Our Good friends at http://www.webvideoproduction.com/ have posted a recent article:
Apple finally updated Final Cut Pro adding an X to the name in celebration of a complete rewrite from the ground up. Peter Steinauer – Senior Video Applications Engineer and Randy Ubillos – Chief Architect of Video Applications, took to the stage to unveil Apple’s new Pro app, in front of the people that matter at the FCPUG Supermeet 2011, for a surprisingly affordable $299.
Apple hijacked the ever popular FCPUG Supermeet that traditionally happens on a Tuesday evening at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show in Las Vegas. Pushing all the other sponsors out of the supermeet including Avid, Adobe, Canon, Aja, Blackmagic, Autodesk, and others, demanding the organisers give Apple exclusive rights to the stage, for an exciting announcement. Meaning folk like Philip Bloom and Kevin Smith, could no longer give their keynotes at the event.
Turns out that everything everyone had recently speculated and heard rumors on about Final Cut was true, and much, much more. It has had a complete UI overhaul, the first one since Final Cut 1, it’s now native 64-bit and can utilize more than 4GB of RAM. It will make use of Core Animation, Open CL, and Grand Central Dispatch, all key or new features of OS X that until now haven’t been utilised.
There is now support for resolutions up to 4k, and resolution independent playback. Apple have also integrated automatic colour correction between clips, thanks to the inclusion of full colour management.
Alot of the features introduced in iMovie ’11 have also been ported across including people track, analysing of shots to deduce close-up, medium or wide shots, and auto-syncing clips with audio.
Some more features include:
- Now 64-bit, with OpenCL support
- All editing native – no transcoding (for supported formats incl. H264, I assume)
- New UI (screenshots forthcoming) with “magnetic timeline” and new clip sync method
- Resolution independent playback system
- Handles up to 4K
- Uses Grand Central Dispatch to utilize all your cores
- Fully color-managed (ColorSync)
- Media ready for editing immediately – but stabilization, audio and shutter correction, shot detection and preliminary color balancing automatically applied during ingest
- Timecode-based keywording within clips
- Collections and “smart” collections of media based on metadata and analysis, presented in iMovie filmstrip style
- Auto-syncing clips via audio waveform analysis (very nice if it works as advertised)
- Automated color-matching between clips
The best bit of all of this is the new version of Final Cut Pro will be released via the Mac App Store, and will cost only $299 – Professional video editing brought to the masses. I hope though that Final Cut keeps it’s “Pro” moniker, what with it borrowing so many “features” from iMovie, and the new price tag. I’m also slightly concerned for the rest of the Final Cut Studio suite as no mention of them was seemingly made at this presentation.