A year in the life of Final Cut Pro X and beyond...

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This week on the 21st of June, Final Cut Pro X wil be one year old. We take a look back at that eventful year and take a look forward to the next 12 months of FCPX's life.

We first got news of the impending birth of Final Cut Pro X at the hastily rearranged Los Angeles Final Cut Pro User Group meeting on April 12th during NAB week in Las Vegas. A room full of eager editors and post production professionals witnessed a slick presentation of FCPX from Randy Ubillos, the designer of FCP7 and FCPX. Lots of whooping and cheering accompanied announcements such as 64bit, colorsync, magnetic timeline and of course the price, $299.

One of the problems that brought Apple in for a lot of criticism originated from that meeting. They displayed two timelines showing the same edit, one in FCP7 and a very tidier timeline in FCPX. From this it was assumed that older FCP7 projects could be opened in FCPX and we now know that that's not directly possible. The two programs are completely different, we appreciate they don't share a line of code but imagine a new PhotoShop from Adobe not being able to open old files.

Talking of competitors, Avid got into the news a couple of days earlier by offering a cheeky 60% off Media Composer to switchers, an interesting move that was to be repeated again.

That night's presentation spawned a multitude of guesswork on blogs, some pro articles that are actually funny to read back now and of course at least one Hitler parody video. Closer to the release date we got a few pirated screengrabs posted, then removed and of course Larry Jordan's famous line about FCPX, which looking back wasn't far off the truth. read more...