(We’ll decide the winners in January 2012 and notify them by email. By emailing us, you grant us the right to use publish your story, so please don’t break any NDAs!)

Today they’ve announced they will be unable to support their current range of products, and as such, they are giving them all away for free.

Wow.

You can download the plugins from their website.

James Cameron hates gurus. He imagines them in white lab coats, telling people what they can’t do. On the other hand, him and Vincent Pace want your money in return for certification.

In a nutshell, Cameron Pace Group is trying to become the authority on all things 3D. Their idea is that everything from the workflow and kit used during a shoot, through to the consumer equipment used to playback 3D content will be branded with their logo, much in a similar way to THX and audio equipment. Will they be successful? Well their showreel is certainly impressive.

Adobe has acquired IRIDAS, they of the wonderful SpeedGrade software. Looks like Adobe could be dipping its toe into digital intermediate waters at last. Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is now available for Windows (in addition to Mac and Linux). Filmlight’s Baselight is now available as a plugin for The Foundry’s Nuke, which is a nice idea, especially considering that their Final Cut Pro plugin may turn out to be a waste of time.

The Foundry themselves were introducing a new workflow tool, Hiero. It’s the first stand-alone conforming system I’ve seen (that wasn’t just a cut down grading system at least), and there’s a beta programme if you want to take a closer look.

One of the more interesting products (although not a new one) was Colorfront’s On-Set Dailes. It will ingest and output any format under the sun, has a gorgeous interface, and is the only digital dailies system that I know of that will do sound sync. If you are involved with dailies in any capacity, take a look at it.

There were several “alternatives to FTP” on offer, like TixelTec and FileCatalyst, boasting high-speed transfers, but conveniently neglecting to point out that the transfer speed is almost entirely limited by the lowest speed of either party (oh yes, and FTP is simple and also free to implement). On the other hand, the FileCatalyst Webmail system, which is designed to be a user-friendly front-end to file transfers, is worth a look.

Finally, anyone interested in where colour grading might be going next, should take a look at Bakery Relight. It’s a system for 3D animation rather than post-production, With more work being done in 3D, and with advancements in 2D-to-3D technology, it’s only a matter of time before we start to see tools like that in the grading suite.

On the surface, everything is very shiny and modern. The interface, which was somewhat unfairly compared to iMovie, is a much needed replacement for the very stiff throwback to Avid MediaComposer that was Final Cut Pro 7. It reminds me a great deal of Kai’s Power Tools, and it’s just as much fun to play around with. There’s an event library, which gives you some of the functionality of Final Cut Server, in that you can have media that shared between projects, like stock footage. There’s a lot of processing that goes on in the background. There’s some crashes too, but that’s to be expected with shrink-wrapped software.

There’s a learning curve here, as everything now has a different icon from it’s predecessor, but that was to be expected. You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, right?

Breaking. Some. Eggs.

Well, in the case of FCPX, those eggs are everything a professional editor needs to do their job. It seems like utter madness to release a version of Final Cut Pro that doesn’t import projects from FCP7, that doesn’t provide EDL support (in fact, it is currently impossible to online anything created inside FCPX), that there’s no electronic manual (other than the online help) and that doesn’t have deck control, but that’s what we’ve got here.

Instead, there’s the ability to import from iMovie, publish to YouTube and automatically colour-correct everything. I have absolutely no problem with any of that, but those features are clearly aimed at a different audience, one I suspect already uses iMovie for videoblogging and is now looking to do a little more. FCPX is clearly not aimed at post-production professionals who are hoping for an improvement over FCP7.

Which begs the question, why call it Final Cut Pro at all?

Final Cut Pro was always the underdog to Avid in the high-end editing game, but since the release of Final Cut Studio, it was increasingly gaining ground within Hollywood. Hell, I even used FCP 7 to online The Bengali Detective. So it is astonishing that Apple would suddenly do a U-turn and leave that market left out in the cold.

Editors need to be able to preview their work on a broadcast monitor. They need to be able output edit decision lists in one form or another. They can’t, and yet the wealth of output options can only suggest that this was entirely deliberate.

