Digital Rebellion have just released a new version of one of our favourite FCP workflow tools: Preference Manager.  Now with support for Premiere and AVID and FCPX.  As we move towards supporting more Premiere machines, this is a very welcome addition.

As it is, we support a *lot* of Final Cut Studio machines.   When they start to behave oddly, one of the first things we reset are Preferences.  Done manually, this involves going into User/Library/Preferences and trashing four files there, then resetting all the scratch disks, user preferences, system settings and custom layouts.

So when you trash someone’s preferences, you have to spend a while making sure the preferences are properly configured again.

When you’re running scores of edit suites connected to SANs with hundreds of terabytes of storage, with networked user logins, your system configuration for each user is crucial to stability.  Over the years, we’ve learnt how best to configure a large number of key Final Cut Studio preferences for each client, and roll them out across every user.

This is why Preference Manager is so incredibly useful.  It takes all the pain out of preferences. We can save all our preferred FCP settings and custom easy setups in a Preference Manager settings file, and make it super fast to set up new users and to reset existing users who are having trouble. By providing the settings files on a network for admins and users to double click and load for themselves, you can make trashing and restoring optimised settings extremely portable and easy. And users can save their own custom configurations for instant recall and sharing.

Give it a whirl at:
http://www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/

Do you use Preference Manager? Have any tips to share?

http://vimeo.com/24320919

This is the way to launch a video product.

We often have clients asking us for plugin advice, and it’s incredibly dull to send them links to web pages for lighting effects and transitions with ridiculous names. You want to see what they *do*, for real.

Red Giant obviously realised this, so their showreel for the new version of Magic Bullet Looks is a short film which uses its eponymous Plot Device to take us on a whistlestop tour through Magic Bullet effects. It’s nicely done, and pretty funny – but most of all, it really makes you want to buy it and play with it.

For the first time that I have seen for a long time Apple have commented on what is coming in FCP X ( there are a ton of corporate rules around publishing forward statements in regard to revenue recognition so this is a bit deal for Apple and their figures for FCP X ), notably :

• MultiCam – ” We will provide great multicam support in the next major release”
• XML Import / Export – ” We know how important XML export is to our developers and our users, and we expect to add this functionality to Final Cut Pro X. We will release a set of APIs in the next few weeks so that third-party developers can access the next-generation XML in Final Cut Pro X”
• XML and other interchange formats – “ Not yet. When the APIs for XML export are available, third-party developers will be able to create tools to support OMF, AAF, EDL, and other exchange formats “
• Assign Audio tracks for export – “ Not yet. An update this summer will allow you to use metadata tags to categorize your audio clips by type and export them directly from Final Cut Pro X. “

They have also made a very important statement in the FAQ that really says to me that Apple are again looking to change the way that we capture, make content and deliver content – “ Final Cut Pro X is designed for modern file-based workflows and does not include all the tape capture and output features that were built into Final Cut Pro 7 ”

If this is fully adopted through the industry this will require from users and broadcasters to increase the speed of change in the way they look to capture and deliver their content, it is true that a fully tapeless based environment has its advantages however the reality of that is far from pretty at the moment with delivery to major broadcasters all over the world still tape based and with the EBU still trying to work out a quality control / tech review process for tapeless media it will be a while before we are all ” fully tapeless “.

However, it does also open up a very interesting question about wh0 we will all be delivering content to in the future and where the real media power will lie, is it the traditional broadcasters with their rate of change or is it going to be the new Internet channels with pure file based delivery, I think I know which one I have my money on and truly believe this is a very tactical release from Apple that is just the beginning.

Especially when that software is the main tool of choice for so many editors in the creative industry. In fact, for some, the only piece of software they may have ever used.

I am, of course, talking about Final Cut Pro.

Earlier this week Apple finally announced the shipment of FCP X. Let’s just be clear, this is not an upgrade to Final Cut Studio ( there is no upgrade pricing ) but a completely new product.

FCP X has been written entirely from scratch in Apples COCOA programming language.  Not one line of code was taken from previous versions of FCP.

