magnetic Timeline, Clip Connections, Compound Clips, and Auditions provide a smooth, intuitive editing experience.
With the rise of data-centric workflows and tapeless video recording, organizational tools such as Content Auto-Analysis, Range-based keywords, and Smart Collections work in the background to automate formerly tedious and time-consuming manual processes.
It’s finally here. Apple has released Final Cut Pro X, a brand new version of its flagship professional non-linear video editing software. It should be available as a $300 download from the App Store at some point after 5:30 a.m. Tuesday, though Apple warns that it might take "some time" for it and companion apps Motion and Compressor to be visible.
First previewed to great fanfare at the NAB 2011 Final Cut Pro Users Group SuperMeet, Final Cut Pro X has been completely rewritten, offering 64-bit support, a revamped interface, and a slate of new features. The software takes advantage of Mac OS X features like Cocoa, Core Animation, Open CL, and Grand Central Dispatch to speed up and refine performance. It also features a new floating point linear color system, support for resolution-independent footage up to 4K in size, and full background rendering.
Also available separately are two upgraded companion applications: Motion 5 and Compressor 4. Motion 5 features tools that let you customize titles, transitions, and effects. Compressor 4 offers a wide range of delivery codecs, sizes, frame rates, and encoding parameters. Both are $50.
Baseball season is here in the United States, and in addition to the professionals, little league teams and community leagues are also swinging for the fences. If you capture the action using a video camera, iMovie ’11 includes a little-known feature that lets you build a database of team members (of any sport) for creating highlight videos.
Step 1: Create a team
Build your own franchise in iMovie's Sports Team Editor.
Smith Micro has released a pair of animation program upgrades that cater to both novices and pros. Anime Studio Debut 8, a simple program targeted to novice users, hobbylists, and animation enthusiasts, offers a number of professional-level features in an easy-to-understand format. The Anime Studio Pro 8 upgrade, for professional artists and animators, expands that program by adding a slate of new tools and capabilities.
Debut version
Anime Studio Debut 8 is designed to allow aspiring animators to produce high-quality animations with a minimum of instruction. It offers a new Automatic Image Tracing feature that converts a paper drawing into ready-to-animate vector art in one click. This helps new artists (and kids) to start creating an animation in a few seconds.
Avid on Thursday announced its first iPad application, Avid Scorch. Based on the same engine as Avid’s own Sibelius music notation software, Scorch lets you import your existing Sibelius files or purchase and download sheet music from its own in-app store.
Not only does Scorch let you take your whole sheet music library with you, it also allows you to customize it in real time. It has a playback feature that lets you hear the score, slow it down to help learn difficult passages, and transpose the score on the fly. You can change instrumentation to hear how a flute might sound instead of a trumpet, for example. You can also convert the score to and from guitar tabs. Scorch has a built-in mixer that allows you to bring an instrument’s volume up or down in the mix.
When it comes to printing images at home—whether they be drawings, graphic art, or photos—the cost of paper and ink add up quickly. That’s why it’s handy to know how to print several images on the same page.
Aside from printing contact sheets—a grid of thumbnails that’s great for quality comparison or even test prints—or distributing images of different sizes to friends, this technique is useful for showing off your work in a mini-portfolio. In this article you’ll learn how to print multiple images per page using iPhoto, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Bridge, and Photoshop CS4 and CS5.
