FCP 4 Announced
 

Read all about Apple's latest upgrade to their professional level editing software, Final Cut Pro 4 Many, many new features,

Compressor MPEG 2 and MPEG 4 encoding with 1 pass and 2 pass VBR

SoundTrack, Music composition tools to create your own Royality Free music.

RT EXTREME Multiple Streaming Real Time Effects

LiveType for Industry leading text creation

Over 150 LiveFonts

Create your own keyboard shortcuts, remap the keyboard

Broadcast Quality CODECS

Master in High Definition

Support for Panasonic DVX100 with pull down tools for telecine insertion and removal (3:2 / 2:3).

Pro quality software based 8 bit and 10 bit uncompressed formats. Combine this with 32 bit floating point per channel video processing


And much, much more. The update is $399 USD and the full version is $999 USD. You need 60 Gigs of hard drive space to install. Complete requirements are here.

A big feature in Final Cut Pro 4 is the incorporation of Cinema Tools into FCP with new support for change lists and ink numbers. FCP 4 is big news.

I just received the notice from Apple.

Jeez, 60 Gb of available disk space (presumably on one's system drive) seems unreasonable. Many Macs only ship with a 60Gb drive (such as mine).

I think it is all the fonts. How are you going to get it on a powerbook, was my thought? Time to start looking at the newer 120+ gig drives with 8MB cache.

It looks like they may have fixed the audio synch issue.

Yup, the last sentance seems to sum it up.

Note: FCP4 is not shipping until June. So we can take our time perusing the new features, if so desired.

It may offer some the best quality output in the industry. Support for multiple Codecs and software based uncompressed 8 bit and 10 bit formats. Combine this with 32 bit per channel processing and the image quality should be stunning. Apple says this is the first time these features have been combined on a system costing less than $100,000.

Provided, of course, that you start with something worth looking at. <g>

Quote:
60GB of available hard disk space for installing applications

20GB of available hard disk space for installing LiveType and Soundtrack content

They must be also allowing some space for video. It would be absolutely insane for an app such as this to take up 60GB. I can understand the LiveType and Soundtrack taking up 20GB since all those LiveFonts animated fonts and audio files would get pretty big. But 60GB for FCP is just insane. All the Powerbooks come with 40 or 60GB drives.

They must be erring on the side of caution here.

Well, I do hope so...

The size will be clarified in a few days, I'm sure. If you click on the purchase button, the page says you only need 14 gigs. It's a little confusing. It does say you need a DVD drive for installation. I suspect it will keep the software pirates away for a long time. The app is just to big to download.

This QuickTime explains how FCP 4 w/Cinema Tools handels 24P and 24AP from the Panasonic DVX100.

PDF info
 

The PDF for FCP reads:

1 gig for he application

5 gig for Soundtrack

9 gig for Livetype

DVD a necessity

Hm .,.. has anyone checked out the other new announcement, just to the right of FCP 4 =)

http://www.apple.com/shake/

Also looks pretty interesting.

And re. the soundtrack feature... does it show that Emagic is now owned by Apple :) (Emagic makes Logic Audio, one of the more popular audio/sequencing packages)

/Henrik

Wow! My reaction after having watched most of the quick tour videos. You sure get an awful lot for your money with FCP4.

LiveType aka IndiaGraphics(?) looks cool. Might also prove useful for those, like me, who also dabble in web site creation.

Soundtrack could prove really useful as a quick way to add a bit music to a project. Also looks like a nice way to produce looping audio for DVDs.

Compressor does look like it has similar functionality to Cleaner, though probably if you delve deeper find that it falls short of fully comparing. I'm not complaining. Looks fine for what I want to use it for, and once again useful for compressing video for web.

All in all a very nice package, and that's even before I get started on DVD Studio Pro, or Shake.

Sure is a good time to be a Mac and video/film user/maker.