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The suite will be available in May at a suggested retail price of £849 inc VAT. Upgrades from the current version are £329 inc VAT, and from any previous edition are £449 inc VAT.

Final Cut Pro 6, included in this suite revision, introduces Apple's ProRes 422 format for uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes. An Emmy Award winner, Final Cut Pro now features an Open Format Timeline, which allows for the mixing of any video format at any frame rate on a single timeline, without Transcoding. It has been optimised for use on a MacBook Pro for out-of-the-studio editing, and includes optical flow based SmoothCam technology, to iron out unwanted camera movement.

'Final Cut Studio 2 was specifically designed to enable the rapidly growing community of over 800,000 Final Cut editors worldwide to animate, mix, grade and deliver their work as a natural extension of the editorial process,' said Rob Schoeben, Apple's vice president of Applications Product Marketing. 'Final Cut Studio 2 is the most powerful production

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suite on the planet.'

Motion has reached version 3 with this release, and extends the familiar Motion tools into the 3D space. New camera behaviours, vector-based painting and mapping features that will automatically map any image or effect to the path of another promise to cut editing time. Effects can be moved on the timeline without using keyframes, and audio behaviours allow for effects that respond to soundtrack volume and frequency.

Soundtrack Pro 2 introduces a heads-up display for aligning pictures with effects and dialogue, and it includes a royalty-free library of over 5000 professionally-produced foley and sound effects, of which over 1000 are surround sound and evocative music effects.

The only completely new addition is an application called Color, which is a task-based colour-grading and finishing workflow, featuring colour correction tools and the ability to isolate specific areas of an image with soft-edged mattes and custom-shaped vignettes.

Finally, Compressor 3 handles encoding for output to a range of industry-standard codecs, including Mpeg-2 and H.264. Drag-and-drop presets simplify encoding for the web, iPod, Apple TV, DVD, phones and standard broadcast television.

Final Cut Studio 2 requires a 1.25GHz or faster PowerPC G4, G5 or Intel processor, 1GB of Ram, AGP or PCI Express Quartz Extreme graphics card, Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later, and QuickTime 7.1.6 or later.