Having loaded Snow Leopard over 14 weeks ago onto my iMac I have seen the benefits, quicker start up’s, more responsive and very stable. Only last Thursday 22nd October brought the updated drivers for my AJA io HD now V7.1, along with these drivers came an update to Final Cut Studio V7.0.1.

As soon as these drivers appeared I loaded them onto my MacPro and “WOW” it was like going from 2 star petrol to 4 star petrol, the difference was remarkable and still running 32bit.

It was most noticeable in Motion 4, things that ran sluggishly were given a new lease of life and the best was still to come…if you use Motion you will appreciate that if you want to make “Tummy tabs” (TT) as they are known in the trade, an ident like the one on the picture to your right with my name on it.

In Motion 3 if you wanted to make a TT you had to make sure the output was an animation, millions of colours plus and choose movie plus alpha, then you had to export this and render it on the FC timeline… TTs took ages.

Now with Motion 4, FC and AJA io HD you can choose Apple 4444 ProRes as your export preset and thats it no faffing about, it exports twice as fast and once it reaches your timeline it renders at least 3x faster than choosing the animation option and better still you get a far superior picture…no more banding or shallow colours.

Final Cut seems far more positive…I have 20 SATA drives via four DP500’s and they are twice as fast to load up it’s all a plus, plus experience.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I did not recommend bringing a previous project into FCP-7 as it crashed to the desktop…with some anxiety I did this with a major edit and no problems, worked like a charm. All in all I am delighted with my switch over to Snow Leopard and Final Cut Studio 3…I will put my hands up and applaud AJA for their amazing drivers and the ability to use Apple 4444 ProRez in a box of tricks that I am not so sure was designed to give us that level of resolution, once again well done Apple and AJA.