By now you’ve heard a lot about Color and Final Cut Studio, but if your focus is editing with Final Cut Pro, then what’s in this upgrade for you? Yes, there are lots of bells and whistles, but the marquee application received plenty of Apple attention as well. Many features are under-the-hood enhancements that don’t get as much press but are intended to make life more productive for working editors. Here’s a quick overview.

Open Timeline: Now you can mix and match codecs, frame rates and sizes on the same timeline. These play through the RT Extreme engine in FCP, though rendering is at times still involved before going to tape. Most will show up with a grey/green-colored render indicator on the timeline, which Apple designates as “full quality.” Performance will vary with the model of Mac you are using, plus the amount of RAM and display card that are installed.

ProRes 422: This is a mastering-quality codec, like Canopus HQ or Avid DNxHD. ProRes 422 is resolution-independent, and there are currently two variable bit rate HD presets: Normal (average 145Mb/s, either 8- or 10-bit, depending on the source) and HQ (average 220Mb/s, 10-bit). ProRes 422 can be used for standard- or high-definition video.

SmoothCam: This stabilization algorithm from Shake aids you in stabilizing shaky handheld camera work. It doesn’t require tracking marks or setting a region of interest. The process is nondestructive, so once SmoothCam is used to analyze the amount of shakiness, you can adjust the scaling and smoothness of the effect without having to start over. SmoothCam automatically analyzes the entire media clip—not just the portion that’s on the timeline.

FxPlug Filters: Apple has standardized on FxPlug as its Pro Apps effects architecture and has therefore been able to add many filters into Final Cut that were previously available only in Motion. Look around for them, as they are scattered throughout the effects categories. For example, the Glow group, which had two filters in FCP 5.1.4, now sports five. This move to FxPlug also means Apple is dropping support for older filters based on the After Effects-compatible API. Many old FXScript filters will still work, but some of the AE filters won’t. Most of my favorites—like Nattress, Noise Industries and even Too Much Too Soon—are just fine, but some, like Eureka, will have a few filters that don’t work. Others, like Knoll Light Factory, may require you to download an update.

Motion Templates: You’ve been able to add Motion project files to Final Cut Pro timelines for a while now, but new in FCP 6 is direct access to a set of 2D, 3D, SD and HD Motion Master Templates. These templates are designed with image wells so that you can drop a template onto the timeline, open the controls editor and drag-and-drop your video into the wells—all inside Final Cut, without ever opening Motion. In addition, templates can be edited in Motion and saved as new templates that will show up in the Final Cut Pro effects folder.

Interface Enhancements: This is the least sexy part of the update. Throughout the interface, you’ll find a lot of new tools, features and improvements. For example, there’s a new Log & Transfer tool for Panasonic P2 (and eventually RED camera) file-based media. A nondestructive audio normalizing filter can easily be added to audio tracks without going through the audio effects filter menu. Rename lets you match master clips and media to each other after capture, in case you made a mistake or changed your mind. Sony XDCAM HD and HDV users have the option to render in ProRes 422 instead of the original codec. The Send To command adds Color as a choice. Last but not least, Final Cut Pro 6 sequences can be monitored in surround sound.

LiveType, Cinema Tools and DVD Studio Pro are still there, too. DVD Studio Pro remains unchanged at version 4.1. It was actually updated just before NAB 2007 to fix compatibility issues with the HD DVD format. If you have updated to 4.1, then you will be able to author HD DVD-formatted discs using DVD-R media that will play on set-top players. Toshiba introduced the first HD DVD player to the market, but playback and interactivity were problematic when authoring HD discs using DVD Studio Pro. The Toshiba players with the latest firmware finally work.

I’m a fan of LiveType—I use it for all of my motion graphics within Final Cut. I’m glad it’s still there, but I wish that it had received a little more attention. Apple’s trend has been to put most of these text animation features into Motion, which is great, but I still prefer LiveType for quick text work. I’ve recently added several of 12 Inch Design’s LiveType Central Packs to increase my library of LiveType content, which has really expanded the functionality of LiveType in my daily work.

Some readers will welcome the new features of Final Cut Pro 6 but might be wondering how Studio will perform on an older Power Mac G4 or G5. I’ve done numerous real projects on different Mac Pro and MacBook Pro units. The dual-core and quad-core workstations are great, but even the MacBook Pro worked just fine with all of the apps.

