Apple Final Cut Studio Upgrade from Final Cut Pro (Mac DVD) Description:

Apple Final Cut Studio Upgrade from Final Cut Pro (Mac DVD) review:
5 stars (Outstanding, especially if upgrading from very old versions of FCP.) - The short and sweet of it is that every upgrade in this package seems like an improvement. From Final Cut Pro's multicamera editing addition to Soundtrack Pro's audio cleanup tools, I've found an abundance of tools and features that will soon become essentials for me in an editing package. The package seems to need a fairly high end computer with a fair amount of RAM and OS X Tiger to really utilize of lot of it's new features such as the Core Image/Video features to their fullest extent, but renderless previews are worth it. I'd recommend it to anyone seeking to upgrade FCP and add all the other programs incredible functions.


2 stars (Apple Does it Again) - Don't buy this if you wish to make DVD's! The MPEG-2 Encoding via Compressor 2 is a huge step backwards from every previous edition of DVD Studio Pro. It takes much longer (days longer, in some cases!), and the results are not anywhere near as good. While the other applications in this bundle work reasonably well, the problem is that Compressor is the heart of this package. Without decent MPEG-2 compression, you have no way of showing your beautiful masterpiece to anyone. What good are all of DVD Studio Pro's bells and whistles if your video looks like garbage? What good are all of Motion's fantastic effects if the end result is a bunch of pixelated macroblocks?

Apple has done it again: they took a great product that used to work fine and they broke it. (Did I mention that they removed the old MPEG-2 Quicktime Encoder component from the package so you can't use that old standby anymore?)

The Bottom Line: don't buy this software until Apple releases a fix for the faulty MPEG-2 encoding.