From Digitalfilms.com

Ever since the RED Digital Cinema Camera Company started to ship its innovative RED One camera, producers have been challenged with the best way to post produce its footage. Detractors have slammed RED for a supposed lack of post workflows. This is in wrong, since there are a number of solid ways to post RED footage. The trouble is…

While Apple won’t be attending NAB, those familiar with the company’s plans say it holds ambitions of debuting a new version of Final Cut Studio, currently late in its development stage, at or around the same time the conference kicks off during the third week of April. Further details weren’t provided.

Final Cut Pro will be 10 years old this year and it and its offspring, Final Cut Studio haven’t seen a major upgrade in about 2 years. Other applications anticipated for new versions are the company’s video asset management software, Final Cut Server, compositing software Shake and Apple’s pro audio suite Logic Studio.

Final Cut Server initially generated much excitement and held real promise in the professional realm, particularly because of the lack of comprehensive media management tools in Final Cut Pro. Unfortunately, the software’s instability, unintuitive interface and underwhelming media workflow options have impeded it’s widespread adoption.

An exciting prospect is a seriously revamped or even entirely new version of Shake. The high-end compositing software has not seen an update since 2006 and Apple has been chided in the professional community for the products embarrassingly lackluster support.

Apple also has a replacement for its Shake high-end compositing software under development. It acquired that software in 2002 from NothingReal and last released a major update for it in 2006, when the company announced “Apple will no longer be selling maintenance for Shake and no further software updates are planned as we begin work on the next generation of Shake compositing software.” Apple was rumored to be working on a new replacement title under the code name Phenomenon, based on Motion code and expected for delivery in 2008, making its belated delivery appearing to be imminent.

Logic Studio is also overdue for a new release. The product has not been updated since its initial release in 2007 when Apple packaged Logic Pro with the other components which make up Logic Studio.

The Complex and often arcane world of digital cinema mastering just became a bit more accessible as QuVis Corp. of Topeka, Kansas has announced the availability of a $699 digital cinema mastering plug-in for Final Cut Studio. The QuVis “Wraptor” enables FCS users to create professional-quality DCP’s or Digital Cinema Packages, the digital equivalent of a traditional film based “release print”, directly from a Final Cut Pro project. The plug-in uses the same QPJ™ encoding technology available in the company’s high-end, real-time mastering servers. QuVis developed the product in conjunction with Apple, who strongly supports the product.

Wraptor is actually a plug-in for Final Cut Studio’s Compressor. Considering Compressor’s distributed rendering capabilities, producers looking to take advantage of the plug-in’s low cost, will be able to do so without having to deal with endless render times.

The significance of this product should not be underestimated. To this point digital cinema mastering was one of the few areas of the digital filmmaking process that was not only difficult to decipher, but it was also very expensive. The cost of mastering a feature length film to a DCP typically runs in the 20K range, a stretch for the majority of aspiring and independent filmmakers. The Wraptor plug-in from QuVis seems like it has the ability to change all that and be another paradigm shifting tool that will help usher in a new era of digital cinema.

The more significant change applies to integration with Final Cut Server, a 50MB download which has been updated to v1.1. The FC Server update, which also requires an upgrade to Quicktime 7.5, addresses several issues. The first pertains to the checking in and out of Final Cut Pro projects. Server v1.1 now provides an FCP binary file (as opposed to XML) which solves several issues, including corruption of project preferences that have intermittently been known to occur when a project is checked in or out.  A second change enables automatic updates to FC Server assets when changed in another application (i.e. Final Cut Pro). This applies to the other apps in the Studio suite, however media files for Motion, DVD Studio Pro and Soundtrack Pro still have to be uploaded manually.

A final note; all Final Cut Pro workstations accessing Final Cut Server v1.1 must be upgraded to 6.0.4 and be running quicktime 7.5 in order for these changes to take effect . All edit proxy files will also need to be reanalyzed and recreated after the upgrade.