Also released were Motion v5 and Compressor v4. Soundtrack Pro, Color, Cinema Tools and DVD Studio Pro no longer exist as separate applications, although some of this functionality (especially audio and grading, in a simple form) is now included with FCP X.

So, as a v1 product, how does it stack up?  And what does this mean for the industry, considering our industry is changing at an amazing rate are we looking at the future or the next wave of editing tool just like all those many years ago?

The Good

• FCP X is very fast.  It plays well on the timeline and works well with different formats.  Stacking lots of clips up does not seem to phase it one bit – this is good news for tapeless projects where you are using a lot of different formats all on the same timeline. This is also partly due to the fact that FCP X does not use QuickTime any more but AVFoundation to do its video moving and image processing – so no more 1990′s software.
• FCP X’s internal media management is so much better in some ways – the new database file format and keyword-based metadata tagging are huge improvements.  However this comes with a double-edged sword as all this data is only stored on the local machine, not in a project – see under The Bad, below.
• Distributed rendering in the background, this is something we have been asking for a while for and it is finally in FCP X, you can use other mac machines in your network to render out your project from FCP X, Motion5 and Compressor and all in the background, this is going to be a huge time saver for final delivery.
• Shared file support is supported, you have to remember that you import media into FCP you do not capture media to the system so in essence the media is already on the SAN for you to share or if they are on the card then you can copy the media into the event.
• Tapeless ingest is really quite clever, you can import clips off a card in the background, whilst you immediately start editing with the clips directly off the card.  When it has finished importing it just replaces the footage off the card with that on the hard disk. You are none the wiser – that is smart. You can also create proxies in the background and then just replace with full res when done. Of course this does not take into account that you have to backup the tapeless media first (you are backing up your media aren’t you?)
• There are some other parts of FCP that were really lacking that have been improved – such as effects, titles and trimming. Rendering Motion files in FCP X is now totally seamless, as Motion 5 and FCP X now share the same rendering engine.
• FCP X now works natively with many formats: DSLR H.264, AVCCAM / AVCHD / NXCAM, DVCPRO HD, GoPro, ProRes and some others. FCP X uses AV Foundation rather than any form of QT. So additional codecs (eg R3D or XDCAM) need to be ported to that for native support. Otherwise FCP will transcode native media to ProRes in the background.  How long it takes to port these CODECs is unknown.
• Apple have hinted that new ( or missing ) features will be made available when they are ready and will not have to wait for major version releases.  Also, Apple have hinted that the time between major releases will be far less than previous version of FCP (around 18 months). We may well get several big updates within this period.

The Bad

• We have lost a lot of functionality that we took for granted in FCP Studio, more advanced editors have lost functionality that they took for granted and use on a daily basis.
• If you try to work with FCP X in the same way you work with Final Cut Studio, it will just not work.  This is going to require a whole lot of re-training for editors and production users.
• You need an OpenCL-compatible graphics card.  For those who think that all you need to have an Intel Mac and Snow Leopard, you are very mistaken. FCP X, Motion and Compressor won’t even install on a system without an Apple-certified OpenCL GPU.
• QuickTime export is very limited so you are forced to buy Compressor from the App store.
• It is only available on the Apps Store, this means that for enterprise there’s no traditional deployment path.
• Source file modified when editing a clip another issue, potentially a serious one, is that editing a clip after using the “Open in Timeline” command in Final Cut Pro X will modify the source file. According to this Apple support article, if you want to restore the original source file, you can choose Undo (although this will presumably undo your clip edit as well). If you don’t want to use Undo or you don’t realize what happened until after it’s too late to Undo, your only option is to reimport the original file from its source (e.g., your camera’s media storage). This will create a new clip. If you no longer have the source media, there is no way to retrieve the unedited clip. Backup is king!

