Looking ahead to 2013 in post-production

The year known as 2012 is history and 2013 looms large on the horizon. It was an interesting past year in post-production with many of our tools seeing moderate to significant upgrades while others **cough MacPro cough** got virtually none. There's no sense reliving the past year since there's quite a few good places to listen to the year that was. I was working on a article about 2013 but Oliver Peter’s summed it up well in his post called Editing in 2013. Instead here are some bullet points for what we might see happen in 2013.

The NLEs

• Final Cut Pro X will continue to get updates throughout the year. The viability of FCPX as a true “professional” editing platform will continue to be debated online. Meanwhile many will continue to use it just fine, others will be frustrated by it but a lot of new people will try it out.

• Adobe will release a Premiere Pro update. While many have said it will be version 7 (to support the Adobe Anywhere product) according to Adobe’s own release scheme it should be 6.5. The viability of Premiere Pro as a true “professional” editing platform will continue to be debated online just a little bit longer as this new PPro version will fix a few glaring issues. Meanwhile many will continue to use it just fine, others will be frustrated but a lot of new people will try it out.

• Avid Media Composer should get an update that begins to really capitalize on the 64-rewrite of the application. This may or may not include things like background rendering, background saving and a more fluid interface that doesn’t stop playback when you just look at the mouse. The viability of Avid as a company and whether they can survive given their stock performance in recent years will continue to be debated online. Meanwhile many will continue to use Avid’s tools just fine, others will be frustrated but a lot of new people will try it out.

• You, me and all the professional editors you know will continue to use Final Cut Pro 7 at some point in 2013. Many by choice, others by the choice of someone else. It will continue to work and produce the great results it always has. We will all live in fear of some Mac OS or Mac hardware release from Apple that finally signals the true end of Final Cut Pro 7. read more...