One of my favorite tasks at the end of every year is digging into StudioDaily's analytics and tallying the pageviews for the most popular stories we published in the last 12-month period. The traffic stats always yield an interesting mix of content, from product reviews and case studies to NAB news and business stories. They reveal what we've been spending a lot of time thinking about in the last year and, sometimes, they reveal what we'll still be considering in the next one. Here's part two of our look back at 2012.
 
 
Among big-event films this year, none were bigger than Marvel's mammoth superhero team-up flick The Avengers. In the able hands of writer-director Joss Whedon, the film was a textbook example of comic-book cinema done right. Barbara Robertson approached the film from a different angle, talking to The Third Floor about its detailed previs and postvis techniques for the film's major action sequences.
 
 
The issues facing the VFX business are complicated and vexing — too troublesome to be tackled in a single blog entry. But our Peter Plantec gave it a shot, anyway, and generated lots of discussion in the comments section about history and practice, not to mention what readers thought he got right and what they thought he got wrong. For more from Peter, follow the tag plantec on vfx.
 
 
Looking back decades from now, this may well end up being the single most important technology story of 2012. By accelerating the rate of film exhibition from 24fps to 48fps, The Hobbit took its place in film history as one of those movies that pushes the state of the art forward, despite widespread complaints from HFR naysayers. This early blog entry got the most traction of all our articles on the subject, but we covered this topic in some detail this year; check out the tag hfr 3d for more.
 
 
Ah, the good old product review. Scott Simmons put Premiere Pro through its paces for us and concluded that the CS6 version was "the biggest and best update to Premiere Pro in years." Interest in Adobe's NLE was driven, no doubt, by continued frustration on the part of Final Cut Pro users who were looking at workable alternatives to FCP X. Which brings us to …
 
 
For the second year running, Final Cut Pro X was the biggest story of the year for StudioDaily readers. Many of you abandoned FCP and swore you'd never look back, opting for Avid or Adobe systems instead. But for those who were holding out hope that FCP X would have features restored to it that would make it a usable pro editor once again, this January update offered a bright ray of hope, fixing up the chroma keyer and adding multicam editing to the mix, as well as offering beta support for broadcast monitoring. R3D support and multichannel audio editing came later in the year. Is this, finally, the version of FCP X that should have been released in 2011? Check out our fcpx tag for Scott Simmon's review, and news of further updates.
 
That was the year that was, folks. Here's to 2013! We'll see you in what we hope is a very happy, productive, and fulfilling New Year.