Downright Ugly

• No log and transfer in FCP X – only import file or import camera, and no ingest from tape deck. There are some workarounds but they are not pretty. Third party solutions are required.
• No support for old FCP 6 or 7 projects. We are told that there is a tool on its way.  But we do not know when, and how much that will be from the App Store.  A very unsatisfactory situation where you can import iMovie projects but not previous FCP projects.
• No XML import / output.  There’s some code inside FCPX (http://blog.nicedissolve.com/2011/06/is-python-the-future-of-fcpx-workflow/) which looks like it will enable import of XML in the future, but again we don’t know when or how much it will cost.
• No OMF or AFF import / export – another possible future feature. A third party solution from Automatic Duck is available to add this feature, however it currently costs twice as much as FCP X itself.
• No current ‘real’ broadcast monitor output via 3rd party hardware (eg AJA, Blackmagic or Matrox). I would expect to see this via Thunderbolt, although that would mean a whole machine upgrade for most people. AJA has released a beta version of their drivers for FCP X, but how video output has been implemented is not ideal for professional users needing to monitor video on broadcast equipment.
• Due to its reliance on Quicktime, Compressor 4 is still a 32-bit application.  This is one product that could really do with a 64-bit code update – I am not holding my breath on this being a good release, it is not all bad, rendering within Qmaster is 64-bit so that is going to be fast.
• No multicam features.  Another feature we’re told is coming at some point, possibly at extra cost.
• No shared SAN support – for larger facilities that is going to be tricky.

I will be honest and say that I’m not nearly as stressed as a lot of people who have been Twittering over the last couple of days about the death of FCP.  That does seem a little bit to dramatic to me and having a chance to use FCP X I can see a lot of really great features for the future.

However, I do understand that this is a big deal for a lot of people and companies who rely on FCP to create content and revenue for them and who are now very concerned.

You could argue that Support Partners is one of those companies, as for the last 7 years we have installed, supported and built long term working partnerships with many clients built around the FCP editing ecosystem.

However, in reality we are completely workflow focused: looking at the start and end point of a project, then looking at the technology and the process to deliver that in the most efficient, creative and cost effective way.

FCP X is just another tool available to us, to get to where our clients need to be. For some clients it will be a valuable tool in its current state.  For others, considerable updates will be required from Apple until the features they require have been re-included.

The really interesting point to all this is that the way in which Apple see this product moving forward is by selling functionality via the App Store: MultiCam editing….that will be $10.  XML import….that will be $20, please! Don’t quote me on that – these are just made-up figures.

It doesn’t seem much by itself – but get 1.5 million people forking out for each function as they need it to make the product work, and it will soon become serious pocket money for Mr Jobs.

Key to the future success of FCP X will be the legion of 3rd party hardware and software developers – the same ones that made FCP a viable film and broadcast tool able to compete with systems 4/5/6 times it’s price.

These are the same developers they have just stitched up by letting them know on the release day of FCP X that their plug-ins and hardware will no longer work. Nice!  However, I come back to the $10 for 1.5 million users question: that’s a big market – do you not trust Apple again, or do you make hay while the sun shines and take the opportunity? However, it’s worth pointing out this situation isn’t exclusive to FCP X. When After Effects went 64-bit after the CS 5 release every plug-in stopped working and had to be re-written as well – the difference was that Adobe made this clear to developers long before the 64-bit version was released to allow developers to prepare and port their code.

We will, at this stage, not be advising our clients to migrate over to FCP X. However, we almost never do on a v1 product – so no change there. Fortunately, Final Cut Studio 3 is still a fantastic suite of applications, very well supported by third parties and day in, day out still continues to deliver content to film, TV and digital platforms. There’s life in the old girl yet, and there will be for quite some time, whilst we take a bit of time to reflect on this new wave of creative content tools and see if indeed it moves an industry forward.

Despite all the hoopla and gnashing of teeth in the industry, the key thing to remember is that while FCP is a great solution, it isn’t the only solution.

So if you’re worried that FCPX will not meet your needs the way that Final Cut Studio now does, we can help you look at the potential of other solutions and advise you on how best to migrate to them. This is what Support Partners have always excelled at – and continue to do so.

And in the meantime we’ll keep updating the blog with more FCPX details as they emerge and reflections on what it means in terms of workflows, IT and business.