The biggest issue is the use of ProRes 422. This codec is optimized for the Intel processors and won’t be a big selling point for G5 owners. You have to have either a Quad G5 or an Intel machine to be able to capture without dropping frames when using ProRes 422. On the other hand, if you’re like me and most of your HD work is DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD or HDV, then there’s no requirement to use ProRes 422, so an older dual-processor G5 will handle all of these applications for most projects. Remember, a Power Mac G5 connected to fast storage, like an Apple Xserve RAID, handles uncompressed HD media with very few issues.

The benefit of ProRes 422 is that it takes less storage space than uncompressed HD and maintains full raster (1920x1080), so you don’t introduce scaling artifacts by traveling through the codec and repeatedly resizing the image. On the other hand, one nice touch for XDCAM HD and HDV users is that you can edit natively but render in a special version of ProRes 422 that maintains the native pixel width of 1440. You render in a frame-based codec instead of the native Long GOP structure but avoid possible scaling issues.

I tested the quality of Apple’s ProRes 422 against Avid’s DNxHD and found them to be comparable. To test this yourself, align an uncompressed media clip with a ProRes 422 version of the same clip on two video tracks. Change the composite (or blend) mode of the upper track to Difference. If the quality is identical, the image will be completely black. The larger the disparity between compressed and uncompressed, the more an image becomes visible. In both cases (ProRes 422 and DNxHD), my testing revealed a small amount of noise in the bottom few percent of the image, which is the minor and quite acceptable result of compression. The ProRes 422 settings are equivalent to the compression of HDCAM and D5-HD—more than adequate for broadcast mastering.

Using the whole suite of applications will make you more productive. You can easily integrate LiveType, Color, Soundtrack Pro and Motion elements into your Final Cut Pro timeline. Using the Send To command opens Final Cut clips in Soundtrack Pro, Motion, Shake and Color. Through the background transfer of XML information, round-tripped projects from Color, LiveType and Motion will be instantly updated in the Final Cut timeline when changes are made and saved (or rendered, in the case of Color). Final Cut Studio comes with a wealth of royalty-free content, but new to Soundtrack Pro 2 is set of stereo and surround music beds. Even if you never mix with Soundtrack Pro, make sure you check out the library of tracks, loops and sound effects.

One trendy effect that benefits from Studio integration is retiming. Motion 3 sports a new category of retiming behaviors, so it’s simpler than ever to apply multiple speed ramp effects. Bounce a clip over to Motion 3 and simply apply the desired timing behavior to a portion of the clip’s timeline. You can even apply behaviors adjacent to each other for multiple speed ramp effects on the same clip. A few adjustments in Motion’s floating dashboard controls is all it takes to get great speed ramp effects. Do this once and you’ll never mess with Final Cut’s standard retiming graphs again.

I was quite happy with Apple’s implementation of an open timeline. This works best when clips are similar, such as adding anamorphic 24p DV clips to a 720p/24 HD timeline, but you can also drop a 1080i/29.97 clip on that same timeline and FCP will handle it. In the last example, there is a frame rate conversion (FCP changes the cadence in order to maintain the same speed), so horizontal movement might not be totally smooth; nevertheless, FCP mixes these clips in a way that other NLEs don’t. On a fast Intel machine, like the four-core Xeon that I was using, Long GOP media like XDCAM and HDV are actually a joy to edit, and render times have less impact than on older machines.

There have been only a few issues in this big update, and these issues appear to affect only a handful of users. Some posts in online forums have reported that Motion projects take longer to render in an FCP6 timeline than they do in Motion, but I wasn’t able to reproduce this in my own testing. I did hit an issue with the Intel machines where duplicating sequences caused the original sequences to lose links to their rendered media. Other users haven’t been able to reproduce this particular condition. (Apple engineers are aware of this issue and are looking into it.) As always, a few minor issues are to be expected.

This upgrade is such a no-brainer that all the Final Cut Pro customers and facilities I work with have either already installed the update or are waiting for theirs to arrive in the mail. Later this year, AJA Video will ship the new IoHD that embeds the ProRes 422 codec into its firmware, and MOTU will release V3HD, a similar external I/O device with DVCPRO HD hardware encoding. In total, these developments point to a great 2007 for the Final Cut Pro ecosystem.