I’ve written about this before and I’ve spent a bit of money on my old and trusty MacPro adding a CUDA/Mercury capable NVIDIA 285 graphics card. I’ve also purchased a new MacBook Pro as my old one had a Core Due CPU that couldn’t run 64bit Snow Leopard (You need a Core 2 Duo).
So now I have the kit to take advantage of CS5 and the Mercury engine but I’m still reluctant to make the jump to CS5. I know some of you may argue that I could use CS5 for some jobs and FCP for others, but I don’t like working that way, I really prefer to just use one platform. Especially with XDCAM as FCP needs footage wrapped in to mov’s while CS5 works with the native files.
CS5 has some very nice features. Theres a really good keyer built in. The titler is sooo much better than the one in FCP and as I said above you can work with native XDCAM files which makes archiving simpler. The mercury engine gives some significant real time playback improvements (provided you use mercury capable effects). In addition Adobe are a software company, they make a lot of money from their software so they are likely to continue to invest in it and keep it up to date.
Apple on the other hand are primarily a hardware company. FCP accounts for only a tiny fraction of their revenue and it appears it’s not high on their list of priorities. The last year has seen FCP stand still, or even go backwards compared to the competition. I know there is supposed to be a new, much improved version in the pipelines, but just how long are those pipelines? FCP does have some pro’s… It is regarded as a professional suite of tools and is very common amongst production companies and facilities houses. Apple ProRes files can be used on PC’s as well as Mac’s and it’s a great codec. There is also a large range of input and output cards that offer pro connectivity at very low cost for FCP. Plus I’ve been using it for years and have a nice collection of plugins etc that I use day to day.
So which way to go. Do I jump to CS5? At least I can easily share CS5 projects with PC users. I could even sell my expensive MacPro and replace it with a couple of equivalent PC’s, but I don’t really want to do that, I like OS-X. Or do I stick it out with FCP and hope that the next version arrives soon and delivers the same kind of GPU accelerated performance as CS5.
For the past few years I have been a big Mac fan, using FCP for editing and I have been very happy. They are stable and reliable. But with FCP not yet seeing that long promised re-write, the performance of my Mac systems is now really starting to lag behind some of the competition. Adobe’s latest version of CS5 uses the graphics CPU’s for video processing as opposed to the computer CPU. If you have an Nvidia CUDA capable card you get incredible performance. I’ve just seen a demo of real time 3D editing with full stereoscopic display of two discreet streams, I’ve also seen demo’s of multiple layers of AVCHD in real time. These are all things I can currently only dream of on my Mac Pro. Yes I can get real time 3D performance by using exotic plug-ins, but the new CS5/CUDA based systems are not expensive and the performance really is amazing. Hopefully Apple will get on with it and do some work under the bonnet to take better advantage of the graphics GPU’s, not just for rendering but also for real time playback. If they don’t I may just have to make the jump back to the PC camp.
Just spotted this tucked away on the Sony website. I’m downloading it now to take a look but it appears to be a plugin that allows you to edit native XDCAM HD MXF’s and proxy files in FCP, as well as native EX files. This could be a really nice tool. Once I’ve tried it out I’ll post back. Click Here to go to the sony site. Sadly it’s not free, but it’s certainly interesting and may open up the proxy workflow to FCP users.
I have added some posts in the appropriate editing forums for workflows that make use of the XDCAM HD proxy files for Avid, Vegas and FCP. The FCP workflow is a bit of a work-around but it does work. These workflows are primarily aimed at those using the ability to record Proxies onto USB memory sticks on the PDW-700 and PDW-F800, but could also be used with proxies off XDCAM discs.
Apple very quietly released Final Cut Studio version 7 today. It suddenly appeared on the apple store without any fanfare or fuss. http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/finalcutpro/
It dosn’t really appear to be a major release, more of an upgrade. Some of the key points for me are that there are no upgrades to the already aging DVD Studio , although there are new encoding options and export to BluRay disc within compressor. There are new Proxy and LT versions of Apples ProRes codecs designed to produce smaller sized files. There are new clip speed change tools. Live Type seems to have disappeared and been moved into motion.
So all in all not a major update, just a small upgrade.
With Convergent expecting to start shipping Nano Flash HDSDi recorders at the end of the month I thought I would start looking at workflows. I already have Calibrated Q’s MXF importer for FCP and this works just fine, recognising the MXF files and allowing you to see thumbnails in Finder and then import the clips directly in to FCP. In addition Imagine Products ShotPut pro will automatically back up Compact Flash cards with NanoFlash files. As the device uses Sony’s XDCAM HD codec (but at 25mbps, 50mbps, 100mbs and higher) FCP is able to read the files. If you shoot at 100Mbps with the NanoFlash or Flash XDR then converting the files from 100Mbps to 50Mbps to export back to a Sony Professional Disc is very fast indeed taking only seconds to convert a 30 second clip.
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