JetLib News

It’s NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters conference) in Las Vegas, that means lots of new camera and video stuff. It’s more pro gear than consumer stuff, which is probably why Apple took over the Final Cut Pro User Group Supermeet there to unveil the newest version of their professional video editing software. They’re calling it as revolutionary as the original Final Cut released back in ’99. Guess the rumors were right.

Thanks to Photography Bay for liveblogging the event; the whole thing (plus pictures of the event) can be found there.

After a preamble where they described FCP has having over 2 million users and teasing the competition, they launched into the new features of FCPX, which has been “rebuilt from the ground up”:

• Now 64-bit
• 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 up to 8 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

I’ll continue adding info as it’s revealed, and screenshots as soon as they’re available. The software being demoed is currently in beta, so I don’t expect this will be ready for a couple months.

Devin Coldewey (like “cold-away”) is a freelance writer and photographer based in Seattle. His personal website is coldewey.cc, and you can reach him at devin at crunchgear dot com.