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PHYX Inc, creator of several plugins for the popular Apple Shake compositing system, have partnered with Noise Industries to bring their plugins to several new platforms including Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Final Cut Express.

“Our Apple Shake customers were interested in utilizing our tools in After Effects and Final Cut, which lead us to Noise Industries and FxFactory,” says Justin Bendo, President and CEO, PHYX Inc. “PHYX Keyer is designed to empower users with a toolset to achieve fast, outstanding keying results and FxFactory lets us effectively deliver our powerful visual effects tools to existing and new customers. We thank Noise Industries for their support and look forward to being a part of the innovative FxFactory family.”

Given the recent demise of Shake, this isn’t much of a surprise.  It’s great to see new tools, new common tools, coming to such a diverse collection of systems tho.  Check out the plugin, including a 15-day free trial, at the FxFactory website.

via PHYX Inc. Joins FxFactory Development Partner Program.

Graphics aftereffects, finalcut, fxfactory, motion, noiseindustries, phyx

If you’re a big Final Cut Studio user, then a new product from Digital Rebellion might go a long way to improving your productivity and fixing some of the routine maintenance tasks you find ourself doing every day: The FCS Maintenance Pack

FCS Maintenance Pack is a group of utilities designed to help maintain your Final Cut Studio system. The tools fall into two categories – those that help keep things ticking along and those that help to fix problems when they arise.

FCS Maintenance Pack can clean up your autosaves, locate corrupt clips within a Final Cut Pro sequence, analyze crash logs, periodically trash caches, salvage data from damaged files, manage plugins, repair projects that refuse to launch, remove bloat from applications, and much much more.

A 15 day trial is available for you to try out, but the full version is a mere $99.

via Introducing FCS Maintenance Pack – Digital Rebellion Blog.

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If you’re a Final Cut user, then you’ve undoubtedly heard about the Apple “ProRes” codecs.  Well the new version of Final Cut adds a few new options to the ProRes family, and Apple has released a WhitePaper discussing the benefits of using it.

With the release of the new Final Cut Studio, Apple has introduced three new  members of the Apple ProRes family:  Apple ProRes 422 (Proxy), Apple ProRes 422 (LT),  and Apple ProRes 4444. These new family members increase the power and versatility  of Final Cut Studio while enabling broader usage of Apple ProRes technology. This white paper provides in-depth information about all five members of the Apple ProRes family, including technical specifications and performance metrics.

The paper gets into amazing technical detail with many comparisons and graphs showing how well it does (or does not ) perform in various situations.  It’s freely available as a PDF.

Apple ProRes Whitepaper (PDF), via @FilmBot.

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Apple has released a slew of new updates for Final Cut and it’s associated products, adding alot of new features and functionality.  Jim Geduldick gives a quick overview over at FinalCutUser.

For me the new updates the are note worth to me are new ProRes updates for proxie,LT,4444alpha support,share function in FCPbatch window with Blu Ray support,templates now in Compressor,iChat Theater collab with clients and other via timeline,Speed Changes fixed or enhanced,way better Markers,Auto Transfer,Native support for AVC-INTRA,background exporting,free droplets and so much more.

It’s worth noting that the update is Intel only, so older PowerPC users (are there still any doing FinalCut work?) are left out of the new hotness.

via Apple updates Final Cut Studio, FCS Server and Logic | Final Cut User.

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The America Cinema Editors (ACE) board of directors has selected Avid’s Media Composer software for the organizations first-ever ACE Technical Excellence award.  Now, the award won’t actually be presented until February, but the organization is releasing the news now in order to drive some angst towards another company, Apple.

Harry B. Miller III, an ACE board member and head of the org’s technology committee, said Avid “has always had the superior product” among editing software packages, but recently the company has also gone out of its way to solicit feedback from editors and shape the product to their needs.

Apple, by contrast, has been slow to improve Final Cut Pro. Miller said, “Apple and Final Cut Pro doesn’t listen, doesn’t respond, doesn’t solicit our opinion.”

I know several people who have similar complaints about Apple’s slow response with Final Cut, specifically in the lack of HD editing & BluRAY authoring.

via ACE honors Avid’s Media Composer – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety.

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The new FXFactory2.0.7 plugins for AfterEffects, Final Cut, and Motion offer over 300 real-time visual effects on Mac Platforms.

Graphics aftereffects, finalcut, fxfactory, noiseindustries, software, vfx

If you’re a big Final Cut user, you might want to take a look at SlickFX’s newest plugins.  PhotoMotion, PhotoMotion Producer, and Fusion Factory HD are each on sale for $79, and add several new effects to Final CUt.  PhotoMotion and PhotoMotion Producer both add new effects for manipulating still photos, like Ken Burns effects, and use the computer’s GPU for accelerated renderings.  Fusion Factory HD adds a library of 750 new soft and organic dissolves to Final Cut. (…)

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