Avid Technology announced the latest version of its wildly popular consumer video editing software package, Pinnacle Studio 11, set to ship next month. Now the software is offered in Basic, Plus, and Ultimate versions.
If you don’t need to edit HD, the Basic version for $49 will probably do everything you need. Bump up to the $99 Plus version and you can edit HD videos and also burn HD DVDs. Another 30 bucks gives you Pinnacle Studio Ultimate, unlocking chromakey and film-look effects, panning and zooming tools and a few audio tweaking toys.
Sounds good, but the previous version of this software sucked. Find out more:
If you’re interested in high-end video production, you’ll want to take a look at Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2. It’s chock full o’ apps, included a smooth new update to Final Cut Pro, now in version 6, Its main coolness is its ability to crunch HDTV video down to manageable sizes, made possible by ProRes 422, a codec for compressing video that Apple claims to be able to do the video equivalent of stuffing a basketball through a garden hose.
We watched a lengthy demo of the new software, and found it to be a remarkable polyglot, able to handle all kinds of footage all in one big bucket, something that’s really important to broadcasters and filmmakers these days. When there are dozens of varieties of HDTV and regular TV to deal with, this is not a new feature, but welcome by Final Cut users.
Check out a few of our pics in the gallery below, and read more about Final Cut Studio 2 on the next page. galleryPost('apple_finalcut', 8, 'Apple Press Event');
Apple introduced Open Format for Final Cut Pro, allowing you to mix different formats on the timeline. They say “it just works,” and from the demo, looks like all kinds of formats can nicely live together on the same editing timeline, where they had to be transcoded to work together before.
Then Apple showed some uncompressed 1080p footage with other resolutions and frame rates, all edited together in real time. Nice.
They then showed us a side-by-side comparison of ProRes and uncompressed HD, and it was hard to tell the difference between the two. Then the kicker? The ProRes footage was 10th-generation. Impressive.
Final Cut Studio 2. FCP moves to Version 6. Offers uncompressed 10-bit compression at standard def file sizes. for example, uncompressed HD file that’s 1TB would be 170GB with ProRes422. Changes the world for HD editors.
Rob Schoeben, talking Final Cut, the video editing application. Now there are 800K users. Yeah, Final Cut is big, big big. Lots of plug-ins. Showed a snappy video of all the cool video that’s been created on Final Cut Pro.
Introduced Final Cut Server. Gives editors ability to share video with each other. It’s cross platform, and does lots of media asset management. Also has keyword searches for video, with access controls to keep the riff-raff out. There are workflow templates, too. Can be customized for your organization. Watches over the flow of work and triggers things to happen, review and approve.
