Apple has released the Pro Applications Update 2008-4. As always, we recommend you act very conservatively when applying this update. Refrain from doing it during an ongoing project or busy period. If possible, roll it out onto one workstation for “testing” to see if anything unexpected occurs.

However, Apple is advertising a lot of bug fixes and optimizations across most of the applications in Final Cut Studio, as well as Shake, etc. Apple usually doesn’t offer too many specifics, but one would hope that these fixes tighten things up a bit across the board.

One potentially BIG new feature is now present in Color, which is the ability for Color to natively handle REDCODE footage shot with the RED ONE digital cinema camera! Previously, REDCODE would have to be transcoded to a codec Color could deal with natively, such as ProRes. Now that REDCODE works natively, quality should be enhanced due to the reduction of a transcode operation, and a workflow bottleneck has been eliminated. David Butler of Butler Film tells me that his early testing reveals the functionality to be working as expected, and very exciting for those working with RED ONE footage inside of Apple’s Color.