Final Cut Pro - page 4

Apple just announced its all-new Final Cut Pro X video editing software, which is now available from the Mac App Store today along with Motion 5 and Compressor 4.

For a few minutes today, Twitter account BWilks2001 played host to a number of images purporting to come from Apple’s forthcoming Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5 release, giving designers an intriguing glimpse into what could be the future of Apple’s professional video production suite. Then, just like that, the Twitter account was gone, brought down by Apple’s lawyers.

But don’t worry. We’ve got all the leaked screenshots, after the jump.

Update: Final Cut X will be $299 and will be available in the App Store in June. Still unknown are the future of Final Cut Studio (Including Soundtrack, Motion, Compressor, Color, DVD Studio) or Express.

Apple is, at the very moment I’m writing this, taking the cloak off of Final Cut X live and to much applause in front of the Final Cut Pro User Group Network in Las Vegas. For several weeks there have been rumors and murmurings that Apple would today unveil the next iteration of its venerable Final Cut video editing software, we’re learning now those rumors were true.

Final Cut users know that the last major update the software had was about 10 years ago. Though many users love the program, it was getting so long in the tooth it was starting to look like a vampire.

Details of the new Final Cut X are still coming in since the unveiling isn’t over yet, but one attendee at the event is posting updates via twitter (thanks @fcpsupermeet). Here are some notables from his twitter stream:

• Crowd is unruly!
• Final Cut X is a full rebuild from scratch
• 64 bit – Crowd: “finally!” “thank you!”
• Cocoa, Core Animation, Open CL, Grand Central Dispatch support
• The Focus was on image quality
• Fully color managed
• Resolution independent playback/timeline all the way up to 4K
• Features people detection, single or in groups
• Non-destructive auto color balance
• Automatic audio cleanup (option to auto noise reduce audio, more)
• Features “smart collections”: a lot like the smart folders found in OS X
• Editing can start immediately during importing of AVCHD and other media, switches silently to local media as it ingests
• Uses every available cpu cycle to keep things rendered. Also highly scalable. Will even work on a Macbook
• No interruption for rendering. No transcoding, EVERYTHING native. (incl DSLR footage–assume this means AVC)
• Presentation received a standing ovation!

Via macrumors.com.

“Stay tuned and buckled up.” According to sources speaking to Techcrunch, Apple has far from abandoned their premier Final Cut Pro software after more than a year without updates. It’s coming, and is supposedly slated to be the “biggest overhaul to Final Cut Pro since the original version was created over 10 years ago.” Yowza.

Although details are scant on what will be new, one of Techcrunch’s sources say that Final Cut Pro has been built back up from its marrow, with the changes encompassing everything from low-level architecture to a complete redesign of the user interface (a resdesign which will hopefully go over better than Apple’s redesign of iMovie’s interface a few years back).

The changes are reportedly “dramatic and ambitious,” and will answer all concerns that Apple’s abandoned the pros in their grab for consumers. If Techcrunch is right, Final Cut Pro will be hitting in Spring 2011, possibly to coincide with the National Association of Broadcasters conference on April 9th through 14th.

As a rule, Apple is secretive about when to expect updates to their product lines, but if you know Cupertino’s history of past releases, it’s usually pretty easy to guess when they are likely to announce a new product.

Most of the time, that’s good enough, except when it isn’t. As film postproduction consultant Dustyn Gobler notes, when Apple is secretive about future plans for its software suites — in this case, Final Cut Pro — people who are running their businesses on that software can get edgy.

Gobler decided to write Steve Jobs and see what was happening with Final Cut. As he put it, “My clients are making multi-year, hundreds of thousands of dollars decisions and we need to know what’s going on with Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Server, and Xsan.   We need to know that Apple won’t abandon Final Cut Pro because selling iPads is more lucrative.”

Steve quickly got back to him with a response, assuring him that “a great release of Final Cut is coming early next year.” It was, of course, sent from his iPad.

Gobler’s full email contains a larger plea to Steve to allow the product managers of their pro apps to begin transparently blogging about what Apple is working on, which of course went unaddressed, but come on: good for customers or no, that’s just not Apple’s style.