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Final Cut Pro 4.0 delivers features offering truly professional editing potential. Much of that potential must be realized, however, by the third-party hardware/software creators who step up and harness it. Announced at NAB this year, CineWave 4 promised deep features for a professional workflow that requires speed, flexibility, customization, and quality. This is a "First Look."
What has Pinnacle done to enhance CineWave, and what have they done to make day-to-day editing smoother and more flexible? To both questions I have to answer, plenty. Last year there was a serious commitment to perform within OSX-and a lot of resources flowed to that endeavor. Pinnacle gave us new, rewritten flawless codecs and new features. Apparently those resources did not rest after reaching that goal. It seems rather, the breadth of features delivered in CineWave 4 indicates what we can expect in the future from Pinnacle.
Let me cite an example. FCP4 gives us RT time-remapping. Of the fantasy feature requests-those unlikely to happen yet truly amazing-this was high on the list for me. Apple did it-and with a very intuitive graphic interface-possibly the most impressive feature in Final Cut Pro 4. Enter CineWave 4, with support for uncompressed 8-bit, 10-bit, and 16-bit RT time-remapping-and with any of the compressed formats that are now captured within CineWave 4. Enjoy field blending and RT out to tape-not just preview. That got my attention.
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With a wealth of formats available today, we need a flexible editor. I can now choose to have my footage digitized via CineWave 4 (component, composite, SVID, SDI, or HDSDI) into my preferred member of the digital family, depending on my workflow, project integration, storage needs, etc. One can select from YUV 8-bit, YUV 16-bit, DV25, DV50, CineOffline, and PhotoJPEG. You can choose a 40Mbps file with YUV16 if quality is of the utmost importance and compositing or effects will be applied. At the other end of the spectrum, capture to PhotoJPEG and the file is a diminutive 1.4 Mbps. DV25, DV50, and YUV8 are incrementally greater in file size, throughput, and quality. That said, I am amazed at the image quality of PhotoJPEG-small, fast rendering, more RT capable, and you won't feel like you're looking at...