pro-active-ly by Peter Slavia

You can view the official press release here and read a nice explanation of the acquisition here.  As history repeats itself and Adobe snaps up a $20K+ color grading app just like Apple did when they acquired Silicon Color, distributors of Final Touch, I am here to officially pronounce Final Cut Studio dead.  Maybe you were hanging on with Apple’s recent move to put copies of FCS 3 back on the shelves but I’ve got a 500 dollar door stop, err, copy of Shake that serves as a reminder of Apple’s retail strategy for EOL’ed professional applications.  Final Cut Studio, oh how I loved you and the amazing opportunities you provided me during the first nearly ten years of my still exciting and passionate career.  Oh how I will mourn your passing and will miss you and will remember all the great times we had together.  So long and thanks for all the fish.  Now, back to the world of the living.

With the acquisition of IRIDAS, Adobe has set the stage for symmetry with the Final Cut Studio software package of NLE, Motion Graphics / VFX, Color Grading, DVD Mastering, and Video Compression.  Plus, you get the industry standard image processing software of Photoshop and Illustrator.  They even throw in Soundbooth for shoots and grins.  Now, I saw a demo of Premier at, of all places, my first visit to a LAFCPUG meeting.  And despite a hilarious performance, Adobe Premier Product Manager Al Mooney showed off some awesome features that make switching to Premier frickin’ easy to get on board with.  First of all, you can export your FCP sequence XML and open it in Premier.  Boom.  Secondly, Premier has a built in keyboard shortcut preset for FCP users.  Double boom.

As an Apple Certified Trainer for Color, I’ve been evaluating IRIDAS Framecycler and Speedgrade NX for the last 6 months during my work on Conan the Barbarian.  Framecycler has been built in to Nuke for realtime playback of composites and it does a very good job, maybe a better job than After Effects’ current RAM Preview functionality?  Initially I was using Speedgrade and then upgraded to Speedgrade NX mid-show (not as scary as I thought it might be), the app was rock solid for 2K DPX file playback in stereo 3D.  Yes, dual stream 2K DPX image sequence playback in real time.  And I never posted this tidbit wayyy back in April, but IRIDAS was showing real time playback of stereo 3D 5K RED Epic files on a JMR box at NAB.  On the show floor for all to see. read more...