Apple has overnight announced the immediate availability of their professional video editing suite, Final Cut Pro X, and an updated Time Capsule range offering an extra 1GB of space.
Apple's new-look Final Cut Pro X (Credit: Apple)
Final Cut Pro X was first demonstrated earlier this year at a video-editing conference in Las Vegas, but until today Apple had managed to keep the software under it’s secretive wraps and refused to show-off the software and its features to the wider world.
The software, available exclusively through Apple’s Australian Mac App Store (yep – it’s Mac-only software), has been priced at $349 and is the first edition of the Final Cut Pro software to maximise 64-bit architecture offered on most recent Macs.
It’s also accompanied by the immediate release of companion products Motion 5 — for titles, transitions and other motion graphics — and Compressor 4, a powerful encoding program both of which are also available through the Mac App Store for $59.99 each.
“Final Cut Pro X is the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, said in a statement today.
“We have shown it to many of the world’s best Pro editors, and their jaws have dropped.”
The video-editing software has undergone one of the biggest revamps it’s ever seen, with a completely revamped interface which mimicks that of Apple’s consumer-facing movie editing product, iMovie, which has met with mixed criticism.
Feature-wise, and it now boasts a “magnetic timeline” — a trackless way to add clips to a movie — and “clip connections” — to link overlay media such as titles and audio with clips, so when a clip movies the titles stay in syn — which allow for easy manipulation of videos on a timeline.
It’s also got new content management tools, including “Content Auto-Analysis” which scans content you add to your library and tags it with what Apple calls “useful information”. It’ll also automagically place content into “Smart Collections”, which allows you to easily find groups of videos which have similarities.
Finally the company has also quietly released a range of updated Time Capsule devices, which allow users to backup their Macs automatically to the external hard drive. It now comes with the option of 2 or 3TB of storage (up from the previous maximum of 1TB) at a cost of $319 and $529 in Australia respectively.
Feature-wise there doesn’t appear to be any drastic new changes, and the rumoured iCloud “cache” and support for downloading iOS and Mac updates doesn’t appear to have eventualised, nor does it run Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS.
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