(A quick warning regarding this post, if you don’t have any experience with Final Cut Studio, this will probably be a little bit over your head. It’s basically a technical rant.)
Our office recently upgraded to Final Cut Studio 2 which has provided a few helpful additions, but they are mostly isolated to the new content for the various programs. Motion has a number of new cool templates (for HD and SD video). DVD Studio Pro also has some cool new templates (for HD and SD video as well). Soundtrack Pro has over 20 GB of content, which is pretty crazy considering that sound takes up much less space than video does, so there is a lot of content. We haven’t dived into the new program Color yet, but I’m sure once we start getting into more non-event video stuff we will be able to take full advantage of that program.
My beef with the new Final Cut Studio has to do with their upgraded version of Compressor. A lot has changed with this version, specifically the interface which is not as user friendly as it once was in my opinion. Also, there are some serious performance concerns for encoding video. Video that would have taken an hour to do before hand is now taking upwards of 4 hours. That is for mpeg2 encoding for DVDs. For Quicktime web stuff, it is even worse. I’m not sure what Apple has done differently this time around, but from the look of the online support forums, it appears that I am not the only one running into problems with Compressor. It took me four attempts to successfully install/uninstall/reinstall Compressor.
Also quite frustrating is the integration between Compressor and Qmaster which is used for distributed encoding. We don’t do any distributed encoding at our office so this is pretty much useless to us. I’m curious if Qmaster being active all the time slows down encoding. I’ve tried turning off Qmaster sharing, but then Compressor won’t allow you to submit jobs at all.
I’m hoping that Apple releases some updates for Final Cut Studio which resolves these issues, their most recent updates certainly didn’t resolve any of MY issues.
