Final Cut Pro X !!
Apple has finally announced the next generation of its professional video editing software, Final Cut Pro X, which can take advantage of powerful new hardware and hefty amounts of memory thanks to 64-bit support. FCP X (application only) will be available on the Mac App Store sometime in June for $299.
Now that Final Cut Pro is officially a 64-bit application, it will be able to utilize more than 4 gigabytes of memory. That's something that will be particularly useful to video editors dealing with lengthy films and large high-definition files. It's also a feature that consumers have been demanding even before the release of the last version of the software, Final Cut Pro 7, in 2009.
Adobe Premiere, a direct competitor to Final Cut Pro, has been offering 64-bit support for over a year.
Final Cut Pro X will also be able to handle 4K HD clips — a video standard which is just beginning to make its way to movie theaters, and which offers significantly more resolution than 1080p HD videos — on Macs with 8 CPU cores.
Other new features include a revamped interface that resembles iMovie, instant background rendering, auto image stabilization, people detection and more. You can catch a glimpse at what the software offers below from its announcement at the NAB conference.
Supermeet FCP X Presentation:
The event started with some impressive slides saying that FCP X is as revolutionary as the first FCP. The application currently has a 94% customer satisfaction rate and some 2 million users.
Peter Steinauer, the architect of FCP took the stage to give us more facts on FCP X. It’s going to be a 64 bit application, able to handle larger, more complex projects. It will take advantage of the best of Snow Leopard so no waiting around for Lion to ship.
They want to maintain image quality by having a fully color managed FCP so you can trust color all the way thought the pipeline. It will use a resolution independent playback system, scaling from HD to 4K with native support for most all cameras. And it will have background rendering.
Starting with organization: there will be a “content-auto analysis” system. It can copy media off a camera in the background so you can begin editing quickly, while it’s still copying. “Media Detection” will begin happening with things like image stabilization happening in background.
There will be “People Detection”, shot detection (think one shot, two shot), automatic and non-destructive color balance as well as audio cleanup (excessive noise, hum, and the option to automatically fix a lot of audio problems).
“Range-based Keywording” means you can drag an iMovie like selection around just a part of a clip and keyword on part of a clip. All these keywords will live in a new Event in an Event window. In that Event window you can have “smart collections” that can collect a lot of different parameters.
Editing in the timeline has been revamped with “clip connections.” Think primary audio and video being locked and synced together. Not just video and audio from a clip but things like music and sound fx, that’s primary and secondary content that can be locked together and always move together to stay in sync. FCP X can establish a relationship between specific audio and video frames and keep that relationship throughout the edit.
The biggest oooo and ahhhh feature was the “magnetic timeline.” Slide clips around this new trackless timeline and clips move out of the way and shuffle around so they don’t overlap and collide.
“Compound clips” allows you to take any number of clips and collapse them down into single clip. Double click to reopen the compound clip.
The “inline precision editor” opens an edit into a 2 timeline like view to see unused media. This looked very iMovie like. Frames not in edit is kinda grayed out. Thankfully the precision editor can be driven from keyboard.
“Auditioning” is a really cool way of having a container like window associated with a clip that can hold different version or takes of a clip or totally different ideas for the edit. It’s a new and unique way to really think about reviewing different cuts without actually cutting in new clips each time.
More to come... - if you can't wait, punchin FCP into this site called google.com
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