After some delay, Apple announced Tuesday that it is shipping its Final Cut Server. The product provides what the company called “a powerful software solution for media asset management and work-flow automation.”
Final Cut Server is a scalable server application; it automatically catalogs collections of assets and provides the ability to search across a variety of hard disks and network volumes. The server allows a user to view, annotate and approve content from anywhere via a local computer.
First Announced in 2007
Rob Schoeben, vice president of applications product marketing at Apple, noted that Final Cut Studio is the “choice of editors around the world,” and Final Cut Server makes collaboration easier for those who work with Studio. Final Cut Server was originally introduced last spring at the National Association of Broadcasters show.
A user can search from a PC or a Mac. Searches can be conducted with simple keywords or combinations of IPTC, XMP or XML metadata. There are also a range of access controls that can be defined to determine user permissions for a specific asset or an individual project.
Apple said the basic building block of Final Cut Server is a “watch and respond” sequence, in which the system watches for an event, such as a new file in a watched folder, and then responds with one or more actions.
The server software can generate thumbnail images and automatically catalog media, as well as create poster frames and low-resolution clip “proxies” for quick browsing. Content on folders that the user identifies can be scanned by Final Cut Server to identify asset types, obtain metadata, and generate a catalog without assets being moved or copied. Assets in any Final Cut projects that are discovered are referenced and included.
Proposals, Budgets and More
In addition to non-asset file formats such as Final Cut Studio project files,…