Apple introduced artists to the new version of their award-winning video editing software, Final Cut Pro, late last week. Final Cut Pro 2 is an all-in-one editing solution, featuring real-time editing, breakthrough Power Mac G4 performance and a scalable architecture that allows users to output content into any video format. With Final Cut Pro 2, real-time editing and compositing functions are integrated into the video production workflow seamlessly. By simply adding an optional, supported real-time processing card, video editors can instantly perform wipes, dissolves and 2D motion graphics effects, dramatically increasing their creative freedom and efficiency. Final Cut Pro's real-time architecture allows third-party manufacturers to create hardware that supports a variety of professional editing features and formats. Final Cut Pro 2 takes advantage of the supercomputing performance of Apple's new Power Mac G4 and PowerBook G4 lines and the new QuickTime 5 architecture. On compute-intensive operations, Final Cut Pro 2 is up to 30% faster on G4 systems and 70% faster on dual-processor G4 systems, when compared to the previous generation's performance on similarly configured systems. Final Cut Pro will work with Apple's new DVD Studio Pro to form a complete system for professional digital content creation and delivery. From within Final Cut Pro, users can invoke DVD Studio Pro's powerful compression engine to encode their edited video sequences into MPEG2. Using DVD Studio Pro, they can author sophisticated navigation menus, preview disk operation in real time and burn DVDs using the Power Mac G4's new SuperDrive for playback on consumer DVD players. A release date for Final Cut Pro 2 has yet to be announced.
Learn more about the Final Cut Pro community at AWN's sister site 2-Pop.com, the DV filmmakers' resource.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
