FCPX: What It Might Mean

DCP by Ned Soltz

I've just returned from the tenth anniversary Final Cut Pro Supermeet, that raucous, always entertaining and informative gathering of Final Cut Pro users held as an evening event during NAB. This year, in front of some 1400 attendees, Apple chose to announce its forthcoming update, Final Cut Pro X. Billed as a "sneak peek," this hour-long demo began with the obligatory history of FCP, its ground-breaking features and impressive list of users in every production realm from documentary to indie to feature film--and more.

Richard Townsend of Apple introduced the evening rather unceremoniously and came right to the point. FCP X is rebuilt from the ground up as a 64-bit application that will leverage all available RAM and all available processor cores. It is built atop Snow Leopard with its utilization of CoreGraphics and OpenGL.

FCP X is billed to stress three core elements: image quality, organization and editing all within a redesigned user interface and look. So let's just cut right to those points both as discussed as well as demonstrated by Randy Ubilos, Apple's head of video products development and the architect of the earliest version of FCP.

The display in FCP X is fully color-managed based upon color sync. It has floating point rendering and resolution independent playback from SD to 4K and everything in between. Rendering will be practically a thing of the past as the app will employ unused processor cycles to render constantly in the background. read more...