The Microfilmmaker Community

[SjonStevens]

Jeremy, you did a fantastic job of reviewing Adobe's Production Suite Premium. I have been leaning heavily towards an Intel-based PowerMac (when they come out later this year) and Final Cut Pro Studio. Are there no advantages to FCP? BTW, I seem to recall you saying you were planning an upcoming review of the most recent version of FCP Studios. Is that correct? If so, when do you plan on releasing that review?
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"Imagine what you desire. Will what you imagine. Create what you will."
--George Bernard Shaw

[JeremyHanke]

Sjon,

Thanks for your kind words! We do our best.

Actually, there are two advantges to Final Cut Studio. Unfortunately, neither of them are really that extreme, nor are the especially useful to microfilmmakers.

They are as a follows:

1)Amount of Multicam Support - Premiere Pro 2 only allows you to have four multi-cam cameras, whereas Final Cut Pro 5 supports sixteen. This extra support is very useful for people who are going to be editing synched up concerts and music videos, but not for most low budget filmmakers. (Most of us aren't going to be shooting a single take with eight production quality cameras from different angles.)

2) Special Effects Power - Motion 2 is technically more powerful than After Effects 7. However, it is also way more memory, processor, and hardware hungry, to the point that it is almost unuseable by all but the newest, most powerful Macs. (A buddy of mine bought the suite and couldn't even get Motion 2 to run on his dual 2 Ghz G5 and had to buy one of the new loaded Quad macs to get it to work, believe it or not!) Additionally, the training and support base for After Effects is huge, whereas the Motion training and support base is fairly small. (We're actually going to be reviewing two Advanced After Effects training DVD sets in the next two months, one of which actually shows you how to correctly composite gunfire, explosions, and other multi-million dollar effects.)

We do indeed plan to do an in-depth review of the newer version of Final Cut Studio. When that will occur is based largely on when we get high enough through Apple's chains of command to make it happen. Once it does, I'll let you know! *smile*

One bit of information that might be of news to you: the new Intel based Macs can take a full dual partition with either Windows XP or the newest Mac OS. This is not the Windows-emulator that Mac had in the past, but is actually a full version of Windows XP that will now run on Intel-based Macs. This would mean you would have the greater quality of a Mac-built computer but could still load up Adobe Production Studio Premium.

-Jeremy
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Jeremy Hanke
Editor
Microfilmmaker Magazine
"Improving no-budget filmmaking through technique and critique."
http://www.microfilmmaker.com
jhanke@microfilmmaker.com

[SjonStevens]

[JeremyHanke]

Sjon,

Yeah, the price point on Mac is significantly higher, so it becomes much more questionable as a PC. For folks switching between platforms, it would be handy, but as an elaborate PC, it's even pricier than tweaked out Alienware systems.

Yeah, I look forward to the review of Studios. Hopefully, we'll have a much more concrete contact Apple after NAB and be able to get the review out this summer sometime.

-Jeremy
_________________
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Jeremy Hanke
Editor
Microfilmmaker Magazine
"Improving no-budget filmmaking through technique and critique."
http://www.microfilmmaker.com
jhanke@microfilmmaker.com