Apple has announced and demonstrated Final Cut Pro X, the newest version of its professional video editing software, at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas.
The new iteration of the industry standard suite boasts a complete UI overhaul, with video operations chief Randy Ubillos promising an app completely re-written from the ground up, using Apple's Cocoa.
Final Cut Pro X, which will land on the Mac App Store in June and cost from a very modest $299, will boast 64-bit support, meaning the software will now make use of more than 4GB of RAM on some Macs.
Instant rendering
There's also a host of new features including instant background rendering, to enable faster editing on the fly (borrowed from iMovie), and a magnetic timeline to ensure audio and video clips stay in sync.
More features imported from iMovie include automatic detection of people in footage, and whether shots are close-up, medium or wide-angle. The 'Skimming' feature allows users to previews the content of a clip just by panning across it with the mouse.
There's also 4K-resolution-independent video playback, automatic audio clean-up, a new feature called Smart Collections for organising clips and non-destructive colour balancing.
Mac OS X core features
Final Cut Pro OS X will now boast better performance thanks to the integration of some Mac OS X core features like Core Animation, Color, Soundtrack, Open CL and Grand Central Dispatch.
On first glance, this looks like a cracking update from the always-impressive Apple video editing crew. We can't wait to get a proper look at this.
