Final Cut Studio 2 review

PC Magazine has posted a review of Final Cut Studio 2, the latest version of Apple's professional video-editing suite. Besides Final Cut Pro 6, the suite includes Motion 3, which lets you create and manipulate three-dimensional graphics in the video frame over time; Soundtrack Pro 2 for altering the audio portion of your project; Color, which lets you maintain color consistency throughout your video; Compressor 3, which performs the encoding to a variety of formats and DVD Studio Pro 4 for creating and burning DVDs of the resulting movies.

Final Cut Pro 6 one-ups its primary competition, Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, by including the ability to import AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition, a recording format from Panasonic and Sony), converting the highly compressed file to the new Final Cut Pro ProRes format. Currently, Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 can't import AVCHD. However, Final Cut Pro does not include the breadth of automation tools of Premiere Pro for correcting color and exposure (auto-color, auto-contrast, and auto-levels). It does, though, offer a suite of useful manual functions.

The author examines the SmoothCam feature, by which Final Cut Pro reduces unintended motion and video jitter by analyzing the entire video file. "The analysis occurs just once, but for a 3-minute test file, it took about 25 minutes on a dual-processor, dual-core test bed. You can do the math for fixing a short segment in an hour-long clip. You can continue working on your project while the analysis runs, isolate portions that need smoothing into separate sequences, or do both, but doing so takes time and breaks up the editing workflow."

The review found performance to be varied, with Final Cut Pro besting Adobe Premiere in most tests, but Premiere winning in others. When producing a standard 4-minute test file as an MPEG-2, for instance, Final Cut Pro took 5 minutes 32 seconds, outpacing Premiere Pro's 7:50.

by MacNN Staff