Hands On
Well, it’s been quite a day!
I spent much of it working through each of the sessions that will make up the Apple Classroom at this year’s NAB. We started before the big event got under way and worked through to early evening, which means I missed the formal announcements of Final Cut Studio 2 and Final Cut Server, and I’m now playing a little catch-up. What I did get though was some direct experience with the new applications.
In Final Cut Pro 6 we played with the new Open Format Timeline, integrated Motion templates, and the new Easy Setup dialogue, as well as the SmoothCam and Normalize filters. We also watched a sequence that had been transcoded using the Apple Pro Res 422 codec - it looked fabulous and director, Brian Terwilliger, claimed he couldn’t tell the difference in a direct comparison with the original clips from his film.
With Motion 3 we spent a good amount of time working with the amazing new 3D compositing environment, the tracking points, and the ridiculously easy to use paint tool.
In Soundtrack Pro 2 we explored the new options in the graphical interface and updated keyboard commands. We also worked with the conform tab, the Time Stamp tool, the new surround mixing controls, the fade selector, and the multi-point video HUD*.
While the new FCS application, Color, still looks a lot like Final Touch, it still appears to be a strikingly powerful too. We used it to correct several clips in a sequence, apply primary and secondary colour correction, as well as explore the integration with FCP.
I’m really looking forward to the next few days, there’s a lot of buzz here around Apple’s announcement and people seem excited to experiment with the new tools - I know I could use a number of them on a current project! And if that wasn’t enough apparently Walter Murch will be joining us in the classroom later in this week!
If you’re at NAB this year, you really ought to make the effort to stop by the Apple Classroom, especially if you want to take the new apps for a test run. You need to register at the booth to participate in the sessions and they fill up unbelievably fast!!
UPDATE 16 April 2007: Additional coverage -
*HUD - Heads Up Display is the new generic name for a host of new windows that resemble the Dashboard in previous versions of Motion.
4 Comments
any news on the future of Shake ?
Not at this NAB, though the integraton of Shake technologies in FCP and Motion is very interesting. I’m anticipating the application itself, or whatever they call the “next-generation” version will play a major role next year.
Jonathan,
Will you be calling the new pro app course at Emily Carr “Color200” or “Colour200”? Regardless of what you decide you can count me in.
Hope your week is going splendidly.
The new courses have just been announced and I’ll need to take new trainer certifications, but I plan to bring the revised Apple Pro Training certification to Western Canada.
Watch this space!