Final Cut Studio

Final Cut Studio is a professional video and audio production suite for Mac OS X from Apple Inc., and a direct competitor (and vastly superior) to Avid Media Composer in the high-end movie production industry.

Components

Final Cut Studio version 3 contains six main applications and several smaller applications used in editing video. The major applications it includes are:

• Final Cut Pro 7 – "real-time editing for DV, SD and HD"
• Motion 4 – "real-time motion graphics design"
• Soundtrack Pro 3 – "advanced audio editing and sound design"
• DVD Studio Pro 4 – encoding, authoring and burning.
• Color 1.5 – a new color grading application adapted from Silicon Color's FinalTouch.
• Compressor 3.5 – a video encoding tool for outputting projects in different formats.

Additional applications included are:

• Cinema Tools 4.5 – tools specific to film processing.
• Qmaster 3 – a distributed processing tool.

History

Final Cut Studio was introduced at the National Association of Broadcasters in April 2005. It is the successor to Production Suite, and added new versions of all the Production Suite applications, as well as a 'new' program, Soundtrack Pro, which is really a new version of Soundtrack, formerly included with Final Cut Pro. In January 2006, Final Cut Studio became the only way to purchase any of the individual major applications. In March 2006, Apple released the Universal Binary version as Final Cut Studio 1.1.