Apple announced Final Cut Studio this morning at an event at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. The promo session by Apple is a lead-off event to this week's National Association of Broadcasters convention in Sin City.
Among the outstanding presentations was the real-time use of iChat AV by the folks over at Scrubs to show how they can review video remotely and collaboratively edit with remote locations. The whole world of live remotes for local TV and other real-time production work.
Included in Apple's announcement were lots of cool features but none that top Final Cut Pro 5's emergence as a multi-camera editing platform. Not only does the new revision of Final Cut do multi-camera but it does so in an incredibly slick way. Watch your feeds in a 4x4 to 16x16 viewer window and select from amongst as many high definition feeds as you would like.
Not to hog the spotlight entirely Apple had Panasonic and Sony share the stage. Panasonic used the opportunity to introduce their AG-HVX200 camera. Due out in the fourth quarter of 2005 the camera brings an amazing array of HD video features to a camera below $6,000. Many of the features are common to cameras that are more than ten times the price.
In other news, we ventured down the famed Las Vegas Monorail today for the first time. No parts fell off and no bystanders were injured in the process. A relatively successful test in light of the history.
Apple Computer sent a note this week that there will be an eight hour downtime for .Mac next weekend. The email (pictured) seems to leave a few things to wonder about. First of all, the message says New iChat sessions will be temporarily unavailable, what does this mean. Does it mean that if you use AIM and have iChat as your client you won't be able to start a new IM session, or just not log in?