Too Many Words

That’s what we heard today as I watched Scott edit the trailer for Zodiac in Soundtrack Pro 2. Let’s back up a little.

I was attending the Final Cut Studio 2 Tour at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in DC. Apple picked a few cities around the country in which to do this seminar, and I got lucky and they picked DC. As I told Paul today before I left the office, I didn’t know if it would be 10 guys in a hotel lobby cutting home movies or what. Expectations were destroyed today.

First of all, if I ever leave the area and come back to visit, I’m not staying with friends or family. I’m staying at the Omni Shoreham. Ni-i-ice. Anyway, We got our own personal keynote presentation with the product managers from FCS2. They did some ridiculous live demos on a 30 ft screen that showed in 10 minutes the raw creation of a TV-ready product. It was incredibly slick. They started with Final Cut Pro 6, which was impressive by itself. Then they moved on to Motion 3. Here’s where it just got disgusting.

In about 2 minutes, Jon had created a magic wand that waved around the screen with a trailing particle emitter and illuminated objects around it. In 5, he had a full 3D flying news bumper segment. I thought that may be the greatest thing I would see on a computer in the near future. I was so wrong.

Scott stole the show. He received “spontaneous applause demonstrating sound editing, which is not easy to do”. He demoed Soundtrack Pro 2 which left me speechless. I wish Kevin Doran had been there with me to see this. I excitedly scribbled in my notebook without taking my eyes off the screen. The features he was demoing with just single clicks were incredible and incredibly relevant specifically to the kinds of videos we make. The two biggest things he demoed were the Advanced Take Management and the Audio Restoration. I can’t even describe in words how awestruck the audience was when he removed the background noise of the boom mic being bumped from a scene of dialog without marring the voices. It literally took 10 seconds from start to finish. That was a task that previously would take at least a half hour if it was even possible at all. He used the ATM to clip and splice voice recordings and sync them with the video perfectly. I don’t know if you can read my notes, but here they are:

spectrum analyzer + spectrum editor = fucking awesome
(after he eliminated the boom artifact with one click and left the dialog untouched)

no more Mike
(after realizing that with ATM, Mike’s endless “ok, be serious, we’ll take that again” moments were a thing of the past)

Multi-take will make our movies Mike-proof
(no more re-shooting “The kid sees a boy?” and “Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” for hours)

Multipoint spotting was another 10 second applause-getter. And man, being able to lift and drop Eq settings and F/X from one clip to others with one click made everyone in the room hate the hours they’d spent doing tedious things like that even more. It was just so damn easy to do everything that took Kevin and me hours when working on Bureau stuff. Suddenly the $1299 for the whole studio looked pretty damn attractive. Don’t be surprised if by December I’m cradling another “box from Apple” as Matt says at work. This was just one more reminder that I need to slap the Apple sticker that came with my MBP on my Escape.

I was also in the giving mood, so I bought Kevin’s birthday present while browsing the insane video equipment from the vendors in attendance. He will enjoy it. I was put in that mood by my grandparents, who got me this because my loving grandmother reads my blog more often than Tom.

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