The current version of FCP is a 32 bit application built on an old codebase that can not fully utilize the modern hardware and software available to it in recent Mac’s. No amount of extra RAM, CPU or GPU power you choose to add to your Mac will greatly increase the performance of the current FCP 7.

However, FCP X will change all of that, with a more than a little help from the technologies Apple added ‘under the hood’ of Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard. For the first time, Final Cut Pro will be able to directly take advantage of all the multiple core CPU’s, vast amounts of RAM and modern super-fast graphics cards available for your Mac.

Three core Snow Leopard technologies will be used extensively in the new version of FCP – OpenCL, Grand Central Despatch and 64-bit code, all will add huge performance increases to FCP X and will vastly improve your editing experience. If you your not using Snow Leopard on your Mac, now is the time to upgrade.

OpenCL

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) makes it possible to utilise the vast computing power in modern graphics cards, making it available for general-purpose computing. While CPU performance has been leveling off, GPU performance is still rapidly increasing with faster graphics cards becoming available all the time.

FCP X will use OpenCL extensively to greatly speed rendering and other tasks. In order to see the maximum benefits of the OpenCL optimisations built into FCP X, you will require an Apple certified OpenCL GPU in your Mac. The below cards are currently listed as officially supported in Snow Leopard.

AMD Cards:

Radeon HD 4670

Radeon HD 4850

Radeon HD 4870

Radeon HD 5670

Radeon HD 5750

Radeon HD 5770

Radeon HD 5870

NVIDEA Cards:

GeForce 320M

GeForce GT 330M

GeForce 9400M

GeForce 9600M GT

GeForce 8600M GT

GeForce GT 120

GeForce GT 130

GeForce GTX 285

GeForce 8800 GT

GeForce 8800 GS

Quadro FX 4800

Quadro FX 5600

Currently the PNY NVIDIA Quadro 4000, AMD HD 6970M, 6770M, 6750M and 6470M in the new Thunderbolt iMacs and MacBook Pro’s are not ‘officially’ listed as a supported OpenCL video cards in Snow Leopard. However, these may well be added in 10.6.8, which is due for release in the next few weeks. If not, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will almost certainly offer expanded OpenCL support.

Now is the time to look to upgrade the video card in your Mac, but be careful which one you choose.

Grand Central Despatch

All recent and currently shipping Mac’s include either one or two multi-core CPU’s. Recent iMac’s with Core i7 CPU’s and Mac Pro’ with ‘Westmere’ Xeon CPU’s also include Hyper-Threading technology that enable optimised applications to ‘see’ (and utilise) double’ the amount of physical cores in the Mac – for example a 12-core Mac  Pro can run 24 application threads simultaneously.

Grand Central despatch is an Apple Technology built into Snow Leopard that efficiently and automatically distributes application tasks to all the available CPU’s in a Mac. This distribution process is handled by the operating system rather than within the application enabling maximum performance to be achieved on multi CPU and multi-core systems. The more cores in your Mac the quicker FCP X will operate.

Mac systems with newer Intel CPU’s will see significant speed increases with FCP X. The background rendering feature of FCP X will use Grand Central despatch to enable you to keep editing whilst rendering is carried out. Gone are the days of making tee whilst the render bar slowly fills.

The more core’s in your Mac the faster FCP will operate and render.

64-bit Codebase

Snow Leopard is a full 64-bit OS, with a 64-bit kernel available to newer Intel CPU’s. The larger address space enables much faster system calls, which dramatically boosts the performance of optimised applications, system services and other I/O-intensive applications important to professional customers and especially creative applications. Additionally, a 64-bit OS and application enables applications to fully address massive amounts of memory.

FCP X has been written from scratch entirely in 64-bit code. For the first time FCP will make use of all of the RAM in your Mac enabling much large project files to be easily created and managed and huge video files to be manipulated with ease.

The more RAM you have in your Mac the better.