There were a lot of people who were worried FCPX would be dumbed-down, on the basis that the interface was very similar to iMovie. Then the Apple PR engine rolled out a bunch of testimonials from people claiming that it was going to be great. Even Steve Jobs got in on the act. But in all honestly, nothing about it seems dumbed-down. There’s an absolute ton of innovation in there, a load of features and performance improvements that people have been clamouring for. You just can’t shake the feeling that every single omission is deliberate. It’s just that, in true Apple style, they seem to think they can tell editors how they can be doing their jobs better. At best it shows a lack of understanding of real-world editing (i.e. not direct-to-web editing), and at worst it shows contempt for its own market. It’s not that it isn’t a great product for the right audience. I dare say it will get some use from me on specific, straight-to-web jobs. But an upgrade it is not.

FCPX is also the first Final Cut Pro that is only available via digital download. It’s reasonably-priced because of this (at $299) but then again, many people who paid, thinking they were getting an upgrade to Final Cut Pro will find themselves out of luck, and with no recourse for a refund.

In other news, Synaesthesia Beta 12 is now available. This latest release adds the ability to create sequences using just the data in Synaesthesia. So while we’re all waiting for Final Cut Pro 8 to become available, you can build sequences directly from Synaesthesia, and then export them as EDLs.

Why on Earth would you want to do this? Well let’s say you’re logging Red footage into Synaesthesia. You of course already know how little effort this requires- simply create a new clip, and then drag the R3D file onto the clip breakdown. But now you can create a new sequence, go to the Events tab, click add, and then click next to “Clip:” to choose your logged clip. Synaesthesia will read in the clip information previously logged, and use it to generate a new event in the sequence. You can use this process to quickly create an EDL of footage to be used for VFX work for example (or in YouTube-speak, create a “playlist” of certain clips).

Great? We’ve also added some more Sequence-modifying tools, such as the ability to automatically renumber a sequence, or to regenerate sequence timecodes so that they flow continuously without any breaks between events. You can also lock the duration of events when making changes to source or sequence times. Oh yes, and the aforementioned automated Red logging will now also read some additional data from R3D files, such as the camera model and sensor. Then there’s some more eradicated bugs and other stuff.

Read up on it if you want to know more, and then download the new version.

The Scene Breakdown for a sub-scene

This release also brings a few changes to the Sequence Breakdown. The most noticeable is that the Event window has been re-organised, to make the information clearer and more compact. Additionally, clips and reels can now be changed by choosing other existing clips and/or reels.

The new Event window

Beta 11 is available for download now. Read about all the changes in the release notes.

It’s a little bit late now, but American Cinematographer ran an article on Synaesthesia in their July 2010 issue:

Surreal Road Maps Production Data

Surreal Road has released a beta version of its flagship software product, Synaesthesia. The new version adds the capability to read-in clip information from Final Cut Pro XML files. The new feature adds to an already rich toolset, including support for Red camera footage and Google Maps integration.

Synaesthesia is a database-driven application for Max OSX, targeted at filmmakers who need to track data across the lifetime of a production. From loading in screenplays and storyboards during preproduction, through logging action during a shoot, to creating sequences during post, it forms intelligent links out of all the data and allows filmmakers to annotate and use modern data management techniques such as tagging to keep everything organized and accessible.

Synaesthesia was created to fulfill a need to organize the massive amounts of data and metadata that can be generated on a shoot.

What does this mean? Well it’s much quicker to do the most common actions on any breakdown. For example, to add a new shot to a scene from the Scene Breakdown, you now have 3 ways to do it:

1. Go to the “Shots” tab, then click on the add button at the bottom (previously this was the only way to do it)
2. From the “Attach” menu, choose “Shot”
3. Press Command-Option-O

With the addition of keyboard shortcuts, navigation becomes much less of a chore. For example, to quickly move between different clips on the same reel, from the Clip Breakdown, you can now use the keyboard shortcuts Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow to go to the previous and next clips respectively. Add the shift key to either of those, and you’ll quickly go to the first or the last clips in the set. Browse the complete list of keyboard shortcuts to see more time-savers.

We’ve also fixed a bunch more issues and made some minor adjustments. You can see the full list of changes in the release notes.

If you’re currently using beta 6, you should be prompted to download and install the new version within the next few days. Otherwise, you can download it here.