So with the discontinuation of Shake as stand alone software and the purchase of Final Touch the next Final Cut studio package is looking pretty awesome.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/10/16/apple.buys.silicon.color/

It could be a "Phenomenom"

Just think....Apple FFI at an affordable price.

TT

yet another arrow in Apple's quiver...my thoughts posted at:

http://www.hdforindies.com/2006/10/silicon-color-acquired-by-apple-whats.html

Apple is likely to fold that tech into the RT capabilities of FCS...and may end up hiring Andrew Little and some of his smart folks to help with future products. Apple has bought the IP, but of course that is useless without help to use it.

Make it relatively affordable and you've got a hit.

Apple's likely not going to keep selling the 25k product but perhaps they fold the IP into Final Cut Studio Extreme or whatever they want to call it.

Finally an acquisition by Apple in the genre. I was getting a bit worried there.

I suppose were moving into area 51 by speculating the future but I agree with everyone else that rolling the shake software and the Final Touch software into one program may be the next professional app for apple.

I don't think that these two apps are being rolled into one program, I think bits and pieces of them are getting scattered into the next Final Cut product/s.

What makes sense to me is a next-gen compositing app that takes more advantage of GPU (think Motion on steroids with some more Shake like features, such as handling RGB log files like Cineon and DPX in realtime), and then MAYBE incorporating some of the realtime capabilities that Final Touch had into that compositing app.

But I see most of the IP from Silicon Color going into the color correction tools of Final Cut or the rumored Final Cut Extreme. Realtime secondaries and keys from the GPU would be just the thing to vault Apple ahead of the crowd. I've been getting impatient with the legacy code that holds FCP back to "one codec, one frame size, one frame rate" since its inception.

With the IP Apple has, and the time they've had for a full rewrite, I could see the possibility of having realtime playback of different size/framerate/framesize footage all on the same timeline, with realtime primary and secondary color corrections.

Your mileage would vary based more on your GPU than your CPU.

So, for instance, a quad 2.66 with an upgrade to an ATI 1900 card might outperform a quad 3.0 GHz with a standard, lesser GPU.

Just my speculation.