Summary

For the first time FCP X will fully utilise all the available advanced hardware and software available in modern Mac systems. This will bring huge performance advances compared to FCP 7 and real world, real time complex editing will be widely achievable in FCP with the correct combination of hardware and software

However, all of these need to be carefully pieced together to ensure maximum performance and stability is achieved.

For more information on the best way to upgrade to FCP X and benefit from it’s advanced features contact Support Partners on 0207 043 8206 or uk@support-partners.com

Support Partners leading a consortium of Aardman Animation, BBC Bristol, Star Internet and Mubaloo have managed to get funding to develop new tools that make the production of content such as film, music and computer games, more cost-effective, less risky and yield greater value through new advanced uses of metadata.

Illustrative Purposes

The board wanted to see projects that increase return on investment and the value of media assets by building new metadata tools or making workflows already in place yield richer, more persistent and therefore more valuable metadata. Our joint projects will deliver a demonstrator which will be built around some of the real-world content that is created in our industry.

Support Partners identified and help drive the digital editing and production processes revolution across the creative industries over the last 10 years to non-linear methods of working, taking advantage of many of the online/offline capabilities of digital technology to speed up and make production more efficient. Throughout this revolution, however, we identified that the role of metadata has not been developed as effectively as a means to add value. Unlike the analogue world, nothing needs be left on the cutting room floor – including metadata. Today metadata is frequently generated in almost every aspect of production, from conception to finished product. It is then often discarded, and frequently needs to be manually reintroduced in later stages of the process. In addition, further metadata on aspects of production could be captured that might have the potential to add value later.

The scope of our project is to explore the potential value creation from the development of tools in this field that retain, manage and organise that metadata. We understand that the re-purposing of digital content assets is rapidly becoming a business sector in its own right. Increasing the fineness of granularity in tagging content could allow for combined elements to retain individual component status. This kind of approach might allow for the radical re-use of material created for one production to be re-purposed for another or be made available for sale or licence. Ultimately, we hope, this approach could, for example, allow end-users to pay additional fees to personalise their experience by substituting characters or branded elements with their own images or avatars that place them within the movie or game.

We are very excited about the opportunity to work with leading content providers in the South West so we can design tools and services that have direct input from the users that will use them. We see metadata as a vital part of the production process going forward but we also understand the challenges with capturing that metadata and the potential overhead that puts on staff in production where they are been asked to do more and more every day, we look forward to developing a tool that can help users realise the value of metadata but not with the overhead of having to enter it

The project will kick off in the next few months and we will keep everyone updated of our progress via the blog and our Twitter feed.

This sounds great for on-site / location backup to LTO5.

Supports LTFS.

Records to LTO5 as AVCi and DVCPRO HD via HD SDI

Would be amazing if it had card slots for P2, SxS, CF etc for direct tapeless offload as a standalone unit.

From FORA, so likely not cheap, but be interesting to see how it compares in price to a single LTO5 unit.

http://www.for-a.com/products/ltr120hs/ltr120hs.html

FOR-A’s LTR-120HS is a video archiving recorder with the latest storage standard drive built in, LTO-5 (Linear Tape Open). With its over-whelming 1.5 TB of recording capacity and LTFS portable file system, the LTR-120HS can be used as material/program exchange media server. Using high quality AVC-Intra codec with HD-SDI input/output and MXF wrapper/un-wrapper, the MXF files on LTO-5 tape can be used easily by other NLE systems. The LTR-120HS enables you to build handy video “archive at ingest” solutions.

 

 

For a while now we have been wondering how we deal with the masses of tapeless media that our clients create in a way where you do not have to have a Phd. in computer science to understand the backup and restore process. All the current tools that are out there for industry backup and restore are designed to be managed by a system administrator dedicated just to that job, in our industry we do not work like that so there needs to be a shift in technology.

LTFS designed by IBM is a new technology that allows you to mount an LTO-5 tape on a desktop, Mac OS X, Linux and Windows 32-bit and 64-bit now as if it was an ordinary removable disk drive, you see it mounted on you desktop and you can drag and drop to the file system like you would a normal FireWire or USB drive.

