HD For Indies

UPDATE -

Some folks are wondering whether to update now or wait for an NAB update.

Here's my read on it:

1.) Apple is offering an update to FCP just a few weeks before NAB. Clearly, they want this out, done, and away before they announce whatever they are going to announce at NAB....otherwise they'd just announce or ship at NAB.

2.) Somebody asked in the comments about fear of updating now out of concern for paying another update for v6 (or v5.5 or whatever next). Without any prior knowledge, but just from a business sense perspective, v5.1 is the update for Intel Macs, some new camera (XL H1) support, and some overdue bug fixes. Version Next will offer new features above and beyond these things, and I have no doubt, after buying software for 15 years, that it'll be it's own "full sized" upgrade price, probably no less than $200, but probably no more than $500. Historically, $299 is where I'd peg it.

3.) Because they are shipping v5.1 NOW, my guess is that they'll announce the next version, but it might not ship at the show. Remember how v5 took until May or June? Remember how Motion 1.0 took until October? v5.1 is the holdover until v6 ships - otherwise they would have waited three more weeks and shipped v5.5 or v6 with Intel support at NAB. Because they DID ship v5.1 now, that TELLS ME that the next version is less likely to ship at NAB or immediately thereafter. And that's OK - because v5.1 will work on iMacs and MacBook Pros for now.

End update.

Apple Ships Final Cut Studio 5.1

On laptops, the Intel MacBook Pro is up to 2.5x faster than the 1.67 GHz G4 based laptops according to Apple.

There are also some VERY SIGNIFICANT improvements to FCP above and beyond Intel compatibility, such as some vital Media Manager fixes, support for the Canon XL H1 (which FCP 5.0.4 does NOT recognize), and a bunch of other stuff I'll write about later tonight.

Salient quote from the page:

*DV and HDV rendering from the Timeline is up to twice as fast on a MacBook Pro with 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo than a 15-inch PowerBook® G4 with 1.67 GHz PowerPC. MPEG-2 encoding from DV and HDV for DVD authoring is up to 2.5x as fast on a MacBook Pro with 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo than a 15-inch PowerBook G4 with 1.67 GHz PowerPC.


-mike