All I can say is "Wow!"...What a program! I just was curious if anyone else has had a chance to try this sweet program? "Soundtrack" program that comes with it is awesome, and has the feel of Acid Pro. Anyway, no real point here, except that this program rocks...Later

yeah... I got to tinker with it at NAB when it was introduced.. but i just ordered it.. so im waiting for it to come. I cant wait.. It's a tight program. Just the fact that cinema tools included was a seller for me, cause i want to edit in native 24P but didnt want to pay 1000 more for cinema tools. But the soundtrack and tiling capabilities is amazing. I cant wait for DVD studio Pro 2.0 in August either.

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time"

Wow! How much does this stuff cost? Are you guys students? If so, how do you manage the big bucks for these programs/computers?

for prices check out www.apple.com, students do get a discount. heres the skinny:

FCP4 full retail - 999
FCP4 upgrade - 399

ACADEMIC

FCP4 full - 499
FCP4 upgrade - 399


There is also final cut pro express ($299), which offers a majority of the features that most non pro users would want when styepping above imovie and such. If you dont know much about FCP, this is probably what you want to look at first. It may cover all of your bases.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutexpress/

Personally i am running FCP2 on a G3 and am going to upgrade to 4 when i get a new powerbook...what would i give to hold out long enough for a friggin G5 powerbook! current projects may didctate otherwise...

Is CinemaTools included if you buy the upgrade?!

I know this guy at Virginia Tech...and hes tryin to get me a copy of FCP4...dude he said it comes on 4 DVDS. It comes with 4.5 gigs of sound effects. That's insane!

"Don't breathe or I'll kill you!"

sure does.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/cinematools.html

technically the upgrade is the retail version, it just checks for a prior installation. The software is identical. Comes with Cinema Tools 2.

As for getting FCP4 from your bud - As much as i've been guilty of stolen software in the past i've made it a point to purchase all the programs i use, particularly the ones i am getting paying jobs for. earlier versions of FCP can be had on Ebay quite cheap, if you are doing anything pro oriented i'd consider it. Don't forget as well that 4 is QUITE performance intensive, i hope you have a fast enough mac to run it on! RT extreme wont really work unless you have a really recent machine, you may only get like dissolve to work live and thats it if you have like a 5 or 600 mhz or something like that.

I have 430 bucks. I might just buy the upgrade. That would cancel out buying equipment for the new camera I want. Which should I go with? I have FCP3 right now, so I'm not desperate, and I have NO equipment.

"Don't breathe or I'll kill you!"

well what kind of mac do you have? do you really have a need for the ew features of 4? its worth it for me b/c im on 2, but it depends on what you are doing. Do you have any projects lined up? if so, what do they entail? If it is for school or something, do you have access to good equipment? Do you have a camcorder at all or when you say equipment do you mean like lighting and dollies etc etc?

You students might want to buy it throught your university. I got FCP3 for $299 and the upgrade for FCP4 is only $120. We get 70% off of any software title, so your schools probably have similar rates.

I know what you mean cyos, I told my media teacher that we would need mac os X to run the FCP software she wanted, so she just asked a few friends and eventually they pointed her to this mac website, osx for teachers. We got the full oem version of OSX for free.

Yeah, I have some projects lined up. A few of them might be pretty nice, since I am considering showing them to a company and trying to sell the idea. I can deal with FCP3 for right now, but I really want 4.

"Don't breathe or I'll kill you!"

INSTALLING AS WE SPEAK!!!! Requires a lot of space, guess its time to throw away all the ace of base and right sed fred mp3s lol!

Dare to be diffrent... dont give in to the "norm"

What kind of stuff does FCP 4 hold over FCP 3 ?

And what is cinema tools exactly?

If you don't look I'll force you to _=_

theres a good chunk of new features in 4, check out www.apple.com/finalcutpro for more dtails. they'd say it better than i. the biggest one to me is RT extreme, which is live rendering of commonly used effects, i.e. you dont need to render the file to see the draft of what it will look like. That's worth it alone if you are using FCP with clients. Also, there is a new offlien RT mode which down sizes your vid files from the 4.9MB/s DV rate to something like 350k/s for editing, this means you can edit a whole two hour movie on a laptop, then re import the used footage, render, and you are out the door. Wonderful. Theres a lot more, go read :-)

Cinema Tools is explained better there as well, but essentially it is a linkage system when working with film and HD. From what i understand anyway, i personally am miniDV only for now so i haven't looked to heavily into this feature yet. There's an awful lot to know about Final Cut. The manual I haave for FCP2 was 1500 pages. nuff said.

I got it a few weeks ago and have been pretty impressed. I have run into some problems updating FCP3 project files to run in 4 and RT extreme I haven't gotten to work well for me. I love the time remapping feature. And my favorite new tool is Compressor. I erased cleaner 6 from my computer I like Compressor so well. The new 2-pass vbr m2v encoder is sweet. I get get quality encodes at 3.5 mbs average.

With most apple products, the release version still has bugs to be worked out. I'm anxiously awaiting an update before I completely abandon v3.04.

My main question is wheter they will port FCP to work in 64 bit mode on the G5s? That would be lame if you have to wait 'til FCP5 before you can take advantage of the g5 64 bit processors.

joren

Dude pgPyro, if you got FCP3 and no equiptment, buy some damn equiptment. Can't edit what you don't have, right?

yea joren i hear you on the 64 bit architecture, something tells me there will be something along the way that will take advatage of it, the launch of FCP4 and the release of the G5 were near simultaneous. The question is will it cost anything more, hell it is apple...

Final Cut Pro 4 was built with the G5 in mind. It will run a hell of a lot faster because of the 64-bit processor(s) and especially with the possibility of boosting your RAM to 8GB. Don't worry about waiting until FCP5, it could be a very long wait. As it stands, FCP4 is a hell of an editor with awesome improvements over the previous version.

I have FCP4 running on both of my Macs, one of them a PowerMac G4, and also on my G4 iMac which runs it just fine. Not as fast as the tower, but I'm not complaining.

Can FCP4 capture from a Betacam or Digi Beta deck and keep the footage broadcast quality? Is there a lossless codec option throughout?

Dude Gabe, what I was referring to is if FCP will use 64bit processing. Version 4.0 can't. It will run on g5s because the g5 chip can handle both 32 and 64 bit ported apps--just in theory, it'll get a lot faster when it's a 64 bit app. Also I'm surprised that you say FCP 4 is faster across the board. I've found that this isn't always the case on my g4 tower. I still think it's better than everything else out there now (sub $5k), *cough* just I've learned that over thime that apple's ad campaigns and pr may embellish stuff.

Dude Yossarian, the beauty of FCP is it was designed to be format independent--ever since version 1. You can edit 4:4:4 HD uncompressed on it if you want ...or even 4k film. You won't be able to capture through firewire, however, so you'll need a capture card. Most capture cards come with a special codec, or use a standard quicktime codec so that's not a problem. I like the igniter or the kona. And now with RTextreme in v4, there's a possibility that some effects may even be real-time, depending on your computer (and if you're drive setup can handle dual stream uncompressed -- 50+MB/s).

I'm stoked there's so much enthusiasm. The advancements from v3 to v4 are proving to everyone that FCP is a pro app here to stay.

joren