We have been looking at this technology for a while and whilst it is new and tricky to initially set up, it requires some deep computer knowledge, once it is going it does just work. I load my tape into the LTO-5 drive and it mounts on my desktop and eject it and it disappears and I can then eject the tape.

There are a couple of interesting facts about LTFS that I had not thought about till I saw it working on the HP stand. On an LTO-5 device, it has to be an LTO-5 drive it does not work on anything else you would over SAS get about 100MB/s transfer speed. ProRes 422 HQ is about 28MB/s so that means you could playback a HD clip off a tape drive unit and backup to the drive in 4 X realtime. As most of our clients work at 100mbs / 14MB/s in HD quality off their cameras that means you are backing up at 7 X real time, that is pretty impressive. Before you get any ideas you can not edit off this format, the latency in the tape finding the files on the drive would be too high for that, drop frame heaven…

Of course getting the data on to the tapes is only part of the battle here, finding it again and working in some of our enterprise environment will be so we need to work on some clear protocols and software tools for that with our client base but that should be the less challenging bit if we approach it just like removable drives, have an asset management system to manage the index on a global basis and look to see how we can share the drives over a number of users.

One other great use for this technology is in the consolidation of media for the transport to finishing and grading houses, of course that is if they have an LTO-5 tape drive that supports LTFS, oh no not another format!

Now I just need to get it to work with those 181 slot LTO-5 tape libraries that we have in one of our big broadcasting clients to give us access to 25oTB of tape based backup storage from 64 edit suites over 2 sites.

One passing thought, does anyone else think that it is a bit strange that we shoot tapeless, process tapeless and then delivery on SR Tape ( when we can find one ) and archive off to LTO tape…. I really do not want to think about that to hard !

As expected, Apple previewed the new Final Cut Pro X at NAB in Las Vegas last night – at the FCP User Group SuperMeet.

It happened in the middle of the night, UK-time – and, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t stay up for it. Harry was otherwise engaged so couldn’t attend, but faithfully retweeted all the news coming from @fcpsupermeet, an unofficial live feed by @postist.  Another great source of live tweets was @silveradosys.

But rather than have to wade through the news in reverse chronological order, and because the Twitter feeds will be hard to find in a couple of days, I thought it’d be good to put it in the right order and do a quick summary here in the right order, summarized from what was brilliantly live tweeted by @fcpsupermeet and @silveradosys:

