Apple NAB Announcements

Apple today announced Final Cut Studio 2 at the Venetian Ballroom to an enthusiastic crowd of around 3000 people.

Full details are now available on the Apple site so there’s little point repeating everything here. What’s clear though is that as a package this is a major upgrade. Only DVD Studio Pro has not been updated and remains at version 4.

Cost for the full version remains the same at $1299 with upgrades for $499 from Final Cut Studio 1 and $699 from ANY version of Final Cut Pro, which is a fantastic deal. The package ships next month.

FinalTouch is now re-branded as Color and amazingly is bundled with Final Cut Studio 2. To put this in context, Silicon Color (who Apple acquired in October 2006) used to sell the 2K version of FinalTouch for $25K, which was still a bargain for what it could do.

Another company acquired last year was Proximity who made an asset management app called Artbox. This has been re-launched as Final Cut Server, it’s not yet clear how different it is to Artbox but this is essentially Apple’s answer to Avid’s Interplay at significantly less cost. $999 for up to 10 users, $1999 for unlimited users and shipping in Summer for Mac and Windows.

The other groundbreaking announcement was a sneak peak of ioHD from AJA. Yes it’s the HD version of the popular iO but the seriously big news is that there is an onboard hardware codec that transcodes in real time to/from ProRes. It connects to the Mac with FW800 and has a ton of connectors including HDMI i/o. The price? A mere $3495 with shipping in July.

So what do the announcements mean for competition between Avid and Apple? It’s difficult to imagine how Avid are going to be able to compete with such a strong low cost line up.

updated: OK that was far too diplomatic…the honest sum up? Game over.

Martin Baker is the founder of Avid2FCP/Digital Heaven and an Apple Certified Trainer for FCP and Motion. During his 13 year editing career, as a freelance and at the BBC, he worked on a wide variety of edit systems including linear, Lightworks, Avid DS and Avid Symphony before switching to FCP in 2003.