FCE HD and iMovie05
by Dave BrewisSteve Jobs announced the release of Final Cut Express HD and iMovie 05 at Macworld SF, whilst predicting that 2005 is going to be the year of HD.
Both these releases support 720 and 1080 HD editing, but most importantly, for the video hobbyist/consumer in any case, they both support native HDV editing.
Editing HDV material on the mac has only been possible, until now, by the use of «proxy editing, using software such as Lumiere HD to convert the MPEG2 transport stream coming out of HDV cameras to a QuickTime friendly codec before Ă«onliningĂ your final edit.
To facilitate native HDV editing in Final Cut Express HD and iMovie 05, Apple have developed an intermediary codec which transcodes the MPEG2 coming off of HDV cameras into something more QuickTime friendly, during capture, in real time.
Once captured you can edit as you would with DV.
However, there are limitations which place this process in the consumer/hobbyist domain..
Firstly, when exporting back to camera, it is necessary to transcode back to HDV from the intermediary codec, in other words rendering back to MPEG2. This is a lengthy process, possibly around 100% of the length of the finished edited piece.
Neither will it be possible to monitor HDV externally during editing.
It's also unclear as to whether or not the transcoding process utilised is lossy.
The question therefore is when will the new version of Final Cut Pro be released, and what kind of HDV support will it provide.
At the very least pro editors will want to monitor HDV whilst editing, so the new FCP must surely push HDV back out to a camera or deck.
In any case, Apple's launch of these two software products together with sub 3500 from the likes of Sony, places HD in the hands of the consumer. This can only be a good thing for those of us passionate about HD in general; it will certainly help fire the revolution.