As promised in April, Apple's latest video-editing software, Final Cut Pro X hit the box-less Mac App Store on Tuesday for $299.99.
The new version was "rebuilt from the ground up," Apple wrote in its release notes, with new ways to edit, store, and manage your media clips.
Perhaps most revolutionary is the new timeline editing interface, called Magnetic Timeline. This feature arranges your clips "magnetically" so you can fluidly drag and drop clips while eliminating unwanted black gaps. As you work, you can also preview your sequence with an interactive animation. For additional fine-tuning you can edit footage in a new Precision Editor function: Another new feature, Clip Connections, lets you link primary story clips to elements like titles and sound effects. A new Auditions feature collects different shots in a single destination in your timeline, which you can swap with existing clips and immediately preview for alternate takes.
Media storage and organization were also revamped. Final Cut Pro X automatically scans, imports, and tags all your media, which you can filter by keyword.
For another $49.99 each, you can enhance your audio editing or color correction tools with companion apps, Motion 5 and Compressor 4.
Apple's new Final Cut Pro X is a 64-bit application written to leverage all the RAM in your system so "you never have to wait for the next edit, even if you're working with 4K video," Apple boasts. It is supported by Apple's Cocoa foundation (for dynamic feedback), Grand Central Dispatch for faster processing, ColorSync-managed color pipeline for color consistency across different Final Cut software, and the use of Thunderbolt I/O's high-speed transfer technology, which lets you "daisy-chain," or inter-connect, up to six devices.
"Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "We have shown it to many of the world's best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped."
Apple's Final Cut Pro has a cult-like following among amateur or low-budget filmmakers. It was last updated in 2009. For more, see PCMag's review of Final Cut Studio, a $999 version catered to professionals.
At the 2010 Academy Awards, at least nine out of ten nominated documentaries were created with the help of Apple's Final Cut Pro software; in 2009 another Final Cut Pro-edited film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was nominated for best film editing.
The new version was "rebuilt from the ground up," Apple wrote in its release notes, with new ways to edit, store, and manage your media clips.
Perhaps most revolutionary is the new timeline editing interface, called Magnetic Timeline. This feature arranges your clips "magnetically" so you can fluidly drag and drop clips while eliminating unwanted black gaps. As you work, you can also preview your sequence with an interactive animation. For additional fine-tuning you can edit footage in a new Precision Editor function: Another new feature, Clip Connections, lets you link primary story clips to elements like titles and sound effects. A new Auditions feature collects different shots in a single destination in your timeline, which you can swap with existing clips and immediately preview for alternate takes.
Media storage and organization were also revamped. Final Cut Pro X automatically scans, imports, and tags all your media, which you can filter by keyword.
For another $49.99 each, you can enhance your audio editing or color correction tools with companion apps, Motion 5 and Compressor 4.
"Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro," said Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "We have shown it to many of the world's best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped."
Apple's Final Cut Pro has a cult-like following among amateur or low-budget filmmakers. It was last updated in 2009. For more, see PCMag's review of Final Cut Studio, a $999 version catered to professionals.
At the 2010 Academy Awards, at least nine out of ten nominated documentaries were created with the help of Apple's Final Cut Pro software; in 2009 another Final Cut Pro-edited film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, was nominated for best film editing.
