Geez, if Steve Jobs is really as psychotically opposed to product info leaks as the rumors make him out to be, something tells us that someone in charge at the Apple Store may not be long for this world. Remember back in December, when Final Cut Pro 3 suddenly turned up in Apple's online store before the company had actually formally announced the product? Okay, fine, you slip up once, you take your fifty lashes with the cat o' nine tails, you spend the next two weeks cleaning Steve's private jet with your tongue, and all is forgiven; after all, it's not like Steve would kill off Apple's entire e-commerce initiative just because of one teensy little premature product announcement, no matter how much he despises accidental leaks.

But what about two leaks, or even three? Well, we're about to find out, because as faithful viewer Echidna X points out, as of early this morning, both Cinema Tools 1.0 and DVD Studio Pro 1.5 were available for purchase at the Apple Store, yet neither product had yet been officially announced. Apparently this latest version of DVD Studio Pro adds a handful of new features such as automatic integration of Final Cut Pro chapter markers, which is undeniably nifty-- but the real reason why video professionals might sprain something in their mad rush to order the upgrade is because DVD Studio Pro is finally completely Mac OS X-native. Aw yeah.

Meanwhile, Cinema Tools is a Final Cut Pro add-on that "tracks the relationship between the original camera negative and video established in the telecine logs... so that a negative cutter can accurately recreate the edited video project on film." We're not exactly in the biz, here, but it sounds to us like Cinema Tools lets filmmakers shooting on actual film (instead of digital video) make digital edits in Final Cut Pro which then translate back to the original film negative-- plus there's support for 24P HD video. Think "Final Cut Pro Goes Even More Hollywood." Faithful viewer Mitcho makes the astute observation that this is clearly Apple's repackaged version of Filmlogic, a product that Apple bought from DigitalFilm Tree last year.

Now, at least at the time we started writing this, neither of those two products were showing up anywhere on Apple's site except in the Apple Store-- which led us to believe that whoever spent a fortnight last December licking the side of a plane while nursing a flogged back just hadn't been cured of his or her itchy posting finger. But the point is largely moot now, anyway, since faithful viewer Lawrence Person informs us that Apple has just scraped together a couple of press releases to announce those products that popped out of the gate a bit early.

So the question now is, were those press releases always scheduled to hit the wires today, and the Apple Store just jumped the gun by a few hours? Or did Apple frantically toss together a couple of press releases at the last second because the Apple Store let those two cats out of the bag this morning? And perhaps most importantly of all, where does Steve bury the whip-scarred bodies of his minions who commit a second leaking offense?