• Peter Steinauer is architect of the new suite, presented first part.
• Final Cut Pro X built from ground up – it’s a completely new app.
• Totally 64-bit – No more 4 GB limit of 32-bit apps
• Built with Cocoa, Snow Leopard, Open CL, and Core Video/Audio/Animation
• Completely new UI – very nice looking
• Focus on Image quality–fully color managed with ColorSync
• Fully floating point linear light point based system
• Resolution independent playback system/timeline all the way up to 4K
• Background rendering using Grand Central Dispatch
• Render dialog/bar is gone.  It uses every CPU cycle possible to keep things rendered
• Organization–using Content Auto Analysis – media detection, image stabilization, and people detection (like iMovie face detection) – single or groups.
• New FCPX can plug in directly to cameras, can edit while ingesting – Can start editing during ingest of AVCHD and other media, switches silently to local media as it ingests.
• Background image stabilization – and rolling shutter fixes during import
• Shot detection helps identify wide and close-ups
• Non-destructive automatic color balance
• Audio cleanup during ingest
• Range based keywording – metadata attached to time ranges – you can apply metadata/keywords to a specific range of a clip
• Smart Collections organizes metadata tags – a lot like smart folders elsewhere in OS X – like playlists for clips
• Editorial engine: Clip Connections allows relationships between primary and secondary media like primary video and audio effects.  Like anchoring different media together
• Magentic Timeline introduced allows you to slide material over other media without trim collisions.  Audio moves vertically out of the way instead of causing a trim collision.  And very non-destructive.
• Compound Clips allows you to select and condense/collapse different material into a single clip on timeline.  “How nesting always should have worked”
• Demo of Compound Clips offers HUGE capability to clean up complex timelines. Super nice.
• Inline Precision Editor allows frame accurate ability to cut between two clips.  Makes standard edits (roll, ripple, slip) easier by dynamically expanding to reveal all source media a la iOS.
• Auditioning… allows sampling of different versions of edits in a clean way.  Collect options during edit, choose later (simplifies versioning). This is loosely similar to Logic’s feature for grouping …
• Randy Ubillos, Chief Architect of Video Applications, demos on stage – mentions it’s still beta
• You can “skim” the cursor over filmstrips for previews [like iMovie]
• Highlights a section of a clip where Audi splashes through water and immediately tags it with metadata
• Keyword UI is very minimal, very fast. “This could really get people using metadata.” “Huge improvement”
• Timeline Index: a chronological listing of everything in the timeline, incl markers.
• “Watching an audio clip jump onto a new track to accomodate an audio edit is impressive”
• Tracks will appear and disappear as needed
• Plural Eyes style audio analysis for dual system audio auto-syncing has been integrated into new suite
• iPad slate app was shown
• Demonstrating re-sync using sample accurate audio. Sample-level precision for audio.
• “Secondary Storylines”: demo is showing how to easily do edits in b-roll in place in your sequence.
• Everything can be driven from the keyboard
• Audio skimming is pitch corrected–no high voices
• Audio waveforms in the timeline are gorgeous
• MUCH control of audio in the timeline, peaking controls, range adjustment–all very nicely done.
• Showed how to do a J cut on the new timeline. “Click and drag, audience is ecstatic.”
• Audio fade handles
• Retiming available directly in the timeline – “is awesome–totally done right.” You can “live” adjust retimes
• The theme overall is that you can do everything with ranges in the timeline.
• One-click matching of color between two clips!
• Native editing of GoPro, AVCHD, doesn’t matter–place it and “go” – No interruption for rendering. No transcoding, EVERYTHING native incl DSLR footage.
• Color ranging allows for primary and secondary color correction adjustments in a very clean implementation
• Keyframing effects are hugely improved. Short summary, you won’t need dozens of manually added keyframe dots.  Peaking can be seen visually in the timeline based on your levels.
• Auto guides and keyframes for motion effects a lot like Motion “(without the silly record button)”.
• Outpost Digital is a beta tester…
• Trailer Park Post is a beta tester…
• FCPX shipping in June and will be downloadable at the App Store for $299!

Thank you so much again to @postist/@fcpsupermeet and @silveradosys for awesome live tweeting – and I hope you don’t mind the way I’ve mashed up and reversed your tweets for general consumption

I have already tweeted about this as I was blown away by this and the opportunities that this brings to us in large infrastructure clients, it is also a bit funny as we were in the office saying how we would use Thunderbolt and our top wish list was a FibreChannel adapter for XSAN and here it is. Talking to the European Apple team about this we were wondering what what would happen if we got Thunderbolt on an iMac i7… wouldn’t that bring down the cost of an edit station!  Couple that with the completely unfounded  rumour that XSAN will be bundled with Lion and that really changes the per unit edit cost!

SANLink Highlights

A new generation of connectivity – SANLink technology bridges two high speed technologies together, Fibre Channel and Thunderbolt interfaces, helping to bring the SAN to the masses. SANLink provides dual-ported 4Gbps Fibre Channel access allowing for redundant paths to the SAN.

Outside the box thinking – With SANLink, connectivity is no longer tied to a single computer with a dedicated host bus adapter. Any computer with a Thunderbolt interface can attach to the SAN through SANLink. This makes SAN technology more accessible for groups with collaborative projects.

Extend your Thunderbolt port – SANLink provides two Thunderbolt ports enabling the capability to daisy-chain other Thunderbolt peripherals. The low latency, dual-channel 10Gbps bandwidth of Thunderbolt technology enables simultaneous usage of a daisy-chained display without sacrificing any performance of the Fibre Channel connection.

We do not have a shipment date for this however it is slated for Summer this year, pricing has yet to be decided.