Why are you upgrading to The new Final Cut Studio?
 

So, why are you upgrading to The new Final Cut Studio?

A more appropriate question would be.... why are you not upgrading, if you aren't?

Well:

A full resolution offline codec together with what looks to be vastly improved media management due to completely reworked subclip, nest and speed metadata handling ... will be great for long form editing using trad. offline/online workflows

Faster native handling of XDCAM HD (which is what I work with) together with improved render management ... will make lighter work of shorter form edits and/or all online workflows

Background rendering to Compressor will make getting edits out more quickly and at higher quality without extra steps or holding up work

... and all for a frankly measly 299 USD? Yes please!

Those are the biggies for me ... the rest of it is just gravy, and some damn good gravy too, like voice level match in STP3 so I'll spend less time tweaking vo levels, finally fixing speed controls to act more intuitively, better match framing that'll work in and out of subclips, nests and freeze frames... even the little cosmetic polish like easy exporting of anamorphic edits that'll bloody well open anamorphic in QT Player for review, anamorphic clips that display as 16:9 in the thumbnail view, and built in 4:3 title safe in a 16:9 canvas.

Sure, there's an absolute boat load of little things (and big things) that I might have wished would have been included in this release, but FCS is a work in progress. This update is a steal at 299 USD ... and for new users its lower entry point means much more for much less. It's all good.

I upgraded for the (limited) blu-ray support. It's basically what Toast should be, but it was worth it. It renders in half the time as Toast, with much better image quality, lets you insert chapter stops, and has basic menus that work.

FCP 7 seems much snappier than FCP 5 (where I was before).

I am going to stay with Final Cut Studio 2 for awhile. But I'm a person who is very reluctant to upgrade anything unless there's a specific problem. Installing software is one of my least favorite activities, so I put it off whenever possible.

I'm sure I will want some of these features eventually, but for the time being I'll sit back and read about all new bugs you guys discover!

I tend to agree with you.

No bugs yet. Haven't used it a lot, but I did burn a BD disc, and it worked, so that's a good sign.

The biggest problem I'm having is it's taking freakin' forever to install the content discs for Motion and Soundtrack Pro. The Motion Content 1 disc is telling me that it will take over two hours to finish. And the Soundtrack Pro disc said over seven hours. I cancelled that one, as I don't even use Soundtrack. What's the hold up?

Hi:
Could you please expand upon the "faster native handling of XDCAM HD"?
The promo on Apple's site suggests that there is automatic recognition of the the EX files and that the process loads them to your storage location of choice but it still suggests that the Sony Transfer software is required for the clips to be properly placed within the timeline.

Although I have purchased and received the FCP Studio 7 upgrade, I have not yet installed it. (still running OSX 10.4.11 and am awaiting Snow Leopard before upgrading the OS and installing the new FCP)

Already upgraded. The AVCHD "Blu-Ray" DVDs look amazing. Also, the ability to render to compressor *while* continuing to work is well worth the price of admission.

As an added bonus, the time shifting tools are now finally useful.

Hi Ron
The new Log and Transfer has (I believe) built in support for Sony's XDCAM EX clip format, and should recognize and import the clips automatically as soon as the media is mounted ... you'll still need Sony's Log and Transfer app to support ingest of XDCAM HD tho, and you probably still need their driver software for OS X to recognize and mount their media SxS media in the finder.
Once the clips are ingested, and you begin to work with them in the timeline, you should find things progressing more quickly/smoothly as Apple have apparently spent some time optimizing FCP 7's handling of the XDCAM (and HDV) codecs. If you check the "What's new" page on the Apple website for FCP, it states "Optimized codec performance: Final Cut Pro 7 renders four popular formats faster than ever: XDCAM HD, XDCAM EX, interlaced HDV, and interlaced XDCAM HD 422. This lets you work faster and experiment with greater freedom when you’re creating complex, multilayered sequences."
Hope thats useful info.
Andy

Hi Andy:

Thank you for the reply.
I guess the benefits will only become clear to me when I finally install it.
I had read the blurb vis-a-vis the optimized codecs but I had been hopeful, obviously unrealistically so, that this latest iteration of FCP would harbor the ability to ingest the EX files natively as Adobe has done with their latest version of Afteraffects.

I like this as well, the new ProRes Proxy and LT versions have me pretty excited.

It sounds like they fixed a lot of the bugs in the FCP/Color round trip workflow. If I have to export and re import a still or speed manipulated image I'm gonna explode.

Plus Pro Res 4:4:4 at 320MBps is good enough for me with RED footage since I mainly do broadcast and web delivery. Rendering DPX's out of Color will be nice if I ever have to do a film out.

Also hopefully After Effects can use the Pro Res 4444 codec so I can quit using Animation when rendering out.

Being an avid Avid user I love how you can now have multi colored markers as well as a speed tool worth a damn.

iChat theatre is one of the reasons I think this is great for me. I work a lot with a director based in Paris. We meet for final edits, but I have compressed footage, uploaded it for him to download to look at before we meet. Very time consuming. Now he can watch in real time the changes I do AND comment on them sitting in another country!
Really great.
Oh, and compressor

I also like the iChat theatre integration! Now only if there was a way for Clients using Windows to take advantage of this feature. Or is there?