Supermeet 2011: An Open Mind After Apple's Big Reveal

DV by Ned Soltz

Highs and lows as the highly anticipated FCP update is unceremoniously unveiled.

I’ve just returned from the tenth anniversary Final Cut Pro Supermeet, that raucous and always entertaining and informative gathering of Final Cut Pro users held as an evening event during NAB. This year, in front of some 1,400 attendees, Apple chose to announce its forthcoming update, Final Cut Pro X. Billed as a “sneak peak,” 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 which 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 in a redesigned user interface and look. 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 fully 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.

Ingest of media is also to be a background activity with various automatic analyses taking place during ingest. Footage will be analyzed in the background for stabilization. Audio will be analyzed with the option to repair clicks, pops, phase and other audio defects. During ingest, shots will be detected as medium, wide or close and people will be detected—one, two, more, etc. Finally there will be automatic non-destructive color balance during ingest. read more...