DVD Studio Pro 2, Final Cut Pro 4 and Shake 3 - Announced!

Last week, Apple sent out invitations to journalists to join them for a press conference detailing Apple's strategic direction for digital video production technologies.

During Sunday's Press Conference, Apple revealed three upgrades to existing products, which also presumably incorporate some previously acquired technology. (Silicon Grail and Prismo Graphics).

Apple.com has updated and reflects the three new software announcements:

DVD Studio Pro 2:

DVD Studio Pro(R) 2, a completely new
DVD authoring product, rebuilt from the ground up with a breakthrough user
interface and packed with innovative features that redefine professional DVD
authoring. With professionally designed and fully customizable templates, an
innovative new menu editor, timeline-based track editing and a new
world-class, software-based MPEG-2 encoder



Price Drop: Now $499 (from $999).

Final Cut Pro 4:

Packed
with more than 300 new features, Final Cut Pro 4 introduces RT Extreme, for
real-time composting and effects, powerful new interface customization tools,
new high-quality 8- and 10-bit uncompressed formats and for the first time in
an editing system costing less than $100,000, full 32-bit floating point per
channel video processing. Final Cut Pro 4 also includes three completely new
integrated applications-LiveType for advanced titling, Soundtrack for music
creation and Compressor for full featured batch transcoding.

New Features: LiveType, Cinema Tools included, Compressor, RT Extreme. Same price: $999.

Shake 3:

Shake 3 includes new
Mac(R) OS X only features such as the Shake Qmaster network render management
software and unlimited network rendering licenses which allow visual effects
artists to easily distribute rendering tasks across a cluster of Apple's
Xserve(TM) 1U rack servers or desktop Power Mac(R) G4 computers for maximum
performance and efficiency. Shake 3 also includes new visual effects features
available to Mac OS X, Linux and IRIX customers including motion-tracking and
real-time broadcast preview.

OS X Only Features: QMaster -Rendezvous enabled distributed computing.