Final Cut Pro 8 Tuesday?
It appears that Apple will take the wraps off FCP8 (aka FCPX) at NAB Tuesday night at the Supermeet, a user group event that once focused on Final Cut but lately has branched out. This year is was supposed to feature presentations from several companies, including Avid and Aja, but on Tuesday the program abruptly changed, with Apple bumping all other presenters. The supermeet web site now refers to a “surprise sneak peek at something very special,” which is presumably FCP.
Terry Curren broke the story on the Avid-L listserv and Steve Hullfish has commented there and on the ProVideo Coalition blog. As you can imagine, there’s been plenty of talk in the blogosphere, and the reaction has not been all positive. Some people, including Scott Simmons, are pretty unhappy about the way Apple is throwing its weight around.
Without a presence on the show floor and even before the show opens, Cupertino has demonstrated that it has the power to suck all the air out of the room — without telling us a thing. Mark Raudonis made a presentation at the Editors Lounge a couple of weeks ago and got everybody talking without saying much more than “I saw it and it’s awesome.” When he was asked whether he plans to switch his company over, he politely demurred. That’s Apple’s MO — use mystery and surprise to focus attention. It’s in stark contrast to Avid, a company that now excels at reaching out to, and working with, its customers.
Based on Jobs’ design philosophy, the new version will probably focus on performance and user experience, and eliminate old metaphors whenever possible. I suspect that it will be resolution independent at least up to 4K, probably higher; it will use all the cores and graphics power on modern Macs, and attempt to make transcodes a thing of the past; and it’ll be fully multi-threaded, meaning that you’ll be able to save, render and do all kinds of other work while video plays. It may also ignore tape I/O and eliminate the source/record metaphor. Many features we’ve come to expect may be missing in action.
Will we in the professional world use it? Maybe not immediately. Avid will continue to shine in fully professional environments. But Apple has already got our attention. On Tuesday the reality distortion field will disappear, the multiverse will collapse into ordinary reality, and we’ll know a lot more.
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Splice Now 
April 9, 2011 at 2:00 am
“Will we in the professional world use it?” – Oh please! Wake up to yourself. You need to get out more.
May 12, 2011 at 12:39 am
I’m a professional and have been cutting on FCP for the last 3 years after jumping ship from clunky ol Avid.
Honestly, all you dinosaurs out there really do need to wake up like Chris says. If not you’ll get left behind – it will be like the transition from 3 machine to non linear when the new FCP comes out and those old school die hard Avid fan boys will be left rolling around in the dust with just their hour glass and rendering task bar for company!