While Apple is flaunted for its software’s simplicity, high end professional software that run on Macs like Pro Tools and Final Cut Pro are far from amateur jump-in-and-play programs. But the latest version of Final Cut Pro makes the pro editing software a little simpler and a whole lot cleverer.Though being completely rebuilt software, Final Cut Pro X keeps all the best bits of the typical Final Cut design but throws in background rendering and content analysis that does most of the sorting work.
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The new software has been coded for 64-bit hardware, taking full advantage of new Mac computers’ processing power and RAM. Thanks to the extra power it can pull, the new Final Cut renders video clips in the background as you work, and automatically analyses video as it’s imported to categorise it by shot type, media and people.
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The focus has been on upping the performance for quicker editing, enhanced real-time playback and fast background rendering. That’s not to say there aren’t a few cosmetic changes and tweaks to the interface, now looking somewhat more like iMovie (but not in some kind of terrible downgrade kind of way).
The timeline has been converted to a ‘Magnetic Timeline’ that gives users a trackless canvas to throw imported video onto, with clips instantly sliding out of the way for new clips. This way, users don’t have to select whole slabs of tracks and push them out of the way for one slice of video.
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There are also ‘clip connections’ that link main story clips to extraneous effects like sound to make sure everything stays in sync when you move slabs of video up and down the timeline. Clips can be edited down into a ‘compound clip’ within your timeline that can then be edited as a single video clip.
In tune with the auto-analysis of imported video content, the new ‘auditions’ feature lets users swap through alternative takes of the same shot as recognised by the software.
It doesn’t seem like there’s any new tricks for getting .VOB or .AVI files to work on the software without first converting to compatible file types though.
The new clever additions to Final Cut come with Final Cut Pro X, just out today on the Mac App Store for $349 (despite being listed as $299.99 on Apple’s US site).
