At the sold out Supermeet tonight, after a long wait in line outside black curtains in the Ballly Convention Center, we all sat down for an expected evening. A lot of the rumors around the net were true. Tonight Apple's Peter Steinauer announced Final Cut Pro X.
FCPX has been rebuilt from the ground up. It has an all new 64bit engine, hyper threading, rendering in the background, no transcoding and 4K support. It is a lot faster because of this. Also the timeline has been completely redesigned to make editing easier.
FCP's original creator Randy Ubillos was on hand to demonstrate to the audience in real-time the new Final Cut Pro experience without many hiccups of his beta version.
At long last there is no need to transcode footage. All footage, whether ProRes, DSLR H264 or AVCHD drops straight into the project and is available to edit immediately. Final Cut Pro X allows you to begin editing footage on the timeline before it has finished ingesting. This will be greatly appreciated by HDSLR users.
Media management has been much improved. The intelligent detection of footage allows automatic grouping of clips to form scenes together in the media manager for easier access to media in an ordered fashion, according to the project. This is really great – so much better than the basic project management in current NLEs with their crappy bins and tiny thumbnails. There is also a Filmstrip View of clips allowing you to identify and find shots quickly.
Timeline intelligence has been improved. A key area. Apple dubs this a Magnetic Timeline. For example audio clips move out of the way if extended into the edges of other clips. It's faster to use and harder to accidentally stuff up. There are no real video or audio tracks – it is more liquid now, with clip tracks appearing automatically as and when they are required. The Instant Color Matching is also a wonderful new feature. Color grading at the single click of a mouse on the timeline.
After having many flavors of FCP, there will only one. Final Cut Pro X will be available in June for $299 from the Apple App Store online. No mention of the other apps in the Final Cut Suite. Looks like Apple has unbundled the suite like they did with iLife and iWork.
We will have a video of the presentation soon. Stay Tuned.
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