Final Cut Pro X Rebuttal

chris portal

So with tremendous fanfare from 1700+ NAB attendees, Apple provided a sneak peak of their Final Cut Pro app, rebuilt from the ground up. It’s officially called Final Cut Pro X (“final cut pro ten”), and in a word, it’s incredible. There are plenty of insightful blog posts up, so before passing the baton to those, here are a few of my own thoughts/impressions on the topics generating the most buzz.

It’s iMovie on Steroids

Many are expressing concern Apple has dumped the professional and prosumer market to focus on the consumer market, creating a “pro” version of iMovie, designed for “soccer moms”. The arguments people seem to be using is the look and feel of the app, as well as its price. First off, being pretty familiar with the software development world (I manage a team of software developers by day after all), and the massive engineering effort involved in rebuilding a 32 bit app from scratch, to create a 64 bit, true multi-core, multi-process, and multi-threaded application, designed to not only handle “soccer mom” SD video, but also HD and 4K video files, with integrated primary and secondary color correction tools, and audio editing features comparable to those of Pro Tools, it’s borderline ignorance to suggest Apple is abandoning the prosumer market. On the contrary, they are attempting to (and I hate to use such an overused word with them) reinvent digital editing. To change the non-linear editing (NLE) game. read more and watch the videos...