It’s taken a little while, but there are three new Thunderbolt devices appearing on the market. Sonnet Technologies will have an Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter which lets you connect older devices to your newer Mac. Blackmagic Technologies has their UltraStudio 3D which provides portable video capture and playback for professional editors. And LaCie will have a Little Big Disk, an external storage device with either hard drives or solid-state drives in a built-in RAID 0 configuration.

The big news with Premiere Pro CS5 is that it’s a 64 bit application and has a new rendering engine (dubbed “Mercury”) that greatly increases rendering speed with certain NVIDIA cards. But I edit my short films on a Macbook Pro that’s approaching its two year birthday, and I’ve been using Final Cut Pro for longer than that. So what’s this other professional video editing software like? Pretty impressive, once you get past the alien interface.

After Effects is a program that allows you to do pretty much anything to video. You can alter time, warp reality, change lighting, or make that light saber video you secretly dream about (it’s okay, everyone does it). It’s an extremely powerful program with a steep learning curve that’s about more than just special effects, but also about manipulating video in the same way Photoshop manipulates images.

One of the hassles of dealing with “pro” level software is that quite often it won’t do something simple you need it to because, well, that’s not how professionals do things. Video editing and effects can be a pain if you’re looking for a simple fix, or tools that are common in photo editing. Elasty HD is a box full of odd and useful things that can be difficult, impossible, or expensive to find in another application.

Mac users who use Final Cut Express received an update to their movie editing software on Thursday. Apple has released Final Cut Express 4.0.1. Those used to seeing the brief support notes that usually accompany Apple releases will be surprised at the detailed notes that accompany this update.

Check them out after the break.

Apple is getting stronger and stronger everyday. One sign of this, according to Market Watch, is in the loss of share value Avid Technology is experiencing. Decreasing to half their size, this video editing and post production company is seeing drastic losses due to Apple’s strengthened grip on this market with their Final Cut products. more »

Apple released an update today for Final Cut Studio 2.0, its professional video editing suite of applications for Macs. According to Apple’s changelog, Pro Applications Update 2008-01 includes Final Cut Pro 6.0.3 and Compressor 3.0.3.

The new update for Final Cut Pro resolves five issues including one that would warn that a project file was unreadable or too new for that specific version of Final Cut Pro. A problem with images being scaled when exported from the application has also been fixed; still images are now exported at their native export ratio.