At long last, Apple released a new version of its Final Cut Studio suite of professional video applications last week. The move was welcome news to users who were impatient with the long wait in between iterations of the software, even if many of them said that the interface refinements and feature upgrades it offered were incremental improvements rather than the kind of blanket revamp they were hoping for. But the announcement also amounted to a marketing coup.

From last Thursday morning heading on into the weekend, it seemed like there was nothing but Final Cut chatter on pro-video-oriented Web sites, as eager users dissected the more than 100 new features Apple claimed had been implemented in this go-round. Sweetening the deal – and perhaps tacitly acknowledging the great strides forward Adobe has made with its own CS4 group of integrated content-creation applications – Apple reduced the price of the bundle to $999. And, at $299 for an upgrade from any previous version, it’s likely that relatively few users will see value in not getting the new version.

Apple made a PR pit stop in New York, where HD Studio sat with Apple reps as they briefly ran the suite through its paces. Here’s a digest-sized look at what’s new and notable across the board.

Final Cut Pro 7

Editors will be greeted with three new ProRes codecs addressing different needs across the board. At the high end, there’s ProRes 4444 (Apple pronounces that “four by four”), generously budgeted at 330 Mbps for 1920×1080 29.97fps HD footage. The fourth “4” represents the included full-resolution alpha channel, which may make this the go-to codec for quality-intensive graphics applications. The second new codec is ProRes 422LT, which runs at 100 Mbps for 1080p/29.97 and is geared toward broadcast applications. Finally – and perhaps most enticingly for the broad desktop video audience – the new ProRes 422 Proxy is an offline codec that runs at 45 Mbps for 1080p/29.97 footage. Take a good look at the footage and you’ll see all kinds of artifacts – blockiness in the film, halos around text, a muddiness and loss of detail in the shadows – but it’s plenty good enough for your offline, and it may even pass muster for some broadcast work, which is going to have the heck compressed out of it anyway as it makes its way into viewers’ homes.

FCP now boasts native support for the MPEG-4-compliant AVC Intra codec currently being championed by Panasonic as a good way to get extra quality and capacity out of the P2 solid-state recording format. Ingest the files through Final Cut’s log-and-transfer window and they will be rewrapped as QuickTimes without transcoding. (Apple’s reps say the rewrapping process should take less time than copying the file itself.)

More interface enhancements have been designed to make editing less of a hassle. Perhaps most impressively, the new set of speed tools includes a “change speed” window with a handful of predefined, button-selectable curves that should go some distance toward addressing your speed-ramping needs. You can also zoom in on the timeline and change speeds and create ramps by manipulating a graphical representation of the keyframes that runs along the bottom of your clip. You’ll get constant feedback from the program about what percentage of normal speed the different segments of your clip are running at as you flagrantly manipulate the space-time continuum.

On the more mundane side, FCP now has a useful system of multi-colored markers that should give the meticulous among us exciting new ways to stay in control of our timeline. And there’s a new, resizable timecode window that can be floated to any position on your displays. A little thing, but hey – it’s timecode!

A new “easy export” function lets you shoot your timeline out in one (or more) of a number of formats, including YouTube, MobileMe, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, and DVD or even Blu-ray with basic menu templates included. (It also supports burning highly compressed HD content onto a standard recordable DVD for playback on Blu-ray machines.) The fully automated encode takes place in the background while you’re paying attention to your project, not puzzling out settings in Compressor. Apple has conspicuously declined to upgrade Final Cut Studio this time around, so you won’t be burning any Blu-rays from inside that app.

And, speaking of paying attention to your project, the new Final Cut Pro is tightly integrated with iChat, which allows the editor to talk with a collaborator through iChat, playing or scrubbing through a video in real time. The collaborator does not need to have Final Cut installed on the receiving to watch the clip. It’s a clever way to take advantage of a ubiquitous piece of Apple software.

Motion 4

The new version of Motion includes improved text tools – including support for Live Fonts – that take the place of the Live Type application, which has been discontinued. There’s a set of tools for shadows and reflections that makes it easy to create shadows based on the position of virtual lights in a 3D scene, or to attach a reflection property to objects in a scene. Tweaking the properties of 3D shadows and reflections in motion is about as easy as defining the look of a drop shadow in Photoshop.

Motion has also added depth-of-field controls for every camera in a scene, allowing you to define a few parameters that can push elements in and out of focus, define the depth of field in a scene, and even construct rack focuses that switch at a given speed from one element in a scene to another. This is more than just an applied blur effect. It actually strives to mimic the focal qualities of a camera lens.

Soundtrack Pro 3

Soundtrack Pro has been enhanced with a new function for equalizing dialogue across a set of clips. The new “lift voice level” option in the lift-and-stamp toolkit now allows users to match the level of dialogue throughout a scene or sequence. Soundtrack analyzes each clip’s aural content, isolating vocal frequencies and ignoring non-vocal content, so that your ambient noise level isn’t raised along with your dialogue in a given clip.

Soundtrack Pro also implements new gestural navigation tools aimed at mouseless notebook users.

Compressor 3.5

Compressor now has the ability to auto-detect settings from a given video file, matching the encoding parameters of an existing clip. Just drag the file from your desktop into the compressor window, and it adopts all of that file’s settings for audio and video codecs, frame rates, and resolution – including arcane, codec-specific parameters like spatial and temporal quality and keyframe interval. And Compressor’s newly expanded droplet functionality means you can create a droplet on your desktop that will apply those encoding parameters to any video file you drag onto it. Set up a column of droplets, each one marked to correspond to a different deliverable format you use, and you’re all set.

Color 1.5

Color now supports ProRes, AVC Intra, and XDCAM formats, along with Red RAW files, at up to 4K resolution. (Final Cut Pro supports editing at up to 2K resolution.) Speaking of Red, the company yesterday released a new “Final Cut Pro installer” that gives Red users native REDCODE (.R3D) support in Final Cut Pro and Color. It’s available here: www.red.com/support

Apple also now provides a software development kit for the Color interface, meaning inexpensive control surfaces like the Tangent Devices Wave or the forthcoming Euphonix MC Color can be used to make Color feel more like a full-on color-correction suite.

Final Cut Server 1.5

Final Cut Server has been upgraded as well. It now supports the ProRes Proxy editing workflow, and its engine has been rebuilt for improved search performance – searching large databases could be up to 10 times faster, Apple says. The new Server is available in just one version, supporting unlimited clients, for $999 or a $299 upgrade from any other version, including limited-client licenses. That’s another big cut from its predecessor’s $1999 price tag for unlimited clients.

Conclusions?

Even if these refinements to Final Cut Studio don’t constitute the kind of dramatic upgrade that users have been pining for, the significant price cuts are a nice bonus in a down economy and they reaffirm Apple’s commitment to expand the user base of its pro video apps. From the buzz online and off, it seems clear that users are happy to have these improvements – but the next time Apple announces an upgrade to the Final Cut suite, they’re going to expect to have their socks knocked off.

For more information: http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/