While I was at work today I noticed a tweet that ever so casually mentioned that Apple announced, nay, was shipping both Final Cut Studio and Logic Studio upgrades. So I’m like “woot” and spent part of my lunch scanning what’s new.
There are a lot of joyous tweets and surprised blog posts, all fo which amounts to very little information that isn’t readily available on Apple’s product page. As is often the case some reading between the lines is needed and then there is the fine print:
Required: Mac computer with an Intel processor
The big one. The last nail in the PPC coffin.
Logic Studio is no different. It’s all Intel from now on.
Final Cut Studio also is $299 for the upgrade. A nice price. I bet that’s partially because it has omitted the twenty or so pounds of printed manuals – check out the smaller box in the photo above. Yup, time to save some trees.
This will probably not surprise anyone too much – I personally was shocked that my Final Cut Studio 2 box was the same behemoth that previous versions were (albeit no extensive Color manual). No doubt UPS and Fed Ex drivers everywhere burned some extra calories after Apple shipped new Pro Apps.
The biggest new awesome improvement for me is the beefed up ProRes codec, now supporting the ubiquitous alpha channel, a staple in my workflow.
Curse you Animation codec! You were grand back in the day, but now I want my lossless compression and my full frame playback too!
And as I tweeted, it’s the little things that are the core of this upgrade, some of which are long-standing Avid features that Final Cut Pro hasn’t had all these years.
It should be fun to take for a spin – after we’re done with my current project which is tied up in ProRes and Red Raw workflows that would have loved the new features had they come before post production.
The other problem for me is that times are tough and I still can’t afford a suitable Intel replacement for my PPC G5 Quad core Mac. The writing is now on the wall and it started with After Effects CS4 so hopefully that day will come.
It’s important to note that not having the latest and greatest right when it comes out is also a great thing – the bugs won’t be a problem and in the end I can still make great things. These days the tools aren’t as much of an obstacle as the creative process anyway.
Cheers to Apple for what looks like a fantastic upgrade (Logic too!).
Thank You Ken Wilhelm
During the last half of 1994 into the first half of 1995 I was enrolled in a night class called Audio In Media at my alma mater, The Evergreen State College.
Our instructor was a unique and somewhat legendary fellow named Ken Wilhelm. The class was for audio engineers and A/V geeks and Ken was all of those things. He was sort of a mystery as we never were completely sure when he was making a sarcastic joke laced with some truth (for the sake of learning) or what he really thought. Reading his evaluations of my work always surprised me – Ken knew more about what was going on then he showed.
One of Ken’s assignments split the class into groups of three or four people. Each group was given a edited part of a classic Benny Hill movie – with the audio stripped out. Each group was to re-dub all the dialogue and foley and do so without knowing what the other groups were doing. As an assignment for teaching foley and sound for picture using SMTPE sync this was genius. Why, because even though it was work it was fun.
So off we went. I hauled my eighties Yamaha DX-11 into the Audio Lab for several sessions and we used that for music cues, and some basic sound effects. Other sounds came from props and our voices. We actually brought in glass and broke it to match a broken window in the footage. We had eight tracks to work with and as I recall we filled them all easily.
At the end of the assignment all the newly dubbed segments were handed in and Ken edited them back together and showed them during our final class. He made popcorn for everybody. I missed this class due to a conflict with a performance I had to play with the Batucada band I was a key member of. I still wish I could have seen the final piece.
Ken seemed to have a love of kitschy things though he never referred to anything using that description. He had boxes of a vinyl 45 record made by JBL recordings in the seventies during the hifi boom as a promotional or educational vehicle. The record featured the band Malibu performing a track called “Enjoy Yourself”. An accompanying film showed the band in the studio. We watched this as a class and Ken apparently offered copies of the 45 to anyone that wanted one. Turntables weren’t super common unless you were a DJ in 1995, so I don’t recall anyone taking any. I should have but didn’t as I have a solid old Techniques belt-drive that still spins to this day. Little did I know that years later I’d end up working with another Greener who took Audio In Media with Ken Wilhelm who did take a copy of Enjoy Yourself home. So I borrowed it and recorded it with my dusty turntable a few years back. And now that it’s been sitting around for a while I’m going to share it here, for anyone that might ever find the need to search for it on the Internet.
Enjoy Enjoy Yourself, by Malibu, brought to you by Ken Wilhelm.
Thanks Ken.