I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

Yesterday Apple showed their biggest upgrade of Final Cut Pro ever; the Final Cut Studio 2. With new versions of abot everything (except Livetype).

Let me start off with the single most important thing to me as a video editor: Open Format Timeline. With this new feature in FCP, I can drop all my most used video formats in the same timeline… (drum roll) with no rendering!. I’m going to save hours and hours just with this feature. All these formats are supported by this feature:

FinalTouch = Color

Apple bought FinalTouch last autumn, and now they are throwing it into Final Cut Studio 2 – for free! Yes, it’s part of the package. Either you pay $1299 for the a new package, or $499 to upgrade from Final Cut Studio, or $699 from any previous version of FCP – including version 1 from 1999. That’s a very good deal. Applause for Apple, who have sold more then 800,000 copies of Final Cut Pro so far, and will sell tons more with this upgrade.

Have a look at the new features of FinalTouch, now called Color.

I’ll have a full rundown of all important new features of the new Final Cut Studio 2 package soon.

When Lucas picked the number four for the first episode he’d film, he may have made a mistake. He locked himself into three prior episodes and he simply didn’t have the content to fill three movies.

Randsinrepose looks forward to Star Wars III, the movie where all the good stuff is put.

Also have a look at Millimeter’s article Mixing a masterpiece. Did you know that Chewbecca is a walrus? And that Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder is the roar of Los Angeles’ congested Harbor Freeway, recorded through a vacuum-cleaner pipe? Sven at Filmsound.org has lots of other articles on the sounds of Star Wars.

If you’re looking at a volume graph in ProTools, you can’t see the pan graph at the same time. Or if you are keyframing parameters in an eq, you can’t see the graphs for all the parameters at the same time. It’s so lame. Work one hour in After Effects or Motion or almost any program that deals with keyframes on a timeline, and you’ll see how lame ProTools is on this thing.

Try this: Grab a DV-camera and have someone run in front of you, starting on the lawn outside the house, into the front door, trough a long narrow hall, into a big livingroom, then a kitchen, and out on the lawn again, screaming all the way, all in one take. Then replace the original sound (which includes your own feet tramping) with a new scream from the studio. Then add the right eq and reverb etc. on the whole take, to make it realistic.

It’s a total mess in ProTools.

You have to change between the different graphs about 8 000 times. I once discussed this with a DigiDesign representative, and aske why they don’t adobt the multiple graph approach that graphics and video applications have. All I got was a answer like “people are used to doing it this way”. Oh, then leave